Safetyism

On October 7, 2023, I was the chairman of the political science department at a large public university, but not for long. I did what I presumed universities are for, encouraging students to talk with professors about big questions and important issues of the day. So on October 18, I held a faculty-student discussion with a Middle East expert. I opened the event by stating some facts: that a terrorist organization committed to the death of Jews had attacked Israel, raping and murdering many young people at a peace concert and seizing hostages. I said that these events raised deep moral questions about what should be done in response, regarding the destruction of Hamas and the fate of thousands of noncombatant Palestinians. Discuss. The discussion did not go well.

Had King James’s Privy Council contained a proto-Anthony Fauci in 1620, there might not have been a Thanksgiving holiday for the current-day Fauci and his peers to cancel four centuries later. The transatlantic voyage that brought the Pilgrims to Plymouth Rock would have been unthinkable under the ‘stay safe’ philosophy that now governs American life. Nearly half the 102 occupants of the Mayflower died in their first year of settlement at Plymouth, sometimes at a rate of three a day. Such a mortality rate was predictable. The earlier outpost at Jamestown, founded in 1607, lost 66 of its original 104 settlers in its first nine months.