Risk: The human adventure
by
Published by the European Science and
Environment Foundation, 2001
Contents
Introduction
Part One
Chapter One: Risk, probability
and gambling
Chapter Two: Risk Society:
Its proponents and opponents
Chapter Three: Risk and morality:
Martyrs, military men, mountaineers and feeding the millions.
Chapter Four: Risk and profit
Chapter Five: Nature, the
risk taker
Chapter Six: Trust and the
political management of risk - and a proposal
Chapter Seven: Managing risk:
throwing the precautionary principle to the winds
The Adventure of Risk
by
INTRODUCTION
“Risk is the chance that
something adverse will happen” – The Health and Safety Executive, UK [HSE,
1988]
"The word 'risk' derives
from the early Italian 'risicare', which means 'to dare'. In this sense, risk
is a choice rather than a fate" - Peter L Bernstein [Bernstein,
1996]
Risk
is a lovely subject. But it is a difficult one. Still, we mustn't risk being downhearted.
We must keep our nerve. We need to see who we can trust in such a tricky
matter. We need to know what evidence about these matters we can believe. These are the subjects of this short book:
nerve, trust and evidence. An important further message is about social
responsibility: we owe it to risk-takers in the past that we are now well-off;
we are now – as societies – taking further risks to get what we want. We owe it
to one another not to bleat when some of the risks go wrong.
We
know we can think about risk in very sophisticated ways virtually without effort.
We cross roads every day, after all. Many of us find our most intense pleasure
in betting shops, where risk is almost all that is discussed, and it isn't our
failure to understand the nature of betting which makes us losers but our
failure to understand equine quadrupedalism.
Of
course, views on risk are very diverse. Our bank manager seems averse to it whenever
we seek to interest him in our new ventures. Doctors one minute tell us butter
is a big risk, the next that we can wolf it down to our heart's desire.
Greenpeace and others say the entire planet is at risk. They would have us
eschew all research on genetically modified plants: a response to a new technology
almost as silly as that of government ministers who say we shall only proceed
with it when it is proved that there is no risk attached to the project.
This
book does not dwell on the risks which are the most fun: the risks of sex, sport
and intoxication. It is, in a way unfortunately, about more serious matters even
than those.
It
argues that so far as we can guess, our age has been, and may even remain, quite
a safe one. The risks we produce are much more threats to our ideas of naturalness
than to our health or even to that of the planet. In other words, our equanimity
is more at threat than our physical well-being.
It
argues that, as members of society, we benefit hugely from much risk-taking and
should try to accept the consequences of risk when they are bad as well as when
they are good. It argues (Chapter Seven) that the management of risk by the government
cannot be as precautionary as many fashionable voices demand, and yet could be
far more intelligible and intelligent than it now is. These are issues not so
much of risk, as of trust.
This is isn't a text book about the mathematical ideas of
risk which underlie these minefields, though I hope newcomers to the subject will
find (especially in Chapter One) enough of a starter's pack to get them going
with the issue.
All
these issues would be of interest at any time. They are of special poignancy now
because, as we discuss in Chapter Two, there is a modern industry, comprised of
media, law and campaigning NGOs - and their adjuncts in academia - which is
using risk as a handle to claim attention and income. They wouldn’t put it that
way, of course. They claim noisily that they are pursuing the citizen's rights
against overweening vested interests in industry and against the indifference
of the regulatory authorities. But when they create unnecessary anxiety, rather
than assuage it - they are up to no good, and it is worth pointing out the
damage they are doing. They are one of the larger risks we face.
Chapter Three will put a wide range of
risk-taking into a moral framework, the better to make its point that almost all
risks of the kind we are supposed to worry about so much now, the risks to health,
safety and the environment, are worth taking.
Chapter
Four then tries to put risk-taking into an economic framework, the better to develop
some ideas about how economic and health, safety and environment (HSE) risk-taking
can be compared. By the way, we use “HSE” to cover almost all non-financial risk. I am taking
it, therefore, to cover what might be called cultural risk, or the risk to our
mental well-being.
Chapter Five addresses the way risk-taking
occurs in nature, which matters especially since the emerging aversion to
risk-taking stresses that modern risks are an affront to it. Nature, too often
seen as an icon of stability, co-operation and fragility, is more truly seen as
a world in which nerve, gambling, opportunism – risk-taking – are for ever in
evidence.
