New at Reason

Julian Sanchez | February 17, 2006

Ronald Bailey reports from the American Enterprise Institute, where British sociologist Frank Furedi decries the pussification of Western culture.

Comments

|2.17.06 @ 9:38AM|#

Damn good article.

|2.17.06 @ 9:39AM|#

I'm not sure that, strictly speaking, "Today, no one is criticized for not taking risks" in the business world. There's plenty of lip service paid to risk-taking in current management jargon. It's just that it never seems to go beyond the jargon. Managers soon recognize that the consequences of taking a risk that doesn't pay off are more severe than the consequences of "playing it safe".

Jeff P.|2.17.06 @ 9:46AM|#

I am reminded of the transportation history book I read that reprinted "scientific evidence" that the 40+ MPH velocities of locomotives would tear a human body apart.

I also can't help but notice a corrolation between the need to pin blame and the abdication of responsibility we keep hearing about. It seems responsibility/liability can only be wielded by institutions and bureaucracies.

|2.17.06 @ 9:52AM|#

Good article. I'd like to vent a few examples that I've come across:

1) When I was really little my mother let me ride a bike without a helmet. Later she made me wear a helmet. Today she's convinced that it's child abuse to let a kid go without a helmet. Now, I'm not saying that helmets aren't a good idea, but there's a big difference between something that is a good idea and something that is such a moral imperative that anybody who doesn't do it should go to jail. Now, whenever helmets come up I say that when I have kids I'm going to make them wear full body armor when they ride bikes. She doesn't appreciate that.

2) I'll let Jennifer talk about playgrounds. She seems to have the most anecdotes for that one.

3) In fall of 2004 Salon.com (yes, I know) had an article about kids walking to school as a way to reduce childhood obesity. Sounds like a good idea, right? Solve a health problem with a totally natural remedy that doesn't cost anything. What could go wrong?

Well, this being 21st century America, it was organized: Corporate sponsors. Parents committees to map out routes and identify every conceivable hazard. Volunteers to supervise the walks. Coordination with school district bureaucrats. Lawyers review everything. Insurance to handle lawsuits over slippery sidewalks or criminals attacking kids or virtually anything else you can imagine.

It still works out. More kids are walking to school in some places. But it isn't just as simple as parents saying "Walk to school" and kids doing it. It's an expensive, coordinated campaign. I'm sure the people doing it mean well. In fact, it may be that this is the only way it can be done in our culture, and without their elaborate efforts the kids wouldn't walk to school. If true, that's just sad.

One of the organizations posted the Salon article on their web site.

http://www.saferoutestoschools.org/Pressroom/WalkWLawyer.htm

|2.17.06 @ 9:55AM|#

BTW, I realize that some people will probably say "Well, if the money is corporate and the parents are volunteers, what's the problem?"

1) School districts are still involved, so you can still find something problematic from an ideological standpoint, yadda yadda.

2) More importantly, regardless of who's doing it, there's something really sad about requiring an expensive campaign and detailed coordination for kids to do something as simple as walk to school. Yes, I know, if it's a private school and everything is voluntary and yadda yadda yadda then I respect their right to do something stupid yadda yadda yadda. I also have the right to say how stupid it is. So there!

|2.17.06 @ 10:03AM|#

This is one reason among many for why I�ve opted out of the US public school system for my kids. Hopefully as adults they will be risk takers in a sea of scared stay at homes and should therefore do better in the long run.

|2.17.06 @ 10:05AM|#

I blame childless boomers. They're all afraid of breaking their hips these days.

|2.17.06 @ 10:14AM|#

I liked the "redefininiton" of accidents link. They should have just said "There are no accidents, only actionable negligence.".

|2.17.06 @ 10:14AM|#

How do we square pussification and the precautionary principle with the fairly regular rushes to various wars?
Or is Dubya a blessing in disguise for western culture?

|2.17.06 @ 10:14AM|#

I liked the "redefiniton" of accidents link. They should have just said "There are no accidents, only actionable negligence.".

|2.17.06 @ 10:16AM|#

How do we square pussification and the precautionary principle with the fairly regular rushes to various wars?

