1
ON THE LOGIC OF WEALTH
DISTRIBUTION AND RISK
DISTRIBUTION
In advanced modernity the social production of wealth is systematicallY]
accompanied by the social production of risks. Accordingly, the problems
and conflicts relating to distribution in a society of scarcity overlap with
the problems and conflicts that arise from the production, definition and
distribution of techno-scientifically produced risks.
This change from the logic of wealth distribution in a society of scarcity
to the logic of risk distribution in late modernity is connected historically
to (at least) two conditions. First, it occurs - as is recognizable today where
and to the extent that genuine material need can be objectively
reduced and socially isolated through the development of human and
technological productivity, as well as through legal and welfare-state
protections and regulations. Second, this categorical change is likewise
dependent upon the fact that in the course of the exponentially growing
productive forces in the modernization process, hazards and potential
threats have been unleashed to an extent previously unknown.l
To the extent that these conditions occur, one historical type of thinking
and acting is relativized or overridden by another. The concepts of
'industrial' or 'class society', in the broadest sense of Marx or Weber,
revolved around the issue of how socially produced wealth could be
distributed in a socially unequal and also 'legitimate' way. This overlaps
with the new paradigm of risk society which is based on the solution of
a similar and yet quite different problem. How can the risks and hazards
systematically produced as part of modernization be prevented, minimized,
dramatized, or channeled? Where they do finally see the light of
day in the shape of 'latent side effects', how can they be limited and
distributed away so that they neither hamper the modernization process
nor exceed the limits of that which is 'tolerable' - ecologically, medically,
psychologically and socially?
We are therefore concerned no longer exclusively with making nature
useful, or with releasing mankind from traditional constraints, but also
and essentially with problems resulting from techno-economic development
itself. Modernization is becoming reflexive; it is becoming its own
theme. Questions of the development and employment of technologies (in
the realms of nature, society and the personality) are being eclipsed by
questions of the political and economic 'management' of the risks of
actually or potentially utilized technologies - discovering, administering,
20 LIVING ON THE VOLCANO OF CIVILIZATION
acknowledging, avoiding or concealing such hazards with respect to
specially defined horizons of relevance. The promise of security grows
with the risks and destruction and must be reaffirmed over and over again
to an alert and critical public through cosmetic or real interventions in the
techno-economic development.
Both 'paradigms' of inequality are systematically related to definite
periods of modernization. The distribution of socially produced wealth
and related conflicts occupy the foreground so long as obvious material
need, the 'dictatorship of scarcity', rules the thought and action of people
(as today in large parts of the so-called Third World). Under these conditions
of 'scarcity society', the modernization process takes place with the
claim of opening the gates to hidden sources of social wealth with the keys
of techno-scientific development. These promises of emancipation from
undeserved poverty and dependence underlie action, thought and research
in the categories of social inequality, from the class through the stratified
to the individualized society.
In the welfare states of the West a double process is taking place now.
On the one hand, the struggle for one's 'daily bread' has lost its urgency
as a cardinal problem overshadowing everything else, compared to
material subsistence in the first half of this century and to a Third World
menaced by hunger. For many people problems of 'overweight' take the
place of hunger. This development, however, withdraws the legitimizing
basis from the modernization process, the struggle against obvious scarcity,
for which one was prepared to accept a few (no longer completely)
unseen side effects.
Parallel to that, the knowledge is spreading that the sources of wealth
are 'polluted' by growing 'hazardous side effects'. This is not at all new,
but it has remained unnoticed for a long time in the efforts to overcome
poverty. This dark side is also gaining importance through the overdevelopment
of productive forces. In the modernization process, more
and more destructive forces are also being unleashed, forces before which
the human imagination stands in awe. Both sources feed a growing critique
of modernization, which loudly and contentiously determines public
discussions.
In systematic terms, sooner or later in the continuity of modernization
the social positions and conflicts of a 'wealth-distributing' society begin
to be joined by those of a 'risk-distributing' society. In West Germany we
have faced the beginning of this transition since the early 1970s at the
latest - that is my thesis. That means that two types of topics and
conflicts overlap here. We do not yet live in a risk society, but we also
no longer live only within the distribution conflicts of scarcity societies.
To the extent that this transition occurs, there will be a real transformation
of society which will lead us out of the previous modes of thought
and action.
Can the concept of risk carry the theoretical and historical significance
which is demanded of it here? Is this not a primeval phenomenon of
LOGIC OF WEALTH AND RISK DISTRIBUTION 21
human action? Are not risks already characteristic of the industrial society
period, against which they are being differentiated here? It is also true
that risks are not an invention of modernity. Anyone who set out to
discover new countries and continents - like Columbus - certainly
accepted 'risks'. But these were personal risks, not global dangers like
those that arise for all of humanity from nuclear fission or the storage of
radioactive waste. In that earlier period, the word 'risk' had a note of
bravery and adventure, not the threat of self-destruction of all life on
Earth.
Forests have also been dying for some centuries now - first through
being transformed into fields, then through reckless overcutting. But the
death of forests today occurs global/y, as the implicit consequence of
industrialization - with quite different social and political consequences.
Heavily wooded countries like Norway and Sweden, which hardly have
any pollutant-intensive industries of their own, are also affected. They
have to settle up the pollution accounts of other highly industrialized
countries with dying trees, plants and animal species.
It is reported that sailors who fell into the Thames in the early nineteenth
century did not drown, but rather choked to death inhaling the
foul-smelling and poisonous fumes of this London sewer. A walk through
the narrow streets of a medieval city would also have been like running
the gauntlet for the nose. 'Excrement piles up everywhere, in the streets,
at the turnpikes, in the carriages . . . The fal;ades of Parisian houses are
decomposing from urine . . . the socially organized constipation threatens
to pull all of Paris into the process of putrescent decomposition' (Corbin
1984: 41ff.). It is nevertheless striking that hazards in those days assaulted
the nose or the eyes and were thus perceptible to the senses, while the risks
of civilization today typically escape perception and are localized in the
sphere of physical and chemical formulas (e.g. toxins in foodstuffs or the
nuclear threat).
Another difference is directly connected to this. In the past, the hazards
could be traced back to an undersupply of hygienic technology. Today
they have their basis in industrial overproduction. The risks and hazards
of today thus differ in an essential way from the superficially similar ones
in the Middle Ages through the global nature of their threat (people,
animals and plants) and through their modern causes. They are risks of
modernization. They are a wholesale product of industrialization, and are
systematically intensified as it becomes global.
The concept of risk is directly bound to the concept of reflexive modernization.
Risk may be defined as a systematic way ofdealing with hazards
and insecurities induced and introduced by modernization itself. Risks, as
opposed to older dangers, are consequences which relate to the threatening
force of modernization and to its globalization of doubt. They are
pOlitically reflexive.
Risks, in this meaning of the word, are certainly as old as that development
itself. The immiseration of large parts of the population - the
22 LIVING ON THE VOLCANO OF CIVILIZATION
'poverty risk' - kept the nineteenth century holding its breath. 'Threats
to skills' and 'health risks' have long been a theme of automation
processes and the related social conflicts, protections (and research). It did
take some time and struggle to establish social welfare state norms and
minimize or limit these kinds of risk politically. Nevertheless, the
ecological and high-tech risks that have upset the public for some years
now, which will be the focus of what follows, have a new quality. In the
afflictions they produce they are no longer tied to their place of origin the
industrial plant. By their nature they endanger aI/ forms of life on this
planet. The normative bases of their calculation - the concept of accident
and insurance, medical precautions, and so on - do not fit the basic
dimensions of these modern threats. Atomic plants, for example, are not
privately insured or insurable. Atomic accidents are accidents no more (in
the limited sense of the word 'accident'). They outlast generations. The
affected even include those not yet alive at the time or in the place where
the accident occurred but born years later and long distances away.
This means that the calculation of risk as it has been established so far
by science and legal institutions col/apses. Dealing with these consequences
of modern productive and destructive forces in the normal terms
of risk is a false but nevertheless very effective way of legitimizing them.
Risk scientists normally do so as if there is not the gap of a century
between the local accidents of the nineteenth century and the often creeping,
catastrophic potentials at the end of the twentieth century. Indeed,
if you distinguish between calculable and non-calculable threats, under the
surface of risk calculation new kinds of industrialized, decision-produced
incalculabilities and threats are spreading within the globalization of highrisk
industries, whether for warfare or welfare purposes. Max Weber's
concept of 'rationalizatirn' no longer grasps this late modern reality,
produced by successful rationalization. Along with the growing capacity
of technical options [Zweckrationalitiit] grows the incalculability of their
consequences. Compared •..:> these global consequences, the hazards of
primary industrialization indeed belonged to a different age. The dangers
of highly developed nuckar and chemical productive forces abolish the
foundations and categorie. according to which we have thought and acted
to this point, such as space and time, work and leisure time,~ctory and
nation state, indeed even the borders between continentslJ'o put it
differently, in the risk society the unknown and uninteE.sird consequences
come to be a dominant force in history and society.2-:~J
The social architecture and political dynamics of such potentials for
self-endangerment in civilization will occupy the center of these discussions.
The argument can be set out in five theses:
(1) Risks such as those produced in the late modernity differ essentially
from wealth. 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
LOGIC OF WEALTH AND RISK DISTRIBUTION 23
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.
(2) Some people are more affected than others by the distribution and
growth of risks, that is, social risk positions spring up. In some of their
dimensions these follow the inequalities of class and strata positions, but
they bring a fundamentally different distributional logic into play. Risks
of modernization sooner or later also strike those who produce or profit
from them. They contain a boomerang effect, which breaks up the
pattern of class and national society. Ecological disaster and atomic
fallout ignore the borders of nations. Even the rich and powerful are not
safe from them. These are hazards not only to health, but also to legitimation,
property and profit. Connected to the recognition of modernization
risks are ecological devaluations and expropriations, which frequently
and systematically enter into contradiction to the profit and property
interests which advance the process of industrialization. Simultaneously,
risks produce new international inequalities, firstly between the Third
World and the industrial states, secondly among the industrial states
themselves. They undermine the order of national jurisdictions. In view
of the universality and supra-nationality of the circulation of pollutants,
the life of a blade of grass in the Bavarian Forest ultimately comes to
depend on the making and keeping of international agreements. Risk
society in this sense is a world risk society.
