Rediscovering Risk
The sniper murdering at will in the Washington area is a metaphor for the defining characteristic of our new era. It is not terrorism, not an unsteady economy, not the threat of a new war in Iraq -- not even the danger of random assassins. It is risk.</br></br>Though risk never vanished, we forgot about it in the 1990s. We effectively abolished large national risks -- though not small private risks -- through a series of public myths. We presumed that we could control our surroundings in ways that would provide a permanent security and allow most of us to retreat into our private worlds. Because this was a fantasy, we have become victims of our own delusions.</br></br>Myth number one was that, as the "sole remaining superpower," we were gradually molding the world in our image. After the Cold War, American ideas of democracy and economic freedom emerged triumphant. Global problems were increasingly distant and decreasingly dangerous, because more nations were thinking and acting like us.</br></br>A second myth was the "new economy." Economic anxieties declined as the stock market rose and unemployment fell. People felt liberated from traditional economic fears. Politics receded in importance -- it seemed less essential to people's well-being -- and became increasingly regarded as entertainment. For a while, it focused on the constitutional consequences of the president's sex drive.</br></br>All this involves, of course, breathtaking generalization. During these years, there were issues that mattered and dangers that intruded. We waged a small war in Kosovo; AIDS continued to advance; crime remained; Asia suffered a financial crisis. But in some ways, the exceptions seemed to confirm the retreat of risk. The air war in Kosovo was fought without American casualties; new drugs combated AIDS; crime declined; and the economy seemed resilient to Asia's crisis.