Battle in Print: Risk aversion in the 21st century

Tony Gilland, 30 September 2006

Once upon a time, ‘risk’ meant something specific: ‘the possibility that something bad might happen’, or, as a verb, ‘to do something although there is a chance of a bad result’.[1] Now, however, the concept of ‘risk’ has come to define everything that we do, and indeed everything we are. From global politics to family life, from the new technologies we develop to the basic foods we eat, humanity in the twenty-first century is defined as being at risk; and politics and policy is developed according to the grandmotherly maxim ‘better safe than sorry’.

What does it mean to say that society has become organised around risk? Some cite, positively, the development of commonsensical new rules and regulations that enhance safety in the face of obvious potential dangers. For example, the UK government recently stipulated that children in cars travel in special car seats up until the age of 12. Others complain about what they see as risk aversion gone mad – through the banning of the traditional game of conkers by schoolchildren in the playground, or parents’ reaction against the MMR vaccine in the face of all scientific evidence pointing to the vaccine’s safety.

The current heightened preoccupation with risk tends to be explained in one of three ways: that society has become more dangerous, demanding greater protection of the public from myriad dangers; that people have become more fearful about their lives and those of their children, leading them to demand more protection by policy makers; or that opportunistic politicians are cynically playing on people’s fears by creating all manner of daft risk-averse policies in the name of public safety. None of these reasons, however, can fully explain the character of our risk society, or provide the basis for challenging our contemporary obsession with avoiding risk.

Do we live in a more dangerous world than ever before? Looked at rationally, such a proposition is hard to take seriously. In the Western world we are living longer, healthier lives than ever. For all the high media profile given to such cases, people are not routinely stabbed in the streets, children are not routinely abducted, vast swathes of the population are not killed by plague. For all the fears about the MMR vaccine, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced recently that rubella, a disease that can cause serious deformities in foetuses when contracted by pregnant women, has been nearly eradicated in the USA as a consequence of the vaccination programme introduced in the 1970s (Science Daily 8.4.2006). The justification for changing the law on car seats for children is that 63 per cent of parents abandon using safety seats by the time their child is six. Yet in 2002, only 35 children aged up to 11 were killed when travelling in cars – a remarkably small number considering the number of passenger miles driven(BBC News 15.4.2004). Even when it comes to terrorism, the big global fear of our age, we should remember, as the sociologist Frank Furedi points out, that despite the many terror alerts in the US since 9/11, no one has died in a known terrorist incident since that date (Furedi 5.9.2006). So, no, we do not live in more dangerous times: we simply live in times that are more acutely aware of the dangers that may lurk around us.

It is notable that the ‘big issues’ in contemporary risk discourse are not in fact real and present dangers, but risks about which often little is known. Global warming is a complex phenomenon that is highly difficult to anticipate and that experts suggest may lead to a wide range of possible global average temperatures, with unspecified consequences for unspecified societies. Yet it has become the environmental issue about which every politician worth his or her salt must show willingness to ‘do something’, even though the question of what can usefully be done has no definite answer. Another example is genetic modification (GM) of crops – a technology that offers great potential in terms of improving crop yields and other benefits, and which all tests so far have shown to pose no threat to human health. Nonetheless, GM foods had, until recently, been effectively banned from the EU because of fears of what might happen to humanity or biodiversity somewhere down the line. We have endless debates about what terrible things might arise should couples choose to design blue-eyed babies, in what can seem like wilful ignorance of the benefits that have come through assisted fertility treatments.

In short, the big risk issues of today have to do not with proven and existing dangers, but with what Donald Rumsfeld termed, when publicising the threat posed by Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, ‘unknown unknowns’. We are scared not of what is, but of what might be. It is not particular developments or incidents that trigger today’s panics, but a general free-floating anxiety that attaches itself to what can often seem random issues. This is what Furedi has described as the ‘culture of fear’.

What can explain this? Many argue that people have become more isolated and individuated; that because of the disintegration of traditional social bonds, from the family, to organised religion to the trade union movement, people feel increasingly alone in the face of threats to their health and well-being, and are therefore inclined to panic unduly. It is true that traditional social bonds and solidarities have disintegrated, and this has left people more individuated, and therefore liable to feel vulnerable. Yet such explanations miss the origin of modern fears and panics. It was not parents by themselves who cooked up fears about the MMR vaccine: this was a media campaign, sparked by the endorsement of a dubious theory by a respected medical journal. It was not the public who found out about GM crops, boycotted them and lobbied for a UK ban on the products, but campaign groups and the media, using ‘the voice of the public’ to gain legitimacy. Parents haven’t lobbied for new laws about child car seats; nobody really wants to ban conkers from the playground. The individuation process may have left people feeling more vulnerable than before, and certainly more receptive to such fears, but the driver of modern scares and panics comes from the very top.

One question that is often asked about the culture of fear is, ‘Who benefits from it?’ By way of an answer, the finger is pointed at mendacious politicians and opportunistic policy makers who, it is argued, prey on public fears in order to deliberately create a role for themselves by acting as the public’s protector. But while politicians no doubt have done their bit in perpetuating certain scares and in justifying dubious policy in the name of public safety, it is important to recognise that the culture of fear is not the result of some political conspiracy, and that in the end nobody gains from it. The UK government, for example, has arguably lost much economic and political clout in the decision to ban GM crops from the UK. The MMR fiasco was just that – something that quickly escaped the authorities’ control and has yet to be reined in. On a public level, nobody cares about child car seats one way or another; and many of the anti-terrorist measures brought in in the wake of 9/11 and 7/7 have proved an irritant to the public, if not downright unpopular.

The problem is not that the government is setting out to scare us into submission. Rather, it is that the political elite has failed to hold the line; and as its own authority unravels, so does its capacity to manage the very basic task of putting society’s fears into perspective. Acutely self-conscious about its isolation from society and the lack of trust in which people already hold those in authority, the political elite is continually reaching out to consider what it assumes to be public fears, and to take on board what are purported to be public concerns. This invariably makes the problem worse. So when the government tells people not to worry about MMR, this is seen as further proof that there is something to worry about. When it holds a consultation about GM crops, this is taken as an admission that something is being hidden. As the political elite attempts to connect with society through consideration of what it assumes to be our fears, its capacity to take a lead in dealing with such fears is continually diminished.

The crisis at the heart of the culture of fear is not to do with the machinations of unscrupulous politicians, but a more fundamental crisis of politics itself. The very notion that we live in a risk society, in which we cower in the face of ‘unknown unknowns’ and continually remind ourselves of our vulnerability as individuals (MMR), as a society (terrorism) or as a species (global warming), undermines our capacity to act upon the world around us. Politics – the very idea of human beings acting purposefully upon their circumstances and shaping them to their needs – becomes effaced by the notion that we are all victims: of nature, of terrorists, of each other. The challenge for humanity today is not, as is so often said, to recognise our vulnerability or act with humility. It is to reaffirm what makes us human by recognising that we are masters of our destiny, not victims of our fate.

Tony Gilland is Science and Society Director, Institute of Ideas

 Footnotes

[1] See http://www.freesearch.co.uk/dictionary/risk

 References

Use car seats up to age of 11, BBC News, 15 April 2004

Five years after 9/11: the search for meaning goes on, Frank Furedi, spiked, 5 September 2006

Congenital rubella syndrome nearly eradicated in United States, Science Daily, 8 April 2006

 Festival Buzz

"The Battle of Ideas provides a valuable and positive resource at a time when intelligent debate, public speaking and challenge seem to be diminishing in public life."
Barb Jungr, chansonniere