(3) Nevertheless, the diffusion and commercialization of risks do not
break with the logic of capitalist development completely, but instead
they raise the latter to a new stage. There are always losers but also
winners in risk definitions. The space between them varies in relation to
different issues and power differentials. Modernization risks from the
winners' points of view are big business. They are the insatiable
demands long sought by economists. Hunger can be sated, needs can be
satisfied, but civilization risks are a bottomless barrel of demands,
unsatisfiable, infinite, self-producible. One could say along with
Luhmann that with the advent of risks, the economy becomes 'selfreferential',
independent of the surrounding satisfaction of human needs.
But that means: with the economic exploitation of the risks it sets free,
industrial society produces the hazards and the political potential of the
risk society.
(4) One can1lQs,s:essw!!alth, but one can only be afflict~fl'g_YJi~ks; they
are, so to speak, ascribed by civilization. [Bluntly, one-might say: in class
and stratification positions being determines consciousness, while in risk
positions consciousness determines being.] Knowledge gains a new
political significance. Accordingly the political potential of the risk society
24 LIVING ON THE VOLCANO OF CIVILIZATION
must be elaborated and analyzed in a sociological theory of the origin and
diffusion of knowledge about risks.
(5) Socially recognized risks, as appears clearly in the discussions of
forest destruction, contain a peculiar political explosive: what was until
now considered unpolitical becomes political - the elimination of the
causes in the industrialization process itself. Suddenly the public and
politics ~xtend their rule into the private sphere of plant management into
product planning and technical equipment. What is at stake in the
public dispute over the definition of risks is revealed here in an exemplary
fashion: not just secondary health problems for nature and mankind, but
the social, economic and political consequences of these side effects collapsing
markets, devaluation of capital, bureaucratic checks on plant
decisions, the opening of new markets, mammoth costs, legal proceedings
and loss of face. In smaller or larger increments - a smog alarm, a toxic
spill, etc. - what thus emerges in risk society is the political potential of
catastrophes. Averting and managing these can include a reorganization
of power and authority. Risk society is a catastrophic society. In it the
exceptional condition threatens to become the norm.
Scientific Definition and Distributions of Pollutants
The debate on pollutant and toxic elements in air, water and foodstuffs,
as well as on the destruction of nature and the environment in general,
is still being conducted exclusively or dominantly in the terms and
formulas of natural science. It remains unrecognized that a social, cultural
and political meaning is inherent in such scientific 'immiseration
formulas'. There exists accordingly a danger that an environmental
discussion conducted exclusively in chemical, biological and technological
terms will inadvertently include human beings in the picture only as
organic material. Thus the discussion runs the risk of making the same
mistake for which it has long and justly reproached the prevailing
optimism with respect to industrial progress; it runs the risk of atrophying
into a discussion of nature without people, without asking about matters
of social and cultural significance. Particularly the debates over the last
few years, in which all arguments critical of technology and industry were
once again deployed, have remained at heart technocratic and naturalistic.
They exhausted themselves in the invocation and publication of the pollutant
levels in the air, water and foodstuffs, in relative figures of population
growth, energy consumption, food requirements, raw material
shortages and so on. They did so with a passion and a singlemindedness
as if there had never been people such as a certain Max Weber, who
apparently wasted his time showing that without including structures of
social power and distribution, bureaucracies, prevailing norms and
rationalities, such a debate is either meaningless or absurd, and probably
both. An understanding has crept in, according to which modernity is
reduced to the frame of reference of technology and nature in the manner
LOGIC OF WEALTH AND RISK DISTRIBUTION 25
of perpetrator and victim. The social, cultural and political risks of
modernization remain hidden by this very approach, and from this way
of thinking (which is also that of the political environmental movement).
Let us illustrate this with an example. The Rat der SachversHindigen fUr
Umweltfragen (Council of Experts on Environmental Issues) determines
in a report that 'in mother's milk beta-hexachlorocyclohexane, hexachlorobenzol
and DDT are often found in significant concentrations'
(1985: 33). These toxic substances are contained in pesticides and
herbicides that have by now been taken off the market. According to the
report their origin is undetermined (33). At another point it is stated: 'The
exposure of the population to lead is not dangerous on average' (35).
What is concealed behind that statement? Perhaps by analogy the following
distribution. Two men have two apples. One eats both of them. Thus
they have eaten on average one each. Transferred to the distribution of
foodstuffs on the global scale this statement would mean: 'on average' all
the people in the world have enough to eat. The cynicism here is obvious.
In one part of the Earth people are dying of hunger, while in the other
the consequences of overeating have become a major item of expense. It
may be, of course, that this statement about pollutants and toxins is not
cynical, that the average exposure is also the actual exposure of all groups
in the population. But do we know that? In order to defend this statement,
is it not a prerequisite that we know what other poisons the people
are forced to inhale and ingest? It is astonishing how as a matter ofcourse
one inquires about 'the average'. A person who inquires about the
average already excludes many socially unequal risk positions. But that is
exactly what that person cannot know. Perhaps there are groups and
living conditions for which the levels of lead and the like that are 'on
average harmless' constitute a mortal danger?
The next sentence of the report reads: 'Only in the vicinity of industrial
emitters are dangerous concentrations of lead sometimes found in
children.' What is characteristic is not just the absence of any social
differentiations in this and other reports on pollutants and toxins. It is
also characteristic how differentiations are made - along regional lines
with regard to emission sources and according to age differences - both
criteria that are rooted in biological (or more generally, natural scientific)
thinking. This cannot be blamed on the expert committees. It only reflects
the general state of scientific and social thought with regard to
environmental problems. These are generally viewed as matters of nature
and technology, or of economics and medicine. What is astonishing about
that is that the industrial pollution of the environment and the destruction
of nature, with their multifarious effects on the health and social life of
people, which only arise in highly developed societies, are characterized by
a loss ofsocial thinking. This loss becomes caricature - this absence seems
to strike no one, not even sociologists themselves.
People inquire about and investigate the distribution of pollutants,
toxins, contamination of water, air, and foodstuffs. The results are
26 LIVING ON THE VOLCANO OF CIVILIZATION
presented to an alarmed public on multi-colored 'environmental maps',
differentiated along regional lines. To the extent that the state of the
environment is to be presented in this way, this mode of presentation and
consideration is obviously appropriate. As soon as consequences for
people are to be drawn from it, however, the underlying thought sho~tcircuits.
Either one implies broadly that all people are equally affected m
the identified pollution centers - independent of their income, education,
occupation and the associated eating, living and recreational opportunities
and habits (which would have to be proved). Or one ultimately excludes
people and the extent of their affliction entirely and speaks only about
pollutants and their distributions and effects on the region.
The pollution debate conducted in terms of natural science correspondingly
moves between the false conclusion of social afflictions based on
biological ones, and a view of nature which excludes the selective affliction
of people as well as the social and cultural meaning connected to it. At the
same time what is not taken into consideration is that the same pollutants
can have quite different meanings for different people, according to age,
gender, eating habits, type of work, information, education and so on.
What is particularly aggravating is that investigations which start from
individual pollutants can never determine the concentration of pollutants
in people. What may seem 'insignificant' for a single product, ~s perh~ps
extremely significant when collected in the 'consumer reservOIrs' whIch
people have become in the advanced stage of total marketing. We are in
the presence here of a category error. A pollution analysis oriented to
nature and products is incapable of answering questions about safety, at
least as long as the 'safety' or 'danger' has anything to do with the people
who swallow or breathe the stuff. What is known is that the taking of
several medications can nullify or amplify the effect of each individual
one. Now people obviously do not (yet) live by medications alone. They
also breathe the pollutants in the air, drink those in the water, eat those
in the vegetables, and so on. In other words, the insignificances can add
up quite significantly. Do they thereby become more and more insignificant
- as is usual for sums according to the rules of mathematics?
On the Knowledge Dependence of Modernization Risks
Risks like wealth are the object of distributions, and both constitute positions
- risk positions and class positions respectively. In each ca~e,
however, one is concerned with a quite different good and a qUlte
different controversy on its distribution. In the case of social wealth, one
is dealing with consumer goods, incomes, educational opportunities,
property, etc. as desirable items in scarcity. By contrast, risks are an
incidental problem of modernization in undesi!!!.!?le abundance. The~e
riiUSCbe ~eiiher~Peliminated or denied and reinterpreted. The positive 10glC
of acquisition contrasts with a negative logic of disposition, avoidance,
denial, and reinterpretation.
, ~
.<
.'
Ij
"
)
"I'
LOGIC OF WEALTH AND RISK DISTRIBUTION 27
While such things as income and education are consumable goods that
can be experienced by the individual, the existence of and distribution of
risks and hazards are mediated on principle through argument. That
which impairs health or destroys nature is not recognizable to one's own
feeling or eye, and even where it is seemingly in plain view, qualified
expert judgment is still required to determine it 'objectively'. Many of the
newer risks (nuclear or chemical contaminations, pollutants in foodstuffs,
diseases of civilization) completely escape human powers of direct perception.
The focus is more and more on hazards which are neither visible nor
perceptible to the victims; hazards that in some cases may not even take
effect within the lifespans of those affected, but instead during those of
their children; hazf!rfts in any case that r~'lu.ir€!.Jl1e 'sensory organs' of
science - theories, exp(!r,iments, measuring instruments":'" in order to
,become visible ..f!r,..!~~e!p!!?~b./~...a..~",!!ql,fl.!Jj§..qtfl.lI. The'paradigm of these
hazards is the gene-altering effects of radioactivity, which, as the reactor
accident at Three Mile Island shows, imperceptibly abandon the victims
completely to the judgments, mistakes and controversies of experts, while
subjecting them to terrible psychological stresses.
