Over the past couple of years, one campaign has centered on a particularly pesky hazard: the rise of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. In surgeries all over the UK, posters, pamphlets and informational videos explain how something that has been saving us since its discovery by Alexander Fleming in 1928, might end up killing us all.

It is the coming of an “antibiotic apocalypse”, according to England’s Chief Medical Officer Sally Davies, quoted in The Guardian.

But an array of other dangers might get us first: global warming, fast-spreading epidemics, financial tools so complex their mismanagement can break the economy, and malicious lies – which erode social stability and trust – spread through our systems of communication. And, of course not to mention, the ever-looming risk of nuclear holocaust.

The Doom Machine

It is “an ‘open-ended festival’ of creeping, galloping and overlapping waves of destruction,” writes German sociologist and former professor at the University of Munich Ulrich Beck.

Since the 1980s, Beck – who passed away in 2015 – has argued that although these hazards might initially not seem like they have much in common, it is no coincidence that they are descending on our world at once. They are the unintended and uncontrollable fruits of human progress: the result of the innovation and development that characterised modern industrial society. This industrial society, however, is a state from which we have advanced.

According to Beck, we have entered a post – or second – modernity, which he calls ‘risk society’. In this society, contradictory processes of modernity are having some paradoxical effects. On the one hand, we have more control over our own destinies – collectively and individually – and access to more insight to how the world works than ever before. We are well-informed about what may harm us, like bacteria, and developed effective processes for containing the risk they pose, like antibiotics.

On the other hand, our technological advancements have become truly unruly, with an infinite and uncontrollable destructive potential. In the face of this, mechanisms for managing risk are failing. It cannot be contained nor ensured against. The implications are powerful.

“The foundations of the established risk logic are being subverted or suspended,” writes Beck. He argues that we are completely unable to handle these epic apocalyptic scenarios, which he calls “mega-hazards” or a “worst imaginable accident.”

Beck’s central idea is that in risk society, the awareness of such hazards is so pervasive it becomes a defining feature of our era. Especially so, he argues, because many of the lurking catastrophes are also man-made. The institutions and arrangements that were developed to neutralise the dangers of the world – be it hunger, disease or attack – are manufacturing some of the biggest threats to our existence.

Enlightenment Now

“Where this ‘security pact’ is violated wholesale, flagrantly and systematically,” writes Beck – referring in part to human-made climate change, “the consensus on progress itself is consequently at stake.”

The concept of progress was core in the world-view of the enlightenment and modern industrial period. Rationality, science, probability and objective facts, it was believed, would take us somewhere. The belief in the mysterious ways of God was exchanged – or killed, as Nietzsche put it – for a conviction that discovery would deliver us to resolution. History was moving forwards.

Post-modern risk society abandoned this conviction. Science and development has rendered many puzzles unsolved and contested, while also ushering in new problems and challenges. If we know anything, it is that we are not in control.

The idea can partly be summed up in the proverb, ‘The more I learn, the more I realize how much I don’t know.’ Change the ‘I’ to a ‘we’ and you have captured the gist of Beck’s idea: we are being confronted with the limitations of our ability to grasp and manage our surroundings.

In this view, knowledge is to certainty what a flashlight is to the night: a speck of light in an infinite sea of darkness. And the more we wave our beam around, the more we realise that there is no limit to the darkness. Each new discovery begets new unanswerable questions, with the result being an exponential growth of insecurity.

“This critical reflection upon the dangers of modernity is the difference between industrial society and risk society,” writes sociologist Deborah Lupton, Research Professor at the University of Canberra and an expert on theories of risk.

Continuously, we critically reflect on ourselves and our practices. Beck calls this reflexivity; the insecure musings on what we have done and what we are doing; a self-conscious reaction to the risks of past, current and future deeds and events.

“Anxieties about risks serve to pose questions about current practices,” Lupton explains.

Finding Certainty

This also interacts with other elements of modernity. The departure from tradition and religion, for example, eroded fixed social positions, which were replaced with freedom for the individual and the possibility of mastery of one’s own destiny.

But now, in risk society, doubt of this mastery must coexist with a social system in flux: we are free to choose our own identity and the lives we want to live.

“In the absence of fixed, obligatory and traditional norms and certainties,” writes Lupton, “individuals must produce their own biographies .”

But this puts enormous pressure on people. And this is especially the case in a risk society, where we are constantly reminded of the unmanageable manufactured risks to ourselves and our species. The individual may be king, but what power does she or he wield?

No wonder then, thinks Beck, if people distrust scientists and those responsible for ushering in the age of mega-hazards. We stand to lose everything without anywhere to turn for guidance or comfort. One might say science killed God in a murder-suicide, abandoning us alone in risk society.

But do we need something to believe in when facing an abyss of unknowable risks? Beck points out that in pre-modern times, diseases and accidents were unpredictable, unknowable and their risk incalculable. They were put down to the will of God.

Modernity brought in mechanisms to manage the dangers, but these are ineffective against the daunting dangers of biblical proportions.

“The hazards to which we are exposed date from a different century than the promises of security which attempt to subdue them,” writes Beck. “At the threshold of the twenty-first century, the challenges of the age of atomic, genetic and chemical technology are being handled with concepts and recipes that are derived from early industrial society.

“Measuring procedures and therefore the basis for calculating the hazards are abolished,” he writes, “incomparable entities are compared and calculations turns into obfuscation.”

No wonder, then, that people continue to appeal to whatever God they can find – whether it be conspiracies, superstition, religion or conservative values.

Ever-Lurking Risk

But a return to religion or rigid social roles are not effective solutions to the risk of nuclear holocaust or antibiotic apocalypse. And this exposes a problem with Beck’s ideas. While he offers an exhaustive explanation for risk society, he gives little guidance on how to manage it. He is, however, critical of science and blind trust in progress.

“Beck seems almost to revel in the collapse of expertise,” says Professor Chas Critcher, a visiting professor at Swansea University and expert on Beck. “Yet Beck wants us to heed the warnings of experts about global warming.

“He can’t have it both ways,” says Critcher. “Do we listen to and trust elite scientists or do we ‘democratically’ believe that we are entitled to our opinion, however stupid it is?”

The risks we face are real and ignoring them, denying them or refraining from scientific advancement will not make them go away.

And there are other issues with Beck’s theory, Critcher says. It is, for instance, disputable whether the concern of risk is as influential as Beck thinks.

“There is not a lot of hard evidence to back up his assertions about how people as a whole feel about risk,” says Critcher. “Frankly we have little understanding how far people are conscious of risk in their everyday lives.”

But hard work is being put into bringing risk to the forefront of our consciousness. Almost all activities – recycling, eating unhealthy foods, visiting your GP – come with warnings and reminders of how we are killing ourselves and our planet.

It’s not always noticeable. While waiting for your doctor, for example, you might be reading a book instead of the posters and pamphlets warning imminent doom. But your brain will still register their existence. Later, you might see a news story on antibiotics or maybe a friend will bring up the subject while in the pub.

And this is where we find risk society: Constant and unavoidable reminders of the unmanageable hazards we have let loose on ourselves.

Upon leaving the doctor, then, you might not think more about antibiotics that day, or the next. But a seed of concern has been planted in your mind – you now know there’s a big risk that everything can go really, really wrong.