I’m sometimes stupefied to think of how little was said of the virtue of courage during my formative years. People had come to believe modern life had evolved beyond the need for it. Perhaps courage might have mattered when the world was a dark and brutal place and monsters lurked outside the walls. But that was then—and now we lived in Enlightened and Progressive times.
What I heard about far more often than courage was safety: “Safety first!” “Better safe than sorry!” “Always buckle up!” “Always wear your helmet!” “Always have safe sex!”1
Obnoxious as the cult of safetyism should strike a sound-thinking person, there is a certain backward logic to it. The conclusion follows from the premises. We must always ask the fundamental question: what do we hold to be the point of life? If comfort and consumption are the highest goods, then safetyism truly is the crucial thing because it safeguards your ability to consume another day—safety means additional vacations, movies, video games, women, football games, pizzas, bong-hits, pornos, and all the best that modern life had to offer. Risking yourself jeopardizes the highest goods, and therefore all dangerous behaviors need to be restricted, and courage must be mostly discouraged.
As a result you raise a generation of cowards.2
This is what happens when previous generations come of age grooving out to John Lennon’s “Imagine” and other anthems of stoner nihilism. They believe nothing is worthy of the witness of blood. “Imagine … nothing to kill or die for, and no religion, too”—as though that were a good thing, rather than a nightmare!
