Twelve: Living With Risk
Whether you are aware of it or not, you are a gambler every moment of every day. If you are like me, and do not live on the ground floor of your apartment complex, you are immediately faced with a staircase. Do you ever think about how dangerous going up and down stairs can be? According to the National Safety Council, falling is the third-leading cause of unintentional injury-related death in the United States—nearly 29,000 people die every year in falls. But this time, you made it down the stairs without incident. Now you get behind the wheel of your car, start it up, shift it out of park…in 2014, 33,736 people died in motor vehicle traffic-related accidents. In 2024, it was 39,254, fully 16.3 percent more (the population grew by 6.8 percent in those ten years). You were safer when you were walking down the stairs. So now what? You turn off the car, go back up the stairs (again, without incident) and decide your life is not worth the gamble. You’ll stay home instead…not so fast. You could slip in the bathtub, choke on your food, drown in your swimming pool…
All right, perhaps this is starting to get morbid for your (and my) taste. But the point is made: life involves risk. Those are some of the easier risks to calculate. Living with risk is often not so amenable to calculation. Perhaps if we spent enough time calculating the risks of everything we did, we would be paralyzed by anxiety. Does science have limits, in terms of calculating risk? How does society manage risk, and by what methods? How are these risk management strategies related to the issues discussed so far? We have to engage science itself sociologically, as a phenomenon that can be understood within a social context: science in society, a field devoted to conducting research on the complex relationship between the realm of the natural sciences and social space-time.
What do you think when you hear the word science? You might conjure up an image of people running around in white lab coats, working with toxic chemicals or rare materials, perhaps wearing glasses or safety goggles and rubber gloves. There is a bit of truth here; science is social, something that people do by working together. Broadly speaking, science (notice the lowercase “s”) is a means of systematically understanding the world. Imagine for a moment that you are part of a nomadic group of hunter-gatherers roaming through a forest twenty thousand or so years ago. The person next to you picks a bright red berry off a bush and eats it, followed by another, and another. Shortly after this, that person is dead. Would you eat the berries? The reason you might hesitate is that you have just been provided with possible evidence that those berries are not safe to eat. You form a hypothesis, an educated guess as to a causal connection between two factors, about what you just saw: she ate those berries and then died, and I think those berries might have caused her death.
The berries may not have caused her death, but how can we be sure? Perhaps the person was already sick with something else that was unknown to you—there are many deadly diseases and conditions, some of which can manifest themselves rather suddenly. You are making an educated guess based on the available information, hypothesizing a possibility, theorizing, or telling a story, that connects the dots. It is always possible that we are wrong. There is always room for doubt, but for that doubt to be helpful, it must be measured against the available evidence. It is important to note that science is fallible; there is always more to learn, and always a chance, no matter how small, that the current understandings are inaccurate. This fallibility is particularly noticeable in some fields, such as sociology, epidemiology (the study of disease and health factors on a large scale), and climate science, to name a few, because we do not always have the relative “luxury” of working things out in a laboratory, where we can control for many factors before performing an experiment to test the variables we’re actually interested in.
However, science has also come to mean something rather different in the present. Here, we might talk about the advent of Science (note the capital “S”), developing, in a significant sense, out of the Manhattan Project that led to the construction of the atomic bomb. The changes that took place during this time period are still very much with us today: “us” meaning both our society, and those of “us” who work in fields where we might be labeled “scientists,” “intellectuals,” and/or “academics” (these are not the same thing, even they are sometimes used interchangeably, as Russell Jacoby (1987) points out in his well-known work The Last Intellectuals). As Derek J. DeSolla Price (1984) notes, we made the transition from “little science” to “Big Science.” Big, in that science began to receive massive funding from a government intent, first on winning the Second World War, and then, on winning the subsequent arms race with the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Intellectuals in the era of “small science” were typically eccentric loners from the wealthy or upper middle-class strata of society, though they spent a lot of their time communicating with each other by mail (much as modern university faculty communicate often via email). By contrast, intellectuals during the Cold War were drawn from multiple walks of life and family backgrounds, were largely trained in the natural sciences, especially physics, and worked in large research teams on government- or expensive projects with specific applications aligning with government or business interests.
