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Andrew Hook
They failed to predict it
In a recent Guardian article Simon Jenkins deplores what he sees as the disproportionate media reaction to the Jimmy Savile case. He argues that ‘the BBC, the NHS and some charities’ do indeed ‘bear a portion of culpability for the harm [Savile] caused to young people’. But he insists that no good will come of suggesting that George Entwistle, the new director of the BBC, is the ‘manager of a paedophile ring’ or even ‘an appeaser of sexual harassment’. ‘The case’, he writes, ‘is awash in malice, vilification, exaggeration and litigation’.
In the rest of his article, Jenkins argues that the Savile case and the reaction to it provide a perfect example of a deeper contemporary malaise. What that is can be defined as the rise and rise of what is called risk aversion. Risk aversion began life in the world of business, finance, economics, and psychology. It involves a cautious habit of mind that prefers the certainty of a small financial return to the gamble that might lead to a greatly enhanced one. But today the phrase has gained much wider currency covering all those habitual attitudes and forms of behaviour that attempt to insulate society from dangers or risk-taking of any kind.
Of course there are powerful arguments in favour of all such developments, but what concerns Jenkins is what he calls ‘the paranoia of the modern state’. Risk aversion has seeped into ‘every factory, office and profession, stifling enterprise, "reassessing" risk, clogging decision’. On the other hand, when failures or mistakes involving the vulnerable or young do occur, those responsible are automatically regarded as criminals to be denounced and pilloried. ‘This can only lead’, concludes Jenkins, ‘to ever more defensive behaviour in every sphere of public life’.
Writing his piece, Jenkins was not to know that news was about to break with the potential to send ‘risk aversion’ to new heights of tragi-comic ludicrousness. A court in Italy has sentenced a group of Italian seismologists to six years in prison for giving wrong assurances to the people of the city of L’Aquila over the dangers they were facing hours before the fatal earthquake of 6 April 2009. The six scientists – Italy’s top earthquake experts – were members of what is called the Major Risks Commission. But on this occasion their risk assessment proved to be hopelessly wrong.
The reaction of the world’s scientific community to this Italian verdict has been exactly as one would have expected. The court’s decision is utterly irrational: Italy has reverted to the Dark Ages; the persecution of Galileo in the 17th century has been repeatedly invoked. But the key point is that risk aversion will now overtake those who are best placed to provide rational risk assessment.
Those who assess risk now feel themselves at risk. In consequence, scientists will from now on be reluctant to participate in hazard prediction of any kind. One of the Italian six reports: ‘From what I hear…no one wants to join commissions’. Roger Musson of the British Geological Survey says: ‘One can imagine that next time there are rumblings heard from Vesuvius, Italian volcanologists are going to be reluctant to make any statement, because they have no guarantee that they won’t find themselves arrested if they say one thing and it turns out to be another’. And of course it’s not only earthquake experts who could be in the firing line. Will future Michael Fishs be sent to prison if they fail to warn us of impending hurricanes?
Well it turns out that Simon Jenkins, who has just published a piece on the L’Aquila court decision, thinks they should. Science and scientists – our new gods – he thinks deserve to be taken down a peg or two. What crusty old Simon fails to note, however, is that in the highly unlikely event that the L’Aquila six ever do go to prison, the ‘defensive behaviour in every sphere of public life’, which he bemoaned in his previous article, would soar to new and stratospheric heights.
Andrew Hook is a former professor of English literature at
Glasgow University
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