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Last week we talked about chemotherapy. This week we’re going to talk about radiation, but not metaphorical radiation, actual radiation. And not even the radiation used in radiation therapy for cancer. We’re going to talk about the worst radiation of all, the radiation from nuclear weapons, or at least that’s where we’re going to start.
On August 6, 1945, Tsutomu Yamaguchi had finally reached the end of a three month long business trip to Hiroshima, and was finally ready to leave the city. After having to return to the office to retrieve something he forgot, he was walking near the docks when the Enola Gay dropped the first atomic bomb. The shock wave from the explosion “sucked Yamaguchi from the ground, spun him in the air like a tornado and sent him hurtling into a nearby potato patch.” In addition the explosion “ruptured his eardrums, blinded him temporarily, and left him with serious burns over the left side of the top half of his body.” Afterwards he managed to make his way to an air-raid shelter where he spent the night, and the next day he set out again for his hometown of… Nagasaki, where he received further treatment.
Despite being heavily bandaged, he reported for work on August 9th, and was in the middle of describing the Hiroshima explosion to his supervisor when the Bockscar (I think this is the first time I’ve heard the name of the second plane) dropped another atomic bomb. Both times Yamaguchi was around 3 km from the explosion, but this time, being inside, he was not tossed around or burned, though he suffered from high fever and vomiting for a week afterwards.
Yamaguchi has been called the unluckiest man in the world, and it does sound pretty awful to have been present both times nuclear weapons were used in anger. But what’s interesting is that despite being relatively close to ground zero on both occasions, he survived to the ripe old age of 93. Which is not to say he didn’t have problems related to his exposure in the immediate aftermath, and even later in life, but despite being present at not one, but two nuclear explosions it didn’t shorten his life. Is this just a lot of luck later in life balancing out his initial unluck? Should he have died young, but just beat the odds? According to a paper published last year, no, he wasn’t lucky, the irradiation he was subjected to may have actually lengthened his life.
The paper I’m referring to is titled Low-dose radiation from A-bombs elongated lifespan and reduced cancer mortality relative to un-irradiated individuals. And its central claim is right there in the title, low-dose radiation (technically ionizing radiation, but I’ll be using just ‘radiation’ throughout) didn’t shorten the lifespans of those affected by it, it lengthened them. I imagine for most people this conclusion will be surprising. The reason for this surprise, and the chief villain of the paper is the idea that radiation is the worst thing ever, or what the paper describes as the linear no-threshold hypothesis (LNT). “Linear” meaning that the harm of radiation is always proportional to the dose, and “no-threshold” meaning that there isn’t any point at which it isn’t harmful. According to LNT, radiation, no matter how small the dose, is always harmful. There is no safe level of radiation, and certainly no beneficial level of radiation. As I said LNT is the chief villain of the paper and the authors describe it thusly:
Average solid cancer death ratios of… A-bomb survivors… were lower than the average for Japanese people, which is consistent with the occurrence of radiation adaptive responses (the bases for radiation hormesis), essentially invalidating the LNT model. Nevertheless, LNT has served as the basis of radiation regulation policy. If it were not for LNT, tremendous human, social, and economic losses would not have occurred in the aftermath of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant accident. For many reasons, LNT must be revised or abolished, with changes based not on policy but on science.
Elsewhere they describe LNT as “spurious”, with a “seriously flawed history”, and “no convincing [supporting] data”. Now I’m not an expert in this field, and it’s always possible that their conclusion is wrong, but I would bet that they’re right. For one thing, though I haven’t audited their data, it clearly shows that A-bomb survivors lived longer, on average, than a control group of Japanese who were nowhere near the bomb. But beyond that their claim rests on the assertion that LNT advocates neglected to consider hormesis, or what amounts, essentially, to biological antifragility. Not only am I a huge believer in hormesis (and antifragility) but as part of that I’ve seen lots of examples of people overlooking it. Which is to say, it’s not just with respect to radiation that people apply a linear no-threshold hypothesis, people apply it to just about everything that can cause harm. Creating the widespread belief that if something has been shown to cause harm at any level, that there is then no level at which it doesn’t. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that an overarching linear no-threshold hypothesis may be one of the defining features of our era.
