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.