Is Boston doomed?

Part 7

by Michael Crowley

Are we nuts to be worrying about this stuff? Academics who study risk have long known that people tend to confuse their fear of a certain fate with the actual danger it poses. Fair or not, this condition is the bane of the nuclear-power industry. It is also a major obstacle to peace of mind.

"The fundamental premise in risk perception is that the risks that hurt and kill people, and the risks that upset people, are completely different," says Peter Sandman, a Newton-based risk-communication consultant.

Adds John Hammitt, an associate professor at Harvard's School of Public Health: "If the goal is minimizing the probability of early death, then people are definitely misallocating their efforts."

Experts like these have actually broken down fear into discrete components, a couple of which, it turns out, almost perfectly explain my brand of doomsday fixation.

The first component is what they refer to as catastrophic potential: the threat of sudden, mass death that provokes a basic human horror. Society can tolerate the thousands of deaths that cigarettes cause each year, Sandman points out, but people would recoil in horror if every expiration occurred on the same night in one city.

The other component, even more darkly descriptive, is dread. Gruesome fates feel more threatening, and thus more likely, than mundane ones. For most of us, simply driving a car is one of the riskiest things we do. But cars are commonplace and familiar. In the dark recesses of the mind, a Subaru simply cannot compete with a mushroom cloud.

What's more, summer blockbusters and TV movies aren't about head-on collisions on Route 128. What mass culture celebrates, in its peculiar way, is catastrophe. Movies like Outbreak, Con Air, and even the forthcoming Titanic hammer this point home. Or how about the two television movies in the past year about an asteroid hitting the earth?

And it's not just the entertainment makers. The news media inundate us daily with the worst modern life has to offer. Whom do I thank for those news reports about how fish were nibbling away at the submerged victims of TWA Flight 800? Or the detailed description of the woman who was freed from the rubble in Oklahoma City only when her leg was amputated -- without anesthetic -- with a pocket knife? If growing up during the Cold War instilled in me a sense that sudden demise was possible, living with CNN Headline News and MSNBC has conditioned me to feel that it is everywhere.

But just as I start to rationalize, to talk myself out of my phobias, some new horror always seems to turn up to darken my mood. This week Newsweek reported on the apparently growing risk of an "accidental" nuclear attack from Russia. During the writing of this story, my bogeyman was a recent book called The End of the World: The Science and Ethics of Human Extinction, by philosopher John Leslie, which considers nothing less than the end of the human race ("Why Prolong Human History?" one chapter asks) and ponders fates that make inhaling anthrax on the Green Line sound like a merciful end.

If you've started to worry about my mental hygiene, consider some of the thoughts Leslie takes to bed at night: a giant solar flare destroying the ozone layer; the ignition of the atmosphere (something Robert Oppenheimer supposedly placed a one-dollar bet on before the first atomic-bomb test); and a "new, world-destroying big bang by mistake."

Finally, this: Leslie warns that scientists playing around with particle accelerators could "upset a space-filling `scalar field,' " disturbing the very balance of matter, "and destroy the world, a possibility taken seriously by some leading theorists."

I used to wonder at what point one gives up hope altogether. Now I think I know.

Web of doom

Michael Crowley can be reached at mcrowley[a]phx.com.