Chapters Six and Seven put risk into
a political context. The first of these considers how to remedy what might truly
be called the modern crisis of trust. It proposes a new institution might assess
risks and their regulation. The second describes how the state cannot be as
cautious about risks as it is fashionable now to suppose it must be.
This
short book adds to, and discusses, a burgeoning literature on risk. There is the
literature of alarm, and a much smaller one of reassurance. Mine is a contribution
to the latter. However, I claim that reassurance is no use in genuinely scary
situations, as we discuss in Chapters Six and Seven, which look at some
specific cases of the management of risk. Indeed, reassurance can be harmful,
and not merely to truthfulness. I am keen to say that the world is a safer
place than is commonly supposed, but I loath the creation of a false sense of
security almost as much as I disparage alarmism. Still, the world is quite
dangerous, and we will be happier when we accept that is the case.
I
will claim that a healthy, commonsense view can still be deployed to make sense
of the world we live in, and that a "reality-check" will leave us largely
reassured.
The
book argues that it is far too easy too assume that we should always be aiming to
reduce risk. Most often, it should be optimised,
which may not at all be the same thing. [Wildavsky, 1988] We need to be as sure
as possible that we are getting a good deal from the risk-taking we are involved
in. Assessing that deal will often lead us to suppose that our lives are only
as risky as they more or less need to be, and that we wouldn't, actually, have
it otherwise. I stress that the downside of modern risk-taking is regulated
democratically, and the benefits spread very widely. Risks have been socialised, and that ought to make it
easier for us to bear the occasional mistake, or even disaster.
The Anxiety Industry especially stresses,
to the contrary, that many modern risks are involuntary and unwanted. They
might have added that this is worrying because it means that some risks are not
in the proper sense a gamble. Some risks, they might claim, are not offered to
us in the way that a gamble should be. That is to say, many risks are imposed
on us without our having the right to refuse to accept the gamble involved. But
this view is in important respects flawed. Much modern risk is indeed involuntary,
but quite often they are in the way that taxation is involuntary. Other risks
are involuntary in the way that ill-health is: they are now a part of our
world, as though they were old-fashioned natural risks. But this needn't worry
us as much as is often supposed.
Risk-averse opinion stresses that people
feel alienated from conventional society and conventional authority. We don’t
know who to trust; we feel exposed. The left and its green allies (as we discuss
in Chapter Two) has always claimed that the powers-that-be are lining their
pockets at our expense, and conducting power politics so as to suit the governing
classes. The Anxiety Industry adds to this old case the idea that industry and
government are putting us at unwarranted and unregulated HSE risks as they put
their short-term ambitions before the well-being of the powerless and the
unborn.
There is a useful analogy here between
economic and other risks. There is a battle between those who believe that
industrial capitalism is largely benign economically, and that the less regulation
of it the better. There is also an argument about the role of industrial
capitalism in imposing risks in the realm of HSE. Whether business is imposing
economic risk or HSE risk, there is a legitimate argument about the state's
role in regulating capitalism and in saving people from the consequence of
risk-taking.
There
is especially an argument about the equitability - the fairness - of industrial
capitalism as it spreads (or fails to spread) wealth and spreads (or fails to spread)
risk. The argument applies just as well in HSE as in economic terms.
Are
economic and non-economic benefit and risk fairly spread in society? Are those who
are put at economic and HSE risk by capitalism fairly included in the benefits
which are supposed to accrue? My answer is a strong but qualified "yes"
in both cases, which I think are much more similar than might be supposed.
Only if we look realistically at risk
- at its benefits, at the difficulty of regulating it - will we begin to assess
whether our own system has framed its approach well. This book will argue that
the British have handled the issue rather well. But we have done it best when
governments have been robust and honest. Even then, they have usually - and
dangerously - added to risks because they fail to stress that risks are inevitable,
worthwhile, and as much as possible a matter for the individual.