The era of Big Science has entangled science in politics, raising questions regarding the relationship between science and other institutions, including religion, education, law, and society more broadly. In Brotherhood of the Bomb, Gregg Herken (2002) documents some of the tangled loyalties of the members of the Manhattan Project, and how they rose—and fell—in relation to political interests and associations in the wake of the Second World War. After the United States dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, leading to the end of WWII, three men—Robert Oppenheimer, Edward Teller, and Ernest Lawrence—emerged as heads of the Project. Oppenheimer had a history of left-wing politics and activism, and later found himself on trial for collusion with communists. Lawrence was committed to keeping politics out of the laboratory. Teller went on to develop the hydrogen bomb, a weapon with exponentially more destructive potential, and to champion the use of technology and science, including the atom, for the betterment of the human species. Oppenheimer, for his part, was afflicted by a deep psychological trauma upon realizing that the weapon his knowledge had helped create had been used against human beings, and this trauma left a mark that remained with him for the rest of his life. Perhaps your image of “scientists” made certain assumptions about who scientists are, biographically, psychologically. Scientists, it could be said without controversy, are human, with a level of diversity in their ranks similar to that of any other group of people. Scientists can be idealistic, cynical, honest, corrupt, just like everyone else. One of the roles of institutions, ideally, is to create norms that reward the behaviors that further the scientific enterprise and honest, transparent, evidence-based policymaking rather than partisan manipulation or interference by vested interests. Processes within science, such as peer review, or subjecting every reputable scientific paper to the scrutiny of other experts in a field; and conflict of interest disclosure, which tells the reader whether any of the scientists on a project stood to gain or lose financially from its results; help to do this, but because institutions reflect human blind spots and imperfections, and scientists are just as human as everyone else, no institution is perfect.
Another aspect of Big Science, an unintended consequence, if you will, is that it has come to challenge what might be called the “standard model” of science’s role, and engagement, in society. In this standard model, science is connected to politics through policy. Scientists figure out what is, while politicians and elected leaders make decisions regarding what must be done, that may be more, or less, based on scientific knowledge. In this model, scientific neutrality is prized. An extend quote from the early science in society literature, illustrates this position nicely: “Whether knowledge was used for good or ill, so the argument of scientific neutrality ran, was not the ethical responsibility of the scientist, or the scientific community. While physicists might have developed the theory and split the atom, it was for ‘society’ to choose whether this knowledge be applied to the making and using of nuclear bombs, for the production of electricity in nuclear power stations, or not used for either purpose…In exchange for expanded budgets and social status, science had, in large measure, withdrawn from questioning the established order” (David 2005:18-9; see also Rose and Rose 1976).
This is not to say that scientists cannot operate as political persons on an individual level. This position of neutrality simply means that scientists as scientists are not charged with making policy decisions or challenging the current political order. Scientists as private citizens, however, may well do so. This position, though still tenable, has been challenged by many voices over the course of the past few decades. The neutrality model may, further, remind one of the functionalism of many of the previous chapters—the idea that each social group and institution plays a specific role in the broader context. In fact, when I wrote the first version of this chapter, we as a society stood only a few weeks away from a “March for Science,” a mass demonstration in which scientists as scientists were mobilizing to protest the the U.S. position on climate change and environmental regulation (more on environmental issues in the next chapter). Their rallying cry, Science, Not Silence, stands in opposition to the neutrality model of science, and implies that scientists are not neutral, and should not be. Instead, scientists can, and should, work from a position of leadership and intellectual authority to challenge injustice, a perspective that perhaps sounds a lot more like conflict theories than functionalism, to put it in those terms.
How did we get here? In their well-received work Merchants of Doubt, Oreskes and Conway (2010) discuss what they have come to call “The Tobacco Strategy.” If there is always room for doubt, then it is always possible for vested interests, economic or political, to exploit that doubt for their own ends. Unfortunately, some of the most pressing issues publics face are rooted in knowledge that requires us to study highly complex phenomena outside a laboratory, where it is difficult to isolating variables to establish causal connections. Because we live in a world that is highly complex, and science has become increasingly specialized, there is no one alive who knows even a significant fraction of all that is known. A quick trip to your public or university library provides a compelling argument that this is the case.
