Weekend Essay – what it means to live with risk

Raised on nursery rhymes, we are taught from an early age about the nature of risk. Jack and Jill didn’t know the dangers of hill-climbing when they set out to fetch that pail of water but, by the end of their sorry tale, both they and we are acutely aware of the peril. A valuable lesson is therefore learned by children everywhere: never tackle rough terrain while carrying unsecured liquids.

Risk is one of those perennial axes along which so much of life slides. This past week, Boris Johnson became Mary Poppins in at least two editorial cartoons because the “nanny state” was supposedly back. The Prime Minister’s sin was addressing research that highlighted the specific risks that COVID-19 poses for people who are obese. The message was clear: we don’t exercise enough, and we eat too much sugar. Had Jack and Jill been around, he might have also questioned their pail of water… Spring or stagnant? Rain or river? What’s its sugar content? And couldn’t they just buy their water in a bottle that biodegrades before it gets lodged in a porpoise’s gut?

It’s easy to scoff (especially chocolate and the fizzy stuff) but the Prime Minister was right. “Nanny state”, certainly, but there’s also a reason why “nanny knows best”. Yet none of this explains why we sometimes appear so averse to being risk-averse.

The OED defines risk as “the possibility of loss, injury, or other adverse or unwelcome circumstance; a chance or situation involving such a possibility”. It is hardly a recent concept. In her 2016 book, An Age of Risk, Emily C. Nacol claims that “seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British political thought […] contended openly with the problem of risk”. Hobbes, Locke, Hume, and Smith all tangle with the nature of individual risk set against the broader public good.

That should be a clue as to why the problem still haunts us. Risk is another word for the foundational issues that dominate politics. Risk is what we mean when individual agency is balanced against the protection offered by the state. Yet the idea of risk is also one of probability and therefore belongs in the domain of maths as much as philosophy. Newton gave us equations by which we could calculate the position of the planets at a certain time. It is the determinism we’ve since followed through with Einstein and Plank (but let’s not mention Heisenberg): the universe as a closed system where, if you model the speed and location of every elementary particle, you should be able to calculate what happens next. Reading the future would still be magic but calculating it with absolute precision would simply be maths.

The idea is as attractive as it is esoteric and entirely impractical. Yet the sensibility behind determinism is very current. Advanced nations spend billions on supercomputers just to calculate risk on the basis that, even if it’s impossible to determine the position of every atom in the universe, there is a degree of granularity at which significant forecasts become possible about the weather, markets, wars, and even human behaviour. We can now map so many aspects of our lives against probability curves that risk has increasingly become a matter of hard numbers.

That is a non-trivial change. Having hard numbers alters our attitude towards risk. “There’s a bad flu going around this year” was never as effective as the statistic “20% of people who catch the coronavirus will require hospital treatment”. The psychological difference is that between an advisory and a prediction, or replacing our nursery rhymes with data modelling: Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall and had a 92% chance of a fall with an 89% chance that it might also be fatal. Who wouldn’t avoid egg/wall base scenarios given those numbers?

Risk, described this way, feels antithetical to what it means to be human, though this has long been a criticism held against materialists. “How does a mere and gross materialist, with no expectation of a life to come, decide what, if anything, is worth caring about?” mused the gross materialist Christopher Hitchens. He had answers (and good answers) but that doesn’t mean that the cold abstractions aren’t also a problem. When Jeremy Bentham came up with the panopticon, he didn’t just create a model for the modern prison, he also replicated our ancient relationship with an all-seeing god. Stripped of the myths, the precepts, the moral agency, the panopticon became Soviet Russia and then CCTV culture where we have been left to negotiate our troubled way between the two. It is Big Brother, Hal in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, as well as The New World Order, Big Data, and the Deep State. As for us, we are like Data in Star Trek: The Next Generation or Arnie in The Terminator movies: darkly, machines learning to be human, or, optimistically, humans avoiding becoming machines. Our capacity for risk then becomes a measure of our humanity and the “nanny state” a metric for our compliance.

Michel Foucault observed that “there is no liberalism without a culture of danger”, though this might also be expressed the other way around. Culture exists where people are liberated from danger. This is where the problem resolves into those that are familiar. Where you draw the line will probably define you politically. “If you’re gonna dine with them cannibals,” sings Nick Cave, “Sooner or later, darling, you’re gonna get eaten…” And the answer as any Health and Safety expert would advise him is not to eat with the cannibals. But then where does that leave him lyrically?

And that, surely, is the point. Life constantly involves avoiding risk or prioritising freedom, but these choices are informed by something more than numbers. There is a non-zero chance that the next sentence I write will make you so angry that you’ll expire in a fit of rage. You were warned! Yet you read it anyway and (hopefully) survived. Such is life. Chance is about living; risk is about survival.

Walking across a minefield is much better in single file than making it a free for all. This is what happened as the first wave of COVID-19 hit the UK. It was calculated that the curve would be flattened if half the nation followed the rules on social distancing. This drove government thinking, the public responded, and the curve was eventually flattened. We sacrificed our chances for happiness, love, shopping, money, travel, the joys of Barnard Castle… We sacrificed them all for survival.

Yet this can set a dangerous precedent and we have to be careful that modelling expectations doesn’t start to drive expectations, when “what would happen if” becomes “let’s see if we can”. We’ve cleared the minefield safely but let’s see if we can carry on walking in single file for the rest of our lives. It makes no sense. Evolutionary we are risk-averse but that shouldn’t discount the virtues of diversity and chance. Without the landmines that previously defined one risk, other risks will grow because you are now minimising the chances that flourish with diversity. Life in the panopticon wouldn’t be risk free. It would just mean a different kind of risk.

That doesn’t mean that we aren’t better if we don’t reduce the sugar in our diets. The only thought process as foolish as the one that begins “how dare the government tell me…” is the one that starts  “I must do it because the government says…” Between those two hard extremes is the place where individuals judge the merits of evidence, arguments, as well as circumstance.

So, please, reduce your sugar and wear a mask. But also remember to show a little sympathy to those who fail. Not because they are right and you are wrong, but because our fallacies are as unique to each of us as they are sometimes inexplicably complex. Jack fell down and then so did Jill but the reason they both tripped remains a mystery.