Risk Culture

As I noted a couple of days ago, late-modern culture is a risk culture in which management of risk forms an essential component of self-construction. Yet, modernity is good at micro-managing risk but not macro-managing it: there is also a renewed sense of apocalypticism associated with the side-effects of technology.

Because individuals are ultimately powerless to alter this horrible element of risk, belief in fortuna has become a renewed - and necessary - feature of modern life. That is, there is a resignation to the engines of fate: a sense that some alien force turns the wheel of this dumb-show (to misquote Thomas Hardy). This is why we like to gamble!

One of the reasons for secular distaste for strong religious belief is that religious fervour seems to increase the risk felt by the whole community: it is an unnecessary daring of fate to intervene. Strong belief is a powerful force that may skew the forces of fate against us; it may upset the delicate balance that enables us to live our consumption rich quiet lives.

Giddens on Risk

Anthony Giddens points out that trust is essential for 'an early sense of ontological security'...it is 'basic to a 'protective cocoon' which stands guard over the self in its dealings with everyday reality. Trouble is, we live in a 'risk culture'. Which is to say, the concept of risk has become fundamental to the way we organise the social world:

Under conditions of modernity, the future is continually drawn into the present by means of the reflexive organisation of knowledge environments (p. 4, Modernity and Self-Identity)

Not that life is now more risky than it was, but that the parameters of risk have changed: so that the modern world is beset by an apocalypticism unknown to the past. Modernity has produced security, and a better means of calculating risk, but it has also brought nuclear weapons and environmental degradation. What do we do with this sense of doom then? Well -

If most successfully bracket out such possibilities and get on with their day-to-day activities, this is no doubt because they assess the actual element of risk involved as very small. But it is also because the risks in question are given over to fate - one aspect of the return of fortuna in late modernity... (p. 183)

He continues:

There is a good deal of evidence to indicate that unconscious fears of an 'ending to everything' are prevalent among many sectors of the population, and appear with particular clarity in the fantasies and dreams of children.

Four lessons from Anthony Giddens for preachers

Giddens has a good deal to say about the late-modern soul, though he mightn't call it that. I reckon awareness of this analysis might really help magnify the existential impact of a few sermons...

He identifies four 'tribulations of the self':

1. Unification versus fragmentation By this he means that constructing our identity involes a myriad of contexts and experiences, though which a coherent course must be chartered.

2. Powerlessness versus appropriation We live in a culture surrounded by opportunities and options made available to us by modernity and its technologies. But this also has the effect of generating feelings of powerlessness, even amongst people who are wealthy and educated. It's the system...what can we do about it?

3. Authority versus uncertainty Giddens points out that late modern people experience a radical mistrust of all authorities such that none are final. As a self, therefore, we must steer a way between commitment (possibly without full trust) and uncertainty.

4. Personalised versus commodified experience You have to tell your own story or construct your own self-identity in the midst of circumstances in which the economy of consumption standardises everything. So, because of this one-size-fits-most experience we have in the marketplace, we must find other ways to individualise ourselves...

Nussbaum: The Fragility of Goodness

Nussbaum describes her book as

…an examination of the aspiration to rational self-sufficiency in Greek ethical thought: the aspiration to make the goodness of a good human life safe from luck through the controlling power of reason.[1]

Human practical rationality is not a game played on a smooth playing surface, but rather one with surprising bumps and hollows.[2] Nussbaum finds in the philosophical and literary sources of ancient Greece two ‘normative conceptions’ of how would-be moral agents can respond to this condition. On the one hand, the agent can assert control through uninterrupted, pure activity and through emphasis on the rational aspect of human being over against the merely physical. The eudemonistic life envisaged here is solitary, unimpaired by reference to others. Plato in particular articulates a version of this response, though not uncritically.

On the other hand, the moral agent can be seen as sharing both active and passive components, with the recognition that there are external sources of power that inevitably limit the control one may reasonably expect to have over events. Under this conception, the eudemonistic life is lived alongside and with the cooperation of friends and loved ones.[3] Nussbaum’s Aristotle gives expression to a version of this second normative conception (which Nussbaum herself clearly favours).

A third way? What could a Christian version add?

[1] Martha Craven Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 3
[2] Nussbaum’s suspicion that the problem of luck - and so, risk – is one keenly felt by contemporary people is confirmed by Anthony Giddens, who argues that the culture of late modernity can be regarded as a ‘risk’ culture. Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Cambridge: Polity Press in association with Blackwell, 1991), p. 109-43
[3] Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, p. 20-1

narrating yourself?

