American Enterprise Institute

February 14, 2006

[Edited transcript from audio tapes]

8:45 a.m.	Registration and Breakfast
9:00	Introduction:	JON ENTINE, AEI
9:15	The Politics of Fear
	Speaker:	FRANK FUREDI, University of Kent
10:15           10:30	Discussant:         ROGER BATE, AEI   Break   Culture and Education   Moderator:         CHARLES PAUL FREUND, Reason
	Speakers:	CLAIRE FOX, UK Institute of Ideas
		CHRISTINA HOFF SOMMERS, AEI
11:30	Law and Business    Moderator:         ROBERT POLLOCK, Wall Street Journal
	Speakers:	PHILIP K. HOWARD, Covington and Burling
		JON ENTINE, AEI
12:30 p.m.	Lunch
12:45	Keynote Address:	The Precautionary Principle and the International Conflict over Agricultural Biotechnology LESTER CRAWFORD, Policy Directions, Inc., former FDA commissioner
1:45	Media and Science
	Moderator:    Speakers:	JON ENTINE, AEI TONY GILLAND, UK Institute of Ideas
		JAMES K. GLASSMAN, AEI
3:15	Break	RON BAILEY, Reason
3:30-4:30	Can We Rediscover Our Purpose and Commitment to Innovation?
	Moderator:    Speakers:	TONY GILLAND, UK Institute of Ideas FRANK FUREDI,   University of Kent
		ALAN WOLFE, Center for Religion and American Public Life, Boston College

Proceedings:
Jon Entine:  We welcome everyone here today to the American Enterprise Institute.  I want to introduce myself.  My name is Jon Entine.  I am an adjunct fellow here at the AEI and also with the National Research Initiative which is part of the AEI.  I actually want to take this opportunity to thank the outgoing head of the National Research Institute Kim Dennis [phonetic] who has been heading up the program for a number of years, and also give a warm welcome to the new head of the NRI, Henry Olsen who just took over about a month ago.
Today, as you know, we are going to talk about the precautionary principle not just as it applies to science but as it has been applied to society at large; its great implications for the precautionary principle.  It is a notion that until recent years, was generally directed specifically at environmental and scientific innovations.  We saw evidence of that just this past week when the World Trade Organization reviewed the European Union in which it cited the precautionary principle in banning genetically modified crops and foods.  Precaution is obviously a necessary and useful concept, but it is subjective and susceptible to abuse by policy makers for trade purposes as the WTO decision underscores.
I want to take this opportunity to plug a book that AEI has put out that I am the editor of which discusses a lot of these issues about the precautionary principle in genetically modified crops and foods.  It is called, Let Them Eat Precaution: How Politics Is Undermining The Genetic Revolution In Agriculture.  One of the speakers here today, Tony Gilland from the Institute of Ideas in the UK, also contributed to this book.  A number of distinguished scholars on all sides of the political spectrum contributed to it and I think, especially in the context of this decision, it is a very useful manual; thoughtful reflections on the scientific and political implications of the kind of policies that the European Union has been pursuing in this context.
But I think we should ask ourselves going into this conference, what does the precautionary principle really mean?  And I thought it would be helpful before we got underway to outline the history of this controversial notion.  The origin of the precautionary principle can be traced back to the Germany’s emerging environmental movement of the 1970’s.  Precautionary principles actually, the English translation of the German phrase on, excuse my German since I do not speak it, but “Vorsorgeprinzip,” any German speakers can correct me, which directly translates as the  Foresight Principle.  However, there is no one definition of what it means which is why we are on the pickle we are on today with various advocacy groups, NGOs and countries invoking it when it is not clear how it can be reasonably applied.
During the 1980’s, the precautionary principle was applied rather narrowly; it was generally interpreted to mean nothing more than better safe than sorry.  It served the purpose reminding us to take reasonable caution in making public policy.  But caution over the precautionary principle began to fade in the 1990’s.  In 1992, the United Nations conference on the environment and development in Rio de Janeiro drafted a far broader and more open-ended definition in order to protect the environment.  It said precautionary approach shall be widely applied by states according to their capabilities.  Where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost effective measures to prevent environmental degradation.
But NGOs and advocacy groups believe that even that definition was too limiting.  They organized a meeting in 1988 what became known as the Wingspread Conference to dramatically expand its reach.  They wrote, “When an activity raises threats of harm to human health or the environment, precautionary measures should be taken even if some cause-and-effect relationships are not fully established scientifically.  In this context the proponent of an activity rather than a public should bear the burden of proof.”  This notion was now construed to require that all innovation in public policy err on the side of caution even when there is no evidence, zero evidence of danger or harm.  Today, the precautionary principle has been formally adopted by countries of the European Union and by the City of San Francisco.
Today, we are not just talking about the hypothetical dangers from biotechnology or climate change.  It is being used to address set moral causes of both the left and the right.  Does immunizing children cause more harm than good?  What are the dangers of teaching evolution?  Do cellular phones cause brain cancer?  Does reading Harry Potter corrupt our morals?  Should video games be restricted because they may encourage violence?
Today we will discuss what the precautionary principle means to our society.  It has become inbred in our culture.  The media often referred to it as a given, an unquestioned commitment to moderation.  But should it be?  After all by definition, anything new, every innovation introduces some degree of unpredictable risk.  We all want to avoid risks but few of us are willing to allow our lives to be paralyzed by it, or as David Ropeik of the Harvard Center for Risks Analysis puts it, “We have to recognize that there are very real risks out there, but one of them is fear.”  That brings us to our opening speaker; Frank Furedi who is, and I say this not to embarrass him, the world expert on the politics of fear and the culture of fear.  Just so happens that’s the names of two of his best selling books.  You all have the rest of his distinguished bio in your handouts so I will not waste anymore time with a long winded [sounds like] introduction.  Frank?
 
Morning Address: The Politics of Fear by Frank Furedi

Frank Furedi:  Good morning, everybody.  Thanks very much for inviting me to this very important and interesting discussion.  What I want to do today is to explore what are the dynamics, what are the sort of forces within the society that create a culture that has become so hospitable towards precaution and towards precautionary attitudes, not just in science or in the domain of technology but also in the domain of everyday life.  I think to do that, what I would like to do is to begin by looking at what is special and distinct about the way we experience fear and anxiety.  As you probably know, every culture in society fears differently.  We all have a different take of what it means to fear, and in some societies, people are dominated by the fear of God.  Other societies, they are dominated by the fear of unemployment or the fear of death, the fear of ancestors.
Every culture has got its own story of what fear really means to them.  Well, the interesting thing about our society, and now I am talking about all western societies, is that we do not have any one dominant fear.  It is not the case that societies any longer are subject to one specific fear.  Like in the 50’s, we were all worried about the fear of communism or the fear of nuclear war.  Instead, what we have is a far more promiscuous, far more diffused sense of fear where we fear a lot of different things on an unstable basis.  So one week, we are scared about Avian flu; next week, we talk about an obesity epidemic; the day after, there is a problem of pollution or nuclear energy and you can go on, and on, and on, and on.  The list is endless and it is continually changing and subject to different kind of variations.
So what is happening increasingly is that we limit our world by increasing… our fears have become very intimate, very fragmented, but at the same time, they dominate every single experience of human existence.  Two other things have changed.  One is that the things we fear are no longer the part of the more direct experience.  In your grandparent’s time, the things people used to fear, one of the things that were heard around the breakfast table, your mother would say, “Do not go out there because there are some criminals there” or “Frank, do not go out there because you are going to get into trouble or lose a job.”  They were very direct fears based upon immediate experience.  Today’s fears are much more indirect there.
Currently, what we are really scared about are things we never experienced exactly ourselves.  For example, in Europe, we are very scared of Avian flu than of dying of influenza.  Sometimes, you get very worried about these invisible pollutants whose name we cannot even pronounce but never-theless, seem very tangible and palpable to us.  These are fears that we hear about on CNN, 24 hours news, on the media and elsewhere, and these are fears that you and I can do nothing about.  They are not fears that we can deal with and overcome through our own individual action or acting alongside our friends and our neighbors.  And therefore, the fears have a much more sort of a dominating, in a sense disorienting impact upon our lives.
One of the consequences to all these developments is that fear has a very distinct 21st century character.  What we have today is what I call the autonomization of fear.  Fear has become independent of any specific physical problem, any specific threat.  So, for example, if you look on the Washington D.C. Police Force Admission Statement, they will tell what they are there to do.  Fighting crime is the one thing that the police are meant to be doing, but they probably spend more time fighting the fear of crime.  The fear of crime is now seen as a problem that is at par with real crime and many police forces are primarily in the business of impression management to kind of get folks to be less worried about crime rather than actually dealing with crime.  We talk about the fear of terrorism as probably being a greater problem than terrorism itself.  In the medical profession, people talk about the fear of cancer or a fear of any chronic disease as being as incapacitating as the disease itself.  In the domain of legal and law, we have a suggestion where the fear of something becomes actionable in many parts of the western world where you cannot go to court and claim compensation not because anything has been done to you or nothing physical has been done to you, but the fear that something may happen to you in the future as a result of coming into contact with some particular technology or particular product or experience.
