Introduction: Panic Nation

Mick Hume

EPIDEMIC: Since the panic about a SARS epidemic gripped the world in 2003, the New Labour government's policy towards issues such as bioterrorism and SARS in the Uk has been based on the principle of 'organised paranoia'. This memorable but little-known phrase was coined by Geoff Mulgan, former head of the powerful Downing Street Performance and Innovation Unit.

Mulgan was speaking at a conference entitled 'Panic Attack: Interrogating our Obsession with Risk,' organised by spiked - the online publication of which I am editor - at the Royal Institution in May 2003. He had a wry little smile on his face when he used those words, but he definitely was not joking.

Mulgan suggested that organised paranoia would help the government become better at spotting new risks such as SARS, BSE or bioterrorism 'before they become evident'. But how exactly do the seers and oracles of Whitehall hope to identify a potential risk before it has even become visible? By gazing into a crystal ball, perhaps?

Almost, it seems. The modern political equivalent of the crystal ball is the 'what if?' scenario, and this is increasingly becoming the stuff of policy-planning discussions on both sides of the Atlantic, especially post-9/11.

It means that policy-makers dream up fantasy disasters (what if a terrorist infected with SARS crashed a petrol tanker into a nuclear power station?), and then try to plan how to deal with these hypothetical crises. Under the policy of organised paranoia, government and society are continually being re-educated to expect a worst-case scenario. This trend has the potential to become a real disaster for us all.

The advance of organised paranoia was what prompted spiked to organise the Panic Attack conference in the first place. It proved a timely event, taking place in the middle of the global SARS panic. The reaction to SARS became a powerful symbol of what is wrong. Here was a new but relatively minor epidemic that, in a sane society, would demand a serious response from the medical and epidemiological authorities.

In our apparently less-than-sane society, however, officials from the World Health Organisation (WHO) downwards treated SARS as a cross between the black death and a bioterror attack, quarantining entire cities and damaging whole economies.

Meanwhile, people across the world could be seen walking around wearing useless paper masks, a sort of modern equivalent of the medieval amulets used to ward off evil. The SARS panic turned into an outstanding example of the cure being worse than the disease, causing more damage in the real world than any fantastic 'what if?' scenario is likely to.

It is common to blame such outbreaks of irrationality on the supposed ignorance of 'ordinary people'. But Mulgan's remarks should serve to remind us that the suffocating, safety-first spirit of the age comes from the top down that the precautionary principle has become a guiding light in public life. Major political, academic and scientific institutions now appear to be obsessed with risk and infected by the outlook of organised paranoia, with damaging consequences.

For instance, scary speculation about us all being doomed is traditionally associated with the crank forecasts of astrology. Yet it now seems to have crept into the science of astronomy, too. Martin Rees, the UK's astronomer royal and a leading scientific figure, has published a major book entitled Our Final Century: Will the Human Race Survive the Twenty-first Century?

In it, Rees argues that human civilisation has no more than a 50-50 chance of surviving the twenty-first century, because of the alleged 'dark side' of scientific and technological advance, and because our 'interconnected' world makes us more vulnerable to new risks.

He advocates investment in space travel, not because we might want to push back the boundaries of exploration, but because we will need somewhere else to run to pretty soon, when we have destroyed the Earth. Not very long ago this would have been rightly considered the stuff of science-fiction fantasies. Now it is put forward by a leading scientists, and taken seriously by many of his peers.

Not very long ago the notion that the end of the world is nigh would have been the preserve of a few religious nutters marching up and down wearing sandwich boards. Now the astronomer royal offers it up for serious consideration. If this kind of stuff is allowed to go unchallenged, however, the end of the rational world may well be nigh.

The BBC, one of our leading national institutions, has become a particular champion of organised paranoia and the scaremongering 'what if?' scenario. Around the time of our Panic Attack conference, the BBC broadcast a TV docudrama entitled The Day Britain Stopped, about how a series of events supposedly brings the entire transport system crashing to a halt at the end of 2003, with disastrous consequences.

It was a striking example of a dramatised 'what if?' scenario, but the fictional programme immediately became the subject of a serious Newsnight discussion, where experts pontificated on whether its fantastic scenario was 'plausible' or not.

Since then, the BBC has launched an entire genre of Apocalypselight entertainment shows, screening docudramas about a smallpox epidemic in Britain and a dirty-bomb attack on London, along with a series about similarly speculative risks entitled If... These programmes projected some of society's current fears into the near future, and asked what would happen if the worst possibility became reality.

So we were treated to dramatised considerations of what would happen if the lights went out, if we don't stop eating and so on. These were presented not as horror-film-style fantasies, but as real risks - an impression reinforced by the involvement of genuine experts in the shows.

The professor of food policy who says of obesity, 'This slaughter cannot go on!' If... We Don't Stop Eating' is the same man who in real life dreamed up the far fetched proposal for a fatty-food tax that was almost taken up by the government. The series editor on If... insisted that the film-makers were no more guilty of scaremongering than government emergency planners, British Telecom or the CIA when they create speculative 'what if?' scenarios. He was right about that, at least.

Almost every day, it seems, we are confronted with fresh evidence of how far the obsession with risk and risk-aversion has gone. It all goes to reinforce my view that this has now become the major barrier to social, scientific and technological advance.

