I tend to be critical of inconvenient security and safety measures. Although some make sense, most appear to be stupid and cowardly and unnecessary. I find I am bothered by our nation's and our culture's increasing risk-aversion and what is often basically cowardice. But there is a difficult conundrum at the heart of the issue.
On the one hand, we threaten to turn ourselves into creatures living in risk-free bubbles (though such bubbles can bring distinct risks of their own). Every last
small risk is ferreted out and eliminated until we are safe as we can possibly manage. But the result is that in our daily lives, we are closed in by more and more rules and directions and safety devices and petty authorities snapping orders at us for our own safety and it all adds up to a severe loss of freedom and autonomy. Just to take one example, I see this at our local swimming pool, where the list of activities that the kids and often adults are banned from engaging in is long.
At the same time, when any one rule is considered, is it not a small price to pay to save the lives of even a handful of children or others?
Should hundreds of millions of people accept incursions on their freedom that are relatively miniscule for the
individual, in order that a few people do
not suffer catastrophic, life-ruining tragedies? That is not an easy question to answer.
This conundrum is closely connected to the paradoxes of generalization. Accidents happen in a variety of specific circumstances, which are then used to generate general rules for conduct that are inevitably overbroad. Every stupid thing that someone does somewhere, or freakish accident, leads to new rules designed to ensure it can never happen again.
There is an probably an "aging"
process that takes place over time within a society, in which rules
are put in place that apply to everyone to stop problems as they
arise. Over time, the layers of rules become thicker and thicker. The thickness of those rules would be a function of
Of course, such a dynamic is based on the notion that every bad thing that happens must be responded to with
systemic changes to ensure that such a thing does not recur. This is partly
cultural -- especially characteristic of American can-do attitudes. In the Third World people often tolerate
terrible things without acting. Or perhaps they just tolerate different things -- we seem to have no problem with Vietnam War-level casualties on an annual basis as a result of auto accidents.
So, a more accurate formula for the accumulation of rules is probably:
For Americans, each factor seems to be increasing:
- Time, which despite many people's best efforts marches on.
- Size of population, not primarily because of population growth, but because size of our media-tied world shrinks and the size of those who are tied together rises. In the past an accident in New Jersey may not have led to responsive law in Oregon, but now it's on CNN so it is. The Internet accelerates this factor even more.
-
Sensitivity is rising as our tolerance for risk lowers. This sensitivity to risk could be seen as a sign of
a cowardly, soft people -- or as a sign of civilization, which values
life more highly than ever.
It's tempting to speculate that there must be some kind of cycle, where there is accumulation and calcification, followed by revolution and renewal and freshness. But it's possible, since we are living in arguably the longest-lived stable bureaucratic state in the history of the world, that we are confronting a situation that's genuinely unprecedented. In our lifetimes we will probably be forced to confront the contradictions of this dilemma in a way that no society ever has before. Do we want to live bubbled safe lives, and give up a tremendous amount of freedom, or get out there and really live and embrace risk, and condemn a certain, often quite predictable number of our peers to tragic deaths or other terrible fates?
Comments