Chapter One
Risk, probability and gambling
Risk
is all kinds of things one doesn't at first expect of it. It is more likeable than
is often supposed. We gain more from it than many suppose. However comforting
some of the things one can say about risk, it is certainly about bad things, or
things we do not want. But not at all bad things are classed as risks. Death is
not of itself a risk: it is a certainty. We think ourselves at risk of death
only insofar as it is untimely. So we can see that where there is no element of
uncertainty, there too we do not find risk.
In brief, risk is the downside of chance.
And chance is the well-spring of the gambles which humans take all day, every
day.
A brief history....
There
is some lovely writing about risk, but perhaps the clearest modern account comes
in Peter L Bernstein's Against the Gods: The remarkable story of risk. [Bernstein, 1996] One merit of the book is
that it is aimed at a middle brow reader. There is hardly any algebra. This is
an intellectual history which comes across as a detective story. Its author is
a professional investor, and he enjoys seeing the world of gambling compared
with that of finance.
From this account we can understand how
the mid-seventeenth century mathematicians Fermat and Pascal were engaged in
getting at the numbers which lay behind gambling. There was obvious fascination
in this work, but also a sort of frustration. One mathematician, the late seventeenth
century Frenchman, de Moivre, seems to be pointing to it when, as noted by
Bernstein, he writes: "I wish I were capable of... applying the Doctrine
of Chances to Oeconomical and Political uses...". Actually, he did,
because he was consulted by insurance brokers as well as by people seeking success
at the gaming table.
The
story becomes thoroughly modern when it includes epidemiology, which emerge as people
begin to gather data about the world
around them. This was about measuring the world, but its events not the physical
characteristics which underpinned them. Francis Galton, the great British
statistician, is quoted by Bernstein thus: "Wherever you can, count".
This
is the emergence of a Gradgrind world, excoriated by Dickens in Hard Times in 1854.
Gradgrind took the romance out of life, of making lists and treating people as
cogs in a machine, as manipulable as their behaviour was calculable.
We can see that there are two different
threads to the story. One is to uncover the mathematical expression of
probability and the other is to uncover the patterns in statistics.
Much
thinking about probability began with trying to find some order in the least likely
place, games of chance.
Much thinking about correlations began
by looking for order in statistics, often those gathered by the state. They
typically concerned health: what common factors united several or many people
who got ill in a particular way? The cause of an infection, say, could be
traced to a particular tap because it was at the centre of the known cases of
illnesses, and was the only thing in common to all the victims . Importantly,
epidemiology doesn't depend on knowing much about cause and effect. It does its
work by inductive reasoning from data, not by empirical scientific work on the
world reported in the data.
The intellectual excitement about probability
and correlation is that they are entirely to do with patterns of occurrence and
re-occurrence, and not at all about knowing anything mechanical. You need not
know any Newtonian physics to be a good player of black jack, craps or
roulette. You wouldn't even need to know that a dice had been involved in
producing the runs of numbers which allow one to predict the odds arising from
them.
Similarly, it wasn't an understanding of medicine which led
researchers to the understanding that smoking lay behind a massive increase in
lung cancer. The evidence was circumstantial, to do with correlations [Doll and
Peto, 1981].
Peter Bernstein is especially useful
when he identifies a curious paradox in thinking about risk. In the classical period,
he supposes, the Gods were capricious, and a man's fate both certain and
unpredictable. The medieval European mind believed in one God who was capable
of anything and of absolute control, except that a man was unnervingly morally
responsible for some part of God's work and purpose. Still, a degree of fatalism
was understandable in man, and men did not feel they could much predict and
still less control the future. Bernstein says that moderns came to realise that
human beings are not totally helpless in the hands of fate, nor is their
worldly destiny always determined by God.
“The
Reformation meant more than just a change in humanity's relationship with God. By
eliminating the confessional, it warned people that henceforth they would have
to walk on their own two feet and would have to take responsibility for the
consequences of their decisions.... But if men and women were not at the mercy
of impersonal deities and random chance, they could no longer remain passive in
the face of an unknown future. They had no choice but to begin to make
decisions over a far wider range of circumstances and over far longer periods of
time than ever before.”
They
had, that is to say, a huge interest in becoming efficient at predicting the outcome
of their actions. They had to become more efficient gamblers, and they had to
take the chanciness out of much of what they did.
