Risk, trust and the protective cocoon

The world of `normal appearances', I stressed earlier, is more than just a mutually sustained show of interaction which individuals put on for one another. The routines individuals follow, as their time-space paths criss-cross in the contexts of daily life, constitute that life as `normal' and `predictable'. Normality is managed in fine detail within the textures of social activity: this applies equally to the body and to the articulation of the individual's involvements and projects. The individual must be there in the flesh to be there at all, <sup>20</sup> and the flesh that is the corporeal self has to be chronically guarded and succoured -- in the immediacy of every day-to-day situation as well as in life-planning extending over time and space. The body is in some sense perennially at risk. The possibility of bodily injury is ever-present, even in the most familiar of surroundings. The home, for example, is a dangerous place: a high proportion of serious injuries are brought about by accidents in the domestic milieu. `A body', as Goffman tersely puts it, `is a piece of consequential equipment, and its owner is always putting it on the line.' ²¹

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I suggested in chapter 2 that basic trust is fundamental to the connections between daily routines and normal appearances. Within the settings of daily life, basic trust is expressed as a bracketing-out of possible events or issues which could, in certain circumstances, be cause for alarm. What other people appear to do, and who they appear to be, is usually accepted as the same as what they are actually doing and who they actually are. Consider, however, the world of the spy who, in the interests of self-preservation, cannot accept the range of normal appearances in the way that other people usually do. The spy suspends part of the generalised trust which is ordinarily vested in `things as they are', and suffers tortuous anxieties about what would otherwise be mundane events. To the ordinary person a wrong number may be a minor irritation, but to the undercover agent it may be a disturbing sign that causes alarm.

A feeling of bodily and psychic ease in the routine circumstances of everyday life, as was stressed earlier, is only acquired with great effort. If we mostly seem less fragile than we really are in the contexts of our actions, it is because of long-term learning processes whereby potential threats are avoided or immobilised. The simplest action, such as walking without falling over, avoiding collisions with objects, crossing the road or using a knife and fork, had to be learned in circumstances which originally had connotations of fatefulness. The `uneventful' character of much of day-to-day life is the result of a skilled watchfulness that only long schooling produces, and is crucial to the protective cocoon which all regularised action presumes.

These phenomena can be usefully analysed using Goffman's notion of the Umwelt, a core of (accomplished) normalcy with which individuals and groups surround themselves. ²² The notion comes from the study of animal behaviour. Animals maintain a sensitivity to a surrounding physical area in terms of threats which may emanate from it. The area of sensitivity varies between different species. Some types of animal are able to sense sounds, scents and movements from many miles away; for other animals, the extent of the Umwelt is more limited.

In the case of human beings, the Umwelt includes more than the immediate physical surroundings. It extends over indefinite spans of time and space, and corresponds to the system of relevances, to use Schutz's term, which enframes the individual's

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life. Individuals are more or less constantly alert to signals that relate here-and-now activities to spatially distant persons or events of concern to them, and to projects of life-planning of varying temporal span. The Umwelt is a `moving' world of normalcy which the individual takes around from situation to situation, although this feat depends also on others who confirm, or take part in, reproducing that world. The individual creates, as it were, a `moving wave-front of relevance' which orders contingent events in relation to risk and potential alarms. Time-space movement -- the physical mobility of the body from setting to setting -- centres the individual's concerns in the physical properties of context, but contextual dangers are monitored in relation to other, more diffuse sources of threat. In the globalised circumstances of today, the Umwelt includes awareness of high-consequence risks, which represent dangers from which no one can get completely out of range.

In the settings of modernity, from which fortuna has largely retreated, the individual ordinarily separates the Umwelt into designed and adventitious happenings. The adventitious forms a continuing backdrop to the foreground relevances from which the individual creates a textured flow of action. The differentiation also allows the person to bracket out a whole host of actual and potential happenings, consigning them to a realm which still has to be watched over, but with minimal carefulness. This has the corollary that each person in an interaction situation presumes that much of what she does is a matter of indifference to others -- although indifference still has to be managed in co-present public situations, in the shape of codes of civil inattention.

