In other countries, quite different norms apply to the validity of causal proofs. Often, of course, they have only been established through social conflicts. In view of the globally intermeshed risks of modernization, the judges in Japan have decided they will no longer interpret the impossibility of a rigorous proof of causality to the detriment of the victims and thus ultimately against everyone. They already recognize a causal connection if statistical correlations can be established between
pollution levels and certain diseases. Those plants that emit such pollutants can then be made legally responsible and sentenced to corresponding damage payments. In Japan, a number of firms were obliged to make enormous payments to injured parties in a series of spectacular environmental trials. For the victims in Germany, the causal denial of the injuries and illnesses they have experienced must seem like sheer scorn. As the arguments they collect and advance are blocked, they experience the loss of reality in a scientific rationality and practice that have always confronted their self-produced risks and dangers blindly and like a stranger.
A Phony Trick : Acceptable Levels
There are other ‘cognitive toxic floodgates’ under the control of risk scientists. They also have really great magic at their command: abracadabra!, shimsalabim! This is celebrated in certain areas as the ‘acid rain dance’ – in plain language, acceptable level determination or maximum concentration regulation, both expressions for not having a clue. But since that never happens to scientists, they have many words for it, many methods, many figures. A central term for ‘I don’t know either’ is ‘acceptable level’. Let us spell out this term.
In connection with risk distribution, acceptable levels for ‘permissible’ traces of pollutants and toxins in air, water and food have a meaning similar to that of the principle of efficiency for the distribution of wealth: they permit the emission of toxins and legitimate it to just that limited degree. Whoever limits pollution has also concurred in it. Whatever is still possible is, by social definition, ‘harmless’ – no matter how harmful it might be. Acceptable values may indeed prevent the very worst from happening, but they are at the same time ‘blank checks’ to poison nature and mankind a bit. How big this ‘bit’ can be is what is at stake her. The question of whether plants, animals and people can withstand a large or a small bit of toxin, and how large a bit, and what ‘withstand’ means in this context – such are the delightful horror questions from the toxin and antitoxin factories of advanced civilization which are at stake in the determination of acceptable levels.
We do not wish to concern ourselves here with the fact that values [Werte], even acceptable values [Grenzwerte] at one time were a matter for ethics, not chemistry. Thus we are dealing with the ‘Decree on Maximum Amounts of Agricultural and Other Chemicals as Well as of Other Pesticides in or on Foodstuffs and Tobacco Products’, to quote the clumsy official language, that is, with the residual biological ethics of developed industrial civilization. This remains, however, peculiarly negative. It expresses the formerly self-evident principle that people should not poison one another. More accurately it should have read: not completely poison. For ironically, it permits the famous and controversial bit. The subject of this decree then, is not the prevention of, but the
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permissible extent of poisoning. That it is permissible is no longer an issue on the basis of this decree. Acceptable levels in this sense are the retreat lines of a civilization supplying itself in surplus with pollutants and toxic substances. The really rather obvious demand for non-poisoning is rejected as utopian. At the same time, the bit of poisoning being set down becomes normality. It disappears behind the acceptable values. Acceptable values make possible a permanent ration of collective standardized poisoning. They also cause the poisoning they allow not to have occurred, by declaring the poisoning that did occur harmless. If one has adhered to the acceptable values, then in this sense one has not poisoned anyone or anything – no matter how mush toxin is actually contained in the foodstuffs one produces. This indicates that production of toxins and so on is not only a question of which industries, but of fixing acceptable levels. It is, then, a matter of coproduction across institutional and systemic boundaries, political, bureaucratic and industrial.