As we enter the second wave of the coronavirus pandemic and fix our gaze upon political spectacles with the lucidity of a fever dream, we might ruminate on the path that led to our present state. Modernity seems to lurch from crisis to crisis every year — from financial instability (the “great recession” of 2008-2009) to nuclear disasters (Fukushima) to zoonotic pandemics (COVID-19).

What’s more, the coronavirus pandemic can be viewed as a sort of dress rehearsal for the coming climate emergency; to tackle the latter, we will need a new kind of politics and a return to political thinking designed to create new futures rather than merely manage the risks of the present.

How did utopian dreams of the future come to be replaced by the anthropogenic nightmares of the present? The German social theorist Ulrich Beck offers one historiography of the risks of modernity. Beck believed that modernity has become a victim of its own success, and that we have shifted away from the era when most risks were external or natural — hurricanes, tornados, vocanic eruptions, and the like. Instead, modernity is characterized by anthropogenic risks — financial crises, zoonotic diseases, nuclear meltdowns, terrorism.

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Ulrich Beck and the Risk Society

Ulrich Beck summarized these ideas in his 1986 book Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (Risikogesellschaft: Auf dem Weg in eine andere Moderne). Beck claimed that we are living in a second, post-industrial, science-oriented age of modernity that follows primary industrial modernity; denoting the former as a risk society (risikogesellschaft), Beck, in parallel with contemporaneous sociologist Anthony Giddens, claimed that the modern age is characterized by omnipresent, low-probability, high-consequence risks borne by technological and scientific innovations¹. These risks are inherently technological in the sense that they are not only derived from technological innovation but also only detected and controlled by technological innovation.

The quintessential archetype of this form of risk is radioactivity. Published in the immediate shadow of Chernobyl, Beck observed the all-encompassing technological uncertainty of radioactivity: invisible to the senses, radioactivity is a risk detectable only through dosimeters and sophisticated machinery. It expands to fill space, unencumbered by national boundaries — Western Europe and Central Asian states were uncertain whether their countries would suffer side effects from the meltdown’s effects on the atmosphere. It transcends time in an incalculable manner; the full extent of the count of victims can only be estimated by comparing the probabilities of cancer in the regional population. Here’s Beck on radioactivity:

By risks I mean above all radioactivity, which completely evades human perceptive abilities, but also toxins and pollutants in the air, the water and foodstuffs, together with the accompanying short-and long-term effects on plants, animals and people. They induce systematic and often irreversible harm, generally remain invisible, are based on causal interpretations, and thus initially only exist in terms of the (scientific or anti-scientific) knowledge about them. They can thus be changed, magnified, dramatized or minimized within knowledge, and to that extent they are particularly open to social definition and construction. Hence the mass media and the scientific and legal professions in charge of defining risks become key social and political positions.

— Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, pp.22-23

Beck claims that there are four main defining characteristics of the modern notion of risk². First, modern risks are not limited by geographic boundaries, i.e., they are transnational. In 2008, trans-atlantic cross-holdings of toxic asset-backed securities spurred catastrophic credit writedowns not only in the USA but also in the UK, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Eastern Europe and parts of Asia; in the first days of the Chernobyl crisis, countries far away from Ukraine such as Sweden and Canada were able to detect slight changes in atmospheric radioactivity. Modern risks erode sovereignty and thus their management necessitates a new form of permanent global cooperation.

Risks also do not exhibit temporality, i.e. they are not bounded by a fixed interval of time delineating a path from the start of a catastrophe to a definite endpoint. Using the examples of Chernobyl and the Global Financial Crisis of 2008 as catastrophes intrinsically representative of the state of modern risk once again, it is possible to note that we are still not certain whether their impact has truly left us. Each chronic illness of unknown etiology in Pripyat raises the question of whether the radioactivity has truly faded to normal background levels. Nor can we be certain that the political and economic ramifications of the GFC have fully petered out: is the present low interest rate regime in developed market economies a necessary consequence of post-crisis central bank action, or is it a symptom of a different structural irregularity in the wider economy — perhaps “secular stagnation” — that we have not precisely pinned down yet? Was Donald Trump’s 2016 election victory a consequence of the GFC?

