What I Write About

I write about the infinite number of intersections between every day life and the good news of the God who has come to get us.

Thursday, July 09, 2009

From Hormones to Organic: Our Bi-Polar Obsession with Technology and Safety

The other day Kelly let me in on a conversation swirling around her mommy world: is our culture (specifically parents in our culture) overly-concerned about safety?

From obsession with chemicals in foods to mandatory bike helmets to the doing-away with all the "cool" playground equipment that we had when we were kids, have we just become flat-out paranoid?

My take is that we are a bit paranoid, but that's just half of the equation.

As a culture, we are obsessed with perpetually pushing the envelope in terms of bigger, faster, more and more. Our insatiable demand doesn't always allow for considered evaluation of consequences.

So, for example, we create farms where we inject with hormones to bulk up the beef. But then years later we begin to wonder if the hormones are doing strange things to our kids. Ergo, witness the fresh wave of obsession with organic foods, particularly marketed to parents as safer alternatives to the aforementioned hormone-injected beef.

Jacque Ellul is a dead French guy who wrote prophetically about the consequences to a people when they focus on means rather than ends. He argued that the technological society loses its soul in the relentless pursuit of expediency without any regard to the larger and more important questions of meaning and purpose.

As a technologically-obessesed culture, we will always be a bit bi-polar. We will always be making phenomenal advances that promise much. And we will be regularly reaping the un-intended and un-expected ramifications of those advances.

And for some of us in parent-land, that makes us a little bit overly-obsessive about safety.

2 comments:

kristen said...

I agree with you about moving too fast and not thinking about the consequences being a huge part of this equation, and it's something I think about a great deal - going back to the basics, doing what's simple, natural and sensible.

Another part of this safety equation for me is outside pressure. In the 70s, you could send a 4 year old a few doors down to get a stick of butter and no one would bat an eye. Or leave your kids in the car to get JUST ONE THING at the grocery. (I know, there's the heat danger, but let's pretend it's a pleasant day.) Now, doing either of those things will get you a speedy visit from the police and child protective services from your state.

I've heard people say that there aren't any more stranger kidnappings than there were then, haven't verified this, but it seems reasonable to me. But children being taking in state custody, that's risen profoundly.

In any event, accidents happen, no matter how freakishly safe people are. I have a horn that I toot (only one, car seat safety!) and my basic rules (wear a helmet.) A woman I respect once told me "God is sovereign, but we still wear bike helmets." As long as it isn't a force that rules over us in fear, being a little bit safer is not a bad thing. We know that car seats save lives, so we should put that knowledge to use. But we still need to enjoy life and our kids should enjoy childhood. But I'm a parent who let her less than 2 year old go down a 30 foot slide unattended, because, hey, it's designed to slide, nothing too crazy is going to happen.

Alex said...

great thoughts here, kristen, thanks!