So in that sense, fear has acquired a very different dimension.  It is more privatized, it is more fragmented, it is more indirect, and it now has a power and a force of its own that is quite independent of anything that goes on in the real world which is why we can gradually move in towards the culture that has become so hospitable to a precautionary form of fearing, a very different kind of fearing that we have done in previous times.
You know it is very, very interesting that if you look at the media, people talk about the politics of fear.  And what do you usually mean by the politics of fear is politicians using a political issue to scare the voters to vote for them.  But actually, the politics of fear exist in a more fundamental level.  It is at a fundamental level where ordinary, everyday experiences to do with anxiety of fear become politicized by anybody that wants to make a claim.  So, for example, if you are in the old business, you may want to scare people about, I do not know, oil running out and therefore, the need to invest in nuclear energy and therefore, you want to promote the nuclear industry on the basis of being scared about running out of oil.   If you are against the nuclear industry, then we will say, “Oh, no.  That is a wrong thing to do.  We must not have a nuclear industry because that would invite terrorists to target those particular plans.”  And therefore then, the fear of terrorism becomes an argument against starting a nuclear industry.  And you will find that on virtually every issue.
There is a left and right form of fear, there is different argument, different claims.  The one thing they all have in common is they all adopt the same idiom of fear in order to promote their claim.  That is how they frame the demands.  That is how they put forward the argument that they are particularly interested in.  The whole clan of the precaution that we are discussing today, which is basically an issue to do with not daring to question, not daring to experiment, being safer than sorry, is quite consistent with this kind of, this form of fearing.  Not daring in a sense because the fear is, they have a power that is quite a special, quite a unique force of their own.  Not daring has become a very powerful cultural perspective, and you can see this in the way that in everyday popular culture, the actual daring, the act of taking a risk is usually represented.  And we were always told that whenever there is an innovation, we must not let the genie out of the bottle and that is the kind of the standard quote that is given to us.
Sometimes when you innovate a new scientific product, we talk about the fight that we must not let scientists play God.  We talk about science running out of ethics.  Every time something new happens, there is an argument which basically tells us, “Hey, slow down.  Not so fast.”  Sort of, “Let us relax for a while.  Let us not try to innovate because we are playing God or we are running ahead of where society is. There is some danger that is kind of lurking ahead.”  If you do not believe me, just casually one morning do a Google search on the words “experiment” and “experimentation.”  With two IDs [sounds like] I realized experimenting I think is a very positive human endeavor.  Whenever you Google “experimentation” or “experiment,” the kind of relationships that it draws attention, there is always negative and sinister ones.  Experimentation, if you Google it, will always take you towards some Nazi experiment, some Eugenic experiment that is taking place.  It is never about, oh great, a new drug has been invented or something wonderful that has happened.
Experimentation is always associated with a fairly negative phenomenon that continually invites us to think in the idiom of risk aversion and celebrating risk aversion as very, very positive.  To explain why this is so, well, what I could do in the rest of my introduction is to draw attention to what I think are the principle features of contemporary culture that reinforce this and feel a powerful precautionary and powerful risk-averse attitudes.  I think there are five important trends that are in place to greater or lesser extent in most western cultures.  Although they take different forms, I think they impact everywhere from Japan to the United States all the way to Europe.
In one of the first important developments is the shift in our moral reaction to harm.  The way we view harm in contemporary society is very distinct, very different than in previous times.  One of its principle manifestations is that we no longer believe that there is such a thing as a natural disaster.  If you have a hurricane, if you have an earthquake, it is no longer either an act of God or an act of nature.  There is always somebody behind it.  An irresponsible corporate, currently government bureaucrats or somebody else has got to be responsible for the damage that has been caused by the earthquake or by the hurricane or whatever the incident is.  There is also no longer such thing as accidents.  I mean accidents are increasingly being redefined as preventable injuries in the medical profession.  Nobody any longer believed in the fact that there is such thing as a bad luck. “What a bummer, this just happened to me.”  That is not something that can happen.  Bad luck causing a misfortune is seen with suspicion.
Increasingly, if you look at the way that media represents adversity and misfortune, there is always an assumption that there is a story behind the story.  There is something that we are not being told that is responsible for this or that particular development.  In other words, when we talk about there being a story behind a story we assume that every negative experience has got some meaning, some inner meaning to it, and I do not know about the United States but in England whenever there is an accident of some sort, somebody gets on television and says, “I hope we will learn from my son’s death.”  “I hope that the fact that my daughter died in this car crash contains a very important lessons for everybody,” but actually does not because between you and I, that was just a car crash.  It was a bad luck on that night.  The road was slippery.  Maybe the driver was not paying attention.
Actually, there is no lesson to be learned there most of the time.  Sometimes there is, but 99.9 percent of the time accidents contain inner meaning.  There is no powerful moral story there to be told and to be learned but nevertheless, we interpret them and we at least rhetorically assume that there is a lesson to be learned, that story has some kind of a meaning.  And in many ways, this way of looking at harm and injury represents a return back to the medieval pre-modern days.
Back in the days of high superstition in the 13th-14th century, nothing ever happened without God’s hand being behind it or nothing ever happened behind some malevolent force of the devil or some witches kind of being responsible for it.  Every time any negative happened, that was a moral tale with responsibility was some kind of malevolent force.  Now, I think it seems to be that today, we are pretty much moving in that direction where we can no longer accept the fact that adversity and misfortune can occasionally happen and as a result of that, policy making becomes entirely arbitrary.
In Europe, more familiar with, we now have a form of policy making that is a response to the latest accident.  You can basically have a situation where a couple of children tragically die in a boating accident as they go out with their school.  Next day, there is a debating parliament about it and the day after, they pass a law whereby new regulation are imposed upon other adventure because this is the way they want to avoid future deaths on boating accidents taking place 10:00 in the morning on Tuesdays.  So what they did at least is a very kind of powerful dynamic or micromanagement and micro regulation that is usually the response to the latest accident, not realizing the same accident very rarely occurs in a same place at the same time at the same hour and the same day.
So this influence of the style of a policy making, by the way, what it also does it shifts responsibility from anybody involved in accident to an institution or to other people.  People are never responsible for the malevolent or misfortune that kind of dominates their lives or kills them.  There is always going to be some hidden force, hidden hand that is responsible for it, which by the way also explains partially of why in the United States in particular, conspiracy fears are so powerful.  I have got such incredible resonance in everyday culture.
The second principle feature of precautionary culture is that nature of harm is represented at an increasingly dramatic fashion.  Harm increasingly looses any boundaries, it locks any kind of boundaries and it becomes increasingly subjective.  If you feel that you have been harmed, you are harmed.  If you feel that your emotion has been upset, then you are generally traumatized.  And therefore, the nature of harm acquires this invisible diffuse kind of [indiscernible] not something you can see or smell or even hear, it is just something that you subjectively experience.  People now, when something bad happens to them, are said to be scarred for life.  They become damaged and the language they use, the metaphor, the vocabulary that we use is increasingly about, in a sense, paying a penalty for life.  If it actually happens to you, you can never really recover.  It is always hunting you.  It always dominates your imagination.  People do not simply encounter misfortune and harm that has an immediate consequence.  Increasingly, harm is represented as episodes whose consequences are unknowable, irreversible, and often catastrophic, raising the question of survival.  Harm being unknowable and therefore, its consequences also being far from clear acquires a new chronology, a new time scale.
One of the most important elements that kind of drive the precautionary principle is the idea that any that happens now is an event whose consequences you can never predict.  And therefore, because you can never predict the real nature of the harm that you are now causing, you must be very careful not just today, tomorrow, next week, but for the next 10-20, sometimes a thousand years.  I mean ecologists in Europe are now talking about the ecological footprints that we are leaving behind for people a thousand years from now.  And therefore, increasingly, our activities today are seen as having negative destructive consequences, and at times, that is usually measured in terms of hundred years if it is about technology and science.  If it is about individual harm that we are talking about, something may happen 10, 15, 20 year down the road, something that you can never predict, something you can never in a sense cater for, and therefore all that you can do is say, “Do not do it.”  All that you can do in a sense is say, “Hold back.”
Thirdly, from this perspective life is increasingly perceived as a very, very dangerous place.  We are living in exceedingly dangerous times.  Events are invariably interpreted from the perspective of the worst possible outcome.  I mean precautionary principle has got such a powerful impulse behind it because it continually draws your attention not to probabilities or what could happen or what may happen but always to the worst possible outcome, so that the smallest technical issue can be recast as an issue of human survival, and you can see this in the 21st century.
We begin the 21st century with relatively small, minor, technical problem which we call the millennium bug.  And before long, the millennium bug which is a relatively a small, technical issue basically needs a few resources, a bit of resources to sort it out, gradually turns into a question of life and death and there is always scenarios being projected of what will happen if on that day we do not have the right kind of answers.  And what happens is that under those circumstances, the boundary between analysis and speculation becomes continually eroded and become continually confronted with the “what if” question.  What if this happens?  I mean the way you can be shut up, if you question the precautionary principle if somebody turns to me and says, what if Frank, that what if a near earth object sort of hits us?  That is the end of civilization, all right?  What if this technology gets out of control?  That is the end of human race.  What if… the minute you recast an issue and acclaim in “what if” terms then the only possible answer that you can give is, no, we must not do this, we have to hold back, we have to slow down.  That is the only answer there is.
