Searching for Safety. - book reviews

National Review, Jan 27, 1989 by Chilton Williamson, Jr.

I HAD EXPECTED Searching for Safety (Transaction Books, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, N.J. 08903; $32.95), by Aaron Wildavsky, to be an extended discussion of what P. J. O'Rourke has called "the safety Nazis." I was surprised, but not disappointed, to discover that it is instead a theoretical discourse on the subject of prudence versus adventurousness in the development and application of human ingenuity, and of the wisdom of modern society's attempts at eradicating the last vestige of risk not just to the whole but to each and every one of its parts. Like everything of Professor Wildavsky's that I have read, Searching for Safety is well researched and well thought out, well organizedthough repetitive in places-and well written. It is a book that will be of interest to philosophers engaged in exploring the unreality and hubris of the contemporary mind in yet another of its fascinating permutations, as well as to political scientists and serious journalists embroiled in a loud and vigorously waged public debate.

"Thinking about risk," Professor Wildavsky writes in his introduction,

. . . has been one-sided; safety has been over-identified with keeping things from happening. My aim is to redress this imbalance by emphasizing the increases in safety due to entrepreneurial activity. If this essay in persuasion achieves its purpose, the focus of the risk debate will shift from the passive prevention of harm to a more active search for safety.

This book is about how risk and safety are produced, about the fact that they are intertwined, and about what, therefore, should be done to make the search for better combinations both efficient-devoting resources to the worst hazards-and effective-actually improving safety. Because safety must be discovered, and cannot be merely chosen, I shall argue that trial-and-error risk taking, rather than risk aversion, is the preferable strategy for securing safety. Life, Professor Wildavsky believes, is too complex, too insufficiently straightforward, for human governors confidently to identify what is life-enhancing, what life-denying or -threatening, and to proceed simply to regulate in the interests of the first and against those of the second.

For the most part, safety and danger coexist in the same objects and practices. . . . The trick is to discover not how to avoid risk, for this is impossible, but how to use risk to get more of the good and less of the bad. The search for safety is a balancing act. . . . If every act and every thing has harm for someone somewhere, indeed, if the safety we seek is ineluctably bound up with the danger that accompanies it, more harm than good may be done by efforts to avoid risk. . . . Which set of principles, axioms, and rules, I ask, helps us discover how to reduce risk overall so that society as a whole becomes safer? . . . My candidates in opening up the inquiry on risk and safety are: the principle of uncertainty, the axiom of connectedness, and the rule of sacrifice.

Until quite recently, Professor Wildavsky argues, the law of human progress was that of trial-and-error, which in recent years, however (say, the past twenty), has been amended to "no trials without prior guarantees against error." In this development, he believes, we see the triumph of the argument for "anticipation" rather than for "resilience" as the primary means of combating putative dangers; of a strategy based on the desire to avoid every potential risk at all available costs, instead of one predicated upon an ability to cope with unanticipated dangers after they have emerged and been identified. The direct result of the "no-trials-without-prior-guarantees" approach is the loss of "the opportunity to take risks in order to achieve beneficial consequences"-among them the knowledge that error produces and that translates cumulatively into a more knowledgeable society better equipped to deal flexibly with adversity. Safety, for Professor Wildavsky, is neither "a hothouse plant that can survive only in a carefully controlled environment," nor "a ripe fruit waiting to be plucked." Rather, it "results from a . . . competitive, evolutionary, trial-and-error process," attempts to short-circuit which by "wishing the end- safety" without allowing the means to it-"decentratized search"must ultimately be self-defeating.

In a procession of fascinating chapters, several of them written with the aid of specialists in other fields, Professor Wildavsky shows how the strategy of resilience tends to prevail over that of anticipation in the evolution of non-human life forms, as well as in the functioning of the human body itself. He shows how, in the highly emotional and much-politicized case of the nuclear-energy industry, regulatory attempts to ensure absolute safety of the parts may heighten the likelihood of catastrophe by increased tinkering, as well as by the greater rigidity of the entire system, There is risk in every action, Professor Wildavsky reminds us, including those actions taken for the sole purpose of reducing risk; and man is in at least as much danger when playing God on Three Mile Island as he is when playing God in Yellowstone.