Thinking the Separated Together: Presumptions of Causality
The knowledge dependency and invisibility of civilization's risk positions
of course do not suffice to define them conceptually; they also contain
additional components. Statements on hazards are never reducible to mere
statements of fact. As part of their constitution, they contain both a
theoretical and a normative component. The findings 'significant concentrations
of lead in children' or 'pesticide substances in mothers' milk' as
such are no more risk positions of civilization than the nitrate concentrations
in the rivers or the sulfur dioxide content of the air. A causal interpretation
must be added, which makes this appear to be a product of the
industrial mode of production, a systematic side effect of modernization.
In socially recognized risks, therefore, the authorities and agents of the
modernization process along with all their particular interests and
dependencies are presumed, and are placed in a direct connection, in the
pattern of cause and effect, with signs of damage and threats that are
socially, substantively, spatially and temporally quite detached. The
woman sitting in a three-bedroom apartment in a housing estate of suburban
Munich and nursing her three-month-old son Martin is in this way
'directly related' to the chemical industry that produces agricultural
chemicals, to the farmers who find themselves forced by EEe rules to
engage in specialized mass production with overfertilization and so on.
The radius in which one can search for side effects remains largely open.
Recently an overdose of DDT was even found in Antarctic penguins.
These examples show two things: firstly, that modernization risks
appear ,in geographically specific areas, as well as unspecifically and
universally; secondly, how erraiTi:-iiii,funpredictable the tortuous paths of
28 LIVING ON THE VOLCANO OF CIVILIZATION
their deleterious effects can be. In modernization risks, then, things which
are substantively-objectively, spatially and temporally disparate are drawn
together causally and thus brought into a social and legal context of
responsibility. As we have known at least since Hume, however, .pres~mptions
of causality escape our perception. They must always be lmagmed,
implied to be true, believed. In this sense too, risks ~re invisible. ~he
implied causality always remains more or less uncertam and tentatlVe.
Thus we are dealing with a theoretical and hence a scientized
consciousness, even in the everyday consciousness of risks.
Implicit Ethics
Even this causal linking of the institutionally separated does not suffice.
Risks experienced presume a normative horizon of lost security and
broken trust. Hence, even where they approach us silently, clad in
numbers and formulas, risks remain fundamentally localized,
mathematical condensations of wounded images of a life worth living.
These ideas must in turn be believed, that is, they cannot be experienced
as such. In this sense, risks are objectified negative images of utopias, in
which the human, or what is left of it, is preserved and revived in the
modernization process. Despite all its unrecognizability, this normative
horizon, in which the riskiness of the risk first becomes tangible, cannot
ultimately be removed by mathematics or experiments. Behind all the
objectifications, sooner or later the question of acceptance arises and with
it anew the old question: how do we wish to live? What is the human
quality of humankind, the natural quality of nature which is to be
preserved? The spreading talk of 'catastrophe' is in this sense an objectivized,
pointed, radicalized expression that this development is not
wanted.
These revived questions - what is humankind? what do we think about
nature? - may be shunted back and forth between everyday life, politics
and science. In the most advanced developmental stage of civilization they
once again occupy a very high place on the agenda, even or especially
where they were supposed to have been made invisible by their traditional
magic cap of mathematical formulas and methodological controversies.
Determinations of risks are the form in which ethics, and with it also
philosophy, culture and politics, is resurrected inside the centers. of
modernization - in business, the natural sciences and the techmcal
disciplines. They are, one might say, an unwanted means of democratization
in the fields of industrial production and management, which
somehow does become public discussion, depending on risk reasoning.
Risk determinations are an unrecognized, still undeveloped symbiosis of
the natural and the human sciences, of everyday and expert rationality,
of interest and fact. They are simultaneously neither simply the one nor
only the other. They can no longer be isolated from one another through
specialization, and developed and set down according to their own
1
LOGIC OF WEALTH AND RISK DISTRIBUTION 29
standards of rationality. They require a cooperation across the trenches of
disciplines, citizens' groups, factories, administration and politics, or which
is more likely - they disintegrate between these into antagonistic
definitions and definitional struggles.
Scientific and Social Rationality
Herein lies the essential and momentous consequence: in definitions of
risks the sciences' monopoly on rationality is broken. There are always
competing and conflicting claims, interests and viewpoints of the various
agents of modernity and affected groups, which are forced together in
defining risks in the sense of cause and effect, instigator and injured
party. There is no expert on risk. Many scientists do go to work with the
entire impetus and pathos of their objective rationality, and their effort
to be objective grows in proportion to the political content of their definitions.
But at the center of their work they continue to be reliant on social
and thus prescribed expectations and values. Where and how does one
draw the line between still acceptable and no longer acceptable exposures?
How susceptible to compromise are the presupposed standards? Should
the possibility of an ecological catastrophe be accepted, for instance, in
order to satisfy economic interests? What are necessities, supposed
necessities, and necessities that must be changed?
Science's rationality claim to be a_ble to investigate objectj"dy_the
hazardousness of a risk permanently refutes itself.-It-is based, firstly, on
a houSeOrc~ircfs o(specuia-iive-assumptiOns~··and-moves exclusively within
~iramework of probability statements, whose prognoses of safety cannot---_.__........_..._----=--- .
even be refuted, str~ctly speaking, by actual accidents. -S"econdly;-one must
assume an ethical point oj view iii' order- to-discuSS- risks meaningfully at
all. Risk determinations are based on mathematical possibilities and social
interests, especially, if they are presented with technical certainty. In dealing
with civilization's risks, the sciences have always abandoned their
foundation of experimental logic and made a polygamous marriage with
business, politics and ethics - or more precisely, they live with the latter
in a sort of 'permanent marriage without a license'.
This hidden external determination in risk research becomes a problem
at the very least when scientists still appear with a monopoly claim on
rationality. The studies of reactor safety restrict themselves to the estimationof
ce.r.t.aiIl.quaniifiable risks on the basis of probable acCidents.'Tlie
dimensions of the hazarciare-iiniiiecCfrom-ilie-,,-ery"beginning totechnicaJ
manageability. In some circles it is said that risks which are not yet
technically manageable do not exist - at least not in scientific calculation
or jurisdictional judgment. These uncalculable threats add up to an
unknown residual risk which becomes the industrial endowment for
everyone everywhere. For large segments of the population and for
opponents of nuclear energy, its catastrophic potential is central. No
matter how small an accident probability is held, it is too large when one
30 LIVING ON THE VOLCANO OF CIVILIZATION
accident means annihilation. But the quantifiable concepts of risk concentrate
on the probable occurrence of an accident and deny the difference,
let us say, between a limited aircraft crash and the explosion of an at~mic
plant, improbable as it might be, which affects nations and generat~o.ns
not yet born. Furthermore, in the public discussions, hazardous qualItIes
have roles which are not dealt with at all in the risk studies, such as the
proliferation of nuclear weapons; the changeability of chemical and
atomic technologies from civil to military uses and purposes; the gray
zone between normal and war production, which expands with expanding
risk industries and markets all over the world; the contradiction between
humanity (mistakes and failures) and safety; or the length and irreversibility
of mega-technological decisions that trifle with the lives of future
generations. There is no perfect system, and no perfect human being who
fits its necessities. Even trying to establish something like a perfect system
would mean to establish perfect control, some kind of dictatorship in
everyday life.
In other words, what becom~§....~tfear i~llrisJulisc:u~~!~p.~lule J.h_€:_..fi.~.:;ures
and gaps between scientific and social rationali!y_)J:Lq~.~l~llg.__~ith--the
~ous- potential of Civiiizatloil:-TTieTwo'sides talk past each offier.
S~iaimovement!iraise-queStio-;sthat are not answered by the risk technicians
at all, and the technicians answer questions which miss the point of
what was really asked and what feeds public anxiety.
Scientific and social rationality do indeed break apart, but they remain
at the same time interwoven and interdependent. Strictly speaking, even
this distinction is becoming less and less possible. The scientific concern
with the risks of industrial development in fact relies on social expectations
and value judgments, just as the social discussion and perception of
risks depend on scientific arguments. Risk research follows with some
embarrassment in the footsteps of 'technophobia' which it was called
upon to restrain, and from which, moreover, it has received an
undreamed-of material support in recent years. Public criticism and
disquiet derive essentially from the dialectic of expertise and counterexpertise.
Without scientific arguments and scientific critique of scientific
arguments they remain dull; indeed, they cannot even perceive the mainly
'invisible' object and event of their critique and fears. To modify a
'" fam!lliLphrase: _sci~tific mtionality_without so_~~!_.!~~~~~~~!!.~_..~:~~ns__
m1ll1l.., J;mL~Q.ciaLratio~I!.Y without sci.:ntific ~~!.Y__':~~~:~~ -'jll~.
Theabove is not supposed to outline anTmage of general harmony. vn
the contrary, what is addressed are frequently competing rationality
claims, struggling for acceptance. In both camps quite different things
occupy the center of attention and different things are considered variable
or held constant. In one camp the primary emphasis for change lies on
the industrial mode of production, in the other on the technological
manageability of accident probabilities.
-,
I
t
LOGIC OF WEALTH AND RISK DISTRIBUTION 31
The Multiplicity of Definitions: More and More Risks
The theoretical content and the value reference of risks imply additional
components: the observable conflictual pluralization and multiplicity of
definitions of civilization's risks. There occurs, so to speak, an overproduction
of risks, which sometimes relativize, sometimes supplement
and sometimes outdo one another. One hazardous product might be
defended by dramatizing the risks of the others (for example, the
dramatization of climatic consequences 'minimizes' the risk of nuclear
energy). Every interested party attempts to defend itself with risk definitions,
and in this way to ward off risks which could affect its pocketbook.
The endangering of the soil, plants, air, water and animals occupies a
special place in this struggle of all against all for the most beneficial risk
definition, to the extent that it expresses the common good and the vote
of those who themselves have neither vote nor voice (perhaps only a
passive franchise for grass and earthworms will bring humanity to its
senses). This pluralism is evident in the scope of risks; the urgency and
existence of risks fluctuate with the variety of values and interests. That
this has an effect on the substantive element of risks is less obvious.