There are many examples of this, most take us from the realm of biology to the realm of psychology, and I will admit that I’m making that jump somewhat casually, but I will return and shore it up. But first some examples, One is Brené Brown, who I talked about a few posts ago and who, as far as I can tell, takes an LNT stand on shame. That there is no level of shame which isn’t harmful. You also see it in schools where there is, in effect an LNT around bullying, or even unkind words. The #metoo era has brought it to interactions around sex, where there is no safe amount of discomfort for a woman to experience. Now to be clear, maybe there is no safe level in all three of these examples. I freely admit I don’t have any proof that there are safe or beneficial levels of shame, or bullying or discomfort. But there is significant proof in other areas, and here’s where I start to shore up that jump from biological to psychological. To do so I turn to The Coddling of the American Mind.
I have already touched on Coddling in a previous post, but upon reflection, particularly in light of some of my recent posts, I may not have given it the space it deserves. To begin with it’s a great book, and this is not just my opinion, I know several people who’ve read it and enjoyed it. This includes my daughter, who generally only reads Rowling and Green. Coddling has mostly ended up taking a position on the right in the larger culture war, but the authors, Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt are pretty liberal, and thus the picture they paint of today’s youth (the subtitle of the book is “How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure”) is as objective as anything is likely to be in this day and age. At least in my opinion.
But we were talking about the linear no-threshold hypothesis. You would be surprised if they actually mentioned it, particularly by that name, and they don’t but they end up describing a nearly identical concept, that of “safetyism”.
“Safetyism” refers to a culture or belief system in which safety has become a sacred value, which means that people become unwilling to make trade-offs demanded by other practical and moral concerns. “Safety” trumps everything else, no matter how unlikely or trivial the potential danger. When children are raised in a culture of safetyism, which teaches them to stay “emotionally safe” while protecting them from every imaginable danger, it may set up a feedback loop: kids become more fragile and less resilient, which signals to adults that they need more protection, which then makes them even more fragile and less resilient. The end result may be similar to what happened when we tried to keep kids safe from exposure to peanuts: a widespread backfiring effect in which the “cure” turns out to be the primary cause of the disease.
The emphasis is mine, and that sentence is essentially a restatement of LNT, only applied to all danger, not just the danger of ionizing radiation.
When I crossed over from talking about LNT as it applies to radiation to talking about LNT as a broader psychological and cultural phenomenon in the form of safetyism. I was actually making two assertions: first, that LNT or something nearly identical existed in this additional space, and that it corresponds to what Haidt and Lukianoff call safetyism and second, that safetyism is similarly “spurious”, with a “seriously flawed history”, and “no convincing [supporting] data”. I would hope that the broader existence of LNT/safetyism is more or less self-evident. If not I would ask you to give further consideration to things like microaggressions, safe spaces, trigger warnings, and massive public shaming over minor infractions. All things which are premised on there being no minimum acceptable level of discomfort.
This leaves us with showing that safetyism causes harm. I would think that Haidt and Lukianoff’s description of the feedback loop is a very good start. Beyond that, as might be expected, they bring up the hygiene hypothesis, which I discussed just a couple of posts ago, and where I further made the argument that there is probably a psychological version of it. At the time I hadn’t really considered the LNT angle, but you could certainly imagine that if psychological stressors work anything at all like immune system, and further if there is any mental hormesis, then an attempt to eliminate all emotional stress would cause analogous problems.
The key thing to consider, as I’ve been arguing from the very beginning, is that, in general, humans are antifragile. And we should be more suspicious of philosophies which claim that they aren’t than those which claim that they are. Haidt and Lukianoff agree, pointing out that the current push to identify and eliminate things like microaggressions, triggers, etc. represents a “fundamental misunderstanding of human nature and of the dynamics of trauma and recovery.” And that even if you actually are suffering from something like post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) “avoiding triggers is a symptom of PTSD, not a treatment for it.” In support of this they include a quote from Richard McNally, the director of clinical training in Harvard’s Department of Psychology:
Trigger warnings are counter-therapeutic because they encourage avoidance of reminders of trauma, and avoidance maintains PTSD. Severe emotional reactions triggered by course material are a signal that students need to prioritize their mental health and obtain evidence-based, cognitive-behavioral therapies that will help them overcome PTSD. These therapies involve gradual, systematic exposure to traumatic memories until their capacity to trigger distress diminishes.