Unfortunately, increasingly, the “what if” question is driving policy making in a number of areas, from national security to education to the main of culture and science and technology.  The “what if” question is being raced in a speculative way as if it was a discussion of fact.  It is not even a discussion of theoretical risks but basically, speculative risks.  They are entirely based upon as reinventing the worst case scenario.  The main consequence of this is that it simply decreases our cultural capacity to deal with uncertainty.  Uncertainty in these terms becomes an extremely confusing and disorienting experience, not something I want to embrace and see as an opportunity but something that I want to avoid and immunize ourselves from experiencing.
The fourth important development - something I am sure that you are aware of in the United States because it began in the United States and is much more powerful here than any where else in the world -  in a situation where safety has become an ended itself.  Your safety is not an end in itself and increasingly, the term “safe” has very powerful pseudo-moral cultural connotations.  Now, we talk about safe spaces in libraries and school.  We talk about safe medicine as if there could be such a thing as safe medicine.  We talk about safe sex.  Every time we talk to anybody who’s involved in any institution, the first thing to tell you is how safe while they are doing this.  So when I take my son to his school, we went around looking for a school for my son, the first thing that the teacher has told us, “Mr. Furedi, do not worry about this school.  We make sure it is the number one priority, is your children’s safety.”  And I said, “Actually, I was hoping that it would be his education or teaching how to read, maybe teaching how to count.”  That is really wise going to school not to experience safety.  And then a small railway accident happens near London.  Two people get their fingernails injured, and afterwards, somebody gets up and says, “We want to assure the public that the primary objective of our railway company is the passion to safety.”  And you can already hear the community saying, actually wish that it would be about getting us to our destination on time or providing clean carriages and efficient railway system, but no, a primary objective becomes that of safety.  And increasingly, what happens is that because safety is acquired as smaller dimensions believing that world where nobody gets denounced anymore for not taking chances, nobody gets criticized for not experimenting, that is being responsible.  “That is really good, Frank.  You are not taking a chance.  You are not going outside today because you might slip on the ice in Washington.  That is a very powerful, responsible attitude.”  What is irresponsible is taking risks. 
So, when you do something that it involves engagingly on uncertainty, that is increasingly seen as being irresponsible and if you look at books, novels, or films, risk taking is not seen as being just this much short of being a pedophile or being basically malevolent because risk taking is irresponsible.
Why are you taking a risk?  That has no positive affirmation anymore.  It is seen as a negative and fairly kind of destructive.  And what happens as a result of that is that as we celebrate safety as the purpose of organization or institution or a business, it becomes distracted from what is that we should be doing.  It becomes disoriented from the purpose of our existence, and also as an aside I am sure you would agree with me, trying to be safe does not necessarily make you very safe anyway.  All that it does, it creates the illusion of safety.  It simply means that you are engaging with less experiences and therefore not to be learning from human experience.
And fifthly, the fifth important development in culture, something that I think it is the most important than… it is very much not recognized even by critics of the precautionary principle is that they live in a culture in the west where we are living at that time where we see a very radical redefinition of what a human being is, what person [indiscernible].  Increasingly, we live in that world where the story that we tell about ourselves is one that no longer believes that we have the capacity to cope.  We increasingly question our ability to make things happen.  We think that the desire and the aspiration for individual or human control is really a caricature, “How dare you want to control your life?”  “How dare you do that?”  That is simply has got negative destructive consequences.  We no longer really believe in the ideal of individual autonomy.  And we even have a very feeble version of individual responsibility.  All you are going to say is, “I am addicted to sex, I am addicted to alcohol, I am addicted to shopping” and that becomes an explanation, “Oh, yes.  So that Frank is a bit promiscuous or Frank is a bit out of control.  The poor soul is addicted to alcohol.  He has got an issue, I mean alcohol,” or something on those lines.
So, when we have a suggestion where the human being, the person, is increasingly represented in very weak, very feeble forms, we increasingly see the defining feature of humanity, of personhood as that of vulnerability.  In cases, we use the language of vulnerability as an identity.  So, for example, we now talk about, I am sure in America as well, vulnerable groups and not just an individual being vulnerable but vulnerable groups.  And if you look at government statements, children are called vulnerable, women are called vulnerable, disabled people are vulnerable, immigrants, homeless people, all kinds of minorities are seen as being vulnerable.  When you add it all up, they kind of constitute 115 percent of the population and everybody seems to have some kind of vulnerabilty.  But not only that, but increasingly, vulnerability also define us -  our identities.  So in the English language when I have a new term that has been around for about 12 to 15 years where we talk about the vulnerable.  So it is no longer a description, it becomes a noun.  The vulnerable.  And that means that your identity is not defined by the fact that you lack power, that you are impotent, that you have not got the capacity to do very much.  And it seems to me that once we have this version of personhood, once we look up on people as these feeble individuals who cannot cope with what is thrown at them by everyday life, under those circumstances it is very, very difficult for people to take risk-taking seriously and to be critical of the regime of safety and precaution that dominates many aspects of our society.
It seems to me that under these circumstances, policy making quite naturally has internalized these cultural forces.  Increasingly, policy making echoes in a very powerful way the culture of precaution in all kinds of offenses.  So, for example, social policy is more and more focused on reassuring and protecting people.  Governments talk about supporting people rather than allowing people to make their own way.  Governments are increasingly in the business of giving voice to people, on speaking on their behalf and increasingly, arrogating for themselves the responsibility of telling us what we really need as relatively weak and vulnerable people.
Risk taking is irresponsible and stigmatized in policy-making terms, and most important of all, the fear of uncertainty is validated by the kind of policies that seems to be sort of promoted.  Now obviously, you might say, well, Frank is maybe exaggerating here.  I am making things up.  It is not really as bad as all that.  There are many individuals that you and I know that are still taking risks.  They still want to make things happen, that have a positive attitude towards the future.  And obviously, I am not arguing that human beings have ceased to be normal people.  They are fortunately still often very curious and often really open to new challenges, especially young people.  It is really nice to see young people who still want to make things happen.  And also of course, as you know, despite of all these cultural influences still manage to innovate and still manage occasionally to take risks.  However, I would argue that we do so in circumstances where precautionary culture is continually exacting a very, very heavy price.
I suppose the way that I see it is that we are living in a world that can be understood as a physical world and a world of meaning.  In the physical world, we are still creating wonderful new things in nanotechnology, in biotechnology, in all the different areas.  I mean we are quite good at innovation and technological and scientific development.  In the physical world, we are truly going ahead in a really dramatic, positive fashion and therefore, we have a very good reason to be positive.  But in the world of meaning, which is equally important where we make sense of what we are doing, where we attempt to culturally and morally validate our behavior, we become very, very confused and often find it very difficult to celebrate that which we are creating.
American companies, I almost find really very, very interesting in this respect.  I often use American companies as examples of this because whenever I see a corporate advertising, I hope I am not insulting anybody here, but whenever I see a corporate ad, it is never about the business they are involved in.  It is never about we are here to make a profit.  It is usually about beautiful skies and wonderful environment and pretty flowers and you have a white baby, a Chinese baby, and a black baby, all playing balls together.  And you say, “What is this, a preschool company organizing schooling for children?”  Actually, it is a biotechnical company that has nothing to do with the ads that they are in or if you read the mission statements of companies, it is never about what they are really doing.  Number one, we are really into making profits because that is what businesses do.  You never see that in the mission statement.  You will think that it is a charity organization.  It is never about the fact that we are passionate about the products that we are creating because we really think they are very, very important.
Although we love science, science is really important to promote and to develop about stake holders, we are a part of the community and we provide sort of holiday camps for disabled children.  And it is everything that has nothing to do with what they are about.  And from a sociological point, you know that tells me is that that company finds it culturally very difficult to affirm what it is doing.  It lacks the system of meaning, the moral sense to really celebrate what it does in the physical world.
And I think that is really what is happening in many, many areas of our life.  We are unable to tell the world that we want to dare, we want to challenge, we want to experiment, we want to take a risk.  We may find it very, very difficult to use those words with real conviction.  We sometimes do, but we are aware of the fact that it does not resonate with Hollywood films.  It does not resonate with what you see on TV and therefore, we have to adapt a different a strategy altogether.  And it seems to me that as long as we reconcile ourselves to losing this cultural war over precaution, as long as we are not prepared to take the battleground to the name culture and to celebrate all the attributes of a risk-taking society, as long as we do that we will never be in the situation where precautionary principles in policy making and in culture can be combated.  And as long as that occurs, that will have a phenomenally powerful impact on everyday life.
