The classical paradigm of first modern society is that intellectual progress along a diversity of fronts will in the end yield a unified picture of the world, and furthermore one that evidences the universality of common principles. This model now stands refuted. This is the lesson that can be drawn tangentially from such disparate phenomena as the greenhouse effect, mad cow disease and the potential risks of globalized financial markets. Each sets off heated arguments among experts that typically can’t be resolved by gathering additional information, but instead deepen, widen and multiply themselves. New objects of investigation and new lines of research more often than not turn up new risks and side-effects, and in the process undermine not only the claims of rationality but also those of control. Rather than focusing on and resolving the crises, the established processes of ‘crisis resolution’ set off new chain reactions – loss of confidence, the collapse of markets, the struggle over assigning blame and the virtual abolition of borders – that further jam those mechanisms and set off even more turbulence, which has by this point become predictably unpredictable.
Ulrich Beck, Wolfgang Bonss, and Christoph Lau, The Theory of Reflexive Modernization
