Who is so
dense as to maintain…that all their witchcraft and injuries are phantastic and
imaginary, when the contrary is evident to the senses of everybody?
—Malleus
Maleficarum, 1487
There is a really excellent paper on risk called Witches, Floods and Wonder Drugs: Historical Perspectives on Risk Management (pdf) by William C. Clark. It was written some time ago (1980) but is
still highly entertaining and edifying.
In the "witches" part of the paper, Clark
discusses how, prior to the 15th century, being a witch was
considered a privatized risk:
"Well, if she wants to skip church, talk to her cats and read
chicken entrails, it's her own immortal soul on the line." It was punishable by, perhaps, a day in the
stocks. With the publication of Malleus Maleficarum (The Hammer of
Witches) in 1487, witches became a socialized risk. Witches were responsible for crop
failures, bad weather and high crime rates.
Witches were everybody's problem.
Clark discusses the “stopping rule.” During the Inquisition, their was only two
possible outcomes of an interrogation.
Either the hapless victim confessed and was a witch, or she hadn’t yet
confessed. Guilt could be proven, but
not innocence. If the rack and other engines
of torture were applied long enough, it was only a matter of time before
confession. There was no “stopping rule.”
Thus, since almost everyone interrogated turned out to be a witch,
witches proliferated as did the ruthless arm of the church responsible for
hunting them down.
We see the same approach being used today. Torture the data
long enough and it'll confess to anything.
It doesn't matter what the chemical, contaminant or drug is, given
enough tests eventually some harm will be found. And even if no harm is found, that doesn't
mean it's "safe." It just
means that they haven't found the harm yet.
There's no stopping rule.
The science of risk has exploded: risk assessment, risk
management, risk reduction, risk communication.
Risk assessments for sites contaminated with industrial chemicals easily
reach thousands of pages. We tests
massive doses of chemicals on animals to infer effects of minuscule doses to
human beings.
Environmental impact assessments that are required for new
projects such as mines and oil pipelines are supposed to be, in essence, a quantification of
risk. Yet they've morphed into unwieldy
behemoths that run for years, have a cast of thousands and cost millions.
And yet, at the end of it all, the scientific risk, the
quantitative risk, is not really what matters.
What matters is the perception of risk by people.
Marijuana is a good example.
Here is a drug that has been widely used in the west for over fifty
years, and in the east for eons, to little overall effect. Every major study ever conducted on pot has
more or less concluded that its use is overwhelmingly a personal risk and not a
social one. People don't die from it and they don't kill for it.
The problem that prohibitionists have with marijuana is a
moral one, not a technical one.
Recreational use of a mind altering-substance is abuse. It's immoral.
It's not good. But immorality,
like witchcraft is a privatized risk, and so, to force action by the state,
they have to socialize it. They
have to make it everybody's problem.
They need to blow the risk vastly out of proportion. Now who would be good at doing that? Oh, I know—cue the media. Next thing you know, Walt the postman is
getting random urine inspections, and we have an entire industry of
professionals whose job it is to watch you pee in a cup.
At one point, if you were dumb enough not to wear a seat
belt, then that was social Darwinism at work.
That risk was socialized. Crime. Despite ample evidence that violent crime is decreasing
and has been for centuries, we have to build a bunch of new prisons in
Canada. And the US, with 5% of the
world's population, has 25% of the world's incarcerated population.
Helmets. Diving
boards. Alcohol. Butter.
Trans-fats. Second-hand smoke.
Terrorists. Carbon dioxide.
Saccharine. And those are just the
risks we know about. With all these
deadly risks, most of them unknown to us a generation ago, how is it that we manage
to worry our way to a historically high life expectancy of 85 years?
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