The knowledge we have at our fingertips exists because of the work that specialized experts, spending years on research and study, produce it. Experts do not always agree with one another. For academic research to be published, it must “run the gauntlet” that is peer review: submit a paper to an editor at a journal, and if she does not reject it outright, it will go to an average of three people who have spent a good chunk of their adult lives working in the same tiny sub-sub field of inquiry as you do. As you approach earning a doctorate, you may be among a handful of people on earth who know what you know about that narrow little sub-field, and you have equipped yourself with habits of mind and analyzing information that enable you to get closer to the truth more often, but you may ultimately be no more knowledgeable than the average educated non-expert on most other matters outside your discipline (and perhaps less).
Think of the quest for human knowledge as a jury trial of sorts. When you submit a paper for publication, you are making a claim about how some aspect of the world works. The people who will peer review your work are like a jury of your peers—they will render a decision as to whether your work is suitable to contribute to the existing body of human knowledge or not. The thing is, at every step of the way, the human factor is in play. Different journals have different editors and reviewers, and different standards of publication. The emergence of think tanks means that many people who are attempting to contribute to human knowledge are not working at universities, but work in the private sector, and sometimes are employed by industries and institutions that have specific political or economic agendas.
To understand this a bit better, I will go back to the story of one Clair (Pat) Patterson, a young geochemistry graduate student who was asked by his advisor, Harrison Brown, to conduct the research that would lead to scientifically determining the age of the earth. In order to do this, Patterson was tasked with measuring the amount of lead contained in crystals embedded in meteorites. Over time, atoms of the radioactive element uranium decays into lead, and nuclear physicists know the rate at which the uranium decays based on previous research. Patterson spent years on this project, funded by a grant from the American Petroleum Institute (API). His results were wildly inconsistent—there was far too much lead in the surrounding environment. Patterson created the first “ultra clean room” to remove all the lead from the environment but was still unsure as to where the lead was coming from, and how it had come to be present in such large quantities where it was not expected. Eventually, in 1953, Patterson was able to determine that scientifically speaking, the earth is four and a half billion years old (later results have independently confirmed, more precisely, that the earth is 4.543 billon years old, give or take about 50 million years—error bars or margins of error such as this are typical in any scientific endeavor). During the course of his research, Patterson also discovered the source of the lead that had frustrated his efforts for years.
Lead, as you may or may not know, is toxic. In the human body, it can disrupt normal physical and mental functioning. Lead is a cumulative toxin, meaning that it builds up, or accumulates in the body. Once inside the body, lead remains there for years, even decades. Long-term or heavy exposure to lead can lead to numerous health problems, ranging from infertility to heart disease and stroke to psychological problems and death. According to the World Health Organization’s most recent report, there is no safe level of lead exposure, and lead poisoning is completely preventable. In the twentieth century, gasoline for cars was made with an additive called tetraethyl lead. Tetraethyl lead is a liquid, fat-soluble, especially poisonous form of lead. Humans have known at least since the Roman empire, some 2,000 years ago, that lead is unsafe. Nevertheless, tetraethyl lead was marketed as an agent that prolonged engine life and reliability in cars. The lead Patterson kept detecting, he eventually discovered, after years of fieldwork across various sites throughout the world, was coming out of the tail pipes of those cars that were burning leaded gasoline, and it was slowly poisoning the industrialized world and its citizens. Patterson (1965) published an article in the prestigious science journal Nature, “Contaminated and Natural Lead Environments of Man” in which he announced this latter discovery. The same person who discovered the age of the earth, and the same research, inadvertently brought to light one of the biggest potential public health crises in American history. Given the conflict of interest that arose (those who funded him stood to lose a lot of money from his findings) finding dried up immediately after the publication of this work, and the API unsuccessfully attempted to get him dismissed from his academic position. He fought the lead industry in court for decades before lead was banned by the Clean Air Act in 1996, more than thirty years later.
Patterson’s findings challenged powerful political and economic interests by pointing to a public health problem. And the lead industry battled Patterson’s work with their own scientist, Dr. Robert Keyhoe, himself an expert in toxicology from Cincinnati, was hired by the lead industry to preserve its reputation, and to outline a plan for industry self-regulation to protect employees from systematic or occupational over-exposure to lead. The battle was “about” more than the science in at least one sense: Keyhoe supported self-regulation, charging industries with the responsibility of regulating the health and environmental consequences of their economic activities. This view of regulation tends to receive support from those who advocate for market solutions over government regulations as the best way to meet human needs and manage a capitalist society.