In contrast to the paranoiac, the ordinary individual is thus able to believe that moments which are fateful for his own life are not the result of fate. Luck is what one needs when one contemplates a risky action, but it has a broader connotation, too, as a means of relating chance to fatefulness (as good or as bad luck). Since the distinction between what is adventitious and what is not is in practice sometimes difficult to draw, however, serious tensions can arise when events or activities are `misinterpreted' -- as where an event affecting another is held to be contrived where it is not, or vice versa. The discovery of contrivance may easily be cause for alarm -- a husband is led to suspect infidelity when he finds that an apparently chance meeting between his wife and an ex-lover

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was actually less than a chance encounter after all. The presumption of generalised trust that the recognition of adventitious happenings involves concerns future anticipations as well as current interpretative understandings. In most circumstances of interaction, an individual assumes that others co-present will not use their current dealings with him as a basis for acts of malevolence at some future time. The future exploitation of current situations, however, is always an area of potential vulnerability.

The protective cocoon is the mantle of trust that makes possible the sustaining of a viable Umwelt. That substratum of trust is the condition and the outcome of the routinised nature of an `uneventful' world -- a universe of actual and possible events surrounding the individual's current activities and projects for the future, in which the bulk of what goes on is `non-consequential' so far as that person is concerned. Trust here incorporates actual and potential events in the physical world as well as encounters and activities in the sphere of social life. Living in the circumstances of modern social institutions, in which risk is recognised as risk, creates certain specific difficulties for the generalised vesting of trust in `discounted possibilities' -- possibilities that are bracketed out as irrelevant to the individual's self-identity and pursuits. The psychological security that conceptions of fate can offer is largely foreclosed, as is the personalising of natural events in the shape of spirits, demons or other beings. The chronic constitutive intrusion of abstract systems into day-to-day life creates further problems influencing the relation between generalised trust and the Umwelt.

In modern social conditions, the more the individual seeks reflexively to forge a self-identity, the more he or she will be aware that current practices shape future outcomes. In so far as conceptions of fortuna are completely abandoned, assessment of risk -- or the balance of risk and opportunity -- becomes the core element of the personal colonising of future domains. Yet a psychologically crucial part of the protective cocoon is the deflection of the hazardous consequences that thinking in terms of risk presumes. Since risk profiling is such a central part of modernity, awareness of probability ratios for different types of endeavour or event form one means whereby this can be achieved. What could `go wrong' can be pushed to one side on the grounds that it is so unlikely that it can be put out of mind. Air travel is usually

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calculated to be the safest form of transport in terms of various criteria. The risk of being killed in a plane crash, for the regular commercial airlines, is about one in 850,000 per trip -- a figure derived by dividing the total number of passenger trips over a given period of time by the number of air-crash victims during that period.²³ It has sometimes been asserted that sitting in a seat in an airliner five miles above the ground is the safest place in the world, given the number of accidents which occur at home, work or in other milieux. Yet many people remain terrified of flying, and a certain minority who have the opportunity or resources to travel by air refuse to do so. They cannot put out of their minds what it would be like if things did go wrong.

Interestingly, some such people are willing to travel on the roads without too much worry, even though they are almost certainly aware that the risks of serious injury or death are higher. The weight of the counterfactual seems to matter a lot in this -- horrific though road accidents might be, they perhaps do not evoke quite the same degree of dread as the scenario of an air crash.

Deferment in time and remoteness in space are other factors that can reduce the disquiet that awareness of risk as risk might otherwise produce. A young person in good health might be conscious enough of the risks of smoking, but consign the potential dangers to a time that seems impossibly distant in the future -- such as when he or she reaches forty -- and thus effectively blot out those dangers. Risks remote from an individual's daily contexts of life -- such as high-consequence risks -- might also be bracketed out of the Umwelt. The dangers they present, in other words, are thought of as too far removed from a person's own practical involvements for that individual seriously to contemplate them as possibilities.

Yet notions of fate refuse to disappear altogether, and are found in uneasy combination with an outlook of the secular risk type and with attitudes of fatalism. A belief in the providential nature of things is one sense in which a conception of fortuna crops up -- an important phenomenon, and one connected with some basic characteristics of modernity itself. Providential interpretations of history were major elements of Enlightenment culture, and it is not surprising that their residues are still to be found in modes of thinking in day-to-day life. Attitudes to high-consequence

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risks probably often retain strong traces of a providential outlook. We may live in an apocalyptic world, facing an array of global dangers; yet an individual might feel that governments, scientists or other technical specialists can be trusted to take the appropriate steps to counter them. Or else he feels that `everything is bound to come out all right in the end.'

