The cult of safetyism harms us all

Spectator

4 days ago

Last month, the government announced that 16-year-olds would be able to vote at the next general election. If these new voters had wanted to inform themselves about political issues over the weekend, they would have found it strangely difficult. Take, for example, a recent speech about the rape gangs made by the Tory MP Katie Lam in parliament. It was blocked on X, alongside transcripts of the trials of the perpetrators. X users also discovered that they were unable to watch videos of protests against illegal immigration, unless they could prove they were over 18. Even if 16-year-olds are now wise enough to vote, the government believes there is information that they are too childish to know.
This mess was a consequence of the Online Safety Act, which was passed by the last government, and is supported by the current one. The act returned to the news last week as porn websites were made to implement age checks. The act is driven by a noble goal: to protect children from online pornography and the perversions of social media. But the legislation shows the problems with putting protection from harm ahead of everything else. We are turning a well-intentioned concern with safety into a cult of safetyism.
For most of the 20th century, opposing safety meant opposing a more secure and better life. Resisting seat belts, for example, was a strange hobby for myopic libertarians; condemning the contraceptive pill the sign of an unrepentant reactionary. These protective measures were not only accompanied by unprecedented reductions in mortality – the RAC calculates that vehicle fatalities fell by 60 per cent in the three decades after seat belts became mandatory – but helped our lives become less burdened by fear.
Yet the reduction of unnecessary evils has descended into the absurd. In their book The Coddling of the American Mind, Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff wrote that safety has become sacred, creating an unwillingness to make trade-offs. Over the past two decades, this has stunted the emotional, intellectual and moral development of young people, leaving them less psychologically resilient and more anxious. Safetyism has become a moral anaesthetic, tranquillising the free spirit that young people need.
Haidt and Lukianoff charted safetyism's spread across American universities in the early 21st century, in the form of content warnings and safe spaces 'protecting' students from ideas that might upset them. But safetyism moved out of the campus and is now the defining mindset of our age. We have become obsessed with mitigating every potential harm or distress, with no thought given to the consequences.
The Covid lockdowns represented the peak of safetyism. A fetishisation for protection spread rapidly through our political class, with politicians competing to demand ever-tighter restrictions. Stay-at-home orders, social distancing, mandatory mask-wearing: the overriding political goal was to achieve as few Covid deaths as possible. Concerns over the cost of the measures, the long-term effects on the nation's health and the resilience of freedom appeared to occupy less ministerial time than defining what a 'substantial meal' was.
Not only did a generation of children see their educational and social development stunted by politicians' reaction to a disease that posed little danger to them, but voters also became far too used to their freedoms being curbed under the pretence of 'security'. The move to make smoking illegal for anyone born after 2009 was a natural outgrowth of a belief that the public can't be trusted with choosing whether to put themselves in harm's way.
Overzealous ministers have questions to answer, but not all of the blame should be put on them. The sanctification of caution begins at home. The public supports the smoking ban and were hardline on lockdowns. At one point towards the end of the pandemic, one in four people polled by Ipsos Mori said that nightclubs should never reopen, regardless of the Covid risk.
Last year, the TV presenter Kirstie Allsopp hit out at Britain's 'risk-averse' culture after she was reported to social services for allowing her 15-year-old son to join his friends on a post-GCSE interrailing trip. For some parents, we exist in a Brass Eye nightmare-world, where a paedophile or drug dealer lurks around every corner. Only a third as many children play outside regularly as they did 60 years ago.
Plonking a child in front of an iPad is far less stressful than letting them out. Yet this overprotectiveness will only do children more harm in the long term. The best way to keep a child off social media is to encourage them to go out and play.
What should be encouraged is not the worship of safety but the embrace of risk. Exposure to danger, to trauma, to heartbreak and to wickedness is the only way human beings develop experience and resilience. A nation that forgets that will lose its self-confidence. By the time he was the age of Allsopp's boy, Horatio Nelson had twice crossed the Atlantic, come within ten degrees of the North Pole and chased down a polar bear. While today's Royal Navy recruits might now have to be a little older, it didn't set the young Nelson up too badly. Both politicians and parents need to learn that putting safety first is not always the least dangerous option.