A third defining aspect of modern risk is that, though they are the consequence of human technological developments, the resulting catastrophes lack a sense of accountability — there is no one person or group of people who can really be considered responsible (although, of course, that does not prevent politicians and talk show pundits from trying). Pandemics of zoonotic origin are the result of a flawed human relationship with nature — whether they are due to factory farming that permit an avian flu to hop from one immobilized broiler chicken to another, evolving along the way, or due to human encroachment onto forests that serve as the natural habitats of bats. But it is difficult to point to one person, be it the careless farmer, or the ineffectual environmental regulator, that bears full responsibility for the stochastic path of viral evolution.

Finally, there is an inherent incalculability to modern risk. With resulting catastrophes resembling what Nassim Taleb calls black swan events, modern risks imply the permanent presence of a low-probability, high-consequence risk inherent in the complex systems we engage with as humans. This also means that when taken in conjunction with the other aspects, it is impossible to budget for, offset, or provide compensation for modern technological catastrophes.

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Perhaps the most poignant cinematic metaphor for the state of modern risk is Andrei Tarkovsky’s³ 1979 film Stalker, a film based on Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s science fiction novel Roadside Picnic. In it, the world has been visited by an advanced race of aliens who have briefly used the earth as a pit-stop. Much as careless diners may leave foreign objects — a bread knife, half-empty bottles, a straw — that would seem bizarre and bewildering to an ant, the aliens have left their indelible mark upon patches of the earth, warping time and space in ways incomprehensible to humans. The site of the visitation is known as the Zone— known as a place of great and inestimable danger.

The Stalker is a man navigating the invisible dangers posed by greater forces beyond his comprehension; he sells his expertise and awareness of the dangers of the zone by working as a guide for interested parties wishing to observe the Zone’s peculiarities. He throws a ribbon tied to a rock through the air, observing the unnatural way it contorts in its trajectory as if plumbing for invisble dangers in the air; he steers his guests through tunnels of invisible horrors.

This begs the question: if we are the guests navigating the world of risk, who serves in the guiding role of the Stalker?

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Risk in the modern world

The past section spilled ink (or pixels) on catastrophes of risks past. What of the risks that have not yet come to be catastrophes?

One burgeoning source of uncertainty comes from the integration of “black box” machine learning techniques such as deep learning. The mass roll-out of black-box machine learning models bears all the markers of risk in the Beckian sense. Via the internet, machine learning touches everyone across borders and across time; the arms race of prediction accuracy drives the discovery and (increasingly democratized) applied use of larger and larger models. Already, we can see the rough contours of the future state of risk: deepfakes are rapidly being incorporated into political advertisements; highly realistic language models such as GPT-3 have been used have been used to disguise a bot as a human; innocent people have been arrested by facial recognition algorithms.

And what of the impending risks of climate change? Unlike the previously mentioned risks, the effects of the anthropocene on the Earth’s climate cannot be said to be without warning, given the continual robust telegraphing from the world’s atmospheric scientists. The climate risk is not merely transnational but fully international — the first truly global problem that we face not as citizens of somewhere but as humans anywhere and everywhere. The Paris Agreement is a first half-step in the right direction. But what is really needed is a deep and comprehensive rethinking; what is needed to fulfill the promises of a world without harmful growth (and indeed, in which the absence of GDP growth does not matter) is a political impetus to advance a concrete vision that eases the deep weltschmerz of the here and now — the assumption that there is no alternative to existing in a perpetual state of mediocre modernity run by mediocre risk managers. There must be an effort to wholly reorient the world economy to eliminate the exploitation of not only natural resources but of labor.

And if we truly cannot cooperate as a species to ensure our own future, nobody can say that we didn’t see it coming.

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References and further reading

The most obvious reference — the reference sine qua non on the topic — is Ulrich Beck’s original text.

A less obvious choice for supplementary reading is the British third-way Labour thinker Anthony Giddens’ work on his own conception of modern risk, best summarized in his text The Consequences of Modernity. While Beck and Giddens share commonalities in their notions of the risk society — Giddens also thinks of risk societies as societies obsessed with safety and risk — the latter’s conception of the risk society gives a lesser role to class structure.

I was reminded of Beck’s work by Adam Tooze’s brilliant article appearing in Foreign Policy at the start of August, which provides a view of the coronavirus pandemic through Beck’s work.

Beck himself gave a brief (i.e., 43 minute) talk that summarizes his key ideas at the 42nd St. Gallen Symposium. Consider also this interview with Beck, inauspiciously conducted in 2007.

As a more approachable starting point, one of my favorite YouTube channels, Like Stories of Old, has a wonderful video that views Beck’s work through the recent hit HBO miniseries Chernobyl.

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Footnotes