Everything's dangerous
by David Keene

The other day I invited a friend to dinner and made reservations at a local steak house where he could indulge his addiction to the Atkins diet. When he arrived, however, he informed me that he's abandoned Atkins to reduce the risk that he might somehow come down with mad-cow disease.

He says he doesn't live in fear of mad cow or anything else, but a lot of people do and their fears are encouraged by a gaggle of do-gooders who won't let a day go by without telling us all how to live a better, healthier and safer life. They've gone after tobacco and McDonald's and SUVs. They've told us not to spend too much time outside lest we contract skin cancer and warned us to fear both the water we drink and the air we breathe.

Some of what they tell us makes sense, but a lot of it seems calculated to play on our fears and the nascent paranoia that inhabits a small but significant corner of the human brain.

Their desire appears to be not to warn us to take reasonable measures to reduce very real risks but to find a way to eliminate all risk, even if in doing so we surrender a good bit of what we once referred to as that which "makes life worth living." If we took them all as seriously as they might like us to, we'd be afraid to get up in the morning, let alone move around outside our own homes.

Indeed, it turns out that the earth itself is dangerous. I go fishing every fall in the Yellowstone country, but another friend warned me that perhaps given the danger that Yellowstone Park is due for a volcanic eruption perhaps 8,000 times as big as the one that devastated Mount St. Helens 24 years ago this month. I should restrict my fishing to the East. It seems that things get out of control out there every 600,000 years or so and that it has been 630,000 years since the last time the area blew, covering most of the West in several feet of volcanic ash. He thought that prudence dictates that I avoid the area ... "just in case."

It seems to me that this view of how we ought to live and regard the risk that we used to think of as part of everyday life is summed up pretty well by what has come to be called the "precautionary principle." This "principle," embraced by the fearful among us, admonishes us to do nothing so long as there might be a downside to whatever it is we contemplate doing.

Environmentalists, for example, suggest that we forgo the production of new products unless we can prove in advance that they will have no side effects incompatible with their environmental concerns. They would, I am sure, have advised God to resist the temptation to create and unleash man on the virgin earth lest he mess with things as they were.

In the scientific arena, a strict application of the precautionary principle would freeze things where they are to avoid the dangers inherent in moving forward. It is based, of course, on the theory that no matter how bad things are today, they are about to get worse. Julian Morris of the Institute of Economic Affairs in London summed up the problem recently, suggesting "if someone had evaluated the risk of fire right after it was invented, they may well have decided to eat their food raw."

If one wants to live in fear there is, of course, much to fear, but Americans have always looked not at the downside but at the upside of things. We are part of a nation founded on the theory that we should look forward to tomorrow because, well, no matter how much we enjoyed things today, they will be better tomorrow. It is that optimism and the certainty that problems are to be solved rather than either ignored or accepted that allowed those who came before us to build the nation we live in today.

They armed themselves against the dangers they faced and took what they saw as reasonable precautions, but few of them let the risks inherent in their lives paralyze them. Had they thought like those today who seem to seek a risk free life they would never have crossed the Appalachians or even left Europe. If after all these years we succumb to fear in the quest for perfect safety, tomorrow will most assuredly be worse than today.

David Keene is chairman of the American Conservative Union and a Washington-based government affairs consultant.