Darwin Must Be Turning In His Grave

Depending upon which set of statistics you choose, either 112 or 154 people were recorded as being killed in accidents during the construction of the Hoover Dam. The discrepancy arises because the 112 were listed as construction deaths, and 43 were recorded as "pneumonia" which many people unofficially associated with carbon monoxide poisoning in the site's diversion tunnels.

This sort of fatality rate would have been the norm for this era (1931-1936). Deaths during large projects such as the dam were expected and considered as inevitable a part of the project as the weather.

Health and Safety laws in most countries have come a long way since then. That level of fatalities would not be tolerated at present. Certainly in the US and in Europe these days, you can go to work and be reasonably certain of coming home again, with all limbs and faculties intact. Workers are protected now; an employee cannot be required to perform tasks that are unsafe. This is a very good and just thing. No worker should be coerced or threatened with being fired for refusing to do something that they reasonably deem unsafe.

Part of this change has come about through legislation. Companies can no longer simply budget for deaths (and the compensation payments) as part of any project. CEOs can go to jail for corporate manslaughter now. There are all kinds of regulations covering any imaginable aspect of every sort of industry, all aimed at the safety of the worker or the end user.

However the other part of this change comes from a very natural progression - learning. We've learnt what's dangerous and what isn't. This is what drives safety standards and "best practice".

There's another huge component to this though, one that we are in danger of losing. It's a skill which is eroding and fading like Latin or long division.

Common Sense. It's in demise, and soon people will look at you funny when you mention it. Your grandchildren won't even know what you're talking about.

In my opinion, we've taken the Health and Safety crusade too far in certain critical aspects. I'm all for sensible industrial regulation but The Men In Yellow Jackets are taking it to ludicrous heights. When the Hoover Dam was built, those people were killed because, in the midst of the Great Depression of the 1930s, they were under threat of being sacked if they refused to comply, and some of the modern equipment we use now had not yet been invented. The situation we have now is people being hurt (or worse) largely because they did something stupid. They either knew the risks and did it anyway (arrogant and stupid, the most dangerous character combination known to man), or should have known the risks if they had at least a pair of functioning brain cells. Either way, in almost all cases, no-one else should be blamed as a result. There reaches a point where you can no longer reasonably account for the determination of an ignoramus to do something outrageously cretinous, deliberately or otherwise.

I think it's no coincidence that mankind's greatest achievements occurred before Health and Safety became the mantra that it now is. We might not have known as much as we know now, but I believe that as a people we were more clever. More inventive. More ingenious. A lot of the advances that we take for granted at present could not be invented today, such as the aeroplane. Can you imagine the Risk Assessments the Wright brothers would have had to fill out before they could even start?

There really are people who are mindless enough to smoke while they refuel their cars. They should be stopped from doing that, naturally, because they might blow you or I up at the same time. Of course these are the sort of people who sit on the branch that they're sawing, or cut a live power cable. I knew someone once who proudly told me he'd done the gas piping in his new kitchen and checked for a gas leak with a match.

So where does Darwin come into this? You've all heard of Darwin's theory of evolution, or 'Survival of the fittest' published in "On the Origin of Species" in 1859. The reason that I think that we were more intelligent a hundred years ago, is that somebody who was, by all measurements and common agreement, a moron would eventually do something equally senseless and remove themselves from the gene pool. Permanently. Ideally this would happen before they had the chance to procreate any correspondingly half-witted spawn. The result was that all the idiots were thinned out by nature, leaving only those with enough sense to stay alive with the opportunity to propagate.

Health and Safety is making it ever harder for the truly thick to remove themselves from the gene pool, and the problem is that it brings everything down to the lowest common denominator. What are we left with then?

"Survival of the Thickest". Darwin must be wondering where it all went wrong.