Risk Society: Living in the Age of Anxiety

In 1986, German sociologist Ulrich Beck wrote a book that launched a new concept – risk society. He theorised that we were in a state of reflexive modernity, a second phase of modernisation, where the norms, values, and institutions that fell into place in the late 1800s had started to come into question and were being replaced with a new uncertainty. In risk society, people were becoming increasingly preoccupied with the future, and more specifically, the risks it held. While risk in itself was not a contemporary phenomenon, the types of risks were changing, moving from personal to global.

Environmental degradation and radioactivity from nuclear downfall became the important risk questions of the 1980s. From the Chernobyl disaster in 1986, we learnt that risks streched beyond national borders and concerned everyone. These new risks had an unreal dimension about them and they remained somewhat abstract. More importantly, as they went global they couldn’t be managed on a personal level. With the new 24-hour newscycle, polluted lakes and disappearing forests became a part of every-day-life, but yet the real dangers lingered in projections of the future. If they would come true, the devastation for civilisation was so all-encompassing that any future acts to save it would be nearly impossible.

Flash forward forty years in time and we have the risk society on steroids. The planet is on fire with scorching summers and climate change has become climate crisis. While news coverage used to portray distressed polar bears on melting ice caps as the poster child for climate change, experts began to doubt the effectiveness of these visuals in the 2010s. The bears risked alienating us by implying that the isssue of climate change was removed from our reality as something otherworldly happening elsewhere. Media outlets instead turned to extreme weather events such as forest fires to communicate a climate in crisis. And there’s been no shortage of those reports during recent years. Climate fiction has exploded with dystopian narratives and it’s hard to envision a bright future when you don’t even know if you have one. In light of this, is it strange that we’re feeling more anxious than ever?

We like to blame the pitfalls of modern life. And sure, it doesn’t help that our phones are beeping notifications at us 24/7 or that comparing ourselves to others on social media leads to feelings of inadequacy. That dating on Tinder makes us less likely to find long-term partners or that we’ll probably never get to buy a house or retire in a struggling economy. But eating away at younger people today is the belief that the planet we live on is dying. To make it worse, we are being told that we have no one to blame but ourselves for it. I lost all my respect for David Attenborough about a decade ago when he stated in an inteview that humans were a plague on the earth. What kind of thing is that to say, especially coming from a man who’s consumed resources most of us could only dream of in order to document wildlife? When you’ve spent your life flying around the world in helicopters with a large camera team, it’s pure hypocrisy to critique the "frightening explosion in human numbers." BP went one step further when they tweeted that in order to reduce your emissions you need to know where you stand, encouraging readers to calculate their personal carbon footprints and share their pledges. A brilliant response went viral – “I pledge not to spill 4.9 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico.” Big Oil is a trillion dollar industry and they seek to shift the blame over on us as consumers to the point where we believe that the appropriate solution to the climate crisis is for us all to go vegan.

I like the late comedian George Carlin’s perspective on planetary health – as he saw it the planet was fine but the people were fucked. He pointed out that during its four and a half billion years of existence the planet had been through earth quakes, continental drifts, solar flares, recurring ice ages, bombardment by asteroids, and worldwide floods. And yet here we were in our arrogance, thinking some plastic bags and aluminium cans were going to make a difference. The planet wasn’t going anywhere – we were. And of course, therein lies our anxiety. Consuming news escalates our anxieties as they tell us what is wrong with the world rather than what’s right with it. As a colleague of me once so succinctly put it, when he feels anxious about the state of the world, he leaves his phone behind and goes for a walk, and in observing his immediate surroundings he finds that everything is actually just fine. While global risks are not a figment of our imagination – climate change and all that comes with it is most definitely real – I believe we do ourselves a great disservice by spending too much of our time thinking about things that are out of our control and more so, we run the risk of failing to see the future, which can still be bright.