The causal nexus produced in risks between actual or potential damaging
effects and the system of industrial production opens an almost
infinite number of individual explanations. Actually, one can relate
everything to everything else, at least experimentally, so long as the basic
pattern is retained - modernization as the cause, damage as the side
effect. Much will not be able to be corroborated. Even what has been
corroborated will have to maintain itself against systematic and lasting
skepticism. It is essential, however, that even in the incalculable profusion
of individual interpretations, individual conditions are again and again
related to each other. Let us pick out forest destruction. So long as bark
beetles, squirrels or the particular responsible forestry office were still
being considered as causes and guilty parties, we were seemingly
concerned not with a 'risk of modernization', but rather with sloppy
forestry or animal voracity.
A quite different spectrum of causes and guilty parties is opened up
when this typical local misdiagnosis, which risks always have to break
through in order to be acknowledged, is overcome and the destruction of
the forest is understood and recognized as an effect of industrialization.
Only then does it become a long-term, systematically caused problem,
which can no longer be alleviated at the local level, but instead requires
political solutions. Once this change in views has become established,
many other things become possible. Is it sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides,
their photochemical breakdown products, hydrocarbons, or something
else as yet totally unknown, which are giving us the final and eternal
autumn - the falling leaves? These chemical formulas appear to stand
alone. Behind them, however, companies, industrial sectors, business,
scientific and professional groups move into the firing line of public
"p
32 LIVING ON THE VOLCANO OF CIVILIZATION
criticism. For every socially recognized 'cause' comes under massive
pressure for change, and with it, the system of action in which it
originated. Even if this public pressure is fended off, sales drop, markets
collapse and the 'trust' of customers has to be won back and strengthened
by large, expensive advertising campaigns. Is the automobile the 'chief
polluter of the nation' and thus the real 'forest killer'? Or is it finally time
to install high-quality, state-of-the-art scrubbing apparatus in coal-fired
power plants? Or would that too perhaps prove useless, since the
pollutants which cause the forest to die are delivered 'free to our
doorstep' (or 'free to our forest') from the smokestacks and exhaust pipes
of neighboring countries?
Everywhere the spotlight in search of a cause falls, fire breaks out, so
to speak, and the hastily assembled and poorly equipped 'argumentation
fire company' must try to put it out with a powerful stream of counterarguments,
and save whatever can still be saved. Those who find themselves
in the public pillory as risk producers refute the charges as well as
they can, with the aid of a 'counter-science' gradually becoming institutionalized
in industry, and attempt to bring in other causes and thus other
originators. The picture reproduces itself. Access to the media beromes
crucial. The insecurity within industry intenSIfies: no one knows who will
be-stfiiCk next by the anathema of ecological morality. Good arguments,
or at least arguments capable of convincing the public, become a condition
of business success. Publicity people, the 'argumentation craftsmen',
get their opportunity in the organization.
Chains oj Causality and Cycles oj Damage: the Concept oj
System
To put it again bluntly, all these effects set in quite independently of how
tenable the implied causal interpretations may appear from a possible
scientific perspective. Generally, opinions within the sciences and
disciplines concerned diverge wildly anyway. The Y.EcjaLeJfecLoF risk
dejinitions is therejore not dependent on their scientific validity.
.Thisdiversityonntl~rprefations, however;alsohas its basis in the logic
of modernization risks themselves. After all, the attempt is being made
here to relate destructive effects to individual factors that can scarcely be
isolated within the complex system of the industrial mode of production.
The systemic interdependence of the highly specialized agents of modernization
in business, agriculture, the law and politics ,corresponds to the
absence of isolable single causes and responsibilities. Is agriculture
contaminating the soil, or are the farmers merely the weakest link in the
chain of destructive cycles? Are they perhaps just dependent and subordinate
markets for the chemical feed and fertilizer industries, and are they
where one should apply leverage for a preventive decontamination of the
soil? The authorities could have forbidden or drastically limited the sale
of toxic chemicals long ago. But they do not do it. On the contrary, with
A
l
i
1f.,,
II
!
LOGIC OF WEALTH AND RISK DISTRIBUTION 33
the support of science they continually issue licenses for the 'harmless'
production of toxic chemicals that are cutting us all to the quick (and
deeper still). Who will take the hot potato: the authorities, science or
politics? But they do not till the soil, after all. So it is the farmers? But
they were squeezed by the EEC, they have to practice fertilizer-intensive
overproduction in order to survive . . .
In other words, corresponding to the highly differentiated division of
labor, there is a general complicity, and the complicity is matched by a
general lack of responsibility. Everyone is cause and effect, and thus noncause.
The causes dribble away into a general amalgam of agents and
conditions, reactions'aDdCounter-reactions, which brings social certainty
a~!i.~~-the concept of Systerii-:------=-----
-Tins reveals in exemPlary rasIilOli1l'ie ethical significance of the system
concept: one can do something and continue doing it without having to
take personal responsibility jor it. It is as if one were acting while being
personally absent. One acts physically, without acting morally or
politically. The generalized other - the system - acts within and through
oneself: this is the slave morality of civilization, in which people act
personally and socially as if they were subject to a natural fate, the 'law
of gravitation' of the system. This is the way the 'hot potato' is passed
in the face of the threatening ecological disaster.3
The Risk Content: the Not- Yet-Event as Stimulus to Action
Risks of course do not exhaust themselves in the effects and damages that
have already occurred. There must be a distinction between already
destructive consequences and the potential element of risks. In this second
sense, risks essentially express a juture component. This is based in part
on the prolonging of currently calculable damages into the future, and in
part on a general loss of confidence or on 'risk multipliers'. By nature,
then, risks have something to do with anticipation, with destruction that
has not yet happened but is threatening, and of course in that sense risks
are already real today. An example from the Rat der SachversHindigen fUr
Umweltfragen (1985): the Council notes that the high nitrate concentrations
from nitrogen fertilizers have so far barely if at all seeped down to
the deep ground water from which we draw our drinking water. The
nitrates are largely broken down in the subsoil. It is not known, though,
how this happens or how long it will continue. There are good reasons not
to project the filtering effect of this protective layer into the future
without reservations. 'It is to be feared that the current leaching of nitrate
will also have reached deeper layers of ground water years or decades
from now, with a delay corresponding to the flow time' (29). In other
words: the time bomb is ticking. In this sense risks signify a future which
is to be prevented.
By contrast to the tangible clarity of wealth, risks have something
unreal about them. In a fundamental sense they are both real and unreal.
34 LIVING ON THE VOLCANO OF CIVILIZATION
On the one hand, many hazards and damages are already real today:
polluted and dying bodies of water, the destruction of the forest, new
types of disease, and so on. On the other hand, the actual social impetus
of risks lies in the projected dangers of the future. In this sense there are
hazards which, if they occur, would mean destruction on such a scale that
action afterwards would be practically impossible. Therefore, even as
conjectures, as threats to the future, as prognoses, they have and develop
a practical relevance to preventive actions. The center of risk consciousness
lies not in the present, but in the future. In the risk society, the past
loses the power to determine the present. Its place is taken by the future,
thus, something non-existent, invented, fictive as the 'cause' of current
experience and action. We become active today in order to prevent,
alleviate or take precautions against the problems and crises of tomorrow
and the day after tomorrow - or not to do so. Bottlenecks in the labor
market projected in mathematical models have a direct effect on educational
behavior. Anticipated, threatening unemployment is an essential
determinant of the conditions of and attitude towards life today. The
predicted destruction of the environment and the nuclear threat upset
society and bring large portions of the younger generation into the streets.
In the discussion of the future we are dealing with a 'projected variable',
a 'projected cause' of present (personal and political) action. The
relevance and importance of these variables is directly proportional to
their unpredictability and their threat, and we (must) project the latter in
order to determine and organize our present actions.
Legitimation: 'Latent Side Effects'
This presupposes, of course, that risks have successfully passed through
a process of social recognition. At first, risks are, however, goods to be
avoided, whose non-existence is implied until canceled - according to the
motto 'in dubio pro progress', which means 'in dubio pro looking away'.
A mode of legitimation is clearly connected to this, one which differs
clearly from the unequal distribution of social wealth. Risks can be
legitimated by the fact that one neither saw nor wanted their consequences.
Risk positions first have to break through the protective shield
of taboos surrounding them, and 'be born scientifically' in scientized
civilization. This generally happens as the status of a 'latent side effect',
which simultaneously admits and legitimates the reality of the hazard.
What was not seen could not be prevented, was produced with the best
intentions, and is an unwanted problem child of the objective in mind.
'Latent side effect' thus stands for a type of license, a natural fate of
civilization, which simultaneously confesses to, selectively distributes and
justifies undesirable consequences.
'J
}
i
Ii
:j
I,,;
LOGIC OF WEALTH AND RISK DISTRIBUTION 35
Class-Specific Risks
The type, pattern and media for the distribution of risks differ
systematically"-from those-or-the" dfstributioi1--cir\vealtfi-.··ThiiCdoesnot
iXCIude rIs}{s-troin ()fieii-beillgdrsiributed in a'stratfHed or class-specific
way. In this sense there are broad overlapping areas between class and
risk society. The history of risk distribution shows that, like wealth, risks
adhere to the class pattern, only inversely: wealth accumulates at the top,
risks at the bottom. To that extent, risks seem to strengthen, not to
abolish, the class society. Poverty attractsaii--untortunate abundance of
risks. By contrast:1he wea1thY_.(i~. income, .power or education) can
~hase ..§~__~.~_f~_ee~tom_J~om _.~~~. This -'law'- -oTiIie- class-specific
distribution of risks and thus of the intensification of class antagonisms
through the concentration of risks among the poor and the weak was
valid for a long time and still applies today to some central dimensions
of risk. The risk of becoming unemployed is considerably higher for
unskilled than for skilled workers. Risks from stress, radiation and toxic
chemicals that are connected to working in the corresponding industrial
plants are unevenly distributed among specific occupations. It is especially
the cheaper residential areas for low-income groups near centers of
industrial production that are permanently exposed to various pollutants
in the air, the water and the soil. A higher tolerance can be obtained with
the threat of a loss of income.
