I was remarking to my wife the other day that if I have someone tell me I need to follow certain guidelines “for my own safety”, and those guidelines are not having to do with disarming plastic explosives, hand-feeding lions, or snow crab fishing in the North Atlantic in January, I am going to spit. Safety has come to mean more than mere caution, but a hyperallergic reaction to risk.
The word is plastered on floors and posted in storefront windows. In its name we must stay in our homes, avoid travel, funerals, weddings and restaurants. In Australia, the prime minister directed the citizens to forgo having conversations with other humans for their own safety. Interlocution can be a very dangerous activity.
Safety is really just code now for risk aversion. If we were to transpose common signs we see around town we would read “For your risk aversion and others, wear a mask,” or “Your risk aversion is our priority,” or “For your own risk aversion please maintain 6 feet of social distancing.” Where the traditional meaning of safety included being cautious of potential dangers and proceeding accordingly, risk aversion doesn’t discriminate between levels of risks and simply lumps all risk into one uniform category which collectively must be avoided.
I would like to submit to the jury vaccine craziness as the latest evidence that the Mad Hatter’s tea party that used to be America is really hopping. The Doormouse is snorting coke off Alice’s navel and the March Hare is wearing a lampshade on its head. Someone spiked the chamomile. At this point I don’t think I need to cite examples of said craziness, any more than a man would need to give specific examples of malodorous bouquets in a landfill.
Before I continue, I must add: wear a mask or don’t. Get the vaccine or don’t. Socially distance, or french kiss strangers. The important thing is for us to do so with our feet on the ground and our hair not in a state of conflagration. And when you look around our nation, you see it lit by the fires of self-immolation fueled by fear.
We have worked each other up into a froth, spittle sticking to the corners of our mouths and hyperventilating. What you can make out between breaths blown into the brown paper bag, is that if we don’t all take the covid vaccine we are All. Going. To. Die! When you observe the reaction to covid and compare it to the numbers, particularly for any demographic under 60, one can’t help but wonder what they are all running from. Doctors refusing to treat unvaccinated covid patients, generals snickering at the idea of shipping the unvaccinated to Afghanistan, bureaucrats talking of ceasing interstate travel, prohibiting entrance to restaurants, terminating employment – a no holds barred response has been justified because this pandemic must be stopped by any means possible!!! That’s three exclamation points people. What this all means is that our risk toleration has flat lined. And there is no reason to think this is isolated to our current debacle. We are witnessing the aging of a nation, and all the feebleness that accompanies.
Adopting the spirit of risk aversion makes us peer into the fog of an uncertain future and see it as a gauntlet of threats to avoid and a thousand deaths waiting in ambush. So we turn in trepidation to authorities to be coddled from infancy to old age, anyone who will lengthen our seconds in this mortal coil. We lose our focus on the strength of the human spirit and, yes, the death that may accompany intrepid enterprise, and turn our eyes inward to our fragility, clinging to human weakness as our defining characteristic.
Yet there is a grave danger to safety. It isn’t marked with brightly colored floor signs or circle with lines through them. The idolizing of safety is the heat death of the human spirit; the last move of a people retiring to a gated community.
The benefits of risk are testified to by every great people who came before us. All great things grow in the soil of risk. As Tacitus said “the desire for safety stands against every great and noble enterprise.” So what happens to a culture when safety becomes the prime ethic?
What happens is that culture loses the cornucopia of benefits which come from risk.
Think with me for a moment about some benefits that come to civilization through risky enterprises: discovering new lands, summiting Everest, starting a business, exploration, asking a girl on a date, having kids, innovation, freedom of speech, courage to challenge authorities, fighting bullies, protecting borders, investing, discovery of beauty, saying things like “Give me liberty or give me death,” ending slavery, homesteading on the frontier, space exploration. The greatest achievements of civilizations have come through risk taking behavior and the subjugation of safety to its proper place.
We lose all that. We lose greatness, the joy of boldness, and the strength of perpetual youth which comes with courage in the face of death.
Clothes change behavior. This is self-evident if you observe any person during Halloween. There will be a preponderance of punching from boys dressed up like Spider-Man and daintiness from eight year old princesses. Conversely, the teenage waif donning the sexy duckling costume, or whatever they are making sexy this year, you can bet won’t be reading to illiterate kids.
Similarly, dispositions we adopt, even if we think they are are transient, change us. When a culture wears the mask of risk aversion, even when it plans on it being a temporary measure, will change our behavior and eventually our identity. We will take on as our identity what the mask means. It makes us skittish; the sky feels a bit too close and the ground too far away. We see the inky crows hunched on a leafless tree eyeing us like carrion. And is it not getting colder? We are trapped between a claustrophobic fear of death and an agoraphobic fear of life. Through the covid pandemic, the United States has put on the clothes of fear which it has been knitting for decades.
In the deification of safety, we are at a greater and truer risk of falling victim to a much bigger and looming threat. Alexander Hamilton said fear of risk “creates fertile ground for totalitarian rule. To be more safe [societies] at length become willing to run the risk of being less free.” Tyrannical machinations often come bearing the gifts of safety. Frank Furedi in his book How Fear Works said “relieving people of the burden of freedom in order to make them feel safe is a recurring theme in the history of authoritarianism.” The point of this piece is not to draw a causal line between the clamoring for safety and totalitarianism. It is just one of the natural consequences that result. There will always be and forever has been people more than willing to exchange your freedom for their protection.
Of course, qualifications must be made. Living life defined by risk aversion must be avoided and pushed against as well. We do not throw caution to the wind and make irrational and thoughtless decisions, or make risk excess the sole determining factor of what we do. That would mean to overcorrect and run off the road on the other side. It means our purpose is life, in the living of it and pursuit of it, not death and the avoidance of it. Or as Kevin Costner’s character said in Open Range, “You may not know this, but there are things that gnaw at a man worse than dyin’.”
Not only is a life of risk aversion the death of a society, it is antithetical to Christianity. God does not call us to live a safe life. No one would look at the early church fathers and say they took the safe route. Peter was dodging authorities. Paul got stoned a couple of times (not in the Colorado sense of the phrase) and strolled back into the town that just attempted to kill him. The wide world is seeded with nameless saints slain in the pursuit of the glory of God. Indeed, Jesus says that anyone who would come after him must be prepared to die daily – that’s a 100% chance of dying, not a 0.02%.
Risk aversion has taken a place of preeminence in our lives. This is because we fear death. We fear death because we are guilty. Proverbs describes the restive attitude of guilty “The wicked flee when no one pursues, but the righteous are as bold as lions.” (Prov 28:1). When the fear of death predominates a culture and our modus operandi is the mere subsistence of existence, anyone who threatens our highly curated menagerie of approved safety measures guarding that existence becomes a threat, a threat which must be neutralized.
The cure for our disease is not a vaccine. It is a blood transfusion. The blood of Christ makes us immune to death. Not that we don’t feel it or experience it in our way through this world, but the sting is taken out and all things become for us. Christ freed those who were held in bondage to the fear of death. We must stir up the vigor of what it means to be human, embrace the glory of life by accepting the fact of our deaths ,and that we may, God willing, contribute a verse to the epic poem He is writing that is human history.
Thought Butter 