You see, unlike you or most of you, I became interested, and not because I am involved in business because I am a boring in academic.  I became interested in precautionary principle not because I got a scientific or technological training.  To me, the precautionary principle is a problem because of the way it impacts on everyday life on my relationships with other people.  Let me give you an example of what I am talking about.  What it really means to me.  When I started teaching at a university 85 years ago, I still remember the very first day I arrived at the university, I am still at the same university where I began teaching about 25 years ago and I remember arriving on the very first day for a very first lecture.  And when I finished the lecture, I took a bus back.  I want to take a bus back to the town where I lived and I noticed there was a queue of 50 university students, all queuing up.  And what they were doing is that they were queuing up; there was an orderly queue and every single one of them was hitchhiking.  They were getting leaves into the town, into Canterbury.  And sometimes, two or three of them would get into same car, get in the car with somebody who had no idea who they were.  It was a very nice experience because you got to travel for free.  It was incidentally good for the environment, although that is neither here or there.  It also meant that sometimes you made friends and actually meeting people, talking to them 25 minutes in the car, you learn about each other.  It was good for building social bond, friendship, and everything else.  It was then a normal ritual in everyday life.
Today, if you go to the same bus stop as I do, nobody hitchhikes.  There is no such thing as hitchhiking in Kent where I live.  It is an all-known phenomenon.  When I talk to my son about hitchhiking, he thinks I am talking about the American Civil War.  I am talking about something that happened 300 years ago.  As far as he is concerned, what is hitchhiking?  How could people ever dare to get into a car with a stranger?  I mean how could you ever have done anything like that?  I am talking about Canterbury which is probably the safest place in the world.  I mean it is so safe that is because it is possibly boring.  And yet, nobody dares to do that anymore.
There are a lot of things that we used to take for granted in terms of everyday lives.   The way we related to one another, the way we made friends, the way we loved, the way we build communities, they are not being fragmented by precautionary culture and the way we fear.  You see, at least in the old days when you feared, you feared together.  You feared as a community.  We all did not want to die in a nuclear holocaust.  We all fear to go up together or we all fear communism together or we always feared something together.  That was maybe the downside as well.  Sometimes, you have negative consequences but at least it brought us together.
Today when we fear, in an optimized, privatized promiscuous sense, we fear alone.  And the one that we learn from human experience is that when we fear alone, we also become estranged and alienated from each other.  We also become scared of each other and therefore we lose a lot of our human compassion or human trust which is so crucial and so important for everyday life.  And that to me alone is a very good reason as to why we should do everything possible to combat the precautionary principle.  Thank you.

Roger Bate:  My name is Roger Bate.  I am a resident fellow here at the American Enterprise Institute.  Although I do not think I am on the program other than in the speaker bio, Jon asked me if I would comment very briefly on Frank’s talk, very stimulating talk, and then open it up for questions.  One of the reasons I think he wanted me to do that is because I have known Frank for nearly, I think nearly a decade now.  And when you were talking about, as an example, when he said and I quote, “Frank, of course, is a sex addict,” he reminded me of an article he wrote about the medicalization of the seven deadly sins, with the exception of pride which of course now is a virtue.
And it threw me back to the very first time that I came across Frank which was he was writing for a magazine.  He was independent of it, but he was writing for a magazine called LM magazine and I was asked to do a piece on DDT and Malaria for this magazine.  I had no idea what it was.  And I did a quick search and spoke to someone else about it and found out that it actually stood for Living Marxism and I was thinking, “This is very odd.”  The work Frank identified and I think, well, I was working with scientists on various different aspects of, scientific aspects of risks I guess, on insecticides in particular, Frank was trying to explain what was happening I think at that time in British politics.  I was working then at the [indiscernible] Institute of Economic Affairs and there seemed to be a breakdown of the kind of old left versus right and more the biggest concerns or the biggest differences at least were between approaches to regulation and whether they were highly authoritarian or more libertarian in nature.  And we found that the left and right were becoming, or at least those parts in the think tank academic community were becoming aligned along… are kind of pushing against the kind of risk aversion which was, I suppose, delivering the authoritarian approaches that we were arguing against.  And as I was saying, I was going around saying that things like eating specs of DDT were probably safer than drinking cups of coffee and that some of the most toxic substances known to man such as in broccoli are very natural and natural did not mean safe.  Frank was, indeed in his book, The Culture Affair [sounds like] which was published just over, just under a decade ago, we are actually trying to explain the phenomena.  And the timing was very important I think in British society because it came with the implosion of the conservative party, the rise of the New Labour’s Third Way in the writings of Anthony Giddens, and the acceptance of that Third Way by Tony Blair.  And I think as a genius of the time, I recall, remarked it was “the greedy eighties has been replaced by the nervous nineties.”
No one really knew what was going on and how politics changed.  And I think that, well, some of the scientists got bored pointing out the absurdities of the latest environmental public health regulation.  Frank has stuck to the course, if you like, of trying to explain what has been going on, and I think probably only Aaron Wodaski I have learned more from in this area.  So I have made a debt of gratitude to you, Frank, so thank you for continuing to do this fascinating work.
There are numerous things that I could ask you questions on.  I am largely in agreement with lots of things you said.  I have specific things.  I guess another reason why it may be useful for me to comment is that I moved here just before September 11.  When I say here, I mean United States, and I have seen changes since that time here but I would argue that on the whole, they may fear different things but I think Americans are less risk-averse and I think it is one of the reasons I moved here, in some sense.
So I wonder if you could deal with, as far as best as you can, the differences between Europe, or at least the parts of Europe that you know well, and the United States, the differences.  And I would argue again from something you said that I think that they are vulnerable using it as a noun and Americans, I would argue, are less passive and less dependent on the whole than Europeans.  I would be interested to know what you think of that.  And then to finish off as a cell [sounds like], I’ll probably come back and have some questions, but I’ll open it up to the audience now, reminded me of something else he said about fearing fear.  Reminds me of that, I do not know how many of you have ever seen a British program called “Black Adam.”  It is one of my favorite comedies and it reminds of that statement that we use in [indiscernible], “Ah, voltrek [phonetic]. A fate worse than the fate worse than death.”  And it is almost as though fearing fear has become our biggest concern.
Okay, I am going to take some questions.  Who wants to ask the first question?  Gentleman here, you can say here who you are, where you from and wait for the microphone so that it can be recorded, that will be great.

Questions from the Audience:
Richard Granger (audience member):  Thank you.  My name is Richard Granger, I’m with the American Petroleum Institute and I recently came to API from about 27 years in the industry, and I want to actually challenge one of your statements, one of your five paradigms that you cited on safety, safety becoming an end in itself.  And I’m not going to disagree with the assertion, but I wanted you to comment on the fact that at least as that principle has been increasingly applied in industry, there are many who contend that it has been applied with success.  For example, a great many industrial companies, including the one I was recently employed by, empower individual workers to stop work if they believe a condition of work is unsafe.  A lot of this has its origins in DuPont, which is widely cited as one of the companies with the most significant leadership in safety and also happens to be one of the companies most significant in innovation and in development of new products.  Companies are finding that an emphasis on safety culture actually enhances operational efficiency.  Obviously, there’s room for error here and there’s room for excess, but I’d be interested in your comment on that.  Thank you. 
Frank Furedi:  Yeah, I completely agree with you.  I wasn’t trying to argue that safety is not important.  I suppose what I was trying to say was that safety, from my perspective, is a technical issue, and it’s a technical problem that a company or institution needs to take very, very seriously because we owe to the people that are in that organization to create the safest possible condition.  What I was really getting at was when safety ceases to be a technical matter but becomes a moral principle and is increasingly treated almost in a ritualistic way to define what a company is doing.  In your, for example, health and safety, it’s increasingly encroaching on areas that have got nothing to do with… and they’ll get out of control.  So for example, at my university, as an academic, I can no longer let my Ph.D. students do research in social sciences without doing a risk assessment.  And part of that risk assessment is to look at their safety and the safety becomes a question like, “Are they mature enough to handle interviewing grown-up people?”  So once you move into that area, that safety becomes really something very different than the things you’re discussing, which is a technical matter.  It really becomes a way of morally regulating people and, in a sense, focusing the energies in that specific direction.
Male Voice (audience member):  [indiscernible], Catholic University Law School.  This question is directed to the moderator.  You made the generalization that you think Europeans are more risk-averse compared to Americans, and certainly the case of genetically modified foods would, to which there had been much more resistance in Europe, would support that point of view.  But one contrary example would be thalidomide, which was kept out of the United States and which caused hundreds, if not thousands of teratogens in western Europe.  Would you care to comment?
Roger Bate:  I actually was posing the question to Frank as to whether he’d agree with me, so let him deal with the question.  I think when it comes to thalidomide, that was a success for the Food and Drug Administration and it actually empowered Food and Drug Administration to be more, I would argue, risk-averse than perhaps it’s necessary to be, that was a major success story.  Obviously, there are things in this country which people are more risk-averse about.  Nuclear power, for example, and the threat of terrorism around nuclear power now as well.  But my point was, we’ll now turn it over, is I think on balance, Americans are less risk-averse.
Frank Furedi:  I think it was a very important point.  I mean for 15 years after thalidomide, there was virtually no drug licensed in the United States, whereas they were licensed in Europe.  So there are many, many examples.  For example, in relation to the environment, the outdoors, air pollution, nuclear energy, you can make a list and you’ll find that the list about which Americans are very precautionary is as long as Europe, but they’re usually very different.  That’s what’s so curious, that the United States is precautionary about different things.  I take the view that there is a big difference between the United States and Europe, but it’s not about risk aversion.  I think, if anything, it’s more than risk aversion develops its dynamic in the United States and in California in particular.