Here it is not just this social filtering or amplification effect which
produces class-specific afflictions. The possibilities and abilities to deal
with risks, avoid them or compensate for them are probably unequally
divided among the various occupational and educational strata. Whoever
has the necessary long-term financial cushion at hand can attempt to
avoid risk through the choice of a place of residence or the set-up of the
residence itself (or through a second house, vacations, etc.). The same is
true for nutrition, education and the related behavior patterns in eating
and informing oneself. ,A~.!!!1Y-_welLfi1l~~t w!;dl~u!! one in a position
to j~~E_!l._~~.~-.l!:'C>.~.~£Q.~t.~.1}J~g_h~1}~~_~_~..9_..§.!l:!ad~_Jr.Q!!L~pampered heacis_QL!~~.tyc.e.'.
Education and attentiveness to information open up
new possibilities of dealing with and avoiding risks. One can avoid certain
products (e.g. liver from old steers with high levels of lead), and through
sophisticated nutritional techniques one can vary the weekly menu so that
the heavy metals in North Sea fish are dissolved, supplemented or
neutralized by the toxic chemicals in pork and tea (or maybe they are
intensified after all?). Cooking and eating are becoming a kind of implicit
food chemistry, a kind of witch's cauldron in reverse, meant to minimize
harmful effects. Here quite extensive knowledge is required in order use
'nutritional engineering' to play a little private trick on the overproduction
of pollutants and toxins in the chemical and agricultural industries.
Nonetheless, it is very probable that class-specifically distributed 'antichemical'
nutritional and living habits depend on knowledge and will
36 LIVING ON THE VOLCANO OF CIVILIZATION
emerge in reaction to news about pollution in the press and television. In
'nutritionally aware', well heeled segments of the population, this everyday
'anti-chemistry' (often brought neatly packaged to consumers as an
offshoot of the chemical industry) will turn every area of subsistence
inside out _ from food to housing, from illness to leisure behavior (and
it has already done that). From this, one could derive the general assessment
that through these reflective and well financed dealings with risks
the old social inequalities are strengthened on a new level. But that does
not strike at the heart of the distributional logic of risks.
Parallel to the intensification of risk positions, the private escape routes
and possibilities for compensation shrink and are simultaneously
propagated. The exponential growth of risks, the impossibility of esc~ping
from them, political abstinence and the announcement and sale of pnvate
escape opportunities condition one another. For some foods this private
evasive action may still help, but already in the water supply all the social
strata are connected to the same pipe. When one looks at 'forest
skeletons' in 'rural idylls' far removed from industry, it becomes clear
that the class-specific barriers fall before the air we all breathe. In these
circumstances, only not eating, not drinking and not breathing could
provide effective protection. And even that only helps to a degree. After
all, we know what is happening to the stone in buildings and the lichens
on the ground.
Globalizing the Risks of Civilization
Reduced to a formula: poverty is hierarchic, smog is democratic. With the
expansion of modernization risks - with the endangering of nature,
health, nutrition, and so on - the social differences and limits are
relativized. Very different consequences continue to be drawn from this.
Objectively, however, risks display an equalizing effect within their scope
and among those affected by them. It is precisely therein that their novel
political power resides. In this sense risk societies are not exa~~IY class
societies; their risk positions cannot be understood as class pOSltlOns, or
their conflicts as class conflicts.
This becomes even clearer when one inspects the particular style, the
particular distribution pattern of modernization risks. They possess an
inherent tendency towards globalization. A universalization of hazards
accompanies industrial production, independent of the place where they
are produced: food chains connect practically everyone on earth to
everyone else. They dip under borders. The acid content of the air is not
only nibbling at sculptures and artistic treasures, it also long ago brought
about the disintegration of modern customs barriers. Even in Canada the
lakes have become acidified, and forests are dying even in the northern
reaches of Scandinavia.
The globalization tendency brings about afflictions, which are once
again unspecific in their generality. Where everything turns into a hazard,
.1'
LOGIC OF WEALTH AND RISK DISTRIBUTION 37
somehow nothing is dangerous anymore. Where there is no escape, people
ultimately no longer want to think about it. This eschatological ecofatalism
allows the pendulum of private and political moods to swing in
any direction. The risk society shifts from hysteria to indifference and
vice versa. Action belongs to yesterday anyway. Perhaps one can get at
the omnipresent and everlasting pesticides with (in)sects?
The Boomerang Effect
Contained within the globalization and yet clearly differentiated from it
is a distribution pattern of risks which contains a considerable amount of
political explosive. Sooner or later the risks also catch up with those who
produce or profit from them. Risks display a social boomerang effect in
their diffusion: even the rich and powerful are not safe from them. The
formerly 'latent side effects' strike back even at the centers of their
production. The agents of modernization themselves are emphatically
caught in the maelstrom of hazards that they unleash and profit from.
This can happen in a multitude of ways.
Take the example of agriculture once again. In Germany, the consumption
of artificial fertilizer grew from 143 to 378 kilograms per hectare over
the period 1951 to 1983, and the use of agricultural chemicals rose from
25,000 to 35,000 tonnes between 1975 and 1983. The yields per hectare
also rose, but not nearly as fast as the expense for fertilizer and pesticides.
Yields doubled for grain and were 20 percent higher for potatoes. A
disproportionately small increase of yields in relation to the use of
fertilizer and chemicals contrasts with a disproportionately large increase
in the natural destruction that is visible and painful to the farmer.
An outstanding index of this alarming development is the strong
decrease in many wild plant and animal species. The 'red lists' that serve
as official 'death certificates' to record these threats to existence are growing
longer and longer.
Of 680 plant species occurring in Greenland, 519 are endangered. The populations
of bird species dependent on meadows, such as the white stork, the
curlew, or the whinchat, are decreasing drastically; people are trying to preserve
the last flocks in Bavaria through a 'meadow birds program' ... The affected
animals include ground nesting birds, animals at the top of food chains like
predatory birds, owls and dragonflies, or those specialized in food which is
becoming scarce, for instance large insects or flower nectar available through
the whole growing season. (Rat der Sachverstiindigen fUr Umweltfragen 1985:
20)
Formerly 'unseen secondary effects' thus become visible primary effects
which endanger their causal production centers themselves. The production
of modernization risks follows the boomerang curve. Intensive
industrial agriculture, subsidized with billions, does not just cause the lead
content in mothers' milk and children to rise dramatically in distant cities.
It also frequently undermines the natural basis of agricultural production
38 LIVING ON THE VOLCANO OF CIVILIZATION
itself: the fertility of the soil declines, vitally important animals and plants
disappear, and the danger of soil erosion grows.
The circularity of this social endangering can be generalized: under the
roof of modernization risks, perpetrator and victim sooner or later
become identical. In the worst, unthinkable case, a nuclear world war,
this is evident· it also destroys the aggressor. Here it becomes clear that
the Earth ha~ become an ejector seat that no longer recognizes any
distinctions between rich and poor, black and white, north and south or
east and west. But the effect only exists when it occurs, and when it
occurs, it no longer exists, because nothing exists any more. This
apocalyptic threat therefore leaves behind no tangible traces in the now
of its threat (Anders 1983). That is different in the ecological crisis. It
undermines even the economic foundations of agriculture, and thus the
food supply of the people themselves. Here effects are visible which make
their mark not just in nature, but also in the pocketbooks of the wealthy
and the health of the powerful. From competent authorities, and not
divided along party lines at all, one can hear quite shrill, apocalyptic
sounds in this field.
Ecological Devaluation and Expropriation
The boomerang effect need not manifest itself as a direct threat to life;
it can also affect secondary media, money, property and legitimation. It
does not just strike back directly at the individual source; in a wholesale,
egalitarian way it impairs everyone. The destruction of forests d.oes not
just cause bird species to disappear, but also makes the econ~mlc value
of land and forest property shrink. Where a nuclear or coal-fued power
plant is being built or planned, land prices fall. Urban and industrial
areas, freeways and thoroughfares all pollute their vicinity. It m~y still be
a matter of debate whether 7 percent of the land in Germany IS already
so polluted from these causes that in good conscience no agr~culture
should be carried out there, or whether this will not occur untll some
point in the near future. The principle, however, is.the same: p:o~erty is
being devalued, it is undergoing a creeping ecologICal expropriatIOn.
This effect can be generalized. The destruction and endangering of
nature and the environment, news of toxic substances in foodstuffs and
consumer articles, threatening - and worse yet, actual - chemical, toxic or
reactor accidents have the effect of a creeping or galloping devaluation and
expropriation of property rights. Through the unrestrained production of
modernization risks, a policy of making the Earth uninhabitable is being
conducted in continuing leaps and bounds, and sometimes in catastrophic
intensifications. What is being opposed as a 'communist menace' is occurring
as the sum of our own actions via the detour through a contaminated
nature. On the battlefield of market opportunities, beyond the doctrinal
wars of ideology, everyone is pursuing a 'scorched Earth' policy against
everyone else - with resounding but seldom lasting success.
LOGIC OF WEALTH AND RISK DISTRIBUTION 39
What is contaminated or considered contaminated may belong to
whomever you will - for the loss of social and economic value the distinction
is inconsequential. Even if legal title to ownership is maintained, it
will become useless and worthless. In the case of 'ecological expropriation'
we are thus concerned with a social and economic expropriation
while legal ownership continues. This applies to foodstuffs as much as to
the air, the soil and the water. It applies to everything that lives in them,
and above all, to those who live from what lives in them. The talk of
'residential toxins' makes it clear that everything that constitutes the
culture of our everyday life can be included here.
The basic insight lying behind all this is as simple as possible:
everything which threatens life on this Earth also threatens the property
and commercial interests of those who live from the commodification of
life and its requisites. In this way a genuine and systematically intensifying
contradiction arises between the profit and property interests that advance
the industrialization process and its frequently threatening consequences,
which endanger and expropriate possessions and profits (not to mention
the possession and profit of life).
