As our power to make the world safe gets more and more complete, it becomes more and more necessary that we understand the role of danger in human health.
We’ve started to learn this lesson in terms of environmental pathogens, but it’s still only in science. Science shows us that a sterile environment for kids leads to adulthood allergies and autoimmune diseases. But that knowledge hasn’t spread into our culture. Foolish people who think respecting what’s natural is woo (ie who preposterously think anything without an articulated reason is woo) are still falling over themselves to provide their kids with the most sterile environment they can find.
We need danger. We’ve never had to deal with the possibility of eliminating danger before; it was always something to minimize.
Used to be, we are leafy greens because it was all we could find. Now we have to force our kids to eat their vegetables because we know it’s best for them to do so despite their instincts all pointing to sugar and fats. Same thing with danger: we’ve got no instinct to seek danger because we grew up in an environment abundant with it. Naturally, our instincts crave safety because there was so little of it before that we had to take it wherever we could get it.
It’s a hard problem, but not one we get to ignore.
As our power to make the world safe gets more and more complete, it becomes more and more necessary that we understand the role of danger in human health.
We’ve started to learn this lesson in terms of environmental pathogens, but it’s still only in science. Science shows us that a sterile environment for kids leads to adulthood allergies and autoimmune diseases. But that knowledge hasn’t spread into our culture. Foolish people who think respecting what’s natural is woo (ie who preposterously think anything without an articulated reason is woo) are still falling over themselves to provide their kids with the most sterile environment they can find.
We need danger. We’ve never had to deal with the possibility of eliminating danger before; it was always something to minimize.
Used to be, we are leafy greens because it was all we could find. Now we have to force our kids to eat their vegetables because we know it’s best for them to do so despite their instincts all pointing to sugar and fats. Same thing with danger: we’ve got no instinct to seek danger because we grew up in an environment abundant with it. Naturally, our instincts crave safety because there was so little of it before that we had to take it wherever we could get it.
It’s a hard problem, but not one we get to ignore.