If you look at it historically, I mean most of the important organizations are either like Greenpeace from Canada or the Sierra Club.  I mean there’s numerous organizations and I think it gradually acquires greater definition elsewhere.  It’s in Europe that the risk-averse ideas of California are institutionalized because it corresponds to the European experience much, much more.  That’s kind of the main paradox.
But if you look at the chronology, the main precautionary laws are inactive in the United States far earlier than they are in Europe and with greater force.  For example, when it comes to pollution, the initial cause is never considered in many areas, whereas it’s still considered as an issue within the European context.  To me the issue is best symbolized by my trip to Palo Alto, California where I was doing my interviews for my book to meet real entrepreneurial, risk-taking individuals because I was told you go to the Silicon Valley and that’s where you meet the real risk-takers.  And I think, yes, they were very good at taking risks, especially with other people’s money, sort of the… I was actually quite jealous these young guys are doing all this wonderful stuff.  But when you go to their house, you realize that it’s a paradox because when you go to the house, you open up their fridge, it looks like a scientific lab because “I cannot drink milk,” “I’m not about to eat that food,” and the eating is like a scientific experiment because they have all these kind of precautions that they are taking with everything and in terms of their lifestyle.  It’s like everything, this “I cannot smoke a cigarette,” “I can have maybe a glass-and-a-half of wine a week or less if that is so.”  These entrepreneurial people who are very risk-taking in the domain of new technology, when it comes to their lifestyle were like pussycats, basically.
So in terms of being very, very precautionary-oriented, I think that exists, which is not to say that Americans are more precautionary than Europeans.  I just think it takes a different form.  The one big difference, and that’s the best thing about the United States from a European perspective, is that there’s a more powerful sense of individual rights here and, therefore, because there’s a more powerful sense of individual rights, people kick up against regulation more forcefully and there are more people kicking up against regulation in the United States forcefully than in Europe and, therefore, it’s much more difficult for a regulatory dynamic to have the same impact on people’s lives as it does in Europe.  Because in Europe, it gets homogenized very, very fast through the European Union and there’s a very weak sense of individual rights and, therefore, after much weaker precautionary laws can have a disproportionally greater impact on people’s lives.
So I think the real difference is about how individuals perceive themselves, the whole question of individual rights rather than the culture of precaution.
Richard Tren (audience member):  Thanks.  Richard Tren from health advocacy called Africa Finding Malaria.  You’ve speculated a lot about Europe and the US, but I’m interested in how these fears translate into or get transferred to poor countries.  Roger’s already spoken about DDT and malaria, but there are other cases like the Zambian, ex-Zambian president Levy Mwanawasa refused GM food because he said these were poisons.  And even though there was large-scale famine in Zambia at the time, he refused any kind of donated food.  Can you talk about how those kinds of fears have translated into countries where the risks are completely different to what you face, like from starvation or insect-borne diseases?
Frank Furedi:  Yeah.  I think that the fears and the risks are very complex because on the one hand, you have the old fears where people are scared about natural phenomenon much more than we are in Europe.  For example, in a place like India, you would have hysterical panic about an invasion of monkeys, sort of, and word gets around in whole cities, and urban areas just get shut down for two, three days because they’re worried about dangerous man-monkeys marauding the streets.
So you have those kinds of fears and risks, but in addition to that, what you also have is the globalized one.  So a poor country like Zambia is bombarded with the old-fashioned, traditional risk that kind of dominate everyday people’s lives.  But in addition to that, they also get non-governmental organizations, the western media, transmitting all those other dangers which the elite of those countries internalize to a greater or lesser extent and, therefore, in a sense, they’re penalized doubly.  You still have the old ones but they also suffer from the new ones.  In that sense, they are paying a disproportionally higher price for the precautionary principle than we are in the west. 
Roger Bate:  The answer to the question before that made me think of, and perhaps you could comment on this, social anthropologists, or at least people like Wodaski, characterize the environment in a broader sense, whether it be your neighborhood or a more broader and larger ecosystems as being you either perceive them as being fragile or more robust.  And the culture may change your perception of whether you think that your environment, be it local or far wider, is either fragile or robust.  Do you think that our perceptions in Europe and the United States are that the world around us is more fragile than we thought it was before?  Do you think that actually plays into any of the cultural aspects or is that entirely different?
Frank Furedi:  I think in many ways, it’s more powerful in the United States at the cultural level because if you go to any bookshop in any airport, any small town, and you look at the books that are being sold, for example, I think it’s quite interesting a disproportioned number of the books that are best sellers are about the tipping point, about the collapse of this, about running out of oil, about the influenza.  Have you noticed the number of books that are selling really well that are about natural disasters that happened in America a long time ago, like hurricanes this and earthquakes that, and the 1918 influenza?  It’s almost seen as a moral tale about the world we live in today, and I think that’s, and in popular culture, King Kong, sort of all these films you see, it’s there all the time.
It is to me an extremely worrying development because what it leads to is a very powerful misanthropic culture which we see again both in Europe and America where increasingly, we’ve pulled a human intervention by definition is destructive.  All the metaphors we use, what ecological footprints always assumes that the very act of being humanly active,  of creating industries, new technologies, are going to destroy the earth that we’re living in, and therefore on balance, we make the Earth even weaker and more fragile than it was rather than more powerful.  I think that imagination is very powerful, particularly among young kids.  It’s very, very strong.
Roger Bate:  Next question, John.  And then right at the back.
Jon Entine (from audience):  Hi, I’m Jon Entine with AEI.  You’ve talked about the precautionary culture in the United States and Europe and also reflected a bit on the developing world.  I wondered if you’ve examined this in an Asian context.  I’m curious because the stereotype is that Asians are very risk-averse yet, at least for a period in the 70s and 80s, they were known for innovation, technological innovation and so forth, and obviously more recently there’s a more sense that it’s a much more scleric [sounds like] culture.  So I wondered if you could reflect, if you have reflected on Asian versus United States and Europe.
Frank Furedi:  I think that’s an area where an organization like the AEI could make a lot of difference.  And the reason why I said that is because China, for example, or India, are in between the past and the present because on the one hand, especially amongst young people, you find a very powerful, very robust, innovative, creative, risk-taking attitude and it really reminds me of what the immigrants that came to the United States in the past must have been like [indiscernible] I mean in many, many, many respects, and you find that there’s a lot of scientific and intellectual questioning.  My book sells better in China than anywhere else, which will be a good story.
There’s a lot of interest in risk-taking and the trouble is, is that this is not being challenged by western culture and the influence of the global media.  So you have a situation where, increasingly, Chinese university students come to England or the United States and they pick up what they see in everyday American or British culture, and they’d go back changed.  They still got a bit of go [sounds like] about them but they kind of go back a little bit changed because they’ve internalized a lot of the stuff.  And what you can begin to see happening now in India and China is bit by bit, our precautionary ideals are getting greater and greater influence, particularly through the work of non-governmental organizations.
There are more NGOs in China than there are rats, I mean there are millions of these organizations and they’re all promoting various, the usual causes of precaution in different kind of areas and they are very influential because they’re underground and they have access to the academia, they have access to the cultural elites there.  And although they don’t have a dominant influence yet, I can easily see that that kind of dynamics can change, which is why it’s never too early for other counter-influences to challenge that and to point out that in the west, there are different attitudes towards risk-taking and towards precaution as well. 
Roger Bate:  [indiscernible] question at the back.
Robert Beams (audience member):  Robert Beams [phonetic], energy consultant.  I’m wondering whether, perhaps presently because of the advantage our legal system gives to the defense over the offense, one doesn’t have to draw distinction between the precautionary principle as a blocking principle and the precautionary principle as a basis for affirmative act.  A lawyer of congress [sounds like], Judge Posner within the last year or two, wrote a book called… the word “catastrophe” appears somewhere in the title, arguing for example that we under-invest against the threat of being hit by a very low probability but large impact.
At a more mundane level, we are much better at blocking the storage of nuclear waste than we are at strengthening the levies of New Orleans against a category 4 [indiscernible].  And the difference I think is in the first case, all you have to do is… we’re very good at that in our legal system.  We’re not very good perhaps in taking account events that are unlikely to occur before the next election to make affirmative steps to reduce the risk.
Frank Furedi:  Now, I think you’re right.  I think the kind of dynamic precaution regulation is towards celebrating inaction, not doing something, rather than actually doing something.  That’s always the case and, therefore, in a perverse sense, it means that insofar as safety is an issue, the resources often get directed in areas where they can make very little difference, where you have entirely ritualistic kind of character to it rather than making us more robust and more safe in the long run.
Tony Gillen (from audience):  Thank you.  Tony Gillen from the Institute of Ideas in London.  Jut going back to the discussion about comparison between Europe and America, just one small example from my own experience.  Some years ago, I was invited by the United States State Department to go on a tour of America for three weeks to learn about biotechnology over here.  It was part of a European group of 15 people who they hope to convince about the benefits of biotechnology.  They didn’t realize that they didn’t really need to take me on a nice freebie to do that.  But as it happened, it was at a time of a major outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in the UK which was handled very badly and I was rather struck by the huge number of questions we were asked and the forms that we have to fill in about whether I’ve been within 10 miles of a farm in the last six months, in case we imported or exported, rather, foot-and-mouth disease to America.  So, I think there are clearly instances of precaution in both countries, but for me rather than trade examples of where one country is more precautionary than the other, it’s really the question of how we discuss these issues and it comes to the point that you raised, Frank, about the meaning attached to risk and the precaution principle, because it certainly strikes me that in Europe at least, there is a discussion about meaning in relation to risk.
