Our Risk Averse Society

Leg Iron comments on the risk averse nature of our society in the context of the volcanic ash fiasco. Quite apart from the annoyance of being denied my trip home, I am even more annoyed that it was, in all likelihood, an unnecessary inconvenience. Oh, sure, I have no great desire to fall out of the sky, but equally, I do expect decisions to be made on rather more robust evidence than Met Office computer models. Given recent evidence, neither are sources that are particularly reliable.

As LI points out, the great advances in human achievement were all about risk, about taking chances, about taking that chance and maybe dying in the process. Today, we must be wrapped in cotton wool, for fear of our very lives. We exist, we do not live, for we must not die. Yet die, we will. No amount of “healthy lifestyle” will alter that biological fact. Better to die a little sooner having enjoyed life to the full, than expire a dribbling, incontinent, demented wreck who has been safe for nine or ten decades with nothing to show for it. Better to have risked it all on one turn of pitch-and-toss and lose, and start again at your beginnings than not to have lived at all.

It is with this subject in mind, that I recall watching Ian Hislop talking about Baden Powell a couple of nights back. He raised the obvious point – BP was a single middle-aged man with no obvious interest in women when he took a group of boys camping on Brownsea island in 1907. Hislop observed that that would probably not happen today – not even with the risk assessment, CBI checks and public liability insurance in place. Yet BP’s experiment spawned a movement that became a worldwide phenomenon. A phenomenon in which as a child I took an active part. In those days, we openly carried knives. A sheath knife is a useful tool and I learned how to use mine to build a shelter – in which I slept that night. Would I have been allowed to do that if I was a teenager today? No need to answer that one.

Somewhere along the way, we have lost our way. We have become a weak, cowed, self-absorbed society that lives in a state of fear, expecting nothing bad to happen and taking no risks, to ensure that nothing bad happens and desirous of the state to protect us from the bogeymen, natural disasters and the army of invading microbes threatening to steal our lives away. Everything and anything must be prevented by the government “doing something” and the government, anxious to have a positive headline and five more years of power is only too willing to enable this incestuous cycle of interdependence.

Christ! At this rate, we will never develop the warp engine.