WHEN you want to understand a society, it is more useful to examine its fears than its desires. We could say: Tell me whom you are afraid of and I will tell you who you are. We can now register a fear with new characteristics in the fear taxonomy, and we could call it global fear, in other words, fear of the consequences of the process of globalization. It is a question of risks that have to be governed and from which we have the right to be protected. At the same time, unreasonable reactions to some of the concerns raised by this process express the pathologies of a global “I” that reacts with authoritarianism in order to compensate for its own impotence. This subject is both insecure and tyrannical, apathetic and voracious. This ambiguity closely matches the properties of Bauman’s “liquid fear”: an indistinct and vague fear that begins with the perception of the loss of control over events. This is how we can understand the siege sensation felt by a large part of the Western world, a world that is enjoying a situation of objective security unlike any other previous time in the history of humanity.
Being frightened is an essential part of the human condition. We all feel frightened, and it does not seem we will stop feeling that way, although the motives for fear can be very diverse throughout the world and throughout time. Every moment in history is differentiated from others by the particular forms of fear it knows, or, rather, by the name or particular meaning given to the anxieties that have always accompanied social life. Jean Delumeau (1989), Corey Robin (2004), and Joanna Bourke (2005) have written remarkable books that explain how the perception of fear has changed over the course of time. What remains to be explained is the nature of the global fear that is currently in place at a time when humanity seems to have secured its victory in the face of the randomness of nature and the brutality of social conflict. Texts by Bauman (2006) and Pulcini (2009) attempt to resolve this enigmatic paradox.
How is it possible that a secure society coincides in time with a civilization of fear, that we are more fearful when there are less objective motivations for fear? First of all, because in our society many fears are due precisely to the increase in security; the habit of security has made the perception of loss more acute. We live in a world in which we can lose more because we have so much, in contrast to a world where we could gain more because we had very little. A psychological explanation has to do with the aversion to loss: people consider a loss of status more undesirable than they consider a gain desirable. The displeasure of losing what we have is greater than the pleasure engendered when there is a possibility of improving what we have (Sunstein 2005, 41).
The paradox is also explained by means of the distinction between old dangers and current risks. In traditional societies there were large fears but they were rather foreseeable: shortages, hunger, illness, war. The improbable was situated in a background category of constant fear, which one could deal with in a way. In contrast, current sources of fear are more uncertain and indeterminate; we now see the world as more risk-filled than danger-filled. We cannot program risks in our society; we do not have a list of them. The element of improbability cannot be mastered, particularly in a cognitive manner. The current increase in fear is due not only to the fact that certain risks that threaten society have increased but to the fact that the conditions of uncertainty in which people spend their lives have increased. Our society is constantly exposed to the imponderable. The world has become more complex, and we have not managed to rise to the occasion of that complexity. For that reason, the space of the imaginary and its political use is enormously expanded: wars are fought, elections are won, and governments act in the imaginary realm.
To understand these paradigm changes, we need to take into account the distinct function that fear has had on the construction of modern political community or on the current fragility of globalized spaces. Fear is the passion that is at the heart of life in common. If we reread Hobbes, we will find documentation of this transition that we can now recall concisely. Human beings have a similar capacity for mutual destruction. The fear of death caused by other people leads individuals to the construction of a civil and political society that guarantees security. The goal of self-preservation is at the core of the creation of the modern state. Submission to the sovereign is the price one must pay to stop fearing our fellow human beings.
This is no longer the way it is in the global age. We continue to be afraid of many things, of course, but what has weakened is the productive metamorphosis of fear, its transformation into rational action that configures common institutions. Fear has become ineffective, unproductive, and desperate. The surges of fear that are appearing nowadays no longer contain the productive force that established the political institutions of modernity.
At the same time, we can see that the two main ways of liberating people from fear, through technological and through political intervention, have lost a good deal of their efficacy. Technology has become a multiplier of risk and uncertainty, while politics, in its classic state form, is incapable of confronting the challenges of globalization. In this context, how do we avoid succumbing once again to the “illiteracy of fear” that Musil addressed and that reveals our inability to experience fear in a reasonable manner?
