Risk

The following sections are included:

• Dedication
• Preface
• Contents
• List of Tables
• List of Figures
• List of Illustrations

The phenomenon of ‘social networking’ has plasticised communication making the world's conversations more fluid, open and resistant to editorial control — just as Baudrillard envisioned in his prediction of a coming “hyper-reality.”¹ Twitter™ and Facebook™ have transformed how and when we speak by freeing us of the restraints that once determined with whom we could or should share our knowledge, thoughts and feelings.² If we were to eavesdrop on the innumerable messages sent by the internet it is likely that we would be overwhelmed by the discourse of many millions of people about whom we are uncertain, distrustful, ambivalent, and fearful³…

Bourdieusian field dynamics suggests that the impulse for distinction qualifies life.¹ In many respects, homo ludens epitomises this archetypal ‘distinction-seeker’ who seeks to defy the laws of chance by making the most profitable use of them. This Chapter touches on the contribution made by ludinous play to the discovery of probability. Whilst animating strong ties of kinship with modernism and late modernity, homo ludens is also an important historical figure, whose presence can be traced as far back as to the earliest thinking on the dexterousness of chance and its calculative veracity. The aleatory² principles to which the figurative construction of homo ludens outwardly relates were initially developed as rules and theories for the administration of board games and the throw of the dice like astragalus in ancient African and Middle Eastern cultures, including what is now modern Turkey and Egypt, around 3500 BC.³ This point of inception makes homo ludens a creature of speculation from birth and an archetype of the more ‘serious’ forms of play, noted by Huizinga, in which there is a material stake.⁴ As Florence N. David's account of the history of probability shows, despite their exceptional popularity and near universal appeal, it was many centuries before the ‘root mathematics’ underpinning games of speculation were adequately appraised in Greco-Roman geometrics; and thence Aramaic, Arabic, and latterly, European mathematical conjecture⁵…

A pervasive moral code, derived from the ethical reasoning of eighteenth and nineteenth century economists, underwrites both the logicisation and creative imagining of ignorance, risk and uncertainty in our own time. This inheritance has successfully carried forth moral ascriptions that were prescient to enlightenment philosophers and successor theoreticians whose efforts sought to elevate and transform the episteme of rationality into a protector of goodness, with the capacity to shield private and civic virtues from corruption and harm. It is seldom recognized that even when they appear paradigmatically divided, twentieth and twenty-first century interpretations of risk ontology share a common heritage, instantiated within the moral rhetoric of homo rationalis…

Published in 1925, F. Scott Fitzgerald's famous jazz-age novel The Great Gatsby treats us to a living room conversation which provides a cunning insight into the everyday consumption of pseudo-scientific writing in America.² The scene arises in Chapter One, when Nick, the novel's hero, visits two old friends who live in a Georgian Colonial Mansion which overlooks a bay in East Egg, Long Island. During this social visit a conversation arises in which Tom Buchanan, husband of the novel's heroine Daisy and a Yale graduate, breaks out violently, proclaiming that: “Civilization's going to pieces … I've gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things. Have you read ‘The Rise of the Colored Empires, by this man Goddard?” Nick responds that he has not read the book, to which Tom Buchanan replies, “Well, it's a fine book, and everybody ought to read it. The idea is if we don't look out the white race will be — will be utterly submerged. It's all scientific stuff; it's been proved.” Following a doubtful remark by his wife about Tom reading books with long words in them, Tom continues his praise of Goddard's book by saying: “Well, these books are all scientific … This fellow has worked out the whole thing. It's up to us, who are the dominant race, to watch out or these other races will have control of things.” Tom finally adds “This idea is that we're Nordics. I am, and you are, and you are …” at which stage the conversation peters out³…

It is all too easy to think of the ‘modern age’ as a time in which the advent of strong civil societies and plural democracy have placed ‘reason’ and ‘good moral principles’ in the ascendancy. This is particularly the case when we encounter stories in the press, on TV and in cinemas that tell of human perseverance toward virtuous ends. The individual battling discrimination and unfairness is one such theme. Victims for whom society provides redress is another; as is the redemption of persons and institutions, seemingly reduced to a parlous state of cynicism. We like the idea that the legal, technological and scientific engineering of ‘modernity’ should be used to safeguard, protect, and promote, mutually beneficent causes. Modernity, so defined, is honest, sagacious and unequivocally principled. We find the idea that modernity, replete with its great strides forward in social tolerance, technical eloquence, and scientific acuity, can yet promote injustice, corruption, profligacy and the degradation of humanity to be entirely repellent. Modernity should reflect optimistic visions of a progressive enlightenment…

The German sociologist Walter Bühl suggested that the application of decision and systems analytical approaches to international relations emerged in the years immediately following the end of the Second World War and constituted the dominant paradigm for that discipline for the period from about 1948 to the late 1970s.² During this period the United States possessed a far reaching military and scientific-technological advantage, not only over the former colonial powers of Britain and France but also over its Cold War rival the Soviet Union. This advantage was coupled with a de facto monopoly of military and strategic information by the US, and the presumption by its leaders that the political and institutional system of their country was a model worthy of emulation by other nations³…

The final Chapter of this book discusses two partially interconnected sets of modern and postmodern risk constructs which became prominent from the 1970s and 1980s onwards, having in some cases earlier predecessors. At their core, both of these sets of risk constructs centre on dualities. In the first case this concerns the tension between rich/powerful nations and poor/powerless nations. In the second case the tension originates between the causers of pollution or environmental degradation and the potential or actual sufferers of such ill effects. Conceptually, the first of these dualities — the power duality for short — is related to notions of imperialism, monopoly capitalism, dependency, and hegemonic transition.¹ The second dichotomy — or the polluter duality for short — centres around contemporary notions of risk society which are associated with the works of Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens, which emphasise both the creation of new risks and a new awareness of these risks within modern societies²…

The following sections are included:

• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Authors