“The desire for safety stands against every great and noble enterprise.”

-Tacitus

The Western world is often defined by freedom.

This century—and the many that came before—young men and women in the prime of their lives left behind families and livelihoods to embark on a journey, a journey that for many would be a one-way trip. These souls endeavoured to end tyranny and set captives free; they were, in essence, fighting for their and their children’s liberty of both body and mind. And it was characterized as such in many ways historically. Within the reach of a few generations, there are some Canadians still living who volunteered and fought for the value of liberty, unique as it is in its modern expression.

In his book How Fear Works, Frank Furedi suggests that a “historical amnesia” has overtaken the minds of many Westerners. This amnesia obfuscates the memory of our young standing bravely against the tyrannical regimes of the 20th century, regimes which represented a threat to free people the world over. With these events and others in mind we don’t have to look far into the past to easily see that tyranny, in one form or another, is the status quo of human civilization, a governmental norm upended throughout the eons by many hard-won struggles. We currently represent a wholly unique experiment, the culmination of centuries of a slow cultural creep towards personal responsibility, liberty, and democracy.

It would be a mistake, I think, to rest on our laurels and assume that these values that were purchased at a high cost by our forerunners will proceed unfettered into the infinite future as if they were, as Edmund Burke would say, “ordained in the eternal constitution of things.” If we don’t take the time to tend to the Garden of Liberty, we may find one day that the weeds have choked our fruit-bearing plants.

But we must be realistic: just as our culture of freedom came with a high cost, it remains a high cost that is paid daily, lurking in the background of our lives, unperceived.

The price we pay is our safety.

Liberty and safety are values that are inherently antithetical to each other, the ultimate essence of each representing an extreme on a spectrum. As freedom increases in a society, ultimately the risk of consequences to and from each other grows—free speech, for example, carries with it the potential for offense or discomfort. My, and your, ability to be in public and make choices necessarily impacts everyone else. Mostly these impacts are minor and imperceptible, but sometimes the effects are devastating. In a free and democratic society, these are the costs of liberty. We have been content to pay this price historically, and as a result we have prospered in our freedom.

Should we begin to shape a culture that values safety to a greater degree with each passing year, we must acknowledge that there will be a cost to that as well: to purchase safety, you must pay in freedom. Again, being antithetical, to move towards one is to move away from the other.

Frank Furedi argued for this in his thesis, Culture of Fear, which points towards an “expansion of existential insecurity and risk aversion,” where safety shifts from a condition to a value and consequently grows fundamentally in the heart of a culture, joining the rest of the values in the pantheon. It has become in Western culture a prime directive, a moral good that overshadows all other pursuits.

The culture of fear is explicitly playing out before us now in a very profound way. It hardly bears mentioning that since March 2020, there has been an ongoing struggle between those who value freedom over safety, and vice versa.

The inability to shoulder the risk of COVID-19 for many is a curious thing, since there are manifold risks to our well-being that surround us, missing us by mere inches—sometimes figuratively, sometimes literally. There are very few experiences that are categorically safe. Most of the time, the risk is completely unperceived, and as the pandemic has taught, for many of us that might be a good thing.

Welcome to the world of the living—at some point, it’s going to kill you.

So yes, by the end of this pandemic—should it ever arrive—it seems likely that we will be a safer, more insulated society. But there remain myriad other threats to our lives that go unattended. At the risk of engaging in fallacious thinking, it seems reasonable to begin asking the question: what other threat could we be convinced to no longer tolerate as Canadians? If an official declaration was made in the zeitgeist of harm reduction, what else could we be convinced to furlough in the name of safety—both personal and public?

The writing is already on the wall. Even now some have wrestled with the feasibility of rolling out climate lockdowns—which may include discussions of some sort of carbon emissions passport that would allot a carbon footprint of a general size—resulting in greater restrictions on mobility. Recent events would suggest that many of us would accept these limitations in the name of the greater good.

Whether they have come by the conclusion in good faith or not, it seems as if most Canadians are willing to pay the rising costs of increasing safety, as indicated by the lack of resistance to increasingly authoritarian regulations. But, as Gustave le Bon articulates in his work The Crowd, our institutions, and thus the policies that end up governing us are more of an expression of our collective spirit and perceived needs—our character as people. This is Frank Furedi’s notion of the “cultural script” in action: the culture of fear.

So, if the people are to truly rule, it seems that we will as a nation—at least for the time being—progress inexorably towards safety and harm reduction around communicable viruses, and perhaps other risks going forward, but only as time tells. Would we endeavor to minimize our risk of suffering and death by the smallest of margins in every area of our lives, should any specific risk be dragged in front of us, and our collective eyes held open before a screen a la A Clockwork Orange?

If the answer is yes, then we will purchase that safety—either real or perceived—with our very tangible freedoms.

Because, after all, there is no such thing as a fate worse than death.

I’ll leave you with a quote by C. S. Lewis, an excerpt from his essay How Are We to Live in an Atomic Age?

Believe me, dear sir or madam, you and all whom you love were already sentenced to death before the atomic bomb was invented: and quite a high percentage of us were going to die in unpleasant ways… If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things – praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts – not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.