Philosophical Fight Log: Day 35 (Final Entry of Series) Fighting, Risk, and the Dangers of ‘Safetyism’
“Life is on the wire. The rest is just waiting.” -Karl Wallenda
As a final entry in this fight log, I’d like to wrap things up with a loose collection of thoughts on the value of fighting, risk, physical hardship, asceticism, and the growing dangers of ‘safetyism.’
‘Safetyism,’ or more properly, ‘the ideology of safetyism,’ is a concept coined by philosopher and mechanic, Matthew B. Crawford, author of “Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work” and “Why We Drive: Toward a Philosophy of the Open Road.” Crawford defines this pervasive and growing ideology within modern culture as, “a moral sensibility and loop wherein, the safer we become, the more intolerable any remaining risk appears, making us susceptible to projects that make us more safe.”
Thus, while the increase of bodily safety technically might make one safer in a strictly material sense, Crawford asks us to reconsider what personal virtues, capabilities, competencies, aspects of character and agency, and other goods of an immaterial sort might become diminished, atrophied, or compromised in this constant and never-ending effort towards greater and greater physical safety. The last two or so years of Covid hysteria serves as the clearest and starkest example of this ideology of safetyism in action.
The ideology of safetyism, of course, comes with its own set of presuppositions; about human character, agency, dignity, and capability, individual and collective risk, and what sets of goods count towards human flourishing versus human withering. The unsaid presumption built into the ideology of safetyism, more or less, is that physical risk and physical hardship are always something to be avoided and mitigated within society and at an ever-progressing rate. What idiot, after all, would want to intentionally introduce more risk into one’s life unnecessarily and/or choose a less safe option when a safer option is just as readily available and with no additional cost? To do otherwise, according to such folks, would be ‘irrational.’
But it all depends on how one understands the notion of cost I suppose.
I tend to side with Crawford on this one though, or, to bring things full-circle back to the first entry in this blog series, Tyler Durden from Fight Club,
“How much can you know about yourself if you've never been in a fight? I don't wanna die without any scars.”
What values and goods do scars and the pursuit of scars actually signify? More broadly, what features of the soul exactly do intentional and deliberate practices of physical hardship, asceticism, and risk, and the active denial of physical comfort, bodily pleasure, and safety cultivate, foster, and awaken within us? What is it exactly that the MMA fighter, the extreme sports athlete, the soldier, the monk, the tight rope walker, the dueling society fencer, and the Native American sun dancer have in common? And what transcendent good or set of goods are they pursuing on the other side of such pain, hardship, deprivation, and danger?
To posit a thesis, I would suggest that one such good that comes from such practices of intentional risk, deprivation, and physical hardship is the first-hand experiential knowledge that one’s character, constitution, capabilities, and agency are in fact more than one originally thought. In other words, one wants to not just hypothesize or theorize or speculate as to how one would act in such demanding, ‘real stakes’, ‘life or death’ moments; rather, one wants to know.
What’s more, by thrusting one’s self into such contexts and such activities intentionally and repeatedly, one also fosters, habituates, and earns within one’s self a set of experiential reference points and existential anchors whereby one will have the integrity, fortitude, and grit going into the future to deal with those unexpected challenges and demands that life randomly throws at them that will most certainly not be intentionally chosen. To quote psychologist Jordan Peterson commenting on his method of curing persons with entrenched phobias, ‘you don’t make them less afraid... You make the braver.’ Something like this I believe is what is going on in such contexts of physical hardship, denial, and risk. Growth by intentional pressure, discomfort, and habituation. Lastly, and this is only beginning to scratch the surface, I believe such intentional acts of physical hardship, risk, and asceticism can also serve, at their highest levels, as a form of self-purification, self-mastery, and as a kind of cleansing of the soul. Spiritual healing through physical suffering as it were. These are at least some of the hidden and non-obvious goods of the human spirit that the safety ideologues fail to take into account in their risk mitigation spreadsheets and cost-benefit algorithms; goods which they know absolutely nothing about.
That said, for one to foster and cultivate such attributes of bravery, fortitude, resilience, self-control, grit, competency, etc. there must be an appropriate context whereby to do so. A world of ever-increasing safety actively suffocates and denies the life-giving oxygen necessary for such contexts to even exist, and with it, a corresponding denial of the vital attributes of the human character that such contexts help to foster, realize, and sustain.
What then does it mean for the withering of such metaphysical spaces in this age of ever-growing safetyism? What does it also mean for the withering of the attributes of courage, fortitude, honor, and grit dependent on the preservation of such contexts? And what type of human person will the continued withering and atrophying of such attributes and contexts ultimately lead to as we head further into the 21st century?
To answer this, I will leave you with two possibilities exemplified by two contrasting cinematic scenes; the first from Pixar’s Wall-E and the second from M. Night Shyamalan’s Unbreakable. Both scenes embody a particular set of values trade-offs, a particular set of assumptions about risk, safety, and convenience, and a particular vision of dignity, agency, and human potential.
Option A
Option B
The choice is yours.
Philosophical Fight Log: Day 35 (Final Entry of Series) Fighting, Risk, and the Dangers of ‘Safetyism’
We human beings are all the time wanting to control things and we create mechanisms to defend ourselves from pain. This is something hereditary. Why don't we learn that difficulties create value? Even entrepreneurs get growth out of crisis. When something goes wrong, we already give up, instead of taking into consideration that maybe this moment of conflict is propitious for the development that will come in the medium and long term.
Those who do not accompany the difficulty of life are carried away by it!
High and low are two sides of the same coin!
Human beings are both attracted and repelled by physical danger. We had to accept that in the hunt and later in factories and farms and love there could be injury, sometimes mortal injury. But I wonder if mere thrill seeking and prize fighting is the same? Certainly danger is sharded. But toil and selfless service in the face of danger must be revered more. I
Excellent post.
I should add that Safetyism is another way we think we can utterly master this world, which presumes human perfectability. Oh, those pretty things have arrived...and how.