With reactor accidents or chemical catastrophes, 'blank spots' on the
map arise again in the most advanced stage of civilization. They are
monuments of what threatens us. Even toxic accidents, or suddenly
discovered toxic waste dumps, transform housing estates into toxic waste
estates and turn farmland into wasteland. But there are many preliminary
and insidious forms. The fish from the contaminated seas endanger not
just the people who eat them, but because of that, also all the many
people who make a living from fishing. During smog alerts the land dies
temporarily. Entire industrial regions are transformed into eerie ghost
towns. Such is the will of the boomerang effect: even the wheels of the
polluting industries come to a halt. But not only theirs. Smog cares not
a jot abQlJt the_pol/uter_'p'gy.§...p!.i.l'lsJpl~. On a wholesale and egalffiiiali
-basfs- it strikes everyone, independently of his or her-snare-Tri--smog
produ£!ion. Thus, smog is certainly not an-acivertlsiiiifactor for
sanatoriums, certainly not a big seller. The legally established requirement
to publicize effectively the maximum smog levels in the air at such
establishments (like air and water temperatures) ought to turn the spa
administrations and the resort industry into committed supporters of a
pollution-fighting policy - even though they have so far advocated
policies against setting standards.
Risk Positions are not Class Positions
In this way, with the globalization of risks a social dynamic is set in
motion, which can no longer be composed of and understood in class
categories. Ownership implies non-ownership and thus a social relationship
of tension and conflict, in which reciprocal social identities can
continually evolve and solidify - 'them up there, us down here'. The
40 LIVING ON THE VOLCANO OF CIVILIZATION
situation is quite different for risk positions. Anyone affected by them is
badly off, but deprives the others, the non-affected, of nothing.
Expressed in an analogy: the 'class' of the 'affected' does not confront
a 'class' that is not affected. It confronts at most a 'class' of not-yetaffected
people. The escalating scarcity of health will drive even those still
well off today (in health and well-being) into the ranks of the 'soup
kitchens' provided by insurance companies tomorrow, and the day after
tomorrow into the pariah community of the invalid and the wounded.
The perplexity of authorities in the face of toxic accidents and toxic
waste scandals, and the avalanche of legal, jurisdictional and compensation
issues that is triggered each time, all speak a clear language. To wit,
freedom from risk can turn overnight into irreversible affliction. The
conflicts that arise around modernization risks occur around systematic
causes that coincide with the motor of progress and profit. They relate to
the scale and expansion of hazards and the ensuing demands for compensation
and/or a fundamental change of course. In those conflicts what is
at stake is the issue of whether we can continue the exploitation of nature
(including our own), and thus, whether our concepts of 'progress',
'prosperity', 'economic growth', or 'scientific rationality' are still correct.
In this sense, the conflicts that erupt here take on the character of
doctrinal struggles within civilization over the proper road for modernity.
In many respects, these resemble the doctrinal struggles of the Middle
Ages more than the class conflicts of the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries.
Neither do industrial risks and destruction have any respect for national
boundaries. They couple the life of a blade of grass in the Bavarian Forest
ultimately to effective international agreements on fighting pollution. The
supra-nationality of the movement of pollution can no longer be dealt
with by individual national efforts. The industrial countries must agree
from now on to be distinguished according to their national balances of
emissions or immissions. In other words, international inequalities are
arising between different industrial nations with 'active', 'even', or
'passive' balances of pollutants, or to put it more clearly, between 'filthy
countries' and those who have to clean up, inhale or pay for the filth of
others with increasing deaths, expropriations and devaluations. The
socialist 'fraternal community' will also soon have to face up to this
distinction and the sources of conflict in it.
Risk Position as Fate
The international intractability of modernization risks is matched by the
way they spread. At least for the consumer, their invisibility hardly leaves
a decision open. They are 'piggy-back products' which are inhaled or
ingested with other things. They are the stowaways ot normal cons_li'!!ption.
They travel on the wind and in the water. They can be in anything
and everything, and along with the absolute necessities of life - air to
I
I\
~
LOGIC OF WEALTH AND RISK DISTRIBUTION 41
breathe, food, clothing, home furnishings - they pass through all the
otherwise strictly controlled protective areas of modernity. Unlike wealth,
which is attractive but can also be repellent, for which selection, purchase
and decisions are always possible and necessary, risks and destruction
steal in everywhere implicitly and unhindered by free(!) decisions. IntliiS-sense
they bring about a·new-kInd ·of risk ascripilon by·Civilization. This
recalls in some respects the status fate in medieval society. Now there
exists a kind of risk fate in developed civilization, into which one is born,
which one cannot escape with any amount of achievement, with the 'small
difference' (that is the one with the big effect) that we are all confronted
similarly by that fate.
In developed civilization, which had set out to remove ascriptions, to
evolve privacy, and to free people from the constraints of nature and
tradition, there is thus emerging a new global ascription of risks, against
which individual decisions hardly exist for the simple reason that the
toxins and pollutants are interwoven with the natural basis and the
elementary life processes of the industrial world. The experience of this
victimization by risks which is closed to decisions makes understandable
much of the shock, the helpless rage and the 'no future' feelings with
which many people react ambivalently and with necessarily exploitative
criticism to the latest achievements of technical civilization. Is it at all
possible to create and maintain a critical distance towards things one
cannot escape? Is it permissible to abandon a critical distance just because
one cannot escape it, and to flee to the inevitable with scorn or cynicism,
indifference or jubilation?
New International Inequalities
The worldwide equalization of risk positions must not deceive us about
new social inequalities within the affliction by risk. These arise especially
where risk positions and class positions overlap - also on an international
scale. The proletariat of the global risk society settles beneath the
smokestacks, next to the refineries and chemical factories in the industrial
centers of the Third World. The 'greatest industrial catastrophe in history'
(Der Spiegel), the toxic accident in the Indian city of Bhopal, has raised
this in the consciousness of the global public. Hazardous industries have
been transferred to the low-wage countries of the Third World. This is no
coincidence. There is a systematic 'attraction' between extreme poverty
and extreme risk. In the shunting yard where risks are distributed, stations
in 'underdeveloped provincial holes' enjoy special popularity. And one
would have to be a naive fool to continue to assume that the responsible
switchmen do not know what they are doing. More evidence for this is
the attested 'higher acceptance' of an unemployed provincial population
of 'new' (job-creating) technologies.
On the international scale it is emphatically true that material misery
and blindness to hazards coincide. 'A German development expert reports
42 LIVING ON THE VOLCANO OF CIVILIZATION
on the careless use of pesticides, in Sri Lanka, for instance. "There they
spread DDT around with bare hands, the people are powdered white.'"
On the Antilles island of Trinidad (population 1.2 million) a total of 120
deaths from pesticides were reported. 'A farmer: "If you don't feel sick
after spraying, you haven't sprayed enough'" (Der Spiegel 1984, no. 50:
119).
For these people the complex installations of the chemical factories with
their imposing pipes and tanks are expensive symbols of success. The
death threat they contain, by contrast, remains largely invisible. For them,
the fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides they produce signify above all
emancipation from material need. They are prerequisites of the 'green
revolution', which, systematically supported by the Western industrial
states, has raised food production by 30 percent, and in some Asian and
Latin American countries by 40 percent over the past few years. The fact
that every year 'several hundred thousand tonnes of pesticides are sprayed
. . . on cotton and rice fields, on tobacco and fruit plantations' (119)
recedes behind these tangible successes. In the competition between the
visible threat of death from hunger and the invisible threat of death from
toxic chemicals, the evident fight against material misery is victorious.
Without the widespread use of chemical materials the yields of the land
would sink and insects and spoilage would consume their part. With
chemicals the poor countries of the periphery can build up their own
stocks of foodstuffs, and gain a bit of independence from the power
centers of the industrial world. The chemical factories in the Third World
reinforce this impression of independence in production and from expensive
imports. The struggle against hunger and for autonomy forms the
protective shield behind which the hazards, imperceptible in any case, are
suppressed, minimized and, by virtue of that, amplified, diffused and
eventually returned to the wealthy industrial countries via the food chain.
Safety and protection regulations are insufficiently developed, and
where they do exist, they are often just so much paper. The 'industrial
naivete' of the rural population, which often can neither read nor write,
much less afford protective clothing, provides management with unimagined
opportunities to legitimize the ways of dealing with risks that
would be unthinkable in the more risk-conscious milieus of the industrial
.states. Management can issue strict safety regulations, knowing they will
be unenforceable, and insist that they be obeyed. This way they keep their
hands clean, and can shift responsibility for accidents and death to the
people's cultural blindness to hazards, cheaply and in good conscience.
When catastrophes do occur, the jungle of competing jurisdictions and
the material interest of the poor countries offer good opportunities for a
policy of minimization and obfuscation to limit the devastating consequences
by selectively defining the problem. Economic conditions of
production, freed from the constraints of legitimation, attract industrial
concerns like magnets, and combine with the particular interests of the
countries in overcoming material poverty and gaining national autonomy
:i
.~.
LOGIC OF WEALTH AND RISK DISTRIBUTION 43
into an explosive mixture, in the truest sense of the word. The devil of
hunger is fought with the Beelzebub of multiplying risks. Particularly
hazardous industries are transferred to the poor countries of the
periphery. The poverty of the Third World is joined by horror at the
unleashed destructive powers of the developed risk industry. The pictures
and reports from Bhopal and Latin America speak a language of their
own.
Villa Parisi
The dirtiest chemical town in the world is located in Brazil ... Every year the
slum residents have to redo their corrugated iron roofs, because the acidic rain
eats them away. Anyone who lives here for some time develops rashes,
'alligator skin', as the Brazilians say.
The worst affected are the residents of Villa Parisi, a slum of 15,000 people,
most of whom have been able to build modest little houses of gray stone. Here
they even sell gas masks in supermarkets. Most of the children have asthma,
bronchitis, diseases of the nose and throat, and skin rashes.
In Villa Parisi, it's easy to find your way by smell. On one corner an open
sewer is bubbling, on the other a slimy green stream runs. A smell like burnt
chicken feathers indicates the steel works, while the odor of rotten eggs marks
the chemical factory. An emission meter set up by the town's authorities failed
in 1977, after one and a half years of service. It apparently could not withstand
the pollution.
The history of the dirtiest town in the world began in 1954, when Pegropras,
the Brazilian oil company, selected the coastal marsh as the site for its refinery.