In
addition to being politically unproductive, global fear is characterized by arising from the uneasiness provoked by someone
different rather the potential threat of someone
similar. The Other, the foreigner, anyone who is distinct, comes to represent a disturbing difference. As in the global era, the outside/inside distinction does not work with Hobbesian clarity. It is no longer possible to banish the foreigner or enemy and thus secure one’s own threatened identity. The Other, the foreigner, is now among us. We do not fear a symmetrical conflict—which presupposes equality—as much as assimilation or contamination. The Other who inspires fear is no longer someone similar (with a similarity that is hostile and whose dangerousness arises from the fact, according to a basic Hobbesian way of thinking, that he or she possesses the same destructive capacity as I do), but someone who is different, from an ethnic, religious, cultural, or ideological standpoint. Given that contemporary fear is not enflamed by those who are the same but by those who are different, this fear cannot be easily shifted so that the equality of threats will be transformed into an equality of rights. This point also reveals the profoundly antimodern and unproductive nature of our current fears.
For the creation or maintenance of a democratic society, fear is not good or bad; everything depends on the use that is made of this elemental human passion. Our biggest current challenge is to give it a reasonable direction, for example, transforming it into a constructive force that allows us to know reality better and to strengthen democratic coexistence. We need to be in harmony with fear and manage the double-sided ambiguity that characterizes it: it can paralyze, but it can also organize strategies for defense and construction. Fear is not only paralyzing, but organizational. If well managed, it can offer us a solid cognitive dimension in the face of risk. This ability to recognize dangers and consider them in their just measure is what Hans Jonas (1984) called “the heuristics of fear,” inviting us not to scorn this magnificent resource, which allows the imagination of the most terrible things to become a reasonable spur for action. In that way, the principal problem we have is not the “freedom from fear,” to use Roosevelt’s famous formulation, but the “freedom to fear,” as Günther Anders (1956) suggested, the freedom to be afraid, which presupposes the capacity to feel sufficient fear if we want to free ourselves from the true dangers that threaten us.
Fear is not only an instrument of control for the elites but a fundamental and universal passion, whose first and indispensable function is to guarantee the self-preservation of individuals by keeping the memory of their vulnerability alive within them (Robin 2004). Among other things, politics serves to cultivate in society a proportional and reasonable fear. Of course there is an antidemocratic, populist “creation of fear,” which stigmatizes in order to try to neutralize the democratizing potentialities of pluralism; fear can be skillfully stoked in order to offer itself as a savior or to induce lethargy in a society in such a way that it is more easily governable. But there is fear that can be a source of lucidity and liberation. The opportune dramatization of risks is an antidote against the simple-minded present that does not know how to do anything but continue muddling through (Beck 1997). In relation to many of the true threats we confront, reactivating fear can help us abandon our self-destructive passivity and recuperate the mobilizing force against disaster.
One of our principal tasks is precisely to rationalize global fear, a fear that is very logical given humanity’s common exposure to the risk of self-destruction, the mutual interdependence that connects us to the destiny of those who are similar to us. Vulnerability, negated by subjects who saw themselves as sovereign and self-sufficient, can become the premise for the formation of a subject in relation, capable of taking responsibility for the other and the world (Pulcini 2009, 264). But what if the preservation of the world is the Copernican revolution of the global era? The ideal of caring for and conserving would lose its static and antiprogressive resonance to assume an emancipating significance. In that way, the task at hand could truly unsettle that predatory, parasitic, consumerist, viewing subject, who is now dying of fear.
GOVERNING GLOBAL RISKS
The British magazine
Economist defines itself in this way: published since 1843 “to take part in a severe contest between intelligence, which presses forward, and an unworthy, timid ignorance obstructing our progress.” This liberal declaration, with its epic touch, now has an anachronistic tone. Apart from a few heroic exceptions, we can say today that precaution has replaced planning itself and that our relationship with the future tends to focus on prevention.
For those who grew up with the fears of the 1970s and 1980s (growth and its limits, the nuclear threat, the ecological crisis, shortage of resources, and so on), the word “progress” sounds frivolous. Now, in the midst of the financial crisis, using the language of management, which exalts the culture of risk and the willingness to fail, seems like a provocation. In general, being a progressive today has nothing to do with progress, but rather with precaution toward science and technology. Therefore, it is not unusual to quote Benjamin’s quip against Marx, saying that the revolution is the emergency handbrake of history. Currently, after the financial crises and the problems of climate change, the provocative nature of the idea of progress has only intensified.
The presumption of the danger inherent in technological and scientific innovations has progressively filled the ideological void that appeared after the collapse of the idea of the ingenuity of progress. Novelty and progress are presented under the aegis of risk. What began as skepticism of the vanguard has now become a commonplace. In the best of cases, we expect politics to be able to ward off the threats that may appear in the future. It is not surprising that the idea of sustainable development has aroused so much interest or that the principle of precaution has been formulated and applied with such intensity.
