The Erosion of Risk

Unless you've been under a rock for the last week you'll have heard the story. "Fundamentalist tries to blow up jet". As one journalist puts it the story practically writes itself: suicidal fundamentalist sneaks explosives aboard plane, attempts to collect his 72 virgins[1] as the plane lands in the US. The bomb fizzles, the nuttter's trousers catch fire and he's dealt with robustly by the other passengers. Authorities rush out a new, draconian set of rules making air travel more uncomfortable for everybody, even the silent majority who prefer travelling without explosives up their bums. Full body searches, stuck in your seat for the last hour of the flight, hands where attendants can see them, all electronics banned. Air travel goes from being merely unpleasant to actually excruciating.

Do the rules really enhance security? Much has been written about this; the general concensus is "no". Moreover the speed at which they were implemented is suspicious. Almost as if some agency had a new, guaranteeed-unpopular set of rules out back and was waiting for the latest atrocity to make their implementation seem more necessary.

I won't write about how easy to evade the new rules are, or how specific rules can never combat non-specific threats from a resourceful adversary. Poisonous ideologies must be stopped at the source, not at the airline gate. I'll resist the temptation to discuss how the biggest single factor defeating would-be-suicide-bombers isn't airline security but common sense (in this case bollards in front of the airport terminal) and their own incompetence. Credulous, suicidal, and usually disturbed muppets tend to be those least successful at blowing something up.

Ahem.



What's wrong with this picture?

It's reasonable to make an effort to prevent others from harming us. Clearly the authorities would be in remiss not to apply at least a little common sense. Locks on the cockpit doors, an obvious win. Taking luggage off a plane if its owner doesn't come on board - again, perfectly sensible. One wonders why this ever didn't happen.

But we get to a point where security goes from being a set of obvious, common sense measures to something more intrusive. And this isn't just about travel. I'll give a few examples of invasive & disproportionate security measures:

• The UK government's Interception Modernization Programme
  
• Full-body searches before boarding an aircraft
  
• Background checks for the nine million people going anywhere near someone else's child
  

These measures are indicative of a new kind of thinking about security. In the last few years those in power have come to believe it's their role not just to take reasonable steps to protect their charges but to prevent bad things happening at all, regardless of the cost to individual liberty.

The thinking goes something like "...but the right to not live in fear trumps all personal liberties". And well it might, if we didn't cumulatively inflict upon ourselves an order of magnitude more discomfort and worry than we ever endured to start with.



Security at Any Cost

Once upon a time (I like to believe) we lived in a world where people took a pragmatic approach to risk. "We should attempt to stop bad things" one imagines they reasoned, "but we shouldn't throw out the baby with the bathwater". Being alive is inherently risky - at any moment something might happen (ill-placed bus, falling satellite, wild animals, house fire - you get the idea) to change one's status from "alive" to "not alive".

So what happened?

I think the erosion of risk has come from two sides. Firstly an increasingly prevalent blame-centric worldview - the "no such thing as an accident" culture. This is an narcissistic & very popular way to view the world - to say that everything that happens does so as a result of our choices, either individually or collectively. Good examples are:

• Child abuse - modern practice is to blame this on the local authority
  
• Inclement weather a result of man-made global warming
• Recent lame plane attack a failure of security

Like all popular beliefs this is reinforced by repetition. Every "X is responsible for Y" story, every advert for personal injury lawyers ("Plebs, have you had an accident in the last twelve months? You might be entitled to comp-en-sation")

Secondly, we have the eagerness of public bodies to accept this blame whenever tragedy rears its head. It is unfashionable to say "out of X million flights per year we should not be surprised to see one attacked" or "a large proportion of child abuse is prevented by the intervention of local authorities". Apologies, hand wringing and self-flagellation are de-rigeur. The BBC have apologized for so many things this year they may be forced to replace BBC News 24 with a rolling, constantly feed of live apologies for absolutely everything they do. In the case of governments this is closely related to the desire for power[2] - it's easier to say "we need these invasive new laws" if you can justify them with a commonly perceived threat.

What all this leads to is an total intolerance of risk. If someone hellbent upon bringing down a passenger jet succeeds it's not considered "just one of those things" - and the blame is not laid upon them or those wicked enough to encourage the act. Instead the state throws up its hands and exclaims "Oh no, something bad happened! We must work harder to ensure bad things don't happen (but at the same time foster a culture of fear and suspicion) or nobody will vote for us!". Almost always the solution presented is "more rules" with a side-helping of paranoia and often these rules are out of all proportion with the original threat. Not to mention surrounded by secrecy and paranoia.



Conclusion: Broken Perception of Risk

The net result of all this - a media eager to aportion blame and authorities eager to accept it so they can claim further power[3] - is a disproportionate and press-driven obsession with a very narrow collection of the dangers facing modern man. More people are killed by insects than by terrorists but since wasps are less dramatic (and no-one can be blamed) we do not dedicate immense resources to their eradication.

We are alive at one of the safest points in human history. Medicine, agriculture, relatively effective policing, education, social security and a low incidence of war result in the highest life expectancy ever seen. But pressure from two sides - from the state and from constant media reinforcement - force us to live in more fear than any time in recent memory. We're refuting the idea that risk and uncertainty is a part of being alive and coming to demand that any potential threat to our wellbeing - no matter how remote - be neutralized.

Much is written about the inappropriateness of intrusive, threat-specific security in modern life but little thought has so far been given to the root cause. It isn't the TSA, it isn't New Labour and it isn't the Health and Safety Executive. It's a whole western society grown terrified of its own shadow and a system full of incentives for any organization that propagates fear.

Next time you get patted down at an airport or get ISA checked because you can't be trusted not to explode or molest children, see it for what it is. You're living in a milieu that demands constant fear.

It's sicker than anything your local fundamentalist could ever dream of.






[1] The origin of the "72 houris" concept is discussed in Gibbon's "History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" - online copy here - but there is modern debate around the translation. Gibbon suggests it was introduced as a highly effective way to aid military recruitment. Everyone ought to read Decline and Fall; it gives a fascinating perspective on the development of globalized civilization (not a new idea!) and how little humans have changed in two millennia.

[2] In general it is the nature of government to gain power, not to rescind it.

[3] ...normally used in a cackhanded manner and much more broadly than originally envisaged.