If anything is more pervasive in our cultures today than the concept of technology to explain, legitimate and predict or enforce visions for the future I think it is the concept of risk.  Risk is a modern concept, but it can be found in the ideas of dread, threat, uncertainty…  What is new today is that understanding risk is felt to be determinate.  As people think they can predict their own understanding of risk — e.g. how people react, how systems develop, how forces may counter each other — so too the idea of risk somehow becomes more tame.  It’s very odd.  The more we try to reconcile ourselves to indeterminacy, to the irrationality of nature, the more we want to humanize risk.   We can’t accept risk so we need to buffer it’s equivocalness by rationalizing our reactions.

There is a growing frustration among some people who are aware of this perhaps innate inclination to soften and frame risk in finance.  Alfred North Whitehead said once that science was fundamentally an activity predicated on faith — a faith in the rational, “that there is an underlying order to the universe” that can be discovered.   In our times, that faith might similarly and perversely be felt by financiers who need to convince clients and the general public that the faith in the market can likewise be rational.   It’s not true.