Considering the gravity of the risks we are confronting, fear is not entirely unfounded. There are those who disapprove of the excess of alerts and the aversion to risk, which is seen as a paranoia suffered in wealthy countries. Of course, hysteria is hardly a reasonable means of confronting risks, but that does not mean they do not exist. Risks continue to be a source of anxiety even when our way of confronting them may be exaggerated or ridiculous. What we need is a profound study of the limits of precaution.
Let us take a look at a recent example. The winter of 2009 and 2010 will probably go down in history as the Era of Alerts, among which we could mention swine flu and the prevention of certain potentially catastrophic weather events. I do not know whether this came from the guilty conscience of not having anticipated the economic crisis, but the fact of the matter is that governments outdid themselves in sounding alarms over possible contagions or storms, whose very names (for example, “explosive cyclogenesis” and “the perfect storm”) were themselves colored by a note of warning. Governments preferred to give warning rather than face later accusations of not having foreseen the worst. This attitude seems very sensible, but it also entails some inconvenience, even when things do not go as poorly as we were made to fear. The fact is that not all risks can be given the same attention; every preventive action comes at a price, whether that cost is strictly financial or whether it is a result of the inevitable selectivity of prevention, where emphasizing one risk implies disregarding another. No one demands that anyone be held accountable for inducing panic, the costs of fear, the money wasted, or the attention diverted from other important matters. An excess of alerts is less serious than a shortage of them, but it is not an ideal solution either.
The lesson we should draw from excessive alerts is that programs meant to avoid all risks generate counterproductive effects. Attempting to completely eliminate fear through total prevention is absurd because fears are part of the human condition, our open character, and the corresponding indeterminacy of liberal democracies (Sunstein 2005). Preventions tend to imply some prohibition and should, in an open society, be established—with the greatest possible prevention. A generalized prohibition on innovation would be very risky. Where would society then get the innovations necessary to fight hunger, disease, poverty, or natural disasters? The relative irresponsibility of science is the foundation of its success, and no one currently holds a monopoly on the ability to distinguish bad risks from good innovations.
Prevention has its costs, and it is frequently the case that banishing one fear creates another. One recent example is found in the change the World Health Organization made in the definition of “pandemic.” This change allows medicines and vaccines to be introduced in an emergency fashion, in other words, with less guarantees and greater risks. We could also mention the danger of spreading fear and its side effects or the perverse consequences of exaggerated and unnecessary laws. Prevention also has its risks, especially when it is redundant (Wildavsky 1988). All of this also must be considered within a temporal perspective: many models and methods that were previously recognized in good conscience as reliable advances now appear to be exercises in irresponsible frivolity.
I do not think it is going too far to state that in the future our principal discussions will revolve around the question of how we evaluate risks and what actions we recommend as a consequence. Political confrontation focuses on the probabilities of danger and the anticipation of risks. Politics is more of a competition focused on dangers than on opportunities. Political actors are similar in that they all focus equally on warning us about the imminence of certain dangers, offering to save us from disaster; they differ only in the risks they consider most dangerous: a loss of identity or the lack of social protection, risks related to a lack of safety or to possible abuses by those who are standing guard. But they hardly even try to imagine what would be
desirable because of the fear of
possible evils. The rivalry of threats seems to have replaced the rivalry between projects. Political agents wield less ideology than resources to sound the alarm.
These controversies are fueled by the fact that the perception of risk has a strong degree of subjectivity. Ulrich Beck (2006) ventured to say that this contrast could be extended to a planetary scale and generate a “war of risk religions.” The fact that some cultures fear what is considered normal in others takes on new geopolitical significance. Now that countries like China or India are on the First World stage, we are confronted by risk cultures very different than those to which we are accustomed. Different risk cultures tend to find opportunity in every danger, the appearance of which is weighed in terms of likelihood. Risk taking that we previously considered normal is going to appear less and less normal.
This debate has intensified since the question of global risks has appeared on the political agenda. Climate change, new security threats, health and food risks, and financial crises immediately challenge our conception of these uncertain futures. How can we recognize possible risks? How should we act in relation to risks that are not verifiable facts but latent possibilities whose very identification is open to controversy? How do we remain cognizant of the improbable? Every uncertain future confronts us with dilemmas that are particularly difficult. What precautions are reasonable? How can we preempt the causal chains of disaster? What type of concerted action is appropriate for the global treatment of our problems? How can we manage our inevitable ignorance of future events? And so on.
