The society faced the age of risk

The society faced the age of risk

Since the mid-20th century modern society has seen emerge a set of factors that pose a threat to human life on an unprecedented scale. Nuclear, chemical and biological weapons and the environmental collapse are just some examples.

The notion of risk is currently in a process of transformation. The dangers that our ancestors in pre-industrial society, regardless of its magnitude and capability of devastation, confronted were essentially attributable to the destination and the forces of nature; i.e. that they were external to the human source.

With the development of industrial society humanity learned to deal with a whole range of threats that were the technological development and human activity. During that period we have seen continuous growth of man's capacity to deal with the uncertainty product of industrialization. The improvement and the expansion of insurance to almost all areas of social activity allowed the statistical description and, consequently, the possibility of predicting, within the framework of the laws of large numbers, those events that may be subject to rules of forecast, recognition and compensation of the damage caused when they occur. These events, by definition, affect the individual, are usually of sudden origin, are well located in time and space, are quantifiable, are subject to cause-effect relationships and, in general, non-voluntary origin; i.e., that it occur because "something has gone wrong". Risks of this nature are normally borne by insurance companies.

According to theories that are born at the beginning of the 1990s, society has been transformed into a "risk society" which progressively increases the pace of growth and makes increasingly global threats that it generates in the pursuit of economic and technological development.

Risks to produce this post-industrial society differ from their predecessors in that are not natural forces, or involuntary deviations result behavior, but rather the product of conscious decisions making.

Thanks to science and technology the man has developed the necessary power to control nature in some form, but that power also has the ability to destroy itself and the surrounding environment. Mounted on this dangerous machinery and in order to achieve the maximum economic benefit in the short term, also produces effects which is unable to anticipate with certainty, does it consciously and in a normal, peaceful and systematic way, but for some in a manner inconsistent with the permanence of life on the planet, claiming that in addition to risking the own existence It also has the right to risk of future generations.

The "risk society" theory argues that this new type of risks anticipates unprecedented global catastrophes: affect humanity as a whole, are not located nor geographic, temporal, or socially: do not respect borders, as in the case of global warming; they can remain in a latent state so that their effect cannot be determined in time, as with radioactive waste, and their causes can be so complex that they can not be attributed with sufficient accuracy to someone in particular. They are not evident to our senses, such as radiation, chemical contamination or the effects of genetically modified foods. Finally, its effects are difficult to quantify and, in general, are not compensated, so that they are unsuitable for mechanisms to provide insurance.

The conclusion is that we are in a sphere without output where we share risks that are global and this forces us to recognize that we are all vulnerable, and, to some extent, responsible for our survival and for others, even of those who, not having been born yet, are not here to claim us reciprocity with their rights.