Are we wired for disaster?

The terror attacks on the US left many feeling more vulnerable than ever before but, as Analysis presenter Felipe Fernández-Armesto explains, perhaps we are now better equipped to endure disasters.

Fragility is today's big concept in a world of unsteady nerves.

Catastrophic effects tumble from small causes: a few bad men or an unpredictable glitch. The world has survived one kind of fragility before - The Cold War - when a local dispute or a mistake could have triggered Mutually Assured Destruction.

Some signs suggest we are worse off now. Terror scars security. Accidents imperil eco-systems. Blips disrupt markets. Viruses roam technologies. Jitters become panics.

Yet as disasters multiply the world always seems to recover, like a dropped egg with the power to bounce.

September 11 did not have the expected catastrophic impact on business, after a brief heart-flutter the world returned to work. Regional economies run wild, but we corral the effects.

If, as it looks to be the case, the US economy and the global economy are in some recovery mode this year, that will actually be quite remarkable.

Dr Laura Tyson, Dean of London Business School

We have had computer-viruses but no computer Black Death. We have caused plagues, but have just about contained them. We have invited ecological apocalypse but have not yet entertained it.

So is fragility an analyst's buzz-word or a threat to the world? Two conflicting approaches divide opinion.

Flexible or breakable?

On the one hand, fragility is a property of complex systems. We live with increasingly complex systems in an ever more inter-connected world and, therefore, we face increasing fragility. The world is wired for disaster.

On the other hand complexity may be flexible, bendy rather than breakable. Where there are lots of connections many will be redundant or replicated, so opportunities to by-pass failures increase. Complexity breeds chaos, but chaos may be an environment for survival.

Dr Laura Tyson, Dean of the London Business School, points to what appears to be a rapid economic recovery following the terror attacks on the US as evidence our world is not so fragile.

She says: "If, as it looks to be the case, the US economy and the global economy are in some recovery mode this year, that will actually be quite remarkable. You get the sense of a great deal of robustness and flexibility."

I think the problem is that much of the fragility and much of the turbulence is happening almost by accident.

John Elkington, Chairman of SustainAbility

Lawrence Freedman, Professor of War Studies at London's King's College, is also optimistic, claiming stable democracies react well to crises.

He says: "Fragility in international politics really refers to the stability of political institutions, the ability of man-made organisations for ordering their affairs without having to resort to physical violence."

But John Elkington, Chairman of SustainAbility, and Sandie Thomas, Director of the Nuffield Council on Bio-ethics, believe we may be ill-equipped to detect threats, let alone react appropriately.

Mr Elkington says: "I think the problem is that much of the fragility and much of the turbulence is happening almost by accident- it's not directional, it's not strategic."

Personal crises

Sociologist-cum-psychotherapist Ian Craib of Essex University thinks fragility arises in the mind - in the nervous disorders of modern anomie, where social and political solutions cannot reach.

September 11th left many feeling vulnerable

"People have to deal with their individual crises and their individual situations more by themselves than ever before, and I think that produces a sort of vibrating insecurity at the level of individuals in a particular society," he says.

But the LSE's David Held believes anxiety could facilitate responses to fragility in a new kind of humanised, democratised globalisation.

"Today, when faced with geo-political disasters like September 11, we do not start from nowhere. We start from a basis in international law, we start with a strong commitment to democratic values in many places of the world," he says.

Complexity, it seems, is more flexible than we fear. There is no consensus on fragility, but all the experts identify increasing vulnerability. In other words, we are in for more disasters but we have the means to endure them.

We may be undermined by complacency or panicked by anxiety: the right balance is hard to strike. But in the meanwhile, people like David Held believe we now have a chance to turn fear of fragility into a strategic asset - a wake-up call to reform the world.

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Felipe Fernández-Armesto is a Professorial Fellow of Queen Mary, University of London.

Analysis: Feeling Fragile will be broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on Thursday 4 April at 2030 BST and repeated on Sunday 7 April at 2130 BST.