First, we need to fully understand the nature of those risks if we want to properly manage the uncertainty they imply. Risks, particularly global risks, resist calculation according to scientific criteria, so faith in their existence or lack thereof becomes decisive. It makes no sense to contrast the “poorly informed opinions” people hold about presumed risks with the rational views experts hold on actual risks. All too often, expert rationalism, with its calculation of probability, is as full of errors as when alarmists exalt fear as the supreme bestower of knowledge. Populist alarmism is just as suspicious as technocratic frivolity.
We must agree about acceptable risks. Many decisions regarding risk are not a question of selecting between secure or risky alternatives, but require making a choice between alternatives that are always risky. As I just mentioned, all preventive measures imply risks, because of both what we do and what we fail to do. Fear is a sign, and signs should be neither ignored nor overemphasized. We have not yet managed to articulate a concept or a strategy for what should be a reasonable balance between risk and security, of which we have an outdated opinion. It seems we have not understood either one of them: to what extent is risk at the heart of our societies, and can we make use of a conception of security formulated in another era? That is why our feelings about fear are especially vulnerable. Dealing with a future with uncertain dangers is one of the most difficult things we have to learn: we are often fearful when there is not sufficient cause while we are unreasonably reckless at other times.
For classic authors on sociology such as Parsons or Durkheim, uncertainty had negative repercussions, irregularities that needed to be reoriented toward security. We are currently broadening our thinking so that uncertainty is understood as a possibility that generates the flexibility and learning ability that is essential in an innovation society. It is illusory to think that uncertainties or insecurities can be completely known and calculated. Given the complexity of social systems, we have a hard time when it comes to identifying and reducing insecurities. That is why we need a new culture of insecurity as a type of “third way” between risk aversion and recklessness, a way that explores the possibility of recuperating a functional equivalent of complete security through the construction of confidence, regulation, and cooperation.
When dealing with complex societies, where everything is tightly interrelated, the biggest question is how we can protect ourselves from our own irrationality. The chains of disaster events we need to guard against stem from our irresponsible tendency to fear too much or too little. During the economic crisis, for example, those who were managing financial innovations were less fearful than they should have been; now, distrust of economic agents can be explained because they may fear too much. Speaking in general terms, we should probably generalize a regulation ex ante, which would allow us to foresee things that cannot be remedied, anticipating rather than reacting, preventing rather than correcting. Furthermore, given that fears cannot be entirely eliminated, we need new strategies to govern them. That is why institutions exist; one of the functions of good government is to generate confidence and predictability, not allowing fear to turn to panic or boldness to favor irresponsibility.
Contemporary societies confront the crucial question of how to determine the relationship between risk and security again. The search for procedures to manage risks in an effective and socially acceptable manner has become a task of particular interest both for political reflection and for the practice of governance.
What role does politics play in this context? Concretely, what political innovations are required in a society that depends enormously on technological innovations but that also knows their undesirable consequences, in ecological, economic, and social terms, or regarding the values of freedom and justice?
POLITICS, FACING DANGER ALONE
In our collective imagination, technology appears as a potential threat. This suspicion stems from the fact that, not long ago, both the Right and the Left conceived of technology as a strong, successful, and incontestable reality. Some people hoped that political matters could be resolved (or even eliminated) thanks to the vision of experts and the accuracy of their procedures. Others bemoaned this process of technocratic depoliticization that would result in control, manipulation, destruction, and homogenization. In any case, the assessments would come after agreeing that this increased technification of the world would eventually prevail. To cite just one example of pessimistic premonition, we all remember Lane’s (1966) warning that we were at the beginning of a new era in which scientific knowledge would reduce the significance of politics.
Today’s reality is quite different: in addition to techniques that have been beneficial, we are surrounded by others that have failed. Some of the cases today have made us ever more conscious of the man-made risks that are increasingly out of control. Oil spills in the Gulf of Mexico, the economic crisis produced in large part by the failure of sophisticated technological financial products, and climate change induced by our development model are not only disasters with serious social repercussions but, from the outset, full-blown technological failures. In view of these failures, we can conclude that the technocrats were mistaken, but so were those who feared the success of technology rather than its failures.
What is interesting in this historical turmoil is that it has radically modified our way of understanding the articulation between politics and technology. Neither the technocratic Right nor the neo-Marxist Left of the 1960s and 1970s thought that the renovation of politics would ever stem from the failure of technology. What they imagined instead was its triumphant ascent, regardless of the consequences, whether it was celebrated or feared. The criticism of the technocracy is currently being suppressed by the fact that our technology is generally clumsy and diverse actors are constantly appealing for political intervention. We were hoping politics would protect us from the power of technology, but it now turns out that politics is being called on to resolve problems generated by technology’s weakness.
