First Man To Try Fire No Doubt Burnt Himself

CURBING RISK-TAKING DENIES AN ESSENTIAL HUMAN INSTINCT

The death toll from avalanches in the Alberta-British Columbia mountain
systems this season has already reached an impressive total - nine in one
weekend alone - prompting the predictable demand for laws to restrict
and/or prohibit mountain skiing.

The argument is familiar. These "crazy" people are not only risking their
own lives but occasion great public expense as police and park wardens
conduct rescue missions. Therefore we need laws, regulations and above all
"education" against such foolhardiness.

We have seen this thinking proliferate epidemically throughout the whole
20th century. It is not only illegal but downright evil to go without a
bicycle or motorcycle helmet. The admonition "No Swimming" is familiar in
public parks because of the inclinations of small, parentally neglected boys.

Youngsters for whom skates, a stick, a puck and a frozen pond were once the
total essential for our national game must now be armored like medieval
knights, with their mothers as equerries, driving them in heated cars to
the heated rink.

We have signs - "Do not climb on the Statue" ... "No jumping off the wall"
... "No roller-blading on the embankment" - not to protect the property but
bad little boys from their own native inclinations. An arm was broken here,
a neck there. "Concerned" city councillors had to "take action."

When the little boys grow up they will be similarly protected against this
same reckless instinct. There will be securities commissions, for instance,
to defend them against the dangers of unscrupulous stock promoters.

Already we can see where it will go next. The Weather Network carries
solemn warnings against walking outside in the winter. We're told how many
perished last year from "hypothermia" in Saskatchewan. Soon we can expect
winter walking on the "danger" list.

Sports are already there. High school football gets thumped every time some
kid is carried off the field. We are increasingly lectured on the frightful
spectacle of "hockey violence." Boxing, an exhibition of "bestial
brutality," can't have much longer to go.

Some put this yen to protect and prohibit down to the "feminization" of
society. It's the little boys who do most of the jumping, climbing and
arm-breaking that occasion the proscriptions, and mostly big boys who break
their necks in the mountains. Not that little girls aren't like this. Some
are, though it's instructive that they're known as "tom boys."

Curbing risk-takers, in other words, means inhibiting a mostly male
instinct in favor of a mostly female instinct to protect. Not for nothing
do they call it the "Nanny State." And who can put up an argument against
it? The dire statistics, the dread tolls and the dead-weight costs seem so
unanswerable.

Well as a matter fact they are answerable. Consider this:

Just about everything we of the human species have accomplished has been
done at great risk to somebody. The first man who experimented with fire no
doubt burnt himself, possibly to death. The first man who tried out the
first boat doubtless drowned, and thousands of people have drowned trying
out boats ever since. The primeval pharmacist who tried out the first
medicine no doubt poisoned himself, and I'm sure many of the early
experimenters with internal combustion combusted themselves in the process,
as did so many of the first people who tried to fly.

Risk-taking, that is, has been an essential of human development, and it's
safe to assume that sane, sensible people were always there to decry,
deplore and where possible legislate. Fortunately for humanity, they were
ignored.

Even so with our own history. The settlement of North America by Europeans
was a matter of appalling risk. In the early days, they had one in four
chances of drowning at sea before they even got here. Walk across any
Prairie field in a snowstorm, and imagine a family living alone under an
earthen roof in a log shack with the nearest neighbor miles away, and you
experience first-hand where we came from.

The point is this: If we render the risk-taking instinct as irresponsible,
meaning immoral, we will destroy in ourselves one of the central qualities
that got us where we are. That's the opposing argument. So I say: Let the
mountain skiers go on killing themselves. It is a chronic human inclination.

Copyright (c) 1998, Canoe Limited Partnership.