Risk, trust and abstract systems

The abstract systems of modernity create large areas of relative security for the continuance of day-to-day life. Thinking in terms of risk certainly has its unsettling aspects, as was suggested earlier in the chapter, but it is also a means of seeking to stabilise outcomes, a mode of colonising the future. The more or less constant, profound and rapid momentum of change characteristic of modern institutions, coupled with structured reflexivity, mean that on the level of everyday practice as well as philosophical

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interpretation, nothing can be taken for granted. What is acceptable/appropriate/recommended behaviour today may be seen differently tomorrow in the light of altered circumstances or incoming knowledge-claims. Yet at the same time, so far as many daily transactions are concerned, activities are successfully routinised through their recombination across time-space.

Consider some examples. Modern money is an abstract system of formidable complexity, a prime illustration of a symbolic system that connects truly global processes to the mundane trivialities of daily life. A money economy helps regularise the provision of many day-to-day needs, even for the poorer strata in the developed societies (and even though many transactions, including some of a purely economic nature, are handled in non-monetary terms). Money meshes with many other abstract systems in global arenas and in local economies. The existence of organised monetary exchange makes possible the regularised contacts and exchanges `at distance' (in time and in space) on which such an interlacing of global and local influences depends. In conjunction with a division of labour of parallel complexity, the monetary system routinises the provision of the goods and services necessary to everyday life. Not only is a much greater variety of goods and foodstuffs available to the average individual than in pre-modern economies, but their availability is no longer governed so directly by the idiosyncrasies of time and place. Seasonal foodstuffs, for example, can often now be bought at any time of the year, and food items that cannot be grown at all in a particular country or region may be regularly obtained there.

This is a colonising of time as well as an ordering of space, since provisioning for the future, for the individual consumer, is rendered unnecessary. In fact, it is of little use to hoard stocks of food -- although some might choose to do so in the light of high-consequence risks -- for the ordinary business of life in a modern economy that is functioning vigourously. Such a practice would increase costs, since it would commit income that could otherwise be used for different purposes. Hoarding could in any case be no more than a short-term strategy, unless the individual has developed the capacity to furnish his or her own food. So long as the person vests trust in the monetary system and the division of labour, these allow for greater security and predictability than could be achieved by any other means.

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As another illustration, consider the provision of water, power for heating and lighting, and sanitised sewage disposal. Such systems, and the expertise on which they draw, act to stabilise many of the settings of day-to-day life -- at the same time as, like money, they radically transform them as compared to pre-modern ways of life. In the developed countries, for most of the population, water is available at the turn of a tap, domestic heating and illumination are equally to hand, and personal sewage is quickly flushed away. The organised piping of water has substantially reduced one of the great uncertainties which afflicted life in many pre-modern societies, the inconstant character of water supply. ²⁷ Readily available domestic water has made possible standards of personal cleanliness and hygiene that have made a major contribution to improved health. Constant running water is also necessary for modern sewage systems, and thus for the contribution to health which they have facilitated. Electricity, gas and continually available solid fuels similarly help regulate standards of bodily comfort, and provide power for cooking and the operation of many domestic devices. All these have regularised settings of activity inside and outside the home. Electric lighting has made possible the colonisation of the night. ²⁸ In the domestic milieu, routines are governed by the need for regular daily sleep rather than by the alternating of day and night, which can be cross-cut without any difficulty. Outside the home, an increasing range of organisations operate on a twenty-four hour basis.

Technological intervention into nature is the condition of the development of abstract systems such as these, but of course affects many other aspects of modern social life as well. The `socialisation of nature' has helped stabilise a variety of previously irregular or unpredictable influences on human behaviour. Control of nature was an important endeavour in pre-modern times, especially in the larger agrarian states, in which irrigation schemes, the clearing of forests and other modes of managing nature for human purposes were commonplace. As Dubos has emphasised, by the modern period Europe was already very largely a socialised environment, shaped by many generations of peasants from the original forests and marshes. ²⁹ Yet over the past two or three centuries the process of human intervention into nature has been massively extended; moreover,

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it is no longer confined to certain areas or regions, but like other aspects of modernity has become globalised. Many aspects of social activity have become more secure as a result of these developments. Travel, for example, has become regularised, and made safer, by the construction of modern roads, trains, ships and planes. As with all abstract systems, enormous changes in the nature and scope of travel have been associated with these innovations. But it is now easy for anyone with the necessary financial resources casually to undertake journeys that two centuries ago would have been only for the most intrepid, and would have taken much longer to accomplish.

There is greater security in many aspects of day-to-day life - yet there is also a serious price to pay for these advances. Abstract systems depend on trust, yet they provide none of the moral rewards which can be obtained from personalised trust, or were often available in traditional settings from the moral frameworks within which everyday life was undertaken. Moreover, the wholesale penetration of abstract systems into daily life creates risks which the individual is not well placed to confront; high-consequence risks fall into this category. Greater interdependence, up to and including gobally independent systems, means greater vulnerability when untoward events occur that affect those systems as a whole. Such is the case with each of the examples mentioned above. The money a person possesses, however little it may be, is subject to vagaries of the global economy which even the most powerful of nations may be able to do very little about. A local monetary system may collapse completely, as happened in Germany in the 1920s: in some circumstances, which at the moment we might not envisage at all, this might perhaps happen to the global monetary order, with disastrous consequences for billions of people. A prolonged drought, or other problems with centralised water systems, can sometimes have more disturbing results than periodic water shortages might have had in pre-modern times; while any prolonged shortage of power dislocates the ordinary activities of vast numbers of people.

Socialised nature provides a telling -- and substantively a massively important -- illustration of these characteristics. McKibben argues, with great plausibility, that human intervention in the natural world has been so profound, and so encompassing, that

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today we can speak of the `end of nature'. Socialised nature is quite different from the old natural environment, which existed separately from human endeavours and formed a relatively unchanging backdrop to them. `It is like the old nature in that it makes its points through what we think of as natural processes (rain, wind, heat), but it offers none of the consolations -- the retreat from the human world, a sense of permanence, or even of eternity.' ³⁰

Nature in the old sense, McKibben points out, was quite unpredictable: storms could come without warning, bad summers destroy the crops, devastating floods occur as the result of unexpected rain. Modern technology and expertise have made better monitoring of weather conditions possible, and improved management of the natural environment has allowed many pre-existing hazards to be overcome, or their impact minimalised. Yet socialised nature is in some fundamental respects more unreliable than `old nature', because we cannot be sure how the new natural order will behave. Take the hypothesis of global warming, a phenomenon which, if it is really occurring, will wreak havoc around the world. McKibben concludes that the available evidence supports the view that the `greenhouse effect' is real, and in fact argues that the processes involved are already too far under way for them to be effectively countered in the short or medium term. He may be right about this. The point is that, at the time of writing at any rate, no one can say with assurance that it is not happening. The dangers posed by global warming are high-consequence risks which collectively we face, but about which precise risk assessment is virtually impossible.

Date: 2016-04-22; view: 865