The active courting of risks

Of course, there are differences between risks voluntarily run and those built into the constraints of social life or into a lifestyle pattern to which one is committed. Institutionalised risk environments provide some settings within which individuals can choose to risk scarce resources, including their lives -- as in hazardous sports or other comparable activities. Yet the differentiation between risks that are voluntarily undertaken and risks which affect the individual in a less sought-after way is often blurred, and plainly does not always correspond to the division between extrinsic and institutionalised risk environments. The risk factors built into a modern economy, as mentioned before, affect almost everyone, regardless of whether a given individual is directly active within the economic order. Driving a car and smoking provide other examples. Driving is in many situations a voluntary activity; yet there are some contexts where lifestyle commitments or other constraints will make using a car close to a necessity. Smoking may be voluntarily entered into, but once it is an addition it has a compulsive character, as does alcohol consumption.¹⁹

The active embrace of certain types of risk is an important part of the risk climate. Some aspects or types of risk may be valued

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for their own sake -- the elation that may come from driving fast and dangerously resembles the thrill offered by certain institutionalised risk endeavours. Taking up smoking in the face of its known risks to health may demonstrate a certain bravado that an individual finds psychologically rewarding. To the degree to which this is so, such activities can be understood in terms of dimensions of `cultivated risk' that will be discussed further below. But for the most part, the passive acceptance of the hazards of such practices as driving and cigarette smoking by large sectors of the population has to be interpreted in different terms. Two types of interpretation have commonly been put forward. One is that the large corporations, and other powerful agencies, conspire to mislead the public about the true levels of risk, or use advertising and other conditioning methods to ensure that a substantial proportion of the population engages in these risk-taking habits nevertheless. The other suggests that most laypeople are not sensitive to individually distributed or to deferred risk -- even though they often overreact to collective disasters or to risks that are more `visible'. Both explanations tend to lay considerable emphasis on apparently irrational components of action. Neither explanation seems particularly convincing, although no doubt each points to factors of some importance. The main influences involved probably derive from certain characteristic features of life-planning and lifestyle habits. Since specific practices are ordinarily geared into an integrated cluster of lifestyle habits, individuals do not always, or perhaps even usually, assess risks as separate items, each in its own domain. Life-planning takes account of a `package' of risks rather than calculating the implications of distinct segments of risky behaviour. Taking certain risks in pursuit of a given lifestyle, in other words, is accepted to be within `tolerable limits' as part of that overall package.

Individuals seek to colonise the future for themselves as an intrinsic part of their life-planning. As in the case of collective futures, the degree to which the future realm can be successfully invaded is partial, and subject to the various vagaries of risk assessment. All individuals establish a portfolio of risk assessment, which may be more or less clearly articulated, well informed and `open'; or alternatively may be largely inertial. Thinking in terms of risk becomes more or less inevitable and

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most people will be conscious also of the risks of refusing to think in this way, even if they may choose to ignore those risks. In the charged reflexive settings of high modernity, living on `automatic pilot' becomes more and more difficult to do, and it becomes less and less possible to protect any lifestyle, no matter how firmly pre-established, from the generalised risk climate.

The argument at this point should not be misunderstood. Much risk assessment proceeds on the level of practical consciousness and, as will be indicated below, the protective cocoon of basic trust blocks off most otherwise potentially disturbing happenings which impinge on the individual's life circumstances. Being `at ease' in the world is certainly problematic in the era of high modernity, in which a framework of `care' and the development of `shared histories' with others are largely reflexive achievements. But such histories often provide settings in which ontological security is sustained in the relatively unproblematic way, at least for specific phases of an individual's life.

Date: 2016-04-22; view: 741