Page 111 - Cultural Theory

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••• John Scott •••

the global, technologically created environment of ‘one world’ faces ecological
disaster; the global intensification of surveillance mechanisms generates risks of
totalitarian political repression (Bauman, 1989); and global militarism threatens
nuclear or other forms of large-scale warfare.
The central cultural implication of this globalization of risk is that risk monitoring
becomes a central element in the reflexivity of action. As the ‘dangers’ that are gen-
erated by modern technologies grow, so the calculation of the risks that they involve
becomes an ever more central feature of modern culture. Systems of rational dis-
course and social practice aimed at controlling these risks – insurance, social welfare,
and political intervention – become far more important. Such risk consciousness also
becomes a part of people’s everyday lives and of their immediate personal experi-
ences. Thinking in terms of risk becomes more or less inevitable, even when people
may choose to ignore these risks (Giddens, 1991: 125–6).
Giddens has traced the implications of this growth of risk and risk culture for the
formation of self-identity in the socio-cultural lifeworlds of late modernity. In every-
day life, he argues, people try to build a taken-for-granted world, a sense of stability
and order, that allows them to get on with everyday activity by ‘bracketing off’ their
uncertainties and anxieties. So long as their actions are successful, their picture of the
world is reinforced and their anxieties can remain at bay. They live within a protec-
tive cocoon that provides them with an ontological security and is the basis from
which they can calculate risks and cope with dangers.
Tradition provided a framework of predictability and certainty for pre-modern cul-
tures, making the future predictable and minimizing anxiety (ibid.: 48). Under these
circumstances, people’s lives – their trajectories of self – followed prescribed and pre-
ordained transitions, and it is in this sense, as Durkheim (1893) showed, that the
‘individual’ and individual choice did not exist in a traditional society.
In modern societies, people can no longer rely on pre-established precepts and
practices, and their actions must be constantly subject to revision in the light of new
information and knowledge. Individual choice becomes a necessity, and rational, sci-
entific knowledge becomes a central element in the exercise of this choice. People no
longer have the kind of local, contextual knowledge that allowed their pre-modern
counterparts to cope with life. They must resort to experts and the technical knowl-
edge that they have developed into ‘expert systems’. As knowledge becomes more
technical, individuals cannot judge the knowledge of those that they consult and
they must take their expertise on trust. Choice and deliberation are informed by
expert information.
Modernity, however, has always depended on reformulated and reconstructed tra-
ditions, such as patriarchal views of gender and sexuality, the authority of science,
the national and religious ideologies that legitimate social movements, and so on.
Late modernity involves a ‘de-traditionalization’ as these reformulated traditions are
themselves subjected to critical examination (Giddens, 1994). Reflexive thought
challenges science itself: all forms of knowledge are now open to question, critique,
and revision. People can no longer have any faith in either the judgements of the
experts or their own assessment of these judgements. This situation of ‘radical
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