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The German sociologist Ulrich Beck (1944–2015) also rejects postmodernism. Rather than living in a world ‘beyond the modern’, we are moving into a phase of what he calls ‘the second modernity’. Beck’s social theory of a ‘second modernity’ refers to the fact that modern institutions are becoming global, while everyday life is breaking free from the hold of tradition and custom. The old industrial society is disappearing and is being replaced by a ‘risk society’.

Beck is not arguing that the contemporary world is more risky than that of previous ages. Rather, it is the nature of the risks we must face that is changing. Risk now derives less from natural dangers or hazards than from our own social development and by the development of science and technology. For example, global warming represents possibly the most serious environmental issue today. Yet the scientific consensus is that this is not a simple natural disaster but the product of excessive greenhouse gases from industrial pollution and modern transportation emissions over the past 250 years. Popular science writers have dubbed such problems the ‘revenges of nature’.

The advance of science and technology creates new risk situations that are very different from those of previous ages. Science and technology obviously provide us with many benefits. Yet they create risks that are hard to measure. Thus no one quite knows what the risks involved in the development of new technologies, such as gene therapy or nanotechnology, might be. Supporters of genetically modified crops, for example, claim that at best they give us the possibility of ending malnutrition in the world’s poorest countries and providing cheap food for everyone. Sceptics claim that they could have dangerous, unintended health consequences.

In March 2011, a magnitude 9.0 earthquake off the coast of Japan caused a tsunami which crashed into the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, resulting in three nuclear meltdowns and the release of radioactive material. While earthquakes and tsunamis have always been a risk on the east coast of Japan, our development of nuclear power plants made this a much more serious disaster and has created much greater risk.

Beck’s ideas on risk are discussed in more detail in chapter 5, ‘The Environment’.

According to Beck, an important aspect of the risk society is that its hazards are not restricted spatially, temporally or socially. Today’s risks affect all countries and all social classes; they have global, not merely personal, consequences. Terrorist attacks have impacted on the extent to which people think of their communities as being at risk from extreme violence. The fear of terrorism created inertia in economies around the world, particularly in the months after the attacks of September 2001 (9/11), as businesses became reluctant to risk large-scale investment. Terrorist attacks also changed the assessment that states made over the balance between the freedom of its citizens and their security, with many curtailing civil liberties to increase surveillance of potential terrorist threats.

Many decisions taken at the level of everyday life have also become infused with risk. Risk and gender relations are actually closely linked, as many uncertainties have entered the relationships between the sexes (see chapter 15, ‘Families and Intimate Relationships’). A generation ago, in the developed societies, marriage was a fairly straightforward process of life transition – people moved from being unmarried to being married, and this was assumed to be a fairly permanent situation. Today, many people live together without getting married, and divorce rates are relatively high. Anyone contemplating a relationship with another person must take these facts into account and must calculate the risk, setting the likelihood of happiness and security against an uncertain backdrop.