The influence of risk and doubt

Radical doubt filters into most aspects of day-to-day life, at least as a background phenomenon. So far as lay actors are concerned, its most important consequence is the requirement to steer between the conflicting claims of rival types of abstract system. Yet it also probably generates more diffuse worries. Adherence to a clear-cut faith -- especially one which offers a comprehensive lifestyle -- may diminish such anxieties. But it is probably rare for even the most fundamentalist of fundamentalist believers to escape radical doubt entirely. No one today can but be conscious that living according to the precepts of a determined faith is one choice among other possibilities. The very moral outrage which the `true believer' feels towards outsiders surely often expresses underlying anxiety rather than a feeling of safe adherence to the `cause'.

Living in a secular risk culture is inherently unsettling, and feelings of anxiety may become particularly pronounced during

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episodes which have a fateful quality. As mentioned previously, the difficulties of living in a risk culture do not mean that there is greater insecurity on the level of day-to-day life than was true of previous eras -- even in institutionalised risk settings. They concern anxieties generated by risk calculations themselves, plus the problem of screening out `unlikely' contingencies, thus reducing life-planning to manageable proportions. `Filtering out' is the task of the protective cocoon, but there is no easy boundary to be drawn between a `well-founded' confidence in present and future events and one that is less secure; this fact is intrinsic to the nature of trust, as a phenomenon which `brackets ignorance'. The deliberate, and frequently creative, manipulation of this boundary is one of the main inspirations of forms of cultivated risk-taking. Where it cannot be exploited to bring thrills and excitements, however, the borderline remains a focus for anxieties.

Risk assessment is crucial to the colonisation of the future; at the same time, it necessarily opens the self out to the unknown. There are some risk environments where the element of risk, so far as the situated individual is concerned, can be calculated quite precisely. Even here, and even supposing that the element of risk associated with a particular activity or strategy is small, by acknowledging risk the individual is forced to accept that any given situation could be one of those cases where `things go wrong'. This will not be troubling as a rule if the person concerned has well-established feelings of basic trust. If his sense of basic trust is fragile, however, even contemplating a small risk, particularly in relation to a highly cherished aim, may prove intolerable.

There are many instances, moreover, where riskiness cannot be fully assessed, and others where relevant experts disagree, perhaps in a radical way, about the risks of particular courses of action. The difficulties of living in a secular risk culture are compounded by the importance of lifestyle choices. A person may take refuge in a traditional or pre-established style of life as a means of cutting back on the anxieties that might otherwise beset her. But, for reasons already given, the security such a strategy offers is likely to be limited, because the individual cannot but be conscious that any such option is only one among plural possibilities.

Awareness of high-consequence risks is probably for most people a source of unspecific anxieties. Basic trust is again a

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determining element in whether or not an individual is actively and recurrently plagued with such anxieties. No one can show that it is not `rational' to worry constantly over the possibility of ecological catastrophe, nuclear war or the ravaging of humanity by as yet unanticipated scourges. Yet people who do spend every day worrying about such possibilities are not regarded as `normal'. If most successfully bracket out such possibilities and get on with their day-to-day activities, this is no doubt partly 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. A person may put such contingencies out of mind and assume that things will turn out well, or at least that, should global catastrophes of one kind or another occur, others will bear the brunt of them; alternatively, she might trust to governments and other organizations to cope effectively with the threats that present themselves.

Apocalypse has become banal, a set of statistical risk parameters to everyone's existence. In some sense, everyone has to live along with such risks, even if they make active efforts to help combat the dangers involved -- such as by joining pressure groups or social movements. But no amount of bracketing out is likely altogether to overcome the background anxieties produced by a world which could literally destroy itself. The motif of `survival' which Lasch describes connects such overall anxieties with the life-planning individuals carry out in the more restricted contexts of their action. The satisfaction an individual takes in being a `survivor' relates primarily to the negotiation of troubles of the reflexively organised life career; but it is surely also infused with a more general sense of anxiety about collective survival in a world of high-consequence risks. 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. ¹

Date: 2016-04-22; view: 741