All of this is to say that there is a safe and even beneficial level of discomfort and even trauma. And this applies not just to normal individuals, but beyond that to individuals suffering from genuine, clinical, psychological trauma. That when we deprive people, especially children, of this discomfort under the principle of safetyism that we do real harm. As Haidt and Lukianoff’s summary explains:
Children, like many other complex adaptive systems, are antifragile. Their brains require a wide range of inputs from their environments in order to configure themselves for those environments. Like the immune system, children must be exposed to challenges and stressors (within limits, and in age-appropriate ways), or they will fail to mature into strong and capable adults, able to engage productively with people and ideas that challenge their beliefs and moral convictions.
Haidt and Lukianoff spend most of the rest of the book examining the current, unproductive way in which college students engage with ideas which challenge their beliefs, and it’s all very interesting, but I don’t have the space to go into it here. Also I think it’s a problem that’s been very well covered even for people who have never heard of Coddling or Haidt and Lukianoff. What I’m more interested in examining is where to draw the line on things like discomfort or radiation if we’ve decided that it’s a bad idea to draw the line at zero.
This is not the first time I’ve addressed the question, and in fact when I initially brought up “The Coddling of the American Mind” the title of that post was How Do You Determine the Right Level of Suffering? And my thought process then was largely the same as it is now. If some suffering is needed for healthy development how do you determine how much suffering to allow? Even if you just choose to ignore rather than allow, how do you do that? And do you ignore some suffering, but not others? How is that choice made? Would ignoring it be enough or do you end up having to intentionally causing suffering? Would any of this need to be legislated in order to work? If so how on earth would you pull that off? Replace suffering with trauma or even just challenges and the questions largely remain the same.
One big part of the problem is that up until recently we could do everything in our power to reduce suffering and there was still sufficient suffering built into existence for everyone to get their “daily recommended allowance”. Less than 50 years ago young men could still be drafted to go fight and die in a war. 40 years ago my parents could let me wander around in the wilderness for hours doing who knows what and no one thought it was particularly unusual (a story I told in that last post). But technology and progress have changed things. Now kids are always reachable with smartphones, and they generally don’t wander around outside anyway because they’re inside posting on social media or playing video games. And there are no more wars between the great powers, and no more need for a draft. People still fight and die in wars, but on a completely different scale. Interestingly, some people think this reduction is all because of the A-bomb.
Returning to the A-bomb, one of the reasons I started with radiation is that it’s an early example of dealing with rapid technological change, and its associated dangers, and it’s not an encouraging one. According to the paper I mentioned earlier, the linear no-threshold hypothesis traces its origin all the way back to 1927. This is important because it means we’ve had over 90 years to get the science right, and instead, if anything, we’re more frightened of radiation than ever. While at the same time the case for accepting the dangers of radiation is as strong as it’s ever been. Of course, I’m mostly talking about nuclear power. I have made my case for nuclear power previously, so I won’t rehash it here, but obviously global warming plays into it. (Though perhaps not as much as you might think.) And despite increasing fears of that from nearly all quarters, nuclear power generation declined, as a percentage of all power generation, from 16.5% to 9.5% between 1993 and 2015.
One might be inclined to blame this mostly on the Fukushima disaster, but that didn’t occur till 2011, and the decline was pretty steep already (which is to say that since global generation is increasing that nuclear generation in absolute terms has been basically flat since 2000.) Speaking of Fukushima, as was already alluded to in the initial quote, the authors of the paper feel that LNT created undue burdens not only in Fukushima, but also at Chernobyl. Claiming:
If it were not for LNT, evacuation would not have been necessary in Chernobyl or Fukushima.
Back in the post where I made my case for nuclear power I mentioned Chernobyl, and it’s worth revisiting that section:
It doesn’t take much searching to find articles talking in excited terms about the amount of wildlife found in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone (CEZ). One article declares that it’s a nature reserve. Another mentions that within the CEZ wildlife is flourishing. This was unexpected, in one article from National Geographic I came across, they quote a biologist who “studies Chernobyl” (one wonders if his studies have included a visit) as predicting that when the author of the article goes to Chernobyl that he won’t “see any roadkill in the exclusion zone—and would be lucky to hear any birds or see any animals.” Instead the author reports:
Walking along sandy firebreaks used as forest highways…we found the tracks of wolf, moose, deer, badger, and horses. I counted scores of birds: ravens, songbirds, three kinds of birds of prey, and dozens of swans paddling in the radioactive cooling pond.