You could say that we're going to war in those cases to prevent what might happen.

|2.17.06 @ 10:18AM|#

Thanks, Ron! Damn good indeed. The majority of my peers' conversations never diverge from talking about their diet or work-out schedule. I think there's a certain kinship between being completely risk-averse and lacking a philosophical telos that has produced a culture where-in maintenance, or personal consumption has become a religion of sorts. This is disconcerting, and I think it is related to the examples in the article, of 'safety-first' or fear-driven-environmentalism. It's like the turtle that crawls into his shell because he doesn't know what else to do, or doesn't trust himself to do it.

|2.17.06 @ 10:20AM|#

It seems that it is not the childless who are to blame so much as the below averagely childed. Those with one and two children are taking a rather high stakes evolutionary gamble. Granted, the advances of science and medicine in reducing infant mortality have made this feasible, but it is still a very much an all eggs in one or two basket proposition.

If you have one child, then you must not ony do everything you can to have that child grow up safe and happy, but all of your village must as well. It's not that people with more children tend to love their children less so much as they are less paranoid and tend to have to accept the sometimes brutal realities of sibling interaction.

|2.17.06 @ 10:21AM|#

Unfortunately this article continues a long blind-spot in Reason's writing - failing to discuss the connection between longer life spans/increased wealth and increasing paranoia about ever smaller risks and the demand that somebody (usually government) "do something" about them.

Mike|2.17.06 @ 10:21AM|#

The problem is that all new activities, especially those involving scientific research and technological innovation, always carry some risks.

I think there is one very obvious -- and entirely understandable -- explanation for this fear of innovation: the atomic bomb. Half of the 20th century was lived in fear of nuclear holocaust. If it wasn't the Russians bombing us, it was their powerplants melting down.

Tut-tut all you want about our irrational fears, but for most people in the western world, their point-of-view on international relations can probably be summed up either as "the Russians want to nuke us" or "Reagan wants to nuke the Russians."

*That* is the culture of fear we need to recover from.

|2.17.06 @ 10:46AM|#

Excellent article. About the notion of being scarred for life when one suffers a trauma of some sort, I do think this is pronounced in the U.S. (not by everyone, but sooo many).
My Italian girlfriend's father suffered polio as a child and lost his first wife to cancer, and I've never once heard him bitch once about either of these setbacks. Imagine the mileage your average American would have gotten out of this. (Although this could be a generational thing too.) I've spent a lot of time overseas, and only found out second-hand that people whom I was close to had suffered serious traumas that they had never even thought of whining about.

I don't lump the desire to eat organic and/or pesticide-free foods in with any of this, however. How about this: I recklessly commute to work w/o a bike helmet, and avoid msg and processed foods. Why? Because I feel like shit after I've eaten them, and organic foods taste better. Ever had a steak in Argentina? Then you know what I'm getting at.
I totally agree that Americans are pussified, but the lumping together of inappropriate examples in a pissing contest to demonstrate this pussification doesn't strengthen the argument.

|2.17.06 @ 10:52AM|#

When he took his son to his new school, the principle told him, "Don't worry, our number one priority is your child's safety."

How 'bout that! A school with a precautionary principal.

|2.17.06 @ 10:54AM|#

How do we square pussification and the precautionary principle with the fairly regular rushes to various wars?

Probably because, for the vast majority of Americans, war presents no immediate danger to them or their families. War is seen, and was presented prior to the current war, as a riskless endeavor; we'd waltz in and take Iraq with hardly any combat. Look at the popularity of the current war in Iraq - as more Americans are killed, as risk to people we might know increases, it gets less popular.

|2.17.06 @ 10:56AM|#

I wonder how much of this attitude is due to having such vastly greater amounts of information available? The radio networks didn't even interrupt broadcasts in 1941 to announce the attack on Pearl Harbor, but today we can get the "Terror Alert Level" constantly in the corner of Fox News. Prudence counsels a person to consider known and reasonably foreseeable risks when going about one's activities, so it's only rational to seek out and consider all the information available. The problem now is the sheer, unmanageable volume of information we can get.