Soon Cosipa, Brazil's largest steel concern, and Copegras, a Brazilian-American
fertilizer company, arrived, followed by multinationals like Fiat, Dow Chemical
and Union Carbide. It was the boom phase of Brazilian capitalism. The military
government invited foreign enterprises to produce environmentally harmful
products there. 'Brazil can still afford to import pollution', boasted Planning
Minister Paulo Vellosa in 1972, the year of the environmental conference in
Stockholm. Brazil's only ecological problem was poverty, he claimed.
'The main causes of disease are malnutrition, alcohol and cigarettes', the
spokesman for Pegropras says. 'The people are already ill when they come from
Copatao', agrees Paulo Figueiredo, boss of Union Carbide, 'and if they get
worse, they blame it on us. That's simply illogical.' For years, the governor of
Sao Paulo has been attempting to bring a fresh breeze into polluted Copatao.
He fired thirteen officials of the lax environmental agency and employed
computers to monitor emissions. But the minor fines of a few thousand dollars
didn't bother the environmental violators.
The catastrophe happened on 25 February of this year. Through the sloppiness
of Pegropras, 700,000 liters of oil flowed into the swamp on which the
pile buildings of Villa Soco stand. Within two minutes a fire storm raced
through the javela. Over 500 people were burnt to death. The corpses of small
children were never found. 'They just evaporated from the heat', a Brazilian
official said. (Der Spiegel 1984, no. 50: 110)
Bhopal
The birds fell from the skies. Water buffaloes, cows and dogs lay dead in the
streets and fields - bloated after a few hours in the sun of Central Asia [sid.
And everywhere the asphyxiated people, curled up, foam at the lips, their
cramped hands dug into the earth. There were 3000 of them by the end of last
week and new victims were still being found; the authorities stopped counting.
20,000 people will probably go blind. As many as 200,000 were injured.
44 LIVING ON THE VOLCANO OF CIVILIZATION
In the city of Bhopal an industrial apocalypse without parallel in history
occurred last Sunday night and Monday morning. A toxic cloud escaped from
a chemical factory and settled like a shroud over sixty-five thickly settled square
kilometers; when it finally dissipated, the sickly sweet smell of decay. was
spreading. The city had turned into a battlefield, in the midst of peace. Hmdus
burned their dead on cremation pyres, twenty-five at a time. Soon there was
a shortage of wood for the ritual cremation - thus kerosene flames licked
around the corpses. The Moslem cemetery became too crowded. Earlier graves
had to be opened, breaking holy commandments of Islam. 'I know.it's a sin
to bury two people in a single grave', one of the grave-diggers complams. 'May
Allah forgive us. We're putting three, four and even more in.' (110)
In contrast to material poverty, however, the pauperization of the Third
World through hazards is contagious for the wealthy. The multiplication
of risks causes world society to contract into a community of danger. The
boomerang effect strikes precisely those wealthy countries which had
hoped to get rid of hazards by transferring them overseas, but then had
to import cheaper foodstuffs. The pesticides return to their highly
industrialized homeland in the fruit, cacao beans and tea leaves. The
extreme international inequalities and the interconnections of the world
markets move the poor neighborhoods in the peripheral countries to the
doorsteps of the rich industrial centers. They become the breeding
grounds of an international contamination, which - like the infectious
diseases of the poor in the cramped medieval cities - does not spare even
the wealthy neighborhoods of the world community.
Two Epochs, Two Cultures: on the Relationship between the
Perception and the Production of Risks
Inequalities in class and risk society can therefore overlap and condition
.£!!~.Jm9Jber; the lat!~L~.an...pr.Qduce the former:·T~euneqliarills~ib?i.ron
of social wealth offers almost impregnable defenSive walls and Justlflcations
for the production of risks. Here a precise distinction must be made
between the cultural and political attention to risks and their actual diffu-
sion.
Class societies are societies where, across all the gaps between classes,
the main concern is the visible satisfaction of material needs. Here,
hunger and surplus or power and weakness confront each other. Misery
needs no self-confirmation. It exists. Its directness and visibility correspond
to the material evidence of wealth and power. The certainties of
class societies are in this sense the certainties of a culture of visibility:
emaciated hunger contrasts with plump satiety; palaces with hovels, splendor
with rags.
These evident qualities of the tangible no longer hold in risk societies.
What escapes perceptibility no longer coincides with the unreal, but can
instead even possess a higher degree of hazardous reality. Immediate need
competes with the known element of risk. The world of visible scarcity or
surplus grows dim under the predominance of risks.
LOGIC OF WEALTH AND RISK DISTRIBUTION 45
The race between perceptible wealth and imperceptible risks cannot be
won by the latter. The visible cannot compete with the invisible. Paradox
decrees that for that very reason the invisible risks win the race.
The ignoring of risks that are in any case imperceptible, which always
finds its justification in the elimination of tangible need - and in fact
actually has that justification (see the Third World!) - is the cultural and
political soil on which the risks and hazards grow, bloom and thrive. In
the overlap and competition between the problems of class, industrial and
market society on one side and those of the risk society on the other, the
logic of wealth production always wins, in accordance with the power
relationships and standards of relevance - and for that very reason the
risk society is ultimately victorious. The tangibility of need suppresses the
perception of risks, but only the perception, not their reality or their
effects; risks denied grow especially quickly and well. At a certain stage
of social production, characterized by the development of the chemical
industry, but also by reactor technology, microelectronics, and genetic
technology, the predominance of the logic and conflicts of wealth production,
and thus the social invisibility of the risk society, is no proof of its
unreality; on the contrary, it is a motor for the origin of the risk society
and thus a proof that it is becoming real.
This is what the overlapping and amplification of class and risk positions
in the Third World teaches; the same can be said, however, of action
and thought in the wealthy industrial countries. Protecting economic
recovery and growth still enjoys unchallenged first priority. The threatening
loss of jobs is played up, in order to keep the loopholes in prescribed
emissions regulations wide and their enforcement lax, or to prevent any
investigation into certain toxic residues in foodstuffs. No records are kept
on entire families of chemicals out of consideration for the economic
consequences; they do not exist legally and can be freely circulated for
that very reason. The contradiction that fighting environmental risks has
itself become a flourishing branch of industry that guarantees many
millions of people secure (all too secure) jobs in Germany is passed over
in silence.
At the same time the instruments of definitional risk 'management' are
being sharpened and the relevant axes are being swung. Those who point
out risks are defamed as 'alarmists' and risk producers. Their presentation
of the hazards is considered 'unproven'. The effects on man and animals
they demonstrate are called 'outrageously exaggerated'. More research is
required, they say, before one can be sure what the situation is and take
the appropriate measures. Only a rapidly growing gross national product
could create the prerequisites for improved environmental protection.
They invoke trust in science and research. Their rationality has so far
found solutions to every problem, the argument goes. Critique of science
and anxieties about the future are stigmatized in contrast as 'irrationalism'.
They are supposed to be the real roots of the evils. Risk
belongs to progress as much as a bow-wave belongs to a speeding ship.
46 LIVING ON THE VOLCANO OF CIVILIZATION
Risk is no invention of modern times. It is tolerated in many areas of
social life. The deaths from traffic accidents, for instance. Every year a
middle-sized city in Germany disappears without a trace, so to speak.
People have even got used to that. So there is plenty of free space and
air for little mini-catastrophes with radioactive material or waste or such
(these are in any case extremely unlikely, considering German safety
technology).
Even the dominance of this interpretation cannot delude us as to its loss
of reality. Its victory is a Pyrrhic one. Where it prevails it produces what
it denies, the risk society. But there is no consolation in that; on the
contrary there is a growing danger.
The Utopia of a World Society
Thus it is also and especially in denial and non-perception that the objective
community of a global risk comes into being. Behind the variety of
interests, the reality of risk threatens and grows, knowing no social or
national differences anymore. Behind the walls of indifference, danger
runs wild. Of course, this does not mean that a grand harmony will break
out in the face of the growing risks of civilization. Precisely in dealing
with risks, a variety of new social differentiations and conflicts emerge.
These no longer adhere to the plan of class society. They arise above all
from the double face of risks in late industrial society: risks are no longer
the dark side of opportunities, they are also market opportunities. As the
risk society develops, so does the antagonism between those afflicted by
risks and those who profit from them. The social and economic importance
of knowledge grows similarly, and with it the power over the media
to structure knowledge (science and research) and disseminate it (mass
media). The risk society is in this sense also the science, media and information
society. Thus new antagonisms open up between those who
produce risk definitions and those who consume them.
These tensions between business and the elimination of risks, and
between the consumption and the production of risk definitions, range
across all areas of social action. Here lie the essential sources of the
definitional struggles over the scale, degree and urgency of risks. In the
fixing of acceptable levels, the numbers of people afflicted as patients or
victims increase or decrease. By drawing lines of causation, companies
and occupations are caught in the firing line of accusation. Politicians and
politics release pressure by holding individuals and not systems responsible
for the accidents and damage. On the other hand, the viewers of risk
definition take over and expand their market opportunities. Some, like
chemists, are on both sides at the same time; they make people sick and
then feed them pills to cure their secondary sickness (allergy medication,
for example).
The market-expanding exploitation of risks favors a general to and fro
between revealing and concealing risks - with the effect that ultimately no
LOGIC OF WEALTH AND RISK DISTRIBUTION 47
one quite knows whether the 'problem' might not be the 'solution' or vice
versa, who profits from what, where responsibilities for creation are being
covered up or concealed through causal speculations, and whether the
whole talk about risk is not the expression of a displaced political drama,
which in reality intends something quite different.
But unlike wealth, risks always produce only partial polarization, based
on the adv~1}lag~~,. wN~h ~~ey ·gi.~Q:Jlr:Qd'~"~e";',~i]~~§i=~Qile~:ili~i-=~~Oi
yet fully ~ped. As soon as the growing element of damage moves
into vic;' the advantages and differences melt away. Sooner or later risks
simply present us with threats, which in turn relativize and undermine the
associated advantages, and precisely with the growth of the danger they
make the commonality of risk a reality, through all the variety of
interests. In that way, under the canopy of risk affliction - no matter how
much this covers - commonalities behind all the antagonisms also come
into being. In order to prevent hazards from nuclear energy or toxic waste
or obvious destruction of nature, members of divergent classes, parties,
occupational groups and age groups organize into citizens' movements.
