介绍:
Modern society has become a risk society in the sense that it is increasingly occupied with debating, preventing and managing risks that it itself has produced. That may well be, many will object, but it is indicative rather of a hysteria and politics of fear instigated and aggravated by the mass media. On the contrary, would not someone, looking at European societies from outside have to acknowledge that the risks which get us worked up, are luxury risks, more than anything else? After all, our world appears a lot safer than that, say, of the war-torn regions of Africa, Afghanistan or the Middle East. Are modern societies not distinguished precisely by the fact that to a large extent they have succeeded in bringing under control contingencies and uncertainties, for example with respect to accidents, violence and sickness?
As true as all such observations may be, they miss the most obvious point about risk: that is, the key distinction between risk and catastrophe. Risk does not mean catastrophe. Risk means the anticipation of catastrophe. Risks are about staging the future in the present, whereas the future of future catastrophes is in principle unknown. Without techniques of visualization, without symbolic forms, without mass media, risks are nothing at all. So global risks actually are globally medialized risks.
The sociological and political point is: If destruction and disaster are anticipated this produces a compulsion to act. The anticipation of threatening future catastrophes in the present (and the euro-crisis as again a living example) creates all kindturbulences inside national and international institutions but also in everyday life. Politically speaking, global risks create global public which mobilize people beyond all kind of borders, national, religious, ethnical etc. borders.
What is new about world risk society? Modern societies and their foundations are shaken by the global anticipation of global catastrophes (climate change, financial crisis). Such perceptions of globalized manufactured risks and uncertainties are characterized by these features:
De-localization: Their causes and consequences are not limited to one geographical location or space, but are in principle omnipresent.
• Incalculableness: Their consequences are in principle incalculable; at bottom it is a matter of ‘hypothetical’ or ‘virtual’ risks which, not least, are based on scientifically induced non-knowing and normative dissent.
• Non-compensability: The security dream of 19th century European modernity was based on the scientific utopia of making the unsafe consequences and dangers of decision ever more controllable; accidents could occur as long and because they were considered compensable. If the climate has changed irreversibly, if progress in human genetics makes irreversible interventions in human existence possible, if the ‘Super-Gau’ is happening – then it is too late. Given the new quality of threats to humanity, the logic of compensation breaks down and is replaced by the principle ‘precaution by prevention’ (François Ewald).
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