For most of human history, "known or reasonably foreseeable" were pretty easy to understand. The factors to be considered didn't extend much past one's own family and a 20-mile circle around home base. It certainly not to people or viruses on the other side of an ocean. I think we're hardwired to consider the effect our actions have on the community, because for most of human history a solitary human was a dead human. Also, survival, both of oneself and one's offspring was closely related to status within the group, and those who were known to be foolhardy lost status quickly, usually by dying. People knew only about 150 other people and said 20 square miles of land, and had years of experience with all of 'em on which to base any judgment. Now it seems like the entire world is one big game of pick up sticks, where moving anything disturbs everything.

We're not given nearly enough information to assess the costs and benefits, much less how realistic the latest doomsday prediction may be, but we still have a powerful drive to consider whether any action will cause someone else or ourselves harm. Here are two examples of problems in the recent news which are always presented in the most dire language possible: global warming and Iran's nuclear weapons development. Now, it's entirely possible that both of these problems are every bit as dire as they are presented, but those of us who don't work for NOAA or the IAEA don't know nearly enough to assess the problem, but it seems as though we're all expected to do something, and do it NOW. Since we're hardwired to avoid hurting the kinfolk, this, like Mike's example of the bomb, helps create a constant background hum of fear. I don't at all object to the increase in available information on the whole, but I wish I knew better how to filter the stuff we get.

|2.17.06 @ 10:57AM|#

So true about the school thing. I used to walk about two miles to school every day, uphill both ways, in the snow with no shoes, Uh I digress...
Seriously I did walk to and from for years, it was great, lots of fond memories of after school adventures. So I moved pretty much across the street from the local elementary school and the found out my kids were not ALLOWED to walk to & from because we live on a county road with no side walks or crossing guards.... Pussification indeed!

|2.17.06 @ 11:00AM|#

It's a common to think that your children will not be able to live well or succeed if they don't go to college and work at a corporation.
The outrage of ordinary people have if you pull your children from institutionalized education is amazing. (I homeschool one of my sons)
So I'd have to agree , average people are risk adverse to the extent that they miss "living" rather than existing.

Institutionalized education creates this "worldview" and stifles individualism and creativity. Drug all those kids with short attention spans and at the same time insist that all other drugs are incredibly dangerous.
Most people on this board are old enough to have experimented with drugs but we aren't (all) on the street doing heroin. You wouldn't draw that conclusion from the Drug ads & Drug education programs geared to children.

The ability to access risk is corrupted in the media and the schools.

|2.17.06 @ 11:09AM|#

I think Karen is on to something, but here are some other possibilities which occur to me on the spur of the moment:

1. You know how we're having huge numbers of people these days suffering from asthma or allergies that used to be quite rare? The most popular theory is that this is because, ironically, our surroundings are too clean and too healthy--your immune system (I'm anthropomorphizing here) has a powerful work ethic, and if it can't find any actual germs to fight, it will instead pick fights with dust particles or pollen grains.

Could something similar be going on so far as worry and stress are concerned? Americans are generally free of the Big Worries--your children are unlikely to starve to death because there is no food available, it's unlikely that a rampaging army will invade your town killing and burning everything in sight--so we find other things to worry about.

2. (This possibility is the exact opposite of theory 1, I know) Maybe the problem is one of control. I read of a study demonstrating that a feeling of helplessness, and having no control over your surroundings, causes much mental and physical hardship. In this study, two rats were kept in separate cages that shared a single floor of metal, with electric charges running through it. From time to time, researchers would send powerful and painful electric shocks running through this floor.

Now, Rat A had a button in his cage; when he pushed it the electric shock stopped. Thus, Rat A had control over his surroundings. But Rat B did not--when Rat A pressed the button Rat B was also freed from the shock, but Rat B had no personal control over it. And Rat B ended up with all sorts of physical and emotional problems that Rat A did not have.

So maybe the reason Americans are turning into such wimps these days is because our Really Big Worries are things over which we have no control. If a terrorist is going to nuke your city, or the economy completely falls apart, or a war with Iran or China causes big-time problems for America, or your company goes bankrupt and you lose your pension, there's really not a damned thing you, personally, can do about it. So instead you focus on the things you CAN control--wrap your kid in bubblewrap so he never has to see his own blood coming from a skinned knee, drive your kid everywhere he goes so there's less chance he'll get into trouble without adult supervision, and so forth.

|2.17.06 @ 11:12AM|#

We should all be shipped to Arrakis to toughen us up.