The article goes on to report that in a study of 14 species of mammals one scientist found no evidence that any of those populations were “suppressed” within the CEZ.
I am sure that there are some health impacts on this wildlife and positive that the CEZ is not without its negative effects. I’m sure that if people were allowed to live there, that there would be higher rates of cancer, among other things. But, also recall, that this is the worst of the disasters, combined with the least cost and effort at cleanup.
One of the reasons I wanted to revisit that section is that I think I may have been wrong. I said that I was “positive that the CEZ is not without its negative effects.” I am no longer positive of that. It’s possible that just as low-dose radiation extended the lifespans of the Japanese A-bomb survivors that it has had a positive effect on the wildlife of Chernobyl, above and beyond just the removal of human interference. But because of the widespread belief in LNT, scientists assume that there must be some awful effect. So awful that one even claimed you would be lucky to spot any birds or animals, when the opposite ends up being true.
As I said unfortunately it’s not just with respect to radiation that LNT holds sway, it’s also present nearly everywhere you look in the form of safetyism, and one the reasons I’ve been bouncing back and forth is that both engender a similar level of panic.
Just yesterday I came across what may be, to this point, the most extreme example (though I’m sure in the future I’ll see something even more extreme). It came out of a story about a fight over building a halal butchery. The proposed site was nowhere near anything residential but it was near a lot of pet related businesses. And as a result, people pushed back on behalf of their pets. But really, it’s one comment that perfectly encapsulates what I’m talking about.
Knowing that my dogs may be walked by a business that holds chickens in a windowless room before their throats are slit while fully conscious does not make me feel that my dogs are in a safe environment.
Not only is this, objectively, ridiculous, but it perfectly illustrates the unwillingness to make trade-offs and compromise that Haidt and Lukianoff talked about. Earlier, I said I wanted to do two things. First I wanted to show that we are dealing with a cultural and psychological form of LNT, which has been labeled safetyism. Second I wanted to show that this absolute prioritization of safety is counter productive and harmful. Here, at the end, I think it would be useful to pull together a list from everything I’ve said thus far of the ways it’s harmful:
- It makes people unwilling to compromise, and given that compromise is essential for a functioning society, safetyism has contributed to the horrible political fracture we’re currently seeing.
- There’s a misallocation of resources. We spend time and money eliminating things which not only aren’t harmful, but which are probably beneficial.
- It creates a feedback loop. Safetyism leads to fragility, fragility means that much more attention needs to be paid to safety which in turn produces even more fragility.
- A certain level of stress, suffering, trauma, and/or danger is necessary for healthy development. Safetyism deprives us of that.
- By denying human antifragility it creates widespread fragility.
As I said, even if you’re entirely onboard with my conclusions, deciding how to increase suffering is a hard problem. But to borrow from that wisest of all sages, G.I. Joe, perhaps knowing that it’s a problem is half the battle.
I worry that referencing something like the G.I. Joe cartoon which only ran for three years in the mid-80s may be both horribly obscure and horribly out of date, but I also figure obscure, curmudgeonly stuff might be the definition of my niche. If you agree, or even if you just also remember G.I. Joe, consider donating.
I suspect you are wrong about Chernobyl. I’ll have to look for it but I recall reading there’s quite a few mutations there and one will, in particular, see misinformed trees. I think you have to consider what would you expect to see if LNT hypothesis is true?
Would you expect Chernobyl to be a silent ghost land with no animals or plants? Well no. If animals and plants die faster due to the background radiation in Chernobyl, they would quickly become food for other animals so the actual population of life would remain the same. Only if the radiation was so high that it starts killing life faster than it can reproduce would you see the ‘ghost land’, but then that’s actually what LNT says.
If LNT was true, would it impel us to create a zero radiation environment? Actually no it wouldn’t. LNT is absolutely true with car accidents. Zero cars, zero car accidents but even a single car adds a non-zero risk of someone getting hurt. Yet no community has ever even considered a mass ban on cars. Likewise I see no one trying to ban kitty litter. Kitty litter, for example, is slightly radioactive, enough that shipments of it can set off detectors yet has anyone ever asked Wal-Mart not to have tons of it in one place at a time? LNT is not really much of an argument against nuclear power since you could add more shielding around a reactor to reduce the exposure to levels of essentially zero. Arguments against nuclear power are less based on LNT being true than the fact that they may create situations where you will be exposed to quite a bit of radiation should things not go your way (as many who were just a bit closer to the atomic blasts were).