It is pretty much axiomatic among contemporary thinkers (secular and theological) to use the category of narrative in relation to the self - as a way of understanding or interpreting the self. Ricoeur, Taylor, Benhabib, Giddens, Hauerwas: even Hannah Arendt was using this idea in the 1950s. The value of this perspective lies in the way in which you can analyse a self as a body and not just a mind, as an individual-in-relation and not an individual-in-isolation, and a person in time and history and not a person somehow standing aloof to the conditions and passing of time. Time, body, mind, action, others.

But what does it mean to 'self-narrate', or to see oneself in terms of a narrated life? It is both a hermeneutical and an ethical response to the question posed by existence. Telling your story both interprets the events that have already happened and plots a trajectory into the future. 'Narrating' means 'ascribing some form or meaning to a series of events'.

One responds to the events of one's life as a sequence of cause and effect, as an emplotment (Ricoeur's term). One chooses subsequent attitudes and actions in keeping with the pattern that emerges over time (perhaps) or in response to some deeply held intuition about what should happen next. One plays a role as a character in relation to other characters, as an actor situated next to other actors ('neighbours' even). So, we might ask, what genre is my life? Tragic? Comic? Epic? Romance? Fairy Story? Absurdist Drama?

Seeing life in narrative terms can factor in things outside our control that are crucial to who we are: our gender, our national indentities, our accidents, our historical circumstances. The thing about a narrative is that it is like DNA: no narrative is completely the same as another's, though it may resemble it in type. It is a great way to identify someone.

It is interesting to think about biography and autobiography here. Both of these never quite contain the actual narrative of the person, do they? Autobiography - the telling of one's own tale - is so often an exercise in self-deception, or in choosing the wrong genre. And the problem is that it is always a tale half-told, because your death is not included! To include the manner of dying seems to be essential to the genre of the story.

Is it ever possible to tell the truth about oneself?

giddens and self-identity

I have been reading a terrific book called "Modernity and Self-identity" by Anthony Giddens.

He is very good at describing how we cast ourselves as selves in the contemporary world. Modernity's fundamental attitude towards knowledge is radical scepticism and doubt...which means that when it comes to 'making the self' we have to do it alone..'reflexively'. But we do it amidst a bewildering array of options and possibilities. That is a fact of post-traditional life. No wonder we are anxious...

Trust is basic to modernity, because we have given over knowledge in so many areas to experts. We need to trust them in order to operate: that the train driver knows what he is doing, that the vitamins we take won't give us cancer, that omega 3 oils are good for us, etc. Which is why when expert knowledge is proven mistaken or corrupt we are thrown into such anxiety... it is also true that some of this expert knowledge is getting us into trouble, because we can't integrate it into a whole. So, we may take a pill that solves one problem, only to find it gives us another.

Modernity, says Giddens, is a 'risk culture'. He means that the concept of risk is fundamental to the way we organise the social world. We assess the future by means of calculating risk (rather than entrusting ourselves to prayer, for example). But at the same time, modernity has introduced new, global risks... apocalyptic risks, you might say. Paradoxically, moderns still talk of fate and destiny...

So: 'self-identity becomes a reflexively organised endeavour. The reflexive project of the self...consists in the sustaining of coherent, yet continuously revised, biographical narratives '. We see oursleves as 'writing'/'performing' on life's stage. This is where 'lifestyle' comes in: it is our choice of life-story as far as we have a choice. It is also interesting that the intimate relationship - the 'pure relationship', not formed from anything other than choice - has become so crucial to the way we project our lives.

This affects the body as well... the body as an outward form of our self is subject to our construction and control, or at least our attempts to do so. He notes along with this that our culture has a powerful sense of shame attached to bodies especially, and has largely lost our sense of guilt.

Giddens also notes that the reflexive project of the self generates programmes of actualisation and mastery, though these lack moral meaning.... 'authenticity becomes both a pre-eminent value and a framework for self-actualisation, but represents a morally stunted process' (p. 9).

Wow: there is so much dense thought here and so much of relevance for my project and for Christian thinkers generally. I think martyrs are interesting here because of the way in which they incorporate death into a life-narrative: and also because they have a specific attitude to the future which supercedes calculation of risk...

(NB: I will be away in Cornwall for two weeks: blessed Passiontide and Easter to everyone).