Risk or Die

Once upon a time, a woman risked her life to have a child.  With no medical equipment, doctors, nurses, or even clean water, she lay down in a hut and offered the possibility of her life in exchange for the possibility of our collective future.  In times past, child-birth entailed the very real risk of a mother losing her life. And yet, that risk was taken.  Our existence depended on her choice to take that risk.  Without her choice, we would not exist at all and human life, with all of its joys and sorrows would cease.  In a very real sense she gifted us the future by risking her life.  For all of human existence, we have had to navigate risk.  For living itself requires risk. 

We are now faced with a deadly risk.  A disease that has no cure and no vaccine.  This is not new to humanity.  We have lived with multiple, deadly diseases that had to cure and no vaccine for many thousands of years.  Living and dying with these diseases has simply been part of doing the business of living on this plant.  It has been a long, long time since humanity has had to live with the specter of deadly and incurable transmissible disease.  And we understandably are having a hard time trying to figure out how to respond and cope.

 

Life in centuries past was grim compared to modern standards.  People lived shorter lives, and many died in childhood.  People responded to this with the same kind of resignation and grim fortitude that we demonstrate in the face of things like cancer.  We resigned ourselves to the inevitable risks and attempted to minimize those risks in the best way we knew.  And science, such as it was depending on the time, did its best to help people navigate those risks.  But mostly people carried on with their work and play.  In other words, they tended to the business of living.  Afterall, food had to be produced, shelter had to be constructed, and all the necessities of living had to come from somewhere.  They had no choice in the matter.  Essentially, they either worked and possibly lived, or did not and most assuredly died.

We are blessed to have incredible science to help inform our choices.  And we are blessed to have enough wealth to allow us to pause the business of our living as we to try to figure out the most beneficial approach.  But at some point we are faced with the same inevitable calculus.  We either work, or we die.  We either risk or die.  In the end, that inexorable fact haunts humanity in the same way it did 3000 years ago.  We are defined by that equation.

 

The business of engaging in the work required to live always requires such trade-offs of risk and reward.  And those trade-offs implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, often require us to choose between life and death.  We make these calculations all the time.  We know that driving 65 miles and hour is more risky than driving 10 miles an hour.  We know that 30,000 people die each year in auto accidents.  And yet, we do not have a 10 mile and hour speed limit.  And yet, we pile our children into our cars and drive everyday knowing that every time we do so, we place ourselves and our children at risk of death.  We could certainly reduce auto deaths to almost nonexistent if we reduced our speed limits to 10 miles per hour.  But we don’t.  We don’t because that would be too inconvenient.  We would not get to where we want to be quickly enough.

Every day, we make the choice to place our loved ones in mortal danger because we calculate the reward of getting where we want to be quickly and efficiently to be worth the risk of the death of our children.  Certainly, we have worked hard to minimize the risk through improved safety features in our cars, but the risk remains.  And we consistently choose to take that risk.

And of course we do.  Life requires us to take such risk.  We couldn’t live at all without taking those risks.  We tend to not think about such things, but nevertheless, we make such calculations all the time in every facet of our lives.  Every time you fly in an airplane, every time you cross a busy street, every time you take medicine, every time you go skiing, every time you eat a piece of pizza that you left out from your party the night before.  The risks are minimal, but they are ever present.  The business of being alive requires you to take risks.

In light of our current situation, we are faced with grim calculations of risk.  The debate rages over what risks are acceptable and what risks are too much for us to bear.  And yet, the equation that defines us, work or die, risk or die, lurks in the background.  At some point we will have to emerge from hiding and face that risk.  And that point may be sooner than we think.  We may well have to rebuild the muscles of fortitude and grim resignation that our ancestors had fully developed in order to maintain our existence.  We may have to boldly risk, just like the woman in the hut did so long ago.  Until we figure out how to avoid the entropic certainty of work, we simply cannot sustain an idle population.  In a very real sense, the universe itself will not allow it.