Defining risk
Some
risk specialists use the word "risk" in a way which is too difficult and
unusual for it to be worth holding in our minds very long. However, it does help
us see that the matter in hand has two essential elements. First, it is about
assessing the probability of an outcome, its likelihood, the odds of its happening.
Then, secondly, there is the degree of nastiness of the outcome, or the hazard.
[Royal Society, 1997]
The specialists usually say that risk, strictly
speaking, is the probability bit of this equation and that it is quite separate
from the hazard part. But normal parlance uses risk as covering both the
probability of an outcome and the seriousness of the outcome, and that's how I
shall go on.
From our point of view, risk will be
a compound of the likelihood of a bad outcome, and the degree to which we dislike
the outcome. But the specialists are of course right to see that risk has two
completely different parts. Often they go in different directions. A low risk
can arise out of a very low probability of quite a bad outcome, or a high
probability of an insignificantly bad outcome.
Assessing risk
There
is a large and useful effort to try to quantify risk. That is, there is a long tradition
of attempting to study the mathematical underpinning of the idea of probability,
and to refine the business of prediction and especially the business of trying
to express it numerically. There is also an attempt to quantify, codify and
cost the seriousness of outcomes.
Of course risks vary in their predictability,
and not least in the degree to which an event is likely to occur, and then -
quite separately - in the degree of their seriousness can be foreseen.
Risk as gamble
People
thinking about risk will always find themselves thinking about vulgar betting as
well as thinking about lofty probability. This is because an important dimension
about risk is that it is not just about the downside of damage and pain which
may follow any action. There is also the crucial matter of what one hopes to
gain from the action. Is its prospective positive outcome worth its hazardousness. Is it a good gamble? Is it - as
we say - a good risk?
We
must steer between impulses, fears, desires and above all we must weigh the probability
of good outcomes against the probability of bad outcomes in absolutely
everything we do. This is to say: we take gambles in all we do. This is as true
of our romances as it is of our choice of profession.
Making a bet requires a prediction -
often a precise, numerical one - as to the likelihood of something coming to pass
in the future, whether good or bad. Secondly, making a bet always involves turning
some future event into something with a risk attached. We hook our well-being
to the outcome of a future event. Thirdly, a bet often betrays the degree to
which one is prepared or compelled to take a future event seriously. And
finally, considering risks as a bet also allows one to see how subjective and
personal risk-taking is.
Interestingly, an exceptionally desperate
person might be very like an exceptionally relaxed person in accepting a long
shot: the anxious person might feel that only with one last dramatic gamble
could his position be redeemed whilst the other might feel that only a dramatic
throw imparted any excitement at all. When bookies make their odds, they
attract people who read those risks in very different ways.
There is a big "apples and pears"
problem with costing damage, or fretting over hazard. Is injury to fifty people
worse than a death to one? And so on. Should
we reach out for big gains, attached they often are to big risks, or cultivate
contentment with our current lot?
However difficult these issues, we are
bound to go on discussing and assessing the future, not as though it were a book
written by an alien species whose codes were impenetrable from the start, but
as though it were like a book in a foreign, but not perversely and deliberately
impenetrable, language. The future is a foreign country, but they do things
according to rules there.
For working purposes, we can imagine
and suppose that if we knew enough about the world we would know what was going
to happen next. In practice, we often do not know what is going to happen next,
because we cannot hold in our minds enough of the factors which would be involved
in more accurate prediction, or do not know enough of the underlying mechanics
anyway. However, we can do something very counter-intuitive but completely
normal with unpredictability. Instead of throwing up our hands and accepting
our uncertain (ie, unpredictable) and yet all too certain (ie, unavoidable)
fate, we can discuss and work with the idea of probabilities.
In
other words, though we know the world is uncertain, we can make a stab at working
out some probabilities. We can do this crudely, by wondering whether some event
or other is certain, probable or merely possible. Or we can get very precise
indeed about the matter and start saying things like, "there is a one in
twenty chance that such and such will happen". Sometimes we can be pretty
sure that such predictions are accurate. A dice thrown enough times will behave
with a degree of predictability which, over sufficient runs of throws, approaches
mechanical regularity. That is, given long enough and sufficient numbers of
runs, each run will produce an aggregate result which looks just like the
others. Statisticians call this the "regression to the mean", and it
carries with it the implication that gamblers who believe that they are
enjoying "runs of luck", or are "on a roll", are fooling
themselves when they believe that any appearance of a recent consistency of
outcome in their favour is likely to be continued.