Indeed, one of the major findings of Oreskes and Conway’s work, which covers everything from smoking to global warming, is that scientific experts often enlisted to cast doubt on public health effects had come of age in the Cold War era and were suspicious of federal government regulation of industry as a path to socialism. Coming of age in a social milieu in which one’s arch-nemesis, the Soviet Union, was a nation built on the principles of government command of the economy (whether or not this in any way resembled what Marx foresaw as the stage that would follow capitalism) had a profound effect on many Americans, and scientists are no exception. Am I suggesting that scientists are always guided to their conclusions by their moral and political convictions, and that truth does not exist? Of course not. But gaining knowledge, and especially, addressing social problems with that knowledge, is a socially embedded process. Ideas are communicated back and forth by people with imperfect knowledge of specific occurrences in the real world. We all have biases, blind spots, prejudices, hopes, fears—the goal when one pursues truth is to challenge these systematically, to go where the evidence takes us and be willing to face what is inconvenient for our cherished beliefs and deeply-held opinions, but this is imperfectly achieved. We learn from one another, and the quest for new and better information, and more effective theories to fit it all together, is a never-ending one.
Whether or not you have ever smoked, you have probably seen the Surgeon General’s Warning encased in that black rectangle, warning you that smoking causes lung cancer, heart disease, et cetera. What if I told you that smoking does not, strictly speaking, cause cancer? You would probably be skeptical—smoking does cause cancer—everyone knows that! And before you think I am trying to convince you to start smoking (as an ex-smoker who struggled to quit I assure you I am not), hear me out: if one thing is the cause of another, strictly speaking, it means that every time one thing happens, the other happens. If you jump out of the window of a high-rise building, gravity will cause you to fall and have a really bad day. This is a causal relationship: no matter how many times you jumped out the window, no matter who you were, if you are on the planet earth, gravity will pull you to the ground. Gravity does not make exceptions.
Such a causal relationship simply does not exist with cigarettes. Some people who smoke cigarettes get cancer, and others do not. People are different from one another, and cancer has more than one cause. It would be more accurate to say that smoking significantly raises the risk of lung cancer, or that smoking strongly correlates with lung cancer. Lung cancer may be linked to other factors besides smoking—certain air pollutants are more carcinogenic—meaning exposure is linked to cancer—than cigarettes are, all things being equal. Maybe 15 percent of lifelong smokers will ever get lung cancer. But perhaps the wording of the warning should put “heart disease” first—it is the number one leading cause of death in the United States for many years running, and smokers are far more likely to die from heart disease than cancer. However, once again, sometimes it is hard to pull apart the causal links, because a lot of things correlate with heart disease. Maybe smokers on average are more likely to have a poor diet, drink to excess, exercise less, have poor oral health, which also correlate with heart disease. Maybe heart disease and cancer are so prevalent because so many of us live so long relative to the past—on a long enough time scale, more hearts will become diseased and more people will get cancer, it’s just statistics. But that doesn’t explain why the rates of both have actually declined in recent years.
Shifting from science to policy and personal decision-making: given this knowledge, which any of us can access with a cursory Internet search, why do people still smoke? And if smoking is so dangerous, why isn’t it illegal to do so? We might say smoking is a hazard, or something that is potentially dangerous, and that when we do it, we take a risk, a chance that people who engage in it choose to take when given alternatives. You can choose to smoke, or not (though when one becomes addicted to a substance such as the nicotine in cigarettes, it can come to feel like that choice is difficult to make, or change). When you choose to smoke, a hazard, you are taking a risk—risking numerous ill health effects. At the same time, smoking is not illegal, whereas many other drugs are. Indeed, the concept of a drug is to some extent socially constructed—as I discussed with cannabis and alcohol earlier in the course, illegal drugs are not necessarily illegal because they are more hazardous. What scientists define as a “drug” has to do with how it affects us on a biochemical level, but how societies view drugs, drug use, and drug addiction are much more complex, and entangled with values, cultural expectations, and more.
