RISK CULTURE AND SOCIETY

The Degree of Risk Acceptable to Society is Dependant on the Culture of that Society: A Discussion

The Degree of Risk Acceptable to Society is Dependant on the Culture of that Society: A Discussion

Introduction

It would be right to say that the degree of risk acceptable to society is dependant on the culture of that society. Since their evolutionary origins humans have been confronted with risk—threats to themselves and what they value. It will always be so, even if the threats change dramatically, from that of the saber-toothed tigers threatening our ancestors to the possibility of runaway nanotechnologies facing our descendents. Roots of the idea of risk, that humans can exercise their unique quality of agency to anticipate, assess, avoid, or reduce risk consequences can be traced to very ancient times. This paper discusses the point that the degree of risk acceptable to society is dependant on the culture of that society.

Discussion

The degree of risk acceptable to society is dependant on the culture of that society. For example, in the Tigris-Euphrates valley around 3200 BC lived a group called the Asipu who acted as a new type of seer, not as one who claims to foresee the future, but one who is consulted on risky, uncertain, or difficult decisions (Covello and Mumpower 1985). Still in ancient times, 1700 BC, the Code of Hammurabi included a variety of proscriptions about risk in its 282 clauses.

But the early foundations of the modern idea of risk do not occur until centuries later, in classical Greece. It was there that we find the first use of the word risk (rhiza) in the works of Homer. It is there, too, that we find the first instance of risk transfer, an incipient version of modern day insurance called “bottomry.” It was a loan made to a ship owner to finance the ship's voyage, but remarkably enough, the debt was forgiven if the ship was lost or sunk (Ziskind 1974). Evolving over the centuries that followed was a refined version of bottomry that we now know as modern insurance, in all its variations.

Despite these ancient beginnings, and despite subsequent refinements accompanying the rise of the insurance industry, risk as an analytic tool is a product of high modernity. More particularly, risk is a child of advanced industrialization with its vast increase in the scale and interconnection of complex technologies. The increased complexity of technology was punctuated with the technological advances of World War II—especially the harnessing of the atom for destructive purposes. After the war, the vast potential of that knowledge was directed not only at making larger destructive devices but also for peaceful purposes, principally in the commercial application of nuclear energy for the generation of electricity. And it is in the nuclear industry, owing to the prodigious growth in the size of nuclear reactors, that we find the first applications of formal risk assessment with the application of probabilistic risk assessment (PRA) (cf. U.S. Atomic Energy Commission ...