So for example, environmentalists might say, “Well, we need to be more risk-averse because we need to demonstrate more humility towards the planet.  We need to be less arrogant.”  Indeed, the major scientists now within the Royal Academy would say very, very similar things, picking up from what they regard as public sentiment.  They will argue that we haven’t been humble enough and, yes, we need science but we also need to hold back more, and there is a discussion about the meanings attached to things that takes place within Europe, and I’m not convinced that the same discussion does take place within America.
There seem to be precautionary attitudes but it’s more discussed in terms of trade walls.  I mean that’s what I keep hearing about in terms of precaution, particularly relating to GMOs, this is a trade issue, and I wonder whether there’s a less appreciation of the cultural meaning being attached to risk in the United States than there in Europe. 
Frank Furedi:  And I think where you can see a big difference is in Europe, you have a precautionary principle that’s systematized and institutionalized.  In the United States, you don’t have that institutionalized or presented in a systematic fashion.  I think that tells you the fact that here, things just happen informally and haphazardly.  Whereas in Europe, we feel the need to codify a particular sensibility and that’s really where meaning work becomes quite important. 
Nick Schulz (audience member):  Nick Schulz from TCS Daily.  I have a political question for you.  I’m inclined to agree with most of the things that you’re saying, yet my wife and my neighbors think that I’m crazy for thinking the things that I do, so I want to get it, sort of the political arguments that have resonance and that don’t and in particular, you brought up the illustration of how nobody hitchhikes anymore and this is one of the things that we have lost from an overly cautious or precautionary culture.  There aren’t that many illustrations like that or at least there aren’t many of the ones that I think are important that seem to have much resonance with people.  For example, you say an overly, a precautionary principle leads to drugs that take 10 years to come to market instead of two or never come to market and then people die because of that and they’re very real-world consequences.  Those sorts of arguments seem to have less resonance or currentcy than imagined horrors that come from technological change, the man-monkey hybrid you were talking about.
Could you talk a little bit about why you think that’s the case, why do these intellectual arguments seem to have less political currency in terms of political argument?
Frank Furedi:  Yeah, I’m really glad you said that because the question you raised is the question that inspired and motivates all my work at the moment because I recognize that you cannot win the argument, particularly with the younger generations and they’re the ones that are really important.  Just by talking about the great sort of innovation of a particular product, that doesn’t mean very much to people.
I think that people are touched by existential matters, ones that pertain to the everyday life, one that they could sort of smell and feel and hear, and that is why I think the cultural dynamic is so important, because the way that people in everyday life can be won over to more future-oriented risk-taking sort of approach is if they can see that it makes a very big difference in their lives.  Now, what I’ve done in my own work, and probably it’s been my most successful bit of my work, the one that, in fact, I never talk about in these kinds of circles, is I wrote a book a few years ago called Paranoid Parenting.  It was a book entirely about child-rearing and the reason why I wrote that wasn’t necessarily because I’m that interested in child-rearing as a science, but basically because as a father, you realize that your child is going to have a very different life than you had when you were a child, and basically by discussing childhood and the way in which children today do things that would’ve been unthinkable 20, 30 years ago and there are so many things that they are no longer allowed to do and the consequences of that, you can really engage with people because there are millions of parents out there.  I think most parents, even if they’re captured by the environmentalist imagination, understand that there’s something wrong when their 12-year-olds has never been out on the street on their own.  Something is weird.  You got 13-year-old girls, and I’ve interviewed 13-year-old girls in England who never went shopping by themselves, ever.  Even with mum, they’re going to go in to shop and buy a piece of bread for 10 pence.  That wasn’t part of their lives.
So I think there are, when you actually look at the world around us, there are many, many things that are going on that are influenced by precautionary culture, from the way you relate to professionals, to doctors, to nurses, relations of trust, the way they kind of get broken down by them.  I think that’s really where we got a sort of kind of talk about as well because the way that precaution is structured in terms of a personal relationship is exactly the same as it’s structured in relation to the oil industry or to the nuclear energy industry or anything else.  It’s the same dynamic, it just takes on a different form.  I think we have got to learn to do that in order to gain a new audience, particularly the younger generations, and particularly to appeal to their desire to do things, which young people still have.  And I could go on and on about this.  My favorite example is competitive sports, which I think somebody else is going to talk about it, which is an area where I always thought that the last area in the world where you couldn’t get enough competition is sports, right?  Because it doesn’t make any sense at all but we’re not… because of the precautionary principle, we’re not having major discussions about how the two things shouldn’t go hand-in-hand so you just have non-competitive sports and just imagine what that is and in the break, I’ll give you examples of what non-competitive sports are.
Roger Bate:  Monty Python did that.  About 30 years ago, the football game from philosophers.  Last question from Bob, in front here.
Bob Hershey (audience member):  I’m Bob Hershey.  I’m a consultant.  To what extent can you alleviate the problem by getting into quantitative things of showing the probability of a certain event and, say, comparing it to getting hit by lightning or getting killed in a traffic accident?
Frank Furedi:  I hate to say this, but it makes absolutely no difference and I think the whole risk management endeavor to do that has failed and the reason why it has failed is because people are not interested in quantitative examples and in fact, we often forget that people are quantitavely quite sophisticated.  So for example, in England, I know a lot of people who are very risk-averse and people say, “Well, they’re just really stupid because they don’t know the facts.”  But actually, the same people when they go into the… we got these offices where you can do spread betting or you can bet on races and everything else and these people are very, very good at working out the odds and the risks and everything else when it comes to making a bet, but at the same time when it comes to these big issues about harm, they’re switching off completely.  I think the reason why they switch off completely is because the reason why we react the way that we do has got nothing to do with stats and numbers.
It’s got to do with very powerful cultural forces that play upon our imagination, and what’s really interesting and I’m prepared to bet any of you in this room my $100 against your $1, that everybody in this room must have some risk-averse area in their life.  I mean you can talk and talk about [indiscernible] against the precautionary principle, but you can still be the worst, the most over-anxious father.  So when you got home or you get home and you end up not eating certain foods even though deep inside you know that statistically, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t eat it.  We’ve all internalized an aspect of this culture.  Nobody has really transcended this and I think so when we understand that, we have to realize that the battle ground is not statistics or numbers.  I think the battleground has got to do with taking up the cultural premise of these ideals and give up a counter story to them. 
Roger Bate:  Well, thank you very much Frank for, I think, opening this conference up with a great start.  Thank you very much indeed.  Okay, we’re going to have a very, very brief break now.  I’ll make sure that we start at 10:30, which I think is about seven or eight minutes away.  So have a quick coffee.  Thanks.  
 
Panel 1: Culture and Education
Panelists Christina Hoff Sommers and Claire Fox

Jon Entine (introduction):  I wonder if everyone could please take their seats.  We want to get going on the conference, please.  Excuse me, if everyone could please take their seats.  Thank you.  Actually, I want to make a plug for Frank’s book.  He was too modest to do that, but if you check in your brochures, you will see that there is a little handout for his book, The Politics of Fear.  I highly recommend that in Amazon, Barnes and Noble, barnes&noble.com, whatever, it is a great book.  We are not allowed to sell these books here, so you have to go to the bookstore or wherever to pick up a copy of it.  And again, the book, Let Them Eat Precaution which deals that a lot of issues we are talking about today written by Europeans, by Americans, different perspectives on the science of the precautionary principles specifically related to biotechnology.  It is also available at bookstores Amazon and so forth.  I’m debating if we should raffle off a couple of copies before the end of the day, we’ll decide that.
We want to begin the next part of our conference and we are going to be addressing issues of our precautionary culture and as it applies to culture and education, and we have as our Moderator, Chuck Freund, he is a senior editor at Reason which most of you know as a monthly magazine on politics and culture.  I would explain Chuck’s history and bio in great detail but you all have copies of the bio in your pamphlets.  So Chuck, I will let you take it from here.
Charles Paul Freund (moderator):  Thank you very much.  I welcome all of you to the second session of our look at precautionism and our second stage of AEI’s Panic Attack.  Frank did us a great service by introducing the notion of paranoid parenting because the fact of the matter is that much of the coverage in this country of paranoia as policy, much the coverage of the precautionary principle is usually in terms of science.  It is usually in terms of research, it is often in terms of environmental concerns and it is often in terms of regulation and legislation. 