All the same, the outcome of any particular
throw is unpredictable: within the range of possibilities, any is as likely as
any other. The law of averages describes such events well and clearly, but it
is a law which only talks about the likelihood of a class of things, and not
about any particular individual event. The fascination of a dice is that it is
like a boring machine only if we run throws of it long enough to see the
patterns that emerge, but can be incredibly exciting in its unpredictability as
to the result of the next throw. We know very precisely the odds of a certain
number coming up in a throw of the dice: but it is important to note that this
is a matter of being precise about our degree of uncertainty of a particular
number coming up.
And the excitement about these uncertainties
is vastly increased, of course, according to what bet is riding on the dice. A
pattern will emerge across many throws. But the next throw of the dice will
remain as unpredictable as each of the others was. A very clever and lucky
gambler will get rich because he understands not merely the behaviour of the
dice but the folly of the people he is playing against as they judge things
more wrongly than he. Mind you, it is likely he will end up poor because he
loves to gamble, which is to be in love with risk itself, and leads people into,
not merely the gamble they can win, but the gambles which are too dangerous to
succeed. As Al Pacino, in Martin Scorsese's film, Casino, remarks: the house
never loses if only it can keep a gambler at the table long enough.
Most judgements are far trickier than
the likely outcome of one or a hundred and one throws of a uniform and symmetrical
cube. Whether a nuclear power station will blow up, for instance, is far harder
to predict.
This is
odd, in a way. Because so much talent has been expended on the safety of power
stations, I would pretty freely predict that a British nuclear power station
will not blow up tonight, and will do so with greater confidence (but also
greater anxiety) than I will predict the outcome of the next throw of a dice I
now hold in my hand. In fact, I do know the odds of a particular number
coming
up on the dice, and however clever the efforts of safety experts and of statisticians
working with them in working to make power stations safe and expressing degrees
of confidence in the matter, I know that I do not know the odds of a power
station blowing up.
But I remain confident about nuclear
power in Britain. The confidence is importantly misplaced. However hard we try,
and we try very hard indeed, we have absolutely no knowledge about the future of
a nuclear power station's operation, whilst we know all the little there is to
know about the future of throws of dice. We can readily see that it is not merely
the seriousness of the outcome of an accident at a nuclear power station which
makes it an interesting risk to think about. Of course, the outcome of the
nuclear power station's going wrong is far more important than any throw of any
dice I ever heard of. But at the heart of the risk is the difficulty of being
quite sure enough of systems of any complexity, involving heat, pressure or toxicity
- all of which are at work in nuclear power stations. The key difference here
is that a gambler with dice has merely to understand a given and quite simple
system, but the gambler with nuclear power is working with people who are
trying to change the odds of a very complicated one.
Even beyond unpredictability, there are
elements here that will lead us into very deep water later. A nuclear accident
is serious out of all proportion to the seriousness of its effects on the
people it directly effects. That is usually, actually, rather a small number.
The worst nuclear accident we have ever seen, or know about, Chernobyl, might
kill perhaps 10,000 people over the fifty years from the great explosion of
April 1986.
Why do the rest of us think the risk from Chernobyl
is so serious when it hasn't affected us? Presumably, the reason is that
Chernobyl's going wrong symbolises to us the possibility that another, any other,
nuclear power station might go wrong and be similarly serious but nearer home.
Or is it that nuclear power has, well beyond the likelihood of its damaging us,
a certain mythic power to frighten? Can assessing its risks better help us to
see that we need to put aside at least the superstitious part of our fear so
that we can address the real risk for ourselves with unclouded judgement? These
matters are discussed in Chapter Five.
We certainly need to address the matter.
We are at present in the grip of irrational approaches to risk which make us
unhappy. But it is not coolness or rationality alone we need here. There is an
element of what might be called emotional literacy which is in short supply,
and which needs also to be called to the aid of progress. It would be fatal to
this enterprise of understanding and accepting risk better if it was thought
merely to flow from the intellect, and that it put at a discount the emotional
makeup and needs of real people.