In this sense, the risk society produces new antagonisms of interest and
a new type of community of the endangered whose political carrying
capacity remains, however, an open question. To the extent to which
modernization hazards generalize and thus abolish the remaining zones of
non-involvement, the risk society (in contrast to class society) develops a
tendency to unify the victims in global risk positions. In the limiting case,
then, friend and foe, east and west, above and below, city and country,
south and north are all exposed to the leveling pressure of the exponentially
increasing risks of civilization. Risk societies are not class societies
- that is not saying enough. They contain within themselves a grass-roots
developmental dynamics that destroys boundaries, through which the
people are forced together in the uniform position of civilization's self-
endangering.
To that extent the risk society controls new sources of conflict and
consensus. The place of eliminating scarcity is taken by eliminating risk.
Even if the consciousness and the forms of political organization for this
are still lacking, one can say that risk society, through the dynamic of
endangerment it sets in motion, undermines the borders of nation states
as much as those of military alliances and economic blocs. While class
societies are capable of being organized as national states, risk societies
bring about 'communities of danger' that ultimately can only be
comprised in the United Nations.
The potential for self-endangering developed by civilization in the
modernization process thus also makes the utopia of a world society a
little more real or at least more urgent. People in the nineteenth century
had to learn, on penalty of economic ruin, to subject themselves to the
conditions of industrial society and wage labor. In just the same way, they
also have to learn today as in the future, under the shadow of an
apocalypse of civilization, to sit down at a table to find and enforce
48 LIVING ON THE VOLCANO OF CIVILIZATION
solutions to the self-inflicted endangering that crosses all borders.
Pressure in this direction can already be perceived today. Environmental
problems can only be solved in an objectively meaningful way in borderspanning
negotiations and international agreements, and the way to them
accordingly leads to conferences and agreements crossing military
alliances. The threat from the storage of nuclear weapons with unimaginable
destructive power upsets people in all military spheres and creates a
community of threat, whose viability must still prove itself.
The Political Vacuum
But such attempts to gain at least a political meaning from the terror that
cannot be understood, cannot blind us to the fact that these newly arising
objective commonalities of danger have so far been floating in thin air in
the political and economic sense. On the contrary, they collide with
national-state egoisms and the prevailing intrasocial party, industrial and
interest organizations of industrial societies. There is no place in the
jungle of corporatist society for such global risks that span groups. Here
every organization has its clientele and its social milieu, consisting of
opponents and allies, who are to be activated and played off against one
another. The commonality of dangers confronts the pluralistic structure
of interest group organizations with almost insoluble problems. It
confuses the mutually worked out and well worn compromise routines.
It is true: the dangers grow, but they are not politically reforged into
a preventive risk management policy. What is more, it is unclear what sort
of politics or political institutions would even be capable of that. An
incomprehensible community emerges corresponding to the incomprehensibility
of the problem. But it remains more an ideal than a reality. At the
same time as this gap, a vacuum of institutionalized political competence,
or even of ideas about it, emerges. The openness of the question as to
how the dangers are to be handled politically stands in stark contrast to
the growing need for action and policy-making.
Among the many questions concealed behind this is also that of the
political subject. Theoreticians of the class societies of the nineteenth
century chose the proletariat for this role wi~h good reason. They had
their difficulties with it and still have them today. The social and political
obviousness of this assumption is retrograde, precisely because it was so
right. The achievements of the workers' political and trade union movement
were great, so great that they have even undermined its former role
as leader into the future. It has become more a preserver of what has
already been attained and is being eroded by the future, than a source of
political imagination that seeks and finds the answers to the hazards of
the risk society.
What corresponds to the political subject of class society - the
proletariat - in risk society is only the victimization of a/l by more or less
tangible massive dangers. One need not be a Freudian to believe that such
~- ,', \','" ,,,,,,,,,,-., - . " ,',', ~. .~',' '.' ",..~.'~~," .~'."~ ..-.' . . .., _.... - , ... "-~.'~ .'.~.~~' ,', , ' . . ~', ;
LOGIC OF w.iALTH AND RISK DISTRIBUTION 49
overwhelming anxiety can be easily repressed. Everyone and no one is
responsible for it. In classical industrial society, everyone is engaged in the
struggle for his job (income, family, little house, automobile, hobbies,
vacation wishes, etc. If those are lost, then you are in a tight spot in any
case - pollution or no). But can intangible, universal afflictions be
organized politically at all? Is 'everyone' capable of being a political
subject? Is this not jumping much too casually from the global nature of
the dangers to the commonality of political will and action? Is not
globalized and universal victimization a reason not to take notice of
problem situations or to do so only indirectly, to shift them onto others?
Are not these the roots that lead to the creation of scapegoats?4
From the Solidarity of Need to Solidarity Motivated by Anxiety
Even if the political expression is open and the political consequences
ambiguous, in the transition from class to risk society, the quality of
community begins to change. Schematically, two totally different value
systems are expressed in these two types of modern society. Class societies
remain related to the ideal of equality in their developmental dynamics (in
its various formulations from 'equal opportunity' to the variants of
socialist models of society). Not so the risk '3ociety. Its normative counterproject,
which is its basis and motive force, is safety. The place of the
value system of the 'unequal' society is taken by the value system of the
'unsafe' society. Whereas the utopia of equality contains a wealth of
substantial and positive goals of social change, the utopia of the risk
society remains peculiarly negative and defensive. Basically, one iLllO---
~~.L.c:;Q...l1c,;ern~~~!!?_,attai~g sometbin~~~r with preven- "
ting the worst; self-limitation is the goal which emerges. TIre dream of
class society is that everyone wants and ought to have a share of the pie.
The utopia of the risk society is that everyone should be spared from
poisoning.
There are corresponding differences in the basic social situation in
which people in both societies live and join together, and which moves
them, divides them or fuses them. The driving force in the class society
can be summarized in the phrase: I am hungry! The movement set in
motion by the risk society, on the other hand, is expressed in the statement:
I am afraid! The commonality of anxiety takes the place of the
commonality of need. The type of the risk society marks in this sense a
social epoch in which solidarity from anxiety arises and becomes a
political force. But it is still completely unclear how the binding force of
anxiety operates, even whether it works. To what extent can anxiety
communities withstand stress? What motives and forces for action do they
set in motion? Will the social power of anxiety actually break individual
judgments of utility? How capable of compromise are anxiety-producing
communities of danger? In what forms of action will they organize? Will
anxiety drive people to irrationalism, extremism, or fanaticism? So far,
50 LIVING ON THE VOLCANO OF CIVILIZATION
anxiety has not been a foundation for rational action. Is this assumption
no longer valid either? Is anxiety - unlike material need - perhaps a very
shaky foundation for political movements? Can the community of anxiety
perhaps even be blown apart by the weak draft of counter-information?
Notes
1 Modernization means surges of technological rationalization and changes in work and
organization, but beyond that it includes much more: the change in societal characteristics
and normal biographies, changes of lifestyle and forms of love, change in the structures
of power and influence, in the forms of political repression and participation, in views
of reality and in norms of knowledge. In social science's understanding of modernity, the
plough, the steam locomotive and the microchip are visible indicators of a much deeper
process, which comprises and reshapes the entire social structure. Ultimately the sources
oj certainty on which life feeds are changed (Etzioni 1968; Koselleck 1977; Lepsius 1977;
Eisenstadt 1979). In the last year (after the third edition of this book in Germany) there
has been a new wave of modernization theory. Now the discussion centers on the possible
post-modern problematization of modernity (Berger 1986; Bauman 1989; Alexander and
Sztompka 1990).
2 For more sophisticated distinctions between risk in industrial society and risk in risk
society see Beck (1988) and (1992).
3 Political strategies against this 'organized irresponsibility' are discussed in Beck (1988).
4 This argument is incomplete; it denies the reflexive politicization of risk conflicts. See
Beck (1988: Part II, 1991; and 1992, p. 113ff).
2
THE POLITICS OF KNOWLEDGE IN
THE RISK SOCIETY
Anyone moved by these questions must be interested in the social and
political dynamics of the risk society - alongside its technical, chemical,
biological and medical expertise. That is what will be pursued here. An
analogy to the nineteenth century offers itself as a starting point to that
end. My thesis is that in the risk society we are concerned with a type of
immiseration which is comparable to that of the working masses in the
nineteenth century, and yet not comparable at all. Why 'immiseration'
and in what sense?
Immlseration of Civilization?
Both in the nineteenth century and today, consequences experienced by
the bulk of humanity as devastating are connected with the social process
of industrialization and modernization. With both epochs we are concerned
with drastic and threatening interventions in human living conditions.
These appear in connection with definite stages in the development
of productive forces, of market integration, and of the relationships of
property and power. There may be different material consequences each
time - back then, material immiseration, poverty, hunger, crowding;
today, the threatening and destruction of the natural foundations of life.
There are also comparable aspects, such as the amount of danger and the
systematic nature of modernization with which it is produced and grows.
Therein lies its internal dynamic - not malevolence, but the market,
competition, division of labor, all of it just a bit more global today. Just
as before, the latency (side effects) can in both cases only be broken
through in conflict. Then as now, people went into the streets to protest,
there was and is loud criticism of progress and technology, there was
Luddism - and its counter-arguments.
Then came the gradual admission to the problems, as can still be
observed today. Systematically produced suffering and oppression become
more and more visible and must be recognized by those who have denied
them. The law sets its sails to the prevailing wind, by no means voluntarily,
but with the powerful support of politics and the streets: universal
suffrage, social welfare laws, labor laws and codetermination. The parallels
to today are obvious; harmless things, wine, tea, pasta, etc., turn out
to be dangerous. Fertilizers become long-term toxins with worldwide consequences.
The once highly praised sources of wealth (the atom, chemistry,
genetic technology and so on) are transformed into unpredictable sources