The Opposite of Safetyism Is Blasé Faire

Risk is inherent in life, but it's not something to celebrate

I’m thinking about these debates over urban crime, parking, convenience, friction, etc. that I’ve been having in recent pieces and in the comments. One way to think about these things is what someone’s comfort level with discomfort or risk is.

You can think of suburbia as a kind of inefficient, blunt instrument of insurance against discomfort. It squeezes out crime by pricing out the classes of people from whom petty criminals are likely to hail, which is like not ever eating eggs or chicken solely because you fear salmonella (and ignoring that salmonella can come from other sources). It forces more than enough free parking, which ensures convenience of a sort at the cost of dynamism and entrepreneurship.

The weakness in this way of looking at it is that cars pose their own great and unpredictable risk of injury and death and expense. But for whatever reason, few suburbanites feel anything like the primal fear of urban crime when it comes to the possibility of being hit by a car (whether on foot, or in their own car).

And this gets me thinking about the curious fact that there’s very likely a close overlap between the sorts of people who say things like “risk is part of living” or “suck it up, buttercup” and who find even a historically low crime rate to be intolerably high. If this is in good faith, it implies that they think 1) that crime rates could realistically be driven to near-zero, and 2) that the death toll of cars is a background fact to which fear should not really apply, at least not any more than it should apply to the fact of death in general. (I remember “make sure you stay safe” was a thing everyone said during the pandemic, but roughly half the people meant “Don’t get sick,” the other half meant “Don’t get caught up in the urban riots,” and few meant both. This was one of those very weird ways that politics can determine risk assessment.)

In this dismissal of or embrace of “risk,” I rarely sense the seriousness that should come along with such an understanding. It’s often as though this sober recognition of the dangers of being alive were hiding a suppressed glee at the possibility of some disaster striking.

Maybe that’s very human. There’s always some part of us that hopes the bad thing will happen. That the hurricane with be a Cat 5, that the tornado warning will not be in error, that the car will run out of gas before arriving home. Disasters and emergencies are interesting. From a position of comfort and security, they seem like a little color in a boring life.

When you think of it this way, libertarianism is a kind of decadence. (What’s a libertarian? Someone who yearns for disasters and gets starry-eyed about sour blueberries out of season.) It reminds me of a thing Ronald Reagan supposedly said or expressed once, pushing back on environmentalists: that we had gotten so safe and comfortable, we’d forgotten why it was once axiomatic that the wilderness must be tamed. Environmentalism was a celebration of things we rightly fought against when we were poorer and less secure, when survival was not guaranteed.

This is silly, of course, and in a way it’s the same kind of twee half-argument that conservatives today use to celebrate making life more dangerous. (As if the raw facts of death and poverty were themselves arguments against their alleviation—except, again, in the case of any dangers or inconveniences associated with the big city.)

But it also is more of a point, perhaps, than Reagan intended it to be.