|2.17.06 @ 11:13AM|#

So true Cargen. I put my youngest in Private school after years of watching my older kids peers drugged to stupification for the act of behaving like BOYS.. The number of kids on the pill in PS would stun the average no kid having person. The literally line them up at the nurses office at 10 am every day... Guess it won't be so hard to get them to drink the purple kool-aid huh?

|2.17.06 @ 11:13AM|#

"The problem now is the sheer, unmanageable volume of information we can get."
I totally agree. I also creates a sort of despair in people and--by extension--a habit of curling up and taking even fewer risks because one is on the receiving end of so much information and is so incapable of acting upon it.
"Most people on this board are old enough to have experimented with drugs but we aren't (all) on the street doing heroin."
Yes...but then you would have to drop the whole anti-drug narrative and have an honest debate. Once you start to allow former drug experimenters/users into the debate and people discover that they don't have horns and a tail, well you might actually have to rely on data and base your arguments upon honest policy analysis. That wouldn't do at all.

|2.17.06 @ 11:20AM|#

I think Jennifer is right, especially about the control of one's surroundings thing. I can't control whether bin Laden blows up the state capital, but I can damn sure keep duct tape and batteries. (I don't, by the way. My kids use up the batteries and I always mess up the duct tape roll.) It's the same impulse that makes my mother-in-law wear a St. Christopher medal all the time. At least it's something to do.

For what it's worth, does anyone have any good information on global warming and Iran's nukes?

|2.17.06 @ 11:34AM|#

It certainly does seem that when people are woried only about the immediate circumstances essential to their own survival IE were the next meal is coming from, or shelter etc, they are a lot less freaked out about whether Iran has nukes, or why Dick Cheney didn't run to the self important media immediately after accidentally shooting his hunting partner. People who must act to survive spend their time acting and then reaping the benefits of those actions rather than sitting around wringing their hands about crap that they have zero control of or even a reason to care about. Someone said it earlier in this thread, WE KNOW TOO DAMN MUCH!!! Turn of the TV and get on with enjoying the 70 - 90 years you get.

|2.17.06 @ 11:35AM|#

It's the same impulse that makes my mother-in-law wear a St. Christopher medal all the time. At least it's something to do.

This is also why in the 1950s, the government told people that if the Russians send nukes your way, you can save yourself if you duck and cover. Or why people living in poverty are more likely to turn to fundamentalist religions than people with comfortable, prosperous lives.

Duck and cover was stupid in a lot of ways, but it probably DID do some good--it gave people some small illusion of control over potential catastrophe, which made it easier for them to get on with their normal lives, rather than spend all their time wringing their hands and thinking "Civilization might be destroyed and all I can do is sit here and wait for it!"

Going back to what Karen said about information overload, I think that also contributes to the feeling of helplessness people have. Oh, today's terror alert is bright orange? Well, what the hell am I supposed to do about that--wear a sweater? Bring an umbrella to work? We keep being told about all these horrible things that might happen at any second--and if any of these horrible predictions come true, there isn't a damned thing we can do about it.

|2.17.06 @ 11:39AM|#

Amen Jennifer! Live on, Love lots, and Don't sweat the terror alerts. If Hadji blows us all up tomorrow, or the local nuke plant explodes we'll just get to find out if whatever faith we have has been well invested. Mom was always right...GO OUTSIDE AND PLAY!!

|2.17.06 @ 11:49AM|#

Karen, good thoughts...

There is a book, that I regret to say I have not read by Jerome Corsi called Atomic Iran it's available at www.worldnetdaily.com and Amazon...

I have been reading a great deal of the advertorials for the book, and they certainly are eye opening as compared to MSM's direction and focus...

For some of the best info on Global Warming I suggest Ayn Rands The New Left...

It also goes to great length about fear, and it's origins, and is a must read for anyone interested in living...