Far from turning politics into an anachronism, technology (or, rather, its resounding failures or its potential risks) has reinforced the prestige of politics, which is now expected to provide what other actors have not. That is why it is no exaggeration to assert that managing these risks can be a new source of the legitimacy of political action (Czada 2000). It is still open to debate whether politics knows how to successfully exercise this responsibility and whether it has the necessary tools.
In this way, then, politics is making a comeback in three fundamental areas: the return of the state, the recuperation of political logic, and the demand for a democratic management of risks. Let us look briefly at each of these three points.
From the outset, disasters such as financial or environmental crises point toward a new form of regulatory state control. While the turn toward neoliberalism presumed a withdrawal of the state, the growing awareness of the dangers of a technological civilization encourages the state to assume new tasks, albeit in very different contexts than those in which it was used to acting sovereignly. It is not useful to be carried away on this point by what we could call a neo-Keynesian optical illusion: the state that is returning is not a rich sovereign state, but an indebted state in need of cooperation. The sooner we understand this new reality and explore possibilities for intervention, the less time we will waste on celebrating the fact that history has once again proven us right.
We can experience a moment of repoliticization specifically regarding the discrediting of the supposed experts. Those who monopolized accuracy and efficiency have failed; appealing to science and technology to put an end to controversies has become ideologically suspect; the world of the experts has been shown to be as rarely unanimous as our plural societies. All of that means that we are once again giving the political system the power to define the situation; we have an unusual opportunity to recover politics, in other words, we can employ the art of transforming our lack of evidence into decisions.
The management of risks, dangers, and disasters can also contain an element of democratization. A more uncertain world does not have to be less democratic than the disappeared world of certainties. Quite the opposite. One example of this could be the very evolution of the environmental movement. Ecological discourse, which was characterized in the 1970s by antistate discourse, has since begun to demand state regulation. The very fact of introducing environmental protection into the duties of the state opened a source of legitimacy for regulatory politics; in contrast, the so-called legitimacy of the welfare state, centered on the politics of redistribution, seems to have run its course. Subjecting technological risks to formal political procedures has introduced the conflict between economy and ecology into the system of government. It is no longer subversive or destabilizing. The development of Green parties, especially in Germany, is a telling example of this. After much discussion, the faction that preferred to join government coalitions has ended up imposing itself on the group that advocated external opposition. What some called “the ecological civil war” regarding nuclear energy did not lead to the overthrow of political authorities in the Federal Republic of Germany, as many had feared or hoped. The ecologists, who were arguing for an end to the state monopoly on violence at the beginning of the 1980s, came to recognize in 2000 that their goals could only be achieved through politics and the law.
It can thus be affirmed that while previous disasters could be the gateway to undemocratic states of emergency, the conflicts of “risk societies” have had a democratizing function and have encouraged a political culture of dialogue and conflict resolution. Our way of conceiving how to confront dangers in a democratic society is clearly differentiated from the authoritarian license that sovereign states grant themselves in order to resolve emergency situations. The dangers of the “risk society” do not require a state of emergency in the traditional sense. What they do require is as much normality as possible when handling threats. There are occasionally emergency situations in a democracy, and what we want is for them to be taken care of so we can return to a state of normality. For the reactionary jurist Carl Schmitt, on the other hand, the state of emergency does not arise from the disaster but from the battle against it. For Schmitt, the supreme power determines in a sovereign fashion if there is a state of emergency or not. This is more than a theoretical distinction: what distinguishes the democratic management of contemporary disasters from authoritarian sovereignty is precisely the concern for normality.
We are, therefore, faced with a strange paradox: politics has not been strengthened by technological perfection, but by its failure. Technology needs political regulation now more than ever. Advances in science have expanded political territory since they have produced new normative regulations and requirements. When technological failures are perceived as serious threats to the rights of citizens, there is a demand for politics to assume responsibility for creating the conditions that allow us to confront those consequences as a society. Without the resources of democratic legitimation and functioning states (now also in the form of global governance), there is no way to confront the insecurities, dangers, and accidents that modern technologies present.
We previously believed that there would be a technological solution for every problem in the future, but our response is now reversed and more modest: we can now be reasonably certain that the problems generated by technology will either be resolved politically or not at all.