Alternatively, such attitudes may relapse into fatalism. A fatalistic ethos is one possible generalised response to a secular risk culture. There are risks which we all confront but which, as individuals -- and perhaps even collectively -- none of us can do much about. The things that happen in life, the proponent of such an orientation might declare, are in the end a matter of chance. Therefore we might as well decide that `whatever will be will be', and leave matters there. This having been said, it would be difficult to be fatalistic in all areas of life, given the pressures today which propel us towards taking an active, innovative attitude towards our personal and collective circumstances. Fatalism in specific risk contexts tends to devolve into the more encompassing attitudes of what I have elsewhere called `pragmatic acceptance' or `cynical pessimism'. The former is an attitude of generalized coping -- taking each day as it comes -- while the latter repels anxieties through world-weary humour. ²⁴

There are many unsought-after events which may puncture the protective mantle of ontological security and cause alarm. Alarms come in all shapes and sizes, from the four-minute warning of Armageddon to a slip on the proverbial banana skin. Some are bodily symptoms or failings, others are anxieties sparked by an anticipated or actual failure of cherished projects, or by unexpected events that intrude into the Umwelt. The most challenging situations for the individual to master, however, are those where alarms coincide with consequential changes -- fateful moments. At fateful moments, the individual is likely to recognise that she is faced with an altered set of risks and possibilities. In such circumstances, she is called on to question routinised habits of relevant kinds, even sometimes those most closely integrated with self-identity. Various strategies may be adopted. A person may, for whatever reason, simply carry on with established modes of behaviour, perhaps choosing to disregard whether or not these conform well with new situational demands. In some circumstances, though, this is impossible: for example, someone

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who has separated from his spouse can no longer carry on in the same way as he did while married. Many fateful moments by their very nature oblige the individual to change habits and readjust projects.

Fateful moments do not only `befall' individuals -- they are sometimes cultivated or deliberately sought after. Institutionalised risk environments, and other more individualised risk activities, provide a major category of settings in which fatefulness is actively created. <sup>25</sup> Such situations make possible the display of daring, resourcefulness, skill and sustained endeavour, where people are only too aware of the risks involved in what they are doing, but use them to create an edge which routine circumstances lack. Most institutionalised risk environments, including those in the economic sector, are contests: spaces in which risk-taking pits individuals against one another, or against obstacles in the physical world. Contests call for committed, opportunistic action in a way that situations of `pure chance', like lotteries, do not. The thrills that can be achieved in cultivated risk-taking depend on deliberate exposure to uncertainty, thus allowing the activity in question to stand out in relief against the routines of ordinary life. Thrills can be sought through risk-taking of high order, vicariously in spectator sports, or in activities where the actual level of risk to life and limb is small, but where dangerous situations are simulated (such as a roller-coaster ride). The thrill of risk-taking activities, as Balint says, involves several discernible attitudes: awareness of exposure to danger, a voluntary exposure to such danger, and the more or less confident expectation of overcoming it. ²⁶ Funfairs mimic most of the situations in which thrills are sought elsewhere, but in a controlled way that takes away two key elements: the individual's active mastery; and the circumstances of uncertainty which both call for that mastery and allow it to be demonstrated.

Goffman points out that someone who is strongly inclined towards cultivated risk-taking -- like the inveterate gambler -- is able to discern opportunities for the play of chance in many circumstances which others would treat as routine and uneventful. Spotting such angles, one might add, is a way of turning up possibilities for developing new modes of activity within familiar contexts. For where contingency is discovered, or manufactured, situations which seem closed and pre-defined can again look

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open. Cultivated risk here converges with some of the most basic orientations of modernity. The capability to disturb the fixity of things, open up new pathways, and thereby colonise a segment of a novel future, is integral to modernity's unsettling character.

We could say, I think, that cultivated risk-taking represents an `experiment with trust' (in the sense of basic trust) which consequently has implications for an individual's self-identity. We could redefine Balint's `confident expectation' as trust -- trust that the dangers which are deliberately courted will be conquered. Mastery of such dangers is an act of self-vindication and a demonstration, to the self and others, that under difficult circumstances one can come through. Fear produces the thrill, but it is fear that is redirected in the form of mastery. The thrill of cultivated risk-taking feeds on that `courage to be' which is generic to early socialisation. Courage is demonstrated in cultivated risk-taking precisely as a quality which is placed on trial: the individual submits to a test of integrity by showing the capacity to envisage the `down-side' of the risks being run, and press ahead regardless, even though there is no constraint to do so. The search for thrills, or more soberly for the sense of mastery that comes with the deliberate confrontation of dangers, no doubt derives in some part from its contrast with routine. Yet it also takes on psychological fuel from a contrast with the more deferred and ambiguous gratifications that emerge from other types of encounters with risk. In cultivated risk-taking, the encounter with danger and its resolution are bound up in the same activity, whereas in other consequential settings the payoff of chosen strategies may not be seen for years afterwards.

Date: 2016-04-22; view: 648