Page 134 - Democracy and the Public Sphere

Unfinished Projects: Reflexive Democracy 129

are increasingly mobile and travel widely from their places of origin
(British pollution causes acid rainfall in Scandinavia, economic
decisions made on one side of the globe create unemployment on the
other, and so on). And risks seem increasingly complex and diffi cult to

define or calculate before the fact and before irreversible consequences

have appeared. Fears around genetic modification or the impact of our
increased reliance on antibiotics upon the immune systems of future
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generations, for example, are based on largely incalculable risks.
Risks must be anticipated increasingly through thought experiments,
computer assisted modelling and hypothetical scenarios: scientifi c
inquiry becomes, of necessity, increasingly counterfactual. The risks
involved in a new medical procedure become rapidly apparent when
fifty out of a hundred patients die on the operating table. That

kind of ‘simple’ risk assessment is unproblematic (except for those
unfortunate ‘statistics’). Empiricism does not serve us well, on the

other hand, when it comes to profiling the long-term consequences
of genetic modification, just as an individual could hardly wait and

see how long he lives before he decides whether to change his diet.
Increasingly, risk profiles have to be discursively constructed, or

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‘scientifically born’, as Beck puts it. The confl icts that emerge over

the definitions of risk and the symbolic castings of imagined futures
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are increasingly politicised and taken up in public discourse, as
the competing narratives of genetic modifi cation have highlighted
in recent years: the virtues of scientifi c ‘progress’ and the potential
elimination of hunger versus the dangers of ‘Frankenstein foods’.
Thus far, Beck’s ‘risk society’ fits with Giddens’s refl exive modernity.

Both emphasise the blurring of distinction between risk defi nition
and risk creation (all expert systems and, ultimately, all citizens,
are implicated in both). Modernity’s mythological uncoupling of
‘nature’ and ‘society’ becomes increasingly untenable as institutional
knowledge and its application feed back into the very risk profi les they
address, and as our relations with ‘nature’ (the sphere of ‘facticity’
in its broadest sense) become inextricably bound up in our relations

with each other as we struggle over the definition and distribution of
nature’s ‘goods’ and ‘bads’. But where Giddens’ refl exive modernity
focuses predominantly on the intersections between individual and
expert system, Beck’s analysis proves better equipped to address
one of the most vexing problems of our time: the paradox of
institutionalised hyper-specialisation and late modernity’s cultural
de-differentiation of ‘value spheres’ (after Weber) – science, law and
morality, and aesthetics. The obscurity of the problems we face stems

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