Over the past decades, a tide of “safetyism” has crept over American society.
As Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt put it in their book “The Coddling of the American Mind,” this is the mentality that whatever doesn’t kill you makes you weaker. The goal is to eliminate any stress or hardship a child might encounter, so he or she won’t be wounded by it.
We’ve seen a wave of overprotective parenting. Parents have cut back on their children’s unsupervised outdoor play because their kids might do something unsafe. As Kate Julian reports in “The Anxious Child and the Crisis of Modern Parenting” in The Atlantic, parents are now more likely to accommodate their child’s fears: accompanying a 9-year-old to the toilet because he’s afraid to be alone, preparing different food for a child because she won’t eat what everyone else eats.
Meanwhile, schools ban dodgeball and inflate grades. Since 2005, the average GPA in affluent high schools has risen from about 2.75 to 3.0 so everybody can feel affirmed.
It’s been a disaster. This overprotective impulse doesn’t shelter people from fear; it makes them unprepared to deal with the fear that inevitably comes. Suicide rates are way up, depression rates have skyrocketed, especially for girls.
But there has been one sector of our society that has been relatively immune from this culture of overprotection – medical training. It starts on the undergraduate level. While most academic departments slather students with As, science departments insist on mastery of the materials. While most academic departments have become more forgiving, science departments remain rigorous (to a fault). As much as 60% of pre-meds never make it through their major.
Med school is intrinsically hard but it trains people to work at a very high level amid stress.
“There is tremendous value in knowing they can wake you up in the middle of the night and you can still make a good decision,” says Adina Luba Kalet, director of the Kern Institute for the Transformation of Medical Education at the Medical College of Wisconsin. “Doctors are taught to run into the fire and not away from it. Today, the young doctors feel free to say, ‘I’m terrified, but I’m going to do it anyway.’ That’s courage.” The professional ideal is clear, she concludes. “You can save lives. And when you can’t save lives you can be in the darkness with patients even if there is nothing to offer. You stay.”
Med schools are struggling to become more humane, more relationship-centered and less body-centered. But when you look at what’s happening across the country right now, you see the benefits of tough training. The New York Times Magazine recently ran a diary by an ER doctor named Helen Ouyang. To enter the ER with her in this crisis is to enter another world.
Normal procedures crumble under the crush of patients. A man dies unattended, sitting in a chair. A veteran physician feels stripped of his invincibility. The core of Ouyang’s diary is her acceptance that it’s impossible to do her work and still stay safe. “It seems impossible to avoid getting infected.” Death and talk of death is everywhere. There’s absolutely no self-glorification here, just endurance. I’m reminded of Dr. Albert Schweitzer’s 1931 memoir. When hiring doctors for his hospital in the African jungle, he wrote, he never hired anyone who thought he was doing something grand and heroic. “There are no heroes of action — only heroes of renunciation and suffering.”
I’m also reminded of the maxim that excellence is not an action, it’s a habit. Tenacity is not a spontaneous flowering of good character. It’s doing what you were trained to do. It manifests not in those whose training spared them hardship but in those whose training embraced hardship and taught students to deal with it.
I’m hoping this moment launches a change in the way we raise and train all our young, at all ages. I’m hoping it exorcises the tide of “safetyism,” which has gone overboard. The virus is another reminder that hardship is woven into the warp and woof of existence. Training a young person is training her or him to master hardship, to endure suffering and, by building something new from the wreckage, redeem it.
David Brooks is a columnist for The New York Times.
