Sometimes the new, the novel, the innovative can bring out opposite reactions of fear and anticipation. This titanic push-pull tension seems ever present in our contemporary social discourse.
I'm reminded by Alexis de Tocqueville that progress has always been a messy struggle to seek our best selves as a people. His fear, then as now, that complacency and a comfortable self-satisfaction are the greatest dangers.
"I cannot help fearing that men may reach a point where they look on every new theory as a danger, every innovation as a toilsome trouble, every social advance as a first step toward revolution, and that they may absolutely refuse to move at all for fear of being carried off their feet. The prospect really does frighten me that they may finally become so engrossed in a cowardly love of immediate pleasures that their interest in their own future and in that of their descendants may vanish, and that they will prefer tamely to follow the course of their destiny rather than make a sudden energetic effort necessary to set things right."
Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859), French social philosopher. Democracy in America, vol. 2, pt. 3, ch. 21 (1840).
http://quotes.dictionary.com/I_cannot_help_fearing_that_men_may_reach#blDfE5TCVQ8kcjb9.99
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