In fact, for the next hour, we will be taking a look at how and increasing aversion to risk has been manifesting itself in cultural terms, particularly in raising and in educating the kids and other aspects of childhood.  I’m sure we have all had an opportunity to observe aspects of this.  We see the neighbor’s kid outfitting himself in knee pads, elbow pads, big thick helmet, seemingly readying himself for the rigors of the Indianapolis five hundred, when in fact he is just going to up and down sidewalk in front of his house on a tricycle.  Sure that those of you of whoever strapped a second grader into a car seat have had the opportunity to ponder the precautionary principle.  The same may be said, each of us has encountered in our daily lives, series of very well publicized addictions or so called addictions.  If it lay and wait for children and lay and wait for adolescence, who seemingly are unable to comfort them.  Violent television imagery, bellicose video games, the internet, ads like pokemon are just a few of the things that are demonstrative of the extraordinary fragility the childhood now seems to feature.  So I, for one, have heard very little about post-Pokemon syndrome, among the veterans of that past time and it may be that the original coverage of this threat preceded from mistaken principle.
So those are just some of the aspects of cultural precautionism that we will not be hearing about in the course of the morning from our two speakers, Claire Fox and Christina Hoff Sommers.  We will be looking at issues of childhood and of education to the prism of precaution.  Claire will speak to a manner in which pervasive, a pervasive culture of panic and caution has been distorting the way that society organizes the education and care of its children.  And Christina will address the hazards of protecting children from hazards.
Claire joins us from the UK.  She is the founder and Director of the Institute of Ideas which she established to create a public space where ideas can be contested without constraint, and she has brought that public space with her to this room, the Institute of Ideas as a public policy think-tank that organizes conferences, publishes books on issues ranging from science to education to child care now, where did you hear about that.  She launched the Institute of Ideas in the year 2000 or when she was co-publisher of the journal that was mentioned in the previous session, ground breaking, controversial and in my opinion very much missed magazine, LM.  Claire is a panelist on BBC Radio Four, writes for Britain’s leading newspapers.  Let’s welcome her to our session.

Claire Fox:  I am delighted to be here.  I wanted to take an issue around the inflation of fears and scaremongering, which I think is a serious problem and that is around the issue of child safety.  At a superficial level, I think we, there is some awareness in society that we are all over-protecting children.  I know in the UK, that now it is very difficult to do real science experiments in classrooms because of health and safety regulations.  They seem to be too hazardous.  There is a fear of litigation in relation to allowing children to go on school trips and play school games that schools are sort of sued for, like Johnny getting hurt on the rugby pitch and so on.  And we have already heard Frank Furedi talk about paranoid parenting and unsupervised play being unusual for young people.  And there is talk of a generation of cotton wool kids trained in risk aversion.
However, there is one area in relation to risk and panics, in relation to children’s safety, that is rarely challenged.  And that is in relation to child abuse and child protection.  I have to have a clarification here of my terminology.  In Europe, child protection is the term that is used to describe policies and services which safeguard children from sexual predators and physical cruelty and violence. And it is understandable that, perhaps, when it comes to these rather sensitive and difficult debates around abuse, that there is very little opposition to the panic attack.  And it is so nerve wrecking that I almost did not choose this as my example because I thought, you know, maybe they will think I am kind of acting as some kind of apologist for pedophilia.  But, you know, he wants to say we are overreacting when it comes to abuse of children because surely only a monster could have post policies designed to protect children from abuse.
Well, I am not a monster.  But, I do think, and my thesis is that panics around child abuse do need to be challenged because they are culturally key to the inflation of risk in society.  An example of this inflation greeted me when I arrived in New York the other evening.  I was kind of off watching the storm and a kind of advert with a big headline came on saying, “Child abuse is an epidemic in the USA.”  Is an epidemic, everywhere you look there is child abuse.  And it is that kind of inflation of something that I want to explore.
In truth, things like child sexual abuse and physical violence against children are extremely rare events.  However, they are being generalized, and particularly in Europe, are now turned into policy, a policy which preaches that every child is at risk from everyone.  In 2003, the UK government introduced The Children’s Bill which was based on a document called “Every Child Matters.”  This was a document that was brought in after in response to the murder of an 8-year-old child, Victoria Climbie who was tortured and brutalized by her great aunt and her partner.  It was a horrific crime that shocked the nation.  I mean, it partly shocked us because it was so rare.  However it, as Frank Furedi indicated earlier, immediately almost led to a widespread set of legislation.  And the legislation is not just a new policy, but has introduced a new philosophy to how we view children which is called the preventative approach, the idea that we need to be cautious about every child’s safety and then to begin earlier to prevent harm, to make sure that nobody slips through the net.  So the government minister who launched this new legislation, Margaret Hodge, she was the Children’s Minister at the time, says, “We want to reform child protection and children’s services to best protect children from the risk of harm.  We want to shift the balance to prevention by providing support for all families because every child matters.”
So you can hear the key words there: risk, prevention, and a call to all families and every child.  So now, in relation to child abuse, instead of a targeted intervention to protect the minority children at risk, we have a message that all children are at risk.  I want to look at the consequences that the inflation of fear around children and abuse through examples I draw from child protection policies and sports clubs as a slightly unusual place to start.  But I thought that this kind of game is a prism on education and also, interestingly enough, although it is very institutionalized in Europe, these kind of policies, I checked out that practically every sport that I could think of is American Sports Club, had child protection way bang on the front of their website.  So although it may not be a regulation here, it is very much a focus.
In 2001 in the United Kingdom, the government formed something called the Child Protection in Sport unit, which is run by Sport England and the National Society with the Prevention of Cruelty to Children.  It launched a report which hit the headlines, which said that sports clubs were being deliberately targeted by pedophiles and that clubs have a tendency to cover this up.  As a consequence, it is now a policy that all sports organizations in Britain have to adopt a model child protection policy to receive public money, and as they all rely on public money, that means all sports clubs.
The point of the child protection policies is that they are a detailed regulation of behavior between adults in sports clubs and young people who are members of them.  And all of this is done to prove that clubs are free from abuse.  The implicit implication and my first concern is the idea that child abuse is not the exception but the rule.  For example, the model code of conduct that all of these sports clubs have to adopt is that this club and organization recognizes that anyone may have the potential to abuse children in some way.  So, anyone and everyone is in the frame.  And there is a serious danger of losing perspective here.  For example, the degree to which abuse is prevalent is often based on confusing statistics.  In that same Sports England report, they talked of 179 complaints over the first four months of the year covering eight sports.  Sounds a lot, but there was no breakdown in that, about whether those complaints were valid or upheld.  And when you consider that in the UK, only two percent of the complaints against teachers are actually upheld in court, and of these, a child is defined as a person under age 18, you might want to just look at this again.  Okay, if a teacher of 25 has a relationship with a 17-year-old girl, this might be distasteful but it is hardly on the par with a rate of a 10-year-old.  And I think child abuse as a label is an unhealthful category.  But despite this ropey statistics, Steve Boocock, the director of the Child Protection in Sport unit concludes, “I think this total significantly underestimate the real extent of the problem and emphasize that harassment and abuse often go unreported.”
So the message is constantly that the problem of abuse is much worse than anyone can imagine.  It does not matter what the statistics tell us, it is rampant.  It is an epidemic and all of the literature hypes up the threat.  This leads to my second concern, and that concern is what constitutes the definition of abuse which is now incredibly broad.  And the term “abuse” in today’s context is used in a hopelessly unspecific way.  It covers behavior ranging from “the model code,” resting of an adult’s hands on a child’s shoulder for longer than deemed appropriate to the sexual molestation of toddlers.
The problem here is that we empty out language of the power to shock.  We rob ourselves of the words we need to make important distinctions.  We hear the word abuse full of the connotations of horror that that throws up and we think the worst.  But in contemporary culture, we need to be aware of the fact that abuse now carries a huge weight of meanings.  The Child Protection in Sport unit admits that there is no generally accepted professional definitions of what constitutes harassments or abuse, which is convenient for them because they can make it up as they go along and to use the term abuse in an incredibly promiscuous way.  But it is actually rather amusing to see how it is used.  [indiscernible] football club, which is a kind of minor league football club in Scotland, a kind of a working-class football club, says that sexual abuse in football includes “exposure to sexually explicit inappropriate language, jokes, or pornographic material.”  So there is an awful lot of sexual abuse going on in Scotland because if anyone has been in the locker room of a football club, I can tell you, it is rather rich in their language codes.  The official literature actually goes on to admit that only a small number of child abuse cases in sport involve pedophilia.  And in fact, the majority of allegations relate, not to physical or sexual assaults, but to the more subjective and vague category of bullying and verbal and emotional abuse.
So the model code lists on the verbal abuse:  The use of sarcasm, criticism of performance or giving negative feedback, shouting at a child for misbehaving, which leads to my third concern.  The broadening of abuse in this way ends up demonizing any assertion of adult authority.  In child protection discourse, abuse and authority are almost interchangeable concepts.  A leading child abuse professional in the UK, Peter Saunders, who runs the National Association for People Abused in Childhood, and has been a government adviser on setting up the sports code, he argues to “people who are abusive are going to be attracted to positions of power.”  He goes on to cite a long list of likely abusers:  Doctors, policemen, GPs, lawyers, and priests.  This is [indiscernible] in much of the literature in sports.  I know with interest that the USA’s Wrestling Association’s policy on abuse defines harassment as “asserting unwarranted power or authority over another, whether intended or not,” which either was rather the point of wrestling myself.  But anyway, also in the literature, coaching is now assumed to be implicitly autocratic and abusive, and I quote, “Coaches exert authority over young athletes and they are, therefore, in an ideal position to exploit them and abuse them.”
