The Security Society
In 1986 Ulrich Beck wrote his “The Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity”. At the end of 2020 it reads like a report on recent history. Maybe the shortest summary of the thesis of the book is a three-word sentence: “Progress replaces voting” (Chapter 8, p. 184). It expresses the hyper-reflexivity of these times in which the political progress of universal suffrage is increasingly pitted against science-powered economic progress. Indeed, why vote if science says There Is No Alternative but to do X in order to safeguard economic progress? One sees this at work in the mass psychosis that seems to be characteristic of almost all elections since Beck wrote his book. Paradoxically, the most common reaction is a polarizing political activism that makes one weary of any type of progress, in whatever dimension. In this piece I focus on the inevitably human trait that leads to this Catch-22: the human search for ‘security’ meeting the irreducible indeterminacy of our human world. I argue that to progress beyond this myth of progress without bound, we have to face up to the bounds of rationality.
When I said ‘the bounds of rationality’ I explicitly did not mean ‘the bounds of our rationality’. Beck thematizes reflexive modernity as well as the promise of infallibility of science collapsing under its own methodological fallibilism. It is an often heard musing that ‘if only’ we humans would ‘perfect’ ourselves to be able to transcend our own bounds we would be able to finally end insecurities that plague our existence. As Beck demonstrates — alongside most philosophy from the end of the 19th century — the issue is not with ‘our’ rationality but it is with rationality as such. For all of the successes of rationality in taking away specific insecurity, it will forever remain founded in questioning what appears to be secure: no rationality without insecurity. This is not a criticism of science but a laudatio of the interestedness of science as opposed to the simplification of ‘scientific’ views promoting a ‘disinterested’ view.
The climate crisis is the most acute example of these bounds of rationality. We have industrialized to secure our existence against the vagaries of nature. The success of science lies in seeing — let us hope in time — that we are part of the nature which made us feel insecure: we cannot ‘detach’ from nature’s whims, if only for the simple reason that we are one of nature’s whims. Clearly, there are those who think more technology will allow us to outrun nature — maybe literally by escaping to Mars — but the fact of the matter is that people on the run are people who feel insecure. The problem is not with the running or with the insecurity, but with the denial that the running is a running away from an insecurity that is our everyday existential reality. What happens when we just accept insecurity instead of trying to progress to The Security Society in which every risk is controlled and human dominion over nature is fully established? I believe that we will stop running away from running away. This will allow us to ‘Stay with The Trouble’ (Haraway) of our insecurity. It will also allow us to ‘Throw away The Ladder’ (Wittgenstein) of our theoretical edifices to take the time to enjoy the view of where we got to. It will, finally, allow us to marvel in Problems/Questions instead of getting stuck in solutions/answers (Deleuze). In short, we will be able to be playful again (Lugones/Gadamer and so many others).
We need to come to terms with the fact that progress to an increasingly secure society is what creates the risk society. As an economic animal, we will tend to look for opportunities which make us and our loved ones more secure. And as political animal, we will want to equalize those opportunities to avoid there is a haphazard way of keeping people (which, after all, may be us) systemically insecure. The two are “mutually exclusive but jointly sufficient” (Bohr). What common (social) security we achieve cannot but be eroded by the privilege of those who happen to be best positioned to face the unforeseen novelty of the new levels of security. This dynamic has always powered progress but Beck is completely right that modernity has driven this dynamic to an extreme that is completely novel: that where “progress replaces voting”, where economic and political progress are sharpened to the point of their mutual exclusivity being so palpable that we feel caught in their bi-stability. Some think we can outrun the risks by following the science of always creating more opportunity. Others believe that we first need to deal with the current risks as — so science tells us as well — we might run out of future opportunities altogether. The only thing that still stands in common between these two is that of political action that is internally committed to the fact that their kind of progress is the only way by which we will be able to achieve security and, if need be, to hell with voting.
If we see the outcome of our desire for security as necessarily creating always new risks, we can however appreciate that our desire for security has bounds. Life, as playing, is risky and as such is played on the board of joint sufficiency of economic and political progress. We need to protect life, therefore progress, but we cannot protect it at all cost. Specifically, we cannot protect it to a point of no longer being able to play at all. The risk confronting us in current society is that of either perpetually locking down because some life can be lost or that of always trusting in a scientific/technological solution until such time nature says: game over. In both cases we no longer have freedom. There is no wiggle room left. We are just playing out a script that has been written out “well over our heads”. We are numbed into flip-flopping from arguments of survival into arguments of needing to keep up with a rat race. Liberation can only come in the form of accepting some level of (personal and collective) risk. Then we are able to play again. We can see the bounds of progress and simply ‘do our best’ within those bounds like the nature-bound human creatures we are. This is a scientific stance not only in embracing the fallibility of science but also in the embracing of scientific insight showing nature does not admit of full control, of full determination. Moreover, it will open up our scientific perspective in a way allowing to see, or understand, the actual playful experience of nature (a playful experience in itself sharpened in the human animal and sharpened by human culture).
It will make open-mindedness into the only progress that really matters as, I believe, Whitehead would have had it as well. In all of this a nuclear analogy applies across the board. We have to understand that once we get into a mode of overheating to the core, the only option left is a gradual cooling down. And we have to understand that the higher our precision on security the lower will be our precision on foreseeing risk much in the same way (exactly in the same way, I would contend) that the more precisely we capture the position of some particle the less precise we will be able to determine its momentum. In fact, it is a choice we have whether we want to be precise - or whether we want to be useful. In this my argument has been in favor of choosing usefulness insofar as the most useful is what maximizes play or pleasure — by finding a sweet spot between security and risk; between political and economic progress. A choice which is none other than realizing quality of life is to be preferred over merely living.
