As a humorist might put it, it’s safe to say Americans are becoming increasingly risk-averse. Though it’s always risky to generalize, a broad range of trends point toward the overarching truth. ADVERTISING As a humorist might put it, it’s safe
As a humorist might put it, it’s safe to say Americans are becoming increasingly risk-averse. Though it’s always risky to generalize, a broad range of trends point toward the overarching truth.
We’re familiar with the indicators — from the collapse of our willingness to tolerate high military casualties to the rise of so-called “helicopter parents,” afraid to let their children tackle life on their own. We’re spending less and staying away from big purchases like houses and cars. We’re obsessed with safe sex.
In isolation there might be perfectly sensible reasons for these kinds of attitudes. But, in general, they all tend to boil down to fit a single idea: Nobody wants anyone to die for a bad cause, least of all, themselves. That ought to clue us in to a problem. What cause, nowadays — what purpose — are people really willing to risk themselves for?
Traditionally, the criticism that comes from these kinds of needling questions leads to some kind of patriotic prescription. If only Americans were more courageous and willing to sacrifice, we’ve been told, then we’d restore this country’s moral fiber! Whatever you think about such an argument, it’s ironically oriented around survival. It warns that, if we don’t sacrifice now, we’re toast!
But what if the most important way to think about risk has to do with flourishing, not survival? What if the real benefit of risk is that it elevates our horizons in a practical sense, more than a moral one?
Right now, this important issue is getting all too short a shrift. Although now largely forgotten, the Obama administration’s willingness to curtail NASA’s most ambitious plans received a sharp, instinctive rebuke from many Americans. Some of these adventure-minded people, however, got over it quickly. Private space exploration, they said, was the real future. Get government out of the way and let those who want to adopt the risk do so themselves.
It seemed like a good idea on paper. Yet the public response to the recent crash of the Virgin Galactic rocket plane has revealed a disturbing new vein of risk-averse judgmentalism. Putting a new spin on that scolding and cowardly culture, one writer — at Wired, of all places — insisted that “space tourism isn’t worth dying for.” Virgin, he said, put pilots’ lives at risk to make space trips a viable business, not to get people on Mars or beyond.
It’s hard to see how either of Virgin Galactic’s test pilots — only one of whom survived the crash — can be seen as wage slaves. Like all risk-seekers, they went where the action is — not into the virtual-reality frontier of the Internet, not into the relative safety of America’s elite bomber squadrons, but into a test aircraft for commercial space flight. They sought to use technology to lift our horizons in a practical, immediate way.
We could all learn a little from them — or a lot.
— From the Orange County Register