VM|2.17.06 @ 11:51AM|#

pussification = eurofication??????

ha ha.

|2.17.06 @ 11:55AM|#

Ronald Bailey quotes "superbrilliant" Herman Kahn as describing American schools in 1982 in the following manner: "It would be hard to describe a more unhealthy, immoral, and disastrous educational context, every element of which is either largely incorrect, misleading, overstated, or just plain wrong." It's strange that this "unhealthy, immoral, and disastrous educational context" had just about zero impact on the next twenty years, that the American educational system, considered not as K-12 but kindergarten through postgraduate studies, is easily the best in the world, and that the American economy is likewise. Perhaps the "superbrilliant" Mr. Kahn was just another dude preaching doom and destruction, and getting it way way wrong. And perhaps Mr. Furedi is another such dude. Ron is (almost) always right when he trashes the environmentalists for telling us that the world is coming to an end. Why is it that the anti-environmentalists sound so much like their foes? Are both sides just selling hype? Perish the thought!

|2.17.06 @ 12:02PM|#

No doubt VM! It has always perplexed me when I see the snooty intellectual elite expend all kinds of energy trying to seem more euro (including adopting lame euroesque accents and sppech patterns). It just makes them seem like a bunch of pantywaists (women included). I'd rather hang out with a smart AND strong healthy plain spoken outdoor type then the new found L.L. Bean fly fishing intellectual who pontificates ad nauseum about the finer nuances of this activity or that...Shut up and do it. Please.

Mike|2.17.06 @ 12:14PM|#

For some of the best info on Global Warming I suggest Ayn Rands The New Left...

And for an explanation of modern, theoretical physics might I recommend Newton's Principia.

It's one thing to be a GW skeptic. It's another to suggest a 30+ year old book of essays has "the best info".

|2.17.06 @ 12:21PM|#

SHARK!

VM|2.17.06 @ 12:44PM|#

Mike: sadly, that is a good critique of most Austrian Economics. sigh. (many of their critiques are frozen in the early 50s)

IQ: alter the wardrobe slightly and you've nailed the crowd that hangs out at some froggy-esque cafe at Halsted, Lincoln,and Fullerton (east of the intersection, on Fullerton, north side of the street).

the beret and holding the cigarette backwards is another giveaway :)

|2.17.06 @ 12:49PM|#

I think the sensationalism of the news media plays a role. Every incident is treated as an indicator of a larger epidemic because it makes for must-see viewing.

"A college student dies from alcohol poisoning. Are your kids in danger? A WTNH exclusive at 11"

"Dead crow found on roadside. Has the avian flu come to America?"

"Little league baseball player killed by line drive. Are we doing enough to make sports safe?"

Add to those kinds of stories the amber alerts(which do serve a good purpose), endless studies saying that you're at an increased risk of dying from X, and you have people thinking that we live in the

|2.17.06 @ 1:00PM|#

"many of their critiques are frozen in the early 50s)"

Actually, since Rothbard was writing prolificly well into the 90s, I'm willing to call BS on that one.

Might as well say that all mainstream economics is frozen in the early 20s, as it is all based on the Pigouvian concept of externalities. Or that the Chicago School is frozen in the 40s, as it is all based on Coase.

It's always easier to throw ad hominems than to engage in honest debate. sigh.

|2.17.06 @ 1:13PM|#

I feel old :( Has it already been 20 years since I basically had the run of my city (pop. 250,000), by bike or foot, alone? Things sure have changed.

|2.17.06 @ 1:34PM|#

I remember walking about 1/4 mile to the bus stop as a kindergartner, which was 1979/80. By fifth grade, we we're picked up much closer to our houses. The panic then was guys in vans kidnapping kids by offering acid-laced tattoos or drugged candy.

I also remember a couple a years in the mid eighties when everyone went to the local HS to have their Halloween candy put through a metal detector for razor blades. Good times!

VM|2.17.06 @ 1:39PM|#

quasi:

sher. whatever. pat pat.

|2.17.06 @ 1:40PM|#

"Has it already been 20 years"
25 for me, since I was basically kicked out of the house from sunrise to sunset on days off from school to negotiate my way around my city (pop.65,000) with the standard "stay out of trouble and within the city limits" command.

|2.17.06 @ 1:42PM|#

>does anyone have any good information on global warming

With regard to significant recent developments like:

1) the attempted gagging of NASA's James Hansen, a powerful example, one would think, of bureaucratic arrogance and of ideology trumping science,

or

2) the accelerated melt rate of glaciers in southern Greenland

Reason has thus far maintained an icy silence.

As for the article, how is one to balance near-total skepticism of government with near-blind faith in corporate innovation without one's head at some point simply exploding?

