Two men have two apples. One eats both of them. Thus they have eaten on average one each. Transferred to the distribution of foodstuffs on the global scale this statement would mean: ‘on average’ all the people in the world have enough to eat. The cynicism here is obvious. In one part of the Earth people are dying of hunger, while in the other the consequences of overeating have become a major item of expense.
Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity
by Ulrich Beck
(1992)
This panoramic analysis of the condition of Western societies has been hailed as a classic. This first English edition has taken its place as a core text of contemporary sociology alongside earlier typifications of society as postindustrial and current debates about the social dimensions of the postmodern.
Underpinning the analysis is the notion of the `risk society’. The changing nature of society’s relation to production and distribution is related to the environmental impact as a totalizing, globalizing economy based on scientific and technical knowledge becomes more central to social organization and social conflict.
(P.24-26)
Scientific Definition and Distributions of Pollutants
The debate on pollutant and toxic elements in air, water and foodstuffs, as well as on the destruction of nature and the environment in general, is still being conducted exclusively or dominantly in the terms and formulas of natural science. It remains unrecognized that a social, cultural and political meaning is inherent in such scientific ‘immiseration formulas’. There exists accordingly a danger that an environmental discussion conducted exclusively in chemical, biological and technological terms will inadvertently include human beings in the picture only as organic material. Thus the discussion runs the risk of making the same mistake for which it has long and justly reproached the prevailing optimism with respect to industrial progress; it runs the risk of atrophying into a discussion of nature without people, without asking about matters of social and cultural significance. Particularly the debates over the last few years, in which all arguments critical of technology and industry were once again deployed, have remained at heart technocratic and naturalistic. They exhausted themselves in the invocation and publication of the pollutant levels in the air, water and foodstuffs, in relative figures of population growth, energy consumption, food requirements, raw material shortages and so on. They did so with a passion and a singlemindedness as if there had never been people such as a certain Max Weber, who apparently wasted his time showing that without including structures of social power and distribution, bureaucracies, prevailing norms and rationalities, such a debate is either meaningless or absurd, and probably both. An understanding has crept in, according to which modernity is reduced to the frame of reference of technology and nature in the manner of perpetrator and victim. The social, cultural and political risks of modernization remain hidden by this very approach, and from this way of thinking (which is also that of the political environmental movement).
Let us illustrate this with an example. The Rat der Sachverständigen für Umweltfragen (Council of Experts on Environmental Issues) determines in a report that Mn mother’s milk beta-hexachlorocyclohexane, hexachlorobenzol and DDT are often found in significant concentrations’ (1985: 33). These toxic substances are contained in pesticides and herbicides that have by now been taken off the market. According to the report their origin is undetermined (33). At another point it is stated: The exposure of the population to lead is not dangerous on average* (35). What is concealed behind that statement? Perhaps by analogy the following distribution. Two men have two apples. One eats both of them. Thus they have eaten on average one each. Transferred to the distribution of foodstuffs on the global scale this statement would mean: ‘on average’ all the people in the world have enough to eat. The cynicism here is obvious. In one part of the Earth people are dying of hunger, while in the other the consequences of overeating have become a major item of expense. It may be, of course, that this statement about pollutants and toxins is not cynical, that the average exposure is also the actual exposure of all groups in the population. But do we know that? In order to defend this statement, is it not a prerequisite that we know what other poisons the people are forced to inhale and ingest? It is astonishing how as a matter of course one inquires about ‘the average’. A person who inquires about the average already excludes many socially unequal risk positions. But that is exactly what that person cannot know. Perhaps there are groups and living conditions for which the levels of lead and the like that are On average harmless’ constitute a mortal danger!
The next sentence of the report reads: Only in the vicinity of industrial emitters are dangerous concentrations of lead sometimes found in children.’ What is characteristic is not just the absence of any social differentiations in this and other reports on pollutants and toxins. It is also characteristic how differentiations are made – along regional lines with regard to emission sources and according to age differences – both criteria that are rooted in biological (or more generally, natural scientific) thinking. This cannot be blamed on the expert committees. It only reflects the general state of scientific and social thought with regard to environmental problems. These are generally viewed as matters of nature and technology, or of economics and medicine. What is astonishing about that is that the industrial pollution of the environment and the destruction of nature, with their multifarious effects on the health and social life of people, which only arise in highly developed societies, are characterized by a loss of social thinking. This loss becomes caricature – this absence seems to strike no one, not even sociologists themselves.
People inquire about and investigate the distribution of pollutants, toxins, contamination of water, air, and foodstuffs. The results are presented to an alarmed public on multi-colored ‘environmental maps’, differentiated along regional lines. To the extent that the state of the environment is to be presented in this way, this mode of presentation and consideration is obviously appropriate. As soon as consequences for people are to be drawn from it, however, the underlying thought shortcircuits. Either one implies broadly that all people are equally affected in the identified pollution centers – independent of their income, education, occupation and the associated eating, living and recreational opportunities and habits (which would have to be proved). Or one ultimately excludes people and the extent of their affliction entirely and speaks only about pollutants and their distributions and effects on the region.
The pollution debate conducted in terms of natural science correspondingly moves between the false conclusion of social afflictions based on biological ones, and a view of nature which excludes the selective affliction of people as well as the social and cultural meaning connected to it. At the same time what is not taken into consideration is that the same pollutants can have quite different meanings for different people, according to age, gender, eating habits, type of work, information, education and so on.
What is particularly aggravating is that investigations which start from individual pollutants can never determine the concentration of pollutants in people. What may seem ‘insignificant’ for a single product, is perhaps extremely significant when collected in the ‘consumer reservoirs’ which people have become in the advanced stage of total marketing. We are in the presence here of a category error. A pollution analysis oriented to nature and products is incapable of answering questions about safety, at least as long as the ‘safety’ or ‘danger’ has anything to do with the people who swallow or breathe the stuff. What is known is that the taking of several medications can nullify or amplify the effect of each individual one. Now people obviously do not (yet) live by medications alone. They also breathe the pollutants in the air, drink those in the water, eat those in the vegetables, and so on. In other words, the insignificances can add up quite significantly. Do they thereby become more and more insignificant – as is usual for sums according to the rules of mathematics?