Date: Thu, 11 Dec 1997 10:09:20 +0000
From: James Heartfield <James-AT-heartfield.demon.co.uk>
Subject: Re: M-I: Safety first


In message <v03102802b0b4ee8aea55-AT-[128.146.227.163]>, Yoshie Furuhashi
<Furuhashi.1-AT-osu.edu> writes
>James,
>
>There are risks, and there are risks. Some risks are worth taking; others
>aren't.
>
>Another thing you might consider is that it is one thing to take a risk
>with your own life; it is quite another to promote activities that are more
>likely to put other people's lives at risk than yours.
>
>Yoshie
>
This seems to me a strangely solipsistic attitude for a marxist. When
the bolsheviks plunged Russia into civil war, they were certainly taking
risks with more lives than their own. But they felt that the potential
gains made thos risks worthwhile.

I think 'risk' here is a state of mind as much as a rational assessment.
Justin insisted that the two cases were different because socialism was
a hopeful, future oriented movement, where industrialisation was not. I
don't take such a negative view of technological advance, as you know.
The view of which risk is worth taking then, really dpends on whther you
think the outcome is useful, more than the risk involved.

If you wish to take risk seriously as a factor, you must be able to
distinguish between the perception of risk and real incidence. To take a
fairly well documented example, the fear of crime greatly out-strips its
actual incidence. The percption of risk of crime is far higher amongst
the more vulnerable sections of society, such as the elderly. In these
cases, a general lack of confidence is projected outwards as a fear of
crime.

In Britain, the new Labour government has, even more than its Tory
predecessor, been bringing in new restrictions on civil liberties with
every week. The latest is the curfew on young people in Glasgow. Crime
awareness campaigners will say to those of us who want to defend civil
liberties, 'you can't take risks with people's lives. What if the risk
is overstated, if one life is saved because of the curfew, theen that is
a good thing'.

The risk-aware see danger everywhere. But the one thing that they do not
recognise as a danger, is the danger of conservatism, and of state
regulation. When the future becomes a source of dread rather than an
object of hope, people's aspirations to improve their lives are
diminished. Life insurance and saving for your old age takes precendence
over fighting for better living standards in the here and now. Caution
crowds out experimentation.

Conservatives have always dwelt upon risk, because instinctively they
know that it debilitates and undermines. They warn of the risks of lax
moral standards, or of red conspirators, or of third world terrorists,
or of too much inflation and so on. Fear of the future has always been a
powerful component of conservative ideology.

Implicitly everything is a risk. You just don't know what the unintended
consequences of what you do today might come back to haunt you. But
that's what life is like. If you really could know in advance what the
outcome of very action was going to be thn it would be pretty boring. To
become preoccupied byu the possibility that the sky might fall on your
head is a good reason not to get out of bed.


>
>
>
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-- 
James Heartfield


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