One
of the most pernicious aspects of risk-averse greenery is that it contrives to seem
decent and feeling whilst the risk-taking capitalist or the scientist is characterised
as heartless. This is dangerous nonsense.
Risk and money
The
gambling analogy will come up quite often, and is useful not merely because the
mathematics of gambling are the same as the mathematics of risk. The insurance company
gambles that your premium has been calculated to provide decent odds in their
gamble with you that you won't lose your stuff or have it stolen. The life
assurance company bets you that you won't live as long as you hope to. Or rather,
they bet that of any thousand people they insure, no more than a certain number
will be robbed or have alarmingly long lives. Of course banks and insurance
houses like to festoon themselves with marble and their employees are required
to look and sound tremendously respectable, but that is because their real work
is like a bookie's, and not because it isn't.
Firms
need us to believe them when they say they are solid and reliable. They are, after
all, crucially institutions which need us to believe they will be there in the
future when we need them, and that they will be as good as their word. In these
matters, their reputation for reliability is as important to their business as
such a reputation is to a bookie, and for much the same reasons. They are
taking our stake for various bets, and must seem likely to be able to deliver
on their promises, even in the bad times.
Risk and life
There
is risk, not to say gambling, all around us. When we marry, we say we will take
a person for good or ill. We are throwing our lot in with their genes as they are
with ours. Tests for genetic defects are merely attempts to reduce risk, and
improve the odds of the bet we make about our offspring. Genetic testing, and
the abortions to which it gives rise, are a form of eugenics. They are an attempt
to take at least some of the chanciness out of procreation.
Interestingly, the life sciences are
now likely to have a powerful effect on the insurance market. People will soon know
much more clearly the risks they face, and be tempted to try to insure against
them in a market they are bound to hope will remain ignorant of their case.
Insurance firms, to look at this the other way up, will be bound to require
potential customers to let them inspect their genetic material for the same
information.
Every course of action implies an opportunity
cost: we are betting that the outcome of this set of options is better than the
likely outcomes of the line of options we are eschewing. This is true of
absolutely everything we do in life. It is only a slightly clumsy way
describing the way we arrive at an assessment of where our interests lie in almost
everything we do. In some things, it is not a clumsy way of describing something
simple, but an essential way of simplifying what would otherwise be dauntingly
complex.
The difficulty for us in seeing life
properly in this way is that it can seem so unromantic and bleak. It would rob our
life of much of its romance and honour, and almost all of its glory, if our choices
were seen to be calculated for their likely capability to deliver preferable
rather than disliked options. We do not want our lives to be seen to be driven
by a calculus of empirically-derived self-interest. We would rather be seen as
living by principle or impulse. Actually, of course, we can turn this on its
head: understanding risks give us a wider, not a narrower, field in which to
make moral choices. That we can calculate risks better than our forebears
reminds us, actually, how much courage we need to face the risks we sense
ourselves bound, and honour-bound, to take. This is the subject of Chapter
Three.
The
use of the gambling analogy might seem inappropriate to discussion about risk, in the sense that gambling
is about assessing the odds of a desired outcome and working out how much one
would be prepared to lose to be in with a chance of gaining this or that reward
if one's guess, hunch, assessment or punt was the right one.
Risk seems at first sight rather different.
It seems just to be a way of assessing how horrible the future will be. At
least, that is how those who want to warn us against taking risks would want us
to see the situation. They try to persuade us that certain risks are very real,
large and intolerable. But actually, riskiness is often a gamble turned on its
head. Most gambles are about parting now with something you want (your money,
your freedom) in exchange for the chance of something you want more in the
future (larger sums of money, security). Taking a risk is often like that: you
must risk falling into the river in order to get to the other side, and you
must risk dying of a new vaccine to see if it works or not. But the risks which
are more commonly of interest to us are those which are posed as risks to the
future or to other people or to the environment which may unfold as a result of
some action we want to take now.
Chapter Two: Risk Society:
its proponents and opponents
The proponents of risk society
Something
quite new has happened: people have found a way of getting a living out of risk
and the anxiety it causes. We have seen the emergence of an Anxiety Industry which
masquerades as a campaigning movement quite different from the protest movements
of the past. Historically, these have had largely altruistic purposes: the
abolition of slavery, the rights of women, the welfare of animals, and so on.
