The gravest modern dangers are counterfactually unreal and thus numbing

Evidence

The heavily counterfactual character of the most consequential risks is closely bound up with the numbness that a listing of them tends to promote. In mediaeval times, the invention of hell and damnation as the fate of the unbeliever in the afterlife was “real.” Yet things are different with the most catastrophic dangers which face us today. The greater the danger, measured not in terms of probability of occurrence but in terms of its generalised threat to human life, the more thoroughly counterfactual it is. The risks involved are necessarily “unreal,” because we could only have clear demonstration of them if events occurred that are too terrible to contemplate. Relatively small-scale events, such as the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki or the accidents at Three Mile Island or Chernobyl, give us some sense of what could happen. But these do not in any way bear upon the necessarily counterfactual character of other, more cataclysmic happenings—the main basis of their “unreality” and the narcotising effects produced by the repeated listing of risks. As Susan Sontag remarks, “A permanent modern scenario: apocalypse looms —and it doesn’t occur. And still it looms… . Apocalypse is now a long-running serial: not ‘Apocalypse Now’, but ‘Apocalypse from now on’ “. — Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, 325

Categorization

• XREF: The narcotising effect of counterfactual dangers echoes Stevens’s own psychological numbing — he can feel the ‘greatness’ of his service only by keeping the catastrophic scale of what he enabled unexamined. — connects to: Modernity’s core is an irreducible enigma that cannot be overcome — Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, 124; Intense present-mindedness makes advanced societies blind to their self-inflicted misfortunes.; The feeling that systematic knowledge is impossible stems from uncontrollable modern events, not epistemology — Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, 19

Broader Connections

• Intense present-mindedness makes advanced societies blind to their self-inflicted misfortunes. #expands (0.60)
• The feeling that systematic knowledge is impossible stems from uncontrollable modern events, not epistemology #corroborates (0.50) — Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, 19