I am a drug user, because I drink beer some evenings. I am also a drug addict, because I drink a few cups of coffee every morning, and have a lot of trouble functioning properly without “my morning coffee.” However, for us as a society, the caffeine in coffee is often not thought of as a drug, nor the amount of alcohol contained in those couple of beers. Never mind that alcohol highly addictive and is one of the leading preventable causes of death, or that it is a factor in a vast majority of crimes, from rape to murder to family violence. Alcohol is linked to cancer, liver and kidney disease, and mental disorders, among both long-term chronic users and pregnant women, in particular. Caffeine correlates with depression, anxiety, muscle tremors, high blood pressure, fatigue, and insomnia, that it kills at least 5,800 people every year, and sends another 20,000 to the hospital. I know these things, and yet I consume my morning coffee, and my evening beer (albeit most nights I abstain, to keep my liver healthy); I would vote against and protest any referendum that would try to prevent me from doing so.
One of the reasons smoking is still legal, despite its danger (and the well-established risks of second-hand smoke to nonsmokers standing nearby) has to do with the value placed on liberty, the freedom from interference in how one chooses to live one’s life, and the freedom to pursue one’s own goals. This gets back to the individualism of the culture of the United States, and is why you’re not shocked by my ordinary, even boring, habits despite all the evidence that they pose significant risk. Having the freedom to smoke, or in my case, to drink beer and coffee, provided one is not posing a serious and immediate risk to the well-being of others (I never drive while intoxicated, for example), is something many (including me) cherish. Yet another element enters into the story here: public health. The health of a society at the social level, going beyond the individual, is an inherently sociological idea. As has been shown in the past chapters, we do not make choices in a vacuum. Our choices have far-reaching effects on those around us. Think about the decision, for example, not to wear a seat belt. Why is it illegal not to “buckle up”? I mean, not wearing a seat belt seems only to endanger the life of the person making the choice. Why can we choose to smoke, but not choose not to wear a seat belt? Partly, there is a sense in which the state takes on the role of protector, not only protecting us from one another, but protecting us from ourselves. However, if you are not wearing a seat belt, and are killed or seriously injured in a collision, this has effects on those around you. If you are a parent, your child will grow up without one parent, and we have already seen that this can have profound effects on the life chances of a child. If seat belts do in fact save lives, on average (they definitely do), then reducing injury and death on a social level reduces the social cost of driving, the price, in time, wealth, and future well-being of certain activities, substances, habits, or decisions. Thus, penalizing people with fines for failing to wear their seat belts is a form of social control intended to reduce the social cost of driving, or the risk, which is high: driving a car is the most dangerous thing many Americans regularly do.
We live in a new world, pioneering sociologist of risk Ulrich Beck argued, a world that is globally connected, and a world in which the risks do not come from a natural world at time unpredictable and even hostile to human well-being, as subsistence cultures often experience. In our society, the risks are produced by human activity itself—we live in a risk society, in which human activity produces hazards that are difficult to quantify scientifically, and might entail long-term, unintended consequences. In such an environment, science and politics are entangled. This, I would add (agreeing with Beck), begins with the Manhattan Project, at a time when the technology to end human life on earth came into the possession of human beings. Both nuclear power and nuclear weapons imply some risks—the meltdown of the Japanese Fukushima reactor is a reminder of the potential consequences of nuclear power. This, like the use of lead as a building material, or to prolong engine life in cars in trucks, involves risk that is not taken on primarily by a single individual, but is more obviously distributed, in terms of both costs and benefits, throughout a society.
Industrial societies create hazards for their citizens. Discussion of these hazards, and their eventual impact, Beck argues, cannot take place on the ground of science. Science becomes further entangled in politics, and science must become reflexive, drawing on science to study itself, looking back upon itself using scientific methods. We know that smoking, drinking, and caffeine are hazardous. We know there is no safe level of lead exposure in human beings. The important question is: what do we do with that knowledge?
Image credit: 2021 deaths in the US, USA Facts/Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, https://usafacts.org/articles/americans-causes-of-death-by-age-cdc-data/
Important Words
Carcinogenic
Cause
Conflict of interest disclosure
Drug
Falliable
Hazard
Hypothesis
Liberty
Peer review
Public health
Reflexive
Risk
Risk society
Science
Science in society
Scientific neutrality
Self-regulation
Social cost
Sit With It: Big Questions
How might a person apply the idea of being reflexive, or self-reflective, to one of the many hazards of modern life, including but not limited to the hazards mentioned in this reading?
If risks can be analyzed statistically, but decisions require political debate and engagement, what consequences does this have for the separation of science and politics, and for making public policy?
Note something you learned about establishing a cause in science, and why the difficulties around doing this make it challenging to inform political and social debates with scientific knowledge.