In our own times, the peace movement worried about a threat to innocent people
and was determined to combat it, whether it was concentrating on the H Bomb or
on Vietnam. Much more recently, the human rights movement has an obviously
altruistic focus. In particular, the green movement purported to defend
inarticulate nature.
These causes may or may not have been
pursued by grandstanders, humbugs and the vainglorious, as well as the more
plainly virtuous, but they could all claim - and frequently did, many of them -
to be on a disinterested quest for justice. They were often dominated by people
with a political agenda, and these were almost always of a left-wing sort. But
still, they were at least notionally outward looking.
Now, though, we have the Anxiety Industry.
This is the industry whose product is complaint, dissidence, litigation and
regulation. Its worst practioners are professional whingers whose chief outcome
is organised neurosis. Its prevailing fault is gracelessness in the midst of
well-being. It is composed of a powerful triumvirate comprising lawyers, the
media and campaigners. The medical profession has a walk-on role when its
practitioners are prepared to lend professional weight to the cause, but where
professional medical people won't be sufficiently helpful, the industry is
generally happy to turn to charlatans, alternativists and freelance therapists
to add noise if not substance to its litany of complaint. The movement is
characterised by people who are attention-seekers in their own right, though
they claim to be seeking attention for others.
There are several striking features to
the Anxiety Industry, and they are captured by the idea that this a consumer movement.
It is supposed to be about us, or about a class of person amongst whom we might
soon find ourselves.
It depends on creating victims and then matching
them with largely manufactured villains. The modern world is not short of
people prepared to characterise themselves as victims [Furedi, 1997; Furedi, 1999;
Times 1998a]. It portrays life as a sort of horror story which might unfold
around any one of us at any moment. A wide range of problems which once used to
be regarded as bad luck, or even one's own fault, can now be blamed on an
industry or industrial process, or on institutional failure. These are seen to
be worthy opponents, who in any case shelter behind a barrage of lawyers and then
behind insurance firms. There is an important emerging debate about the status
of scientific fact as victims claim that
they have been damaged by products and processes sold or run by villains.
In the classic case, it is now widely
but wrongly accepted that cigarette manufacturers cause smoking. Pandering to a
craving is now confused with causing it. More specifically, almost any act of
carelessness can land a firm or institution in difficulties. [Times, 1996] In
many of these cases, there are campaigns for the victim to approach for
support. The campaigners will know the ways of the media, who enjoy such rows.
Lawyers will quickly become involved, on a contingency or piece-rate fee basis.
Many of these have to put their natural scepticism on hold as they pursue
claims for which scientific evidence is wafer thin. However, if the “litigious
society” seriously takes off in the UK, we can expect to see defence lawyers
beginning to match the “ambulance chasers” and their eloquence. Already, some
lawyers are challenging the primacy of “junk science” [Financial Times, 98].
The
medical profession is augmented in pursuit of victims by academic researchers, who
will often be prepared to put their reputations on the line for this or that
hypothesis. Modern academics need to be famous and to be published: the funding
of their departments and the flow of students depends on it. Controversy is a
dangerous game for academics, but it is a deeply attractive one.
Some of this activity is merely and even
laudably the expression of free people in a free society. There is even an argument
that the litigious society, in which individuals seek redress from corporations
and institutions, produces a cheaper form of industry regulation than would a
state-run apparatus. It may be a cheaper way to control risks. Thus, it may be
cheaper for society to regulate McDonalds [Times, 1996; Furedi 1999] through an
individual occasionally suing it for a coffee burn, as has happened, than to
make coffee-purveyors safe by a costly system of regulations and policing which
raises the costs of entry into the coffee-purveying business.
But there is at least one major difficulty
with this approach. It tends to produce vulnerability. It creates a situation
in which being vulnerable is in general quite a useful strategy. Being stoical
and resilient becomes inefficient. Self-restraint is at a discount. Composure
is counter-productive.
The Litigious Society and the Blame Culture have led to a proliferation of claims, not all of them pressed to the point of legal case, arising out of a vague sense that modern life - its economy, its products, its science, its institutions, its most private familial arrangements - is somehow, and multifariously, sick. Its working life is especially supposed to be sick. [Sennett, 1998]. People bel