These kinds of definitions completely neuter the ability of adults to discipline children.  Therefore, and because of this, we can see the discipline itself is falling under the abuse category and is having a paralyzing impact on all sorts of professions.  Certainly in Europe, teachers have now lost confidence in dealing with misbehaving pupils for fear that they will be accused of abusive behavior.  But it also has serious implications with sport.  Sports coaches are warned only to give enthusiastic and constructive feedback because negative criticisms and personalized comments are damaging and abusive.  Even having high aspirations for young athletes and allowing them to achieve their potential by pushing them beyond where they are spontaneously is now problematized by the phrase, “over-training.”  Coaches are told “putting children under pressure to perform to unrealistically high standards is a form of emotional abuse."  It is even argued that emotional abuse includes an over-emphasis on winning, which bodes rather badly for future UK sporting successes, I suggest.
My fourth concern about the promiscuous use of the term abuse is where we cannot make the distinction, for example, between abuse and carrying discipline or even the demands of a sporting discipline, is that it creates a climate of paranoia and inevitably leads to a breakdown of trust.
Let us consider parents for a minute.  Parents are now besieged by warnings of the potential dangers to their offspring.  On the Child Protection in Sport website, there is a section on parental advice that has a checklist for signs of abuse, and it asks, “Is your child sulky or moody, irritable, depressed or sad, lacking energy, aggressive, always tired or sleeping too much?  They might be a victim of abuse.”  On that basis, the parents of every stroppy, angst-ridden teenager might well panic.  And even if your child starts doing well at sport and the coach is pleased with them, there is no room for complacency or celebration because parents are warned, “he or she may describe receiving special attention from the adult.  That suggests they are being groomed for future abuse."  What a nasty and mean-spirited conclusion.  But, more importantly, it encourages parents to be suspicious and fear the worst.  This means that parents are constantly on the lookout for either adults as potential abusers and look at everybody with suspicious eyes.
 Under the heading in the parent’s section, “How you can make sports safe,” you are advised to focus entirely on child protection, how well are the staff trained?  Not in the sport, not whether they have a qualification in basketball or swimming but have they been sent on a child protection awareness workshop.  Parents are told to demand written codes of behavior and to investigate every complaint from their child and to look at the boundaries existing between relationships.  And that is, we are told, reassuring to parents.  I would suggest it creates a climate of absolute paranoia and panic and it is no wonder parents worry and become mistrustful.  But parent’s suspicions of those who work with their children has [indiscernible] the other way around in the way that those who work with children are now encouraged to view parents.
In the UK’s Every Child Matters policy that I talked about, they have now settled child safety committees in every locality made up of representatives of all professionals from the voluntary and the statutory sets who work with children.  Those include everyone from teachers to careers advisers to guess what, even sports coaches.  And the idea of these committees is that they get to together and they pool information about children and their families.  They have to flag up any low threshold concerns.
I am using an electronic database which now exists for every child in the UK.  Two flags have showed concern can trigger preventative intervention.  Categories include:  The family who lives in poor housing, family or peers are involved in alcohol culture, negative home influence on education.  The government minister renounced this policy, used an example of a doctor, a GP, thinking that a toddler was underweight, a nursery nurse, who noticed that that same child looked miserable.  She said, this government minister, you put those two items together and you realize something could be going on in that home.
So this is an open light for professional intervention into the family.  I think that atmosphere of paranoia where adult solidarity breaks down and where parents are being spied on by professionals and professionals are spying on parents and so on, is incredibly damaging to a mutual trust over adults which seems to me to be the cornerstone of any kind of community or society.  It is the breakdown of adult solidarity when it comes to socializing and indeed protecting children.  And I think that that is inevitably going to make children more vulnerable because if you see a child wandering around on their own in the UK, you do not invite them in and look after them because you are frightened of how it will be interpreted.
If a parent actually has a child who has a knock on their heads, they are unlikely to take them to the A&E because they may fear it will flag up an area of concern and lead to the social workers knocking on the door.  But I also think that this is likely to destroy and poison the relationship between adults and young people themselves.  I think it is a horrible situation that adults who work with children are now looking at them as a potential threat to their jobs.  Coaches are constantly saying, “I will not touch that child.  I would not have anything to do with that child in case they accuse me.”  My friend Jenny who is a primary school teacher now will not give a lift home to any child after sports activities without having written permission from the child’s parents and without getting reassurance from the head teacher that they will not be prosecuted.
So at every level, it seems to me, these things feed into creating paranoia.  And I just want to finish by asking, what exactly are we teaching children here?  What is the lesson that we are giving young people when we have this unpleasant obsession with child safety?  Surely we are telling children that they must be forever fearful.  That actually, that they are going to be continually victims, that they must look at all of the relationships they have with adults through suspicious eyes.
I think that if we allow the culture of fear to be ingrained into young people in this way, then actually we are going to lose the culture war against the precautionary principle.  And even though having a discussion about child abuse in today's climate is quite nerve-wracking, I do think it is a necessary one to take on.  Thank you very much.
Charles Paul Freund (moderator):  Claire, I have a quick question.
Claire Fox:  Yes.
Charles Paul Freund:  The question that I have, perhaps you addressed the manner in which the notion of abuse has greatly expanded in Britain.  I wonder if, as is the case here in some contexts, the notion of childhood is expanding along with it.  When people talk about issues such as smoking, for example, 18-year-olds are often referred to as kids, despite the fact that they’re not kids under very many other circumstances, so that the issue of victimization can expand.  So is something similar happening rhetorically in the UK along with the notion of expansion of abuse?
Claire Fox:  In fact, at a technical level and in policy terms, the original way that that shifted was when the kind of abusive relationships were removed, the age range went down, so abusive relationships was any child under 18 that you were working with.  This then has kind of been expanded so that it has all to do with power relationships so that in most universities now, it is frowned upon to have a relationship between a member of staff and a student because it seemed to be automatically an abusive relationship.
But I think, so in that sense, you can say that even at the technical level, the kind of idea of protecting people because they are vulnerable as though they were children is getting larger and larger.  But I think anyway, the example was used about hitchhiking.  I think one of the problems is that young people are, I think, being taught a lack of resilience and in fact, one of the things that I wanted to make a point with is that there is now this thing called peer abuse, which is bullying.
Bullying, I used to always think meant getting your head kicked in and somebody stealing your dinner money but actually, the new definition of bullying follows the same pattern which is exclusion from friendship group, sarcasm, name-calling, somebody calls you four-eyes, and you know, these kind of things.  The reason I mentioned that is because when you have a generation of young people who are being bred on this… this is by the way part of the national curriculum.  I mean this has to be taught.  A state school will fail in a government’s inspection if it does not have statutory anti-bullying policies.  And although this is not quite the same in America, I hasten to add that at all the websites I looked at now, bullying is said to be the new big thing that should be introduced into schooling here.  And even President Bush had been working the way on one of those ribbons, which is one of the initiatives that says that Columbine was caused by bullied children.   So, bullying is the key issue.  And then they go to university and there, as it happens, you can see that they are constantly seeing themselves as vulnerable victims and, therefore, children.  So I think it does expand upwards.
Charles Paul Freund:  Thanks very much.  I have a couple of more things and we will get to them in just a bit but we are going to turn to Christina Hoff Sommers, who is well known to many of you.  She is, of course, a resident scholar here at AEI, a professor of philosophy at Clark.  Christina specializes in ethics, in contemporary moral theory.  She is the author of many scholarly articles, as well as two ground-breaking books that have been the source of a great deal of constructive attention, Who Stole Feminism and The War Against Boys, along with her scholarly articles in specialized journals.  She is also the author of a piece that appeared under one of my favorite headlines, Is Maureen Dowd Necessary?
Christina Hoff Sommers:  I ended up saying a few nice things on that one.
Charles Paul Freund:  Yes, [indiscernible].
Christina Hoff Sommers:  She has her purposes.

Christina Hoff Sommers:  American children are now the most buckled up, belted, helmeted, padded, zero-tolerance kids in history.  And in recent years, this vigilance, this hyper-protectiveness has intensified and it now encompasses their physical and emotional safety, not only their physical but also their emotional safety.  Many well-meaning adults try to insulate children not only from physical harm, which any responsible adult will do, but they try to protect them from even remote possibilities of disappointment, hurt feelings, stress, slights to their self-esteem.
What I will show is that many of these efforts to shelter kids from psychological risks are misguided and may actually put them in harm’s way.  Thomas Friedman, the New York Times columnist and best-selling author, tells a story about the different way that immigrant parents approached a parent-teacher conference and American-born parents.  An official from a multiethnic school in California told him that parents from India are almost always unhappy with the amount of homework.  They think it is too little, there should be more homework.  Parents from Chinese are distressed about the textbooks.  They tell them that in China they are much more rigorous and advanced and they almost always have a complaint about the textbooks.  American-born parents, by contrast, worry that there is too much homework, the classes are too demanding, the expectations too high.  "My child is under too much stress."  That is the common refrain.  Which parents have the more legitimate concern?  The media tends to side with the American parents, not always, but typically.  They side with this idea that American children are under duress.  The preponderance of evidence suggests that in fact, it is the immigrant parents who are right.
A few years ag