It is humanity's most powerful self-imposed constraint on its own potential liberation. A century or more ago, an atheistic humanist such as myself might have said that organised religion played that role. Half a century or more ago, it might have been right-wing nationalism or Stalinism, depending on the circumstances. Now I see it as risk aversion, the culture of fear and the politics of organised paranoia.

As the old political and religious systems have lost their purchase on society in recent times, risk and precaution have emerged as the focus for an attempt to create a new kind of morality to guide human behaviour. Safety-first has become a virtue for its own sake, to be repeated like a religious mantra, regardless of the practical consequences.

And, especially since 9/11 brought these underlying trends to the surface of society, organised paranoia has now become a policy principle guiding government planning and discussion.

In the run-up to the 2003 Panic Attack conference, spiked asked leading scientists to name any historic advances that they thought could not have been made if the 'precautionary principle' which constrains science and technology today had been in place in the past. They came up with a scary list, starting with A for aspirin and going through to X for X-rays.

Yet the better-safe-than-sorry spirit of the precautionary principle is not confined to the scientific sphere. It has escaped from the laboratory to infect public discussion about everything from how we should raise our children to how armies ought to fight wars.

When the quasi-religious belief in safety-first touches so many disparate issues, from mobile-phone masts to GM foods, it is clear that the problem must be bigger than the science of the specific disputes. It is feeding off far wider cultural assumptions about human vulnerability, and our supposed incapacity to cope with risk and uncertainty. This is what is really new.

Humanity has always faced risks, and there has always been a debate about how to manage them. Today, however, unlike in the past, risk is seen not as something we can handle or perhaps even turn into opportunity, but as something that we suffer from and must be guarded against.

The war on terror has become the latest focus for much of this stuff.

Take the memorable statement made by one British security official, after the alleged discovery of the chemical agent ricin in a London flat, that 'There is a very serious threat out there still that chemicals that have not yet been found may be used by people who have not yet been identified' (Financial Times, 8 January 2003). As terrorism expert Bill Durodie commented, this is now 'the logic of our times: never mind the evidence, just focus on the possibility.'

George W Bush and Tony Blair have been accused of exploiting the politics of fear around the war on terror. Yet many critics of the US and UK governments seem perfectly willing to deploy the politics of fear in their own arguments. Thus, David Corn, editor of The Nation, America's leading left-leaning journal, argues that 'technologies long challenged by environmental advocates are potential sources of immense danger in an era of terrorism'.

Americans for Fuel-Efficient Cars also link their campaign against sports utility vehicles (SUVs) to people's fear of terrorism, arguing that Americans should 'free ourselves from the nations and terrorists holding us hostage through out addiction to oil.'

Who really benefits from this increasingly pervasive culture of fear, the belief in human vulnerability and the politics of organised paranoia? Apart perhaps from some compensation lawyers or paper-mask manufacturers, nobody does really. The elevation of safety-first into an absolute virtue disorientates society to the point where a one-off accident can close down an entire railway system, or where senior judges can refuse to consider parole for a man who shot a burglar on the grounds that he may pose a risk to others who try to burgle his home.

Even the New Labour government can discover that the precautionary principle comes back to bite it from behind. When the global SARS panic broke, the British authorities tried to reassure the public that there was no real risk in this country. But, having already put Britain on a permanent state of alert about the alleged threat of bio-terrorism, they could not get away with such a sensibly low-key response.

Immediately, the government found itself accused of complacency and of putting the public at risk by not doing enough in the way of airport checks and quarantine. On this, as on many other risk-related issues, the Tory opposition proved that there are now no depths to which it will not sink in search of a populist cause.

Organised paranoia has caused New Labour even more trouble with regard to the MMR triple vaccination, as the government's promotion of innumerable other health panics over everything from passive smoking to fast food made many people less willing to accept official assurances that MMR is safe.

The fact that people in our society now live longer, healthier lives and enjoy a better diet than even before would surely be seen as a cause for celebration in a more level-headed present. Instead, we seem obsessed with worrying about these things, through panics about the supposed demographic time bomb' or 'obesity time bomb'. According to the doctrine of organised paranoia, everything now has to be for the worst, in the worst of all possible worlds.

Writing about the panic over AIDS in the late 1980s, the recently deceased American critic Susan Sontag noted how a widespread 'sense of cultural distress or failure' was encouraging continual 'fantasies of doom'.

In this peculiarly modern mood of social pessimism, the end is believed to be nigh but never comes. It is a case, as she put it, not so much of Apocalypse Now', but of 'Apocalypse From Now On'. Sontag saw the consequence of living in this perpetual state of fear as 'an unparalleled violence that is being done to our sense of reality, our humanity.'

Challenging organised paranoia and all the rest of this risk-averse irrationalism should be a priority for anybody concerned about social and scientific advance.

To do nothing in the face of this danger would be to risk squandering the great potential for society to change and move forward, and that is one risk that it is really not worth running. The cultural mood that Sontag described so well poses a more pressing threat to civilised life as we know it than could any speculative 'what if?' scenario.

The writer is editor of the online magazine Spiked (www.spikedonline.com) and a columnist for The Times

Panic nation is published by John Blake Publishing, London.