That's actually a serious question.

|2.17.06 @ 1:49PM|#

I'd guess that innumeracy was the largest cause of inappropriate risk aversion.

Priorities are a way of determining what to do when there's a conflict. That allows people to have extremely high priorities for handling some relatively uncommon events. If someone asked Professor Furedi to prioritize these two things

• getting kids out of a burning school building
• teaching them an important math concept

wouldn't it be likely that he himself would make getting the kids out of the burning building the higher priority?

It 's disingenuous, at best, to take "Don't worry, our number one priority is your child's safety" as a suggestion that they were skimping on reading, writing and arithmetic, since there's relatively time when the two little conflict and when there is a conflict, you do want safety to win.

|2.17.06 @ 1:59PM|#

Me too Budgie, Weekdays I was left alone, at the tender age of 9, to wander the mean streets of Ogden, Utah till around 7 at night.

Granted, Ogden UT hardly seems like a likely setting for an afterschool special.

|2.17.06 @ 2:07PM|#

The acid-laced candy thing dates to the late 60's, when I was in kindergarten. I remember having my trick or treat bag searched then, and the parentals discussing which pieces of candy looked suspicious.

Also, some of the candy histeria can be traced to a real, if completely isolated, event. In 1973, a father in Houston murdered his own son for insurance money by putting cyanide in Pixie Stix, which Pops helpfully distributed to a few other neighborhood kids in an attempt to deflect blame. None of the others died. This, by the way, isn't to say that fear of Halloween candy is remotely reasonable, only that there is one lonely real incident. Pops, by the way, was executed in 1985 for the crime.

brian423|2.17.06 @ 2:07PM|#

I strongly agree with cargen and Ig about public schools, which, according to John Taylor Gatto, originated in the authoritarian state of nineteenth-century Prussia. Shameless plug: On my blog, I wrote a post about why I resent my schooling.

|2.17.06 @ 2:13PM|#

"Pops, by the way, was executed in 1985 for the crime."

Presumably too mercifully.

|2.17.06 @ 2:35PM|#

Andy,

He was one of the first beneficiaries of Texas' change from the electric chair to lethal injection. Definitely too mercifully.

|2.17.06 @ 7:56PM|#

What about the libertarian philosophy lacks pussification?

"You can't tell me what to do. That's mean. It's my ball, I don't have to share"

(I have a right to _______. Government is violence. My property rights trump the group's need).

Sounds like the kids that got their ass kicked at school to me.

|2.17.06 @ 10:12PM|#

Furedi pointed out that the refrigerators of these same swashbuckling techno-entrepreneurs are chock full of pesticide-free produce; they abhor tobacco; drink just half a glass of wine with dinner; and wear knee pads, elbow pads, and helmets to go bike riding. "In terms of their lifestyles, they are very very precautionary, pussycats basically," said Furedi.

I really don't get this connection. Not smoking and wearing a helmet while biking in traffic makes you an overcautious pussy? A real man isn't afraid to court lung cancer or having birds gorging themselves on his brain matter splattered on the asphalt, I guess.

There's a difference between being bold and being stupid. Discretion is indeed the better part of valor.

|2.17.06 @ 10:27PM|#

What crimethink said. Very poor article, all around - its too late now but the next article on the Precautionary Pr. definitely merits a response & I don't mean just "Yeah Yeah".

|2.17.06 @ 10:39PM|#

Clarification - IMHO, Bailey's take on the PP is correct. But the examples offered here are terrible.

|2.17.06 @ 11:26PM|#

Too bad I missed that AEI event, sounds really interesting.
Allow me to say, I don't know what's wrong with the Americans. When I went to school in the 50's in Europe, we had no atomic war hide and duck drills and were certainly not inundated in school with dire predictions. And we were a hell of a lot closer to the Russians, hell, drive to Berlin and you could actually see them and their convoys.
We walked to school, which was in town and not an isolated complex 5 miles out. I haven't lived there in a while, but last time I was there 10 yo school kids were on public transportation getting home and no helmet laws either.
The people do, however, fear the imminent falling of the environmental sky and the unmanageable danger of atomic energy. No price is too dear to regulate even the slightest bit of pollution or risk in those areas.
I suppose the Americans, being individualists, focus on personal risks while Europeans emphasise the communal.