Where LNT may matter is mammograms/cat/pet scans for cancer screening. If LNT is false, that is an argument for doing more scans in the hopes of finding bad cells as early as possible. Even here, though, the argument is a bit strained. If LNT is untrue, doing lots of scans on people would still create a real false positive problem that would have to be balanced against possible goods that could happen.
Likewise the LTG hypothesis (low threshold is good) has some serious challenges. It would imply that radiation is bad for you at high doses, as you decrease the dose, you decrease the bad…except at some very low level that reverses and you start to get some good.
Imagine as such, 100 units…really bad things happen. 50 units, half bad things happen. 25, 1/4 bad things, 12.5 1/8. 6.25 1/16th, 3.125, 1/32nds. Good good. 1.5625? 1/29th. Wait, less radiation is now making things worse!. 0.78125 units? I guess 1/25th? OK but here you will start running into a problem. You can’t really measure this since you are now getting near the zone of natural variation in background radiation. Did Mr Yamaguchi fly less often? Maybe didn’t get as many chest x-rays? Lived in an area that had outdoor cars and no kitty litter? Maybe he actually ended up over his lifetime with less radiation exposure than a hip New Yorker who drinks expensive bottled water every day and books her quarterly airfare on routes that veer far from flying anywhere near Chernobyl. You’re essentially in the realm of noise which means the LNT might as well be true since it more or less makes predictions that can be verified with the data (essentially the prediction is it will be almost impossible to detect problems with very low radiation). Your theory, on the other hand, should be easily demonstrated with non-human experiments. For example, exposing crops to low levels of radiation to induce growth.
As a social analogy, it does occur to me in my childhood there was a amount of ‘safety posturing’ over exposing kids to ‘porn’. You may recall TV shows required ‘trigger warnings’ should they feature ‘adult situations’…even then they had to be on later at night (say after 9) and even then had to speak in code. Lots of gushing was issued about things like what if news stands had Playboys too low on their shelves or the shiesty merchant was too lax in ‘age policing’ customers.
Now consider today’s ‘trigger warnings’, ‘microaggressions’ etc. I would say this is for the most part a very over played concern. For one thing, I think it probably is valid to have trigger warnings. Consider some very plausible possible people who may have PTSD. Say a combat veteran from Iraq, a rape victim, a hate crime victim, and say a person hit by a drunk driver. A contemporary film class that is going to feature clips from Saving Private Ryan, 12 years a slave, and Kill Bill should probably somewhere in the introduction a note that some of the stuff to be viewed will be a bit harsh. I get the therapeutic value in building up your tolerance, but that should be done in a controlled manner. You don’t treat a fear of spiders by throwing a bucket of spiders at someone when they turn the corner.
But here’s the real point. None of those people I described live in the ultra safe world you describe. Despite what you think Fox News has demonstrated, none of those people would go any amount of time at any elite university in the US without being exposed to all sorts of things. For every case where they were issued a ‘trigger warning’, there will almost certainly be ten instances of an ‘edgy’ alt-right provocateur who may, say, email bomb a thousand people a clip depicting a rape…which is easy today but back in 1980 would require, what, spending $4 to mail someone a VHS tape hoping she would own a $750+ VCR to watch it? The ‘safety culture’ of your youth was much more effective in frustrating your attempts to be exposed to female nudity than today. I remain a skeptic here.
The anti-bullying campaigns in elementary school are probably more helpful to your case, although here I think this is less about safety culture and more about helicopter parenting….which I think is being driven by elitism combining with growing inequality. Having your kids have nicer things than you had is a linear goal which is usually easily accomplished with a halfway decent social system. Having your kids be in the 1% in an age of expanding total income is socially caustic. Doing what it takes to make that happen means others have to be left behind and once you did it this year, next year you’ll have to do even more just to avoid losing ground. What used to be the rare type of parent, Tiger Woods or Micheal Jackson’s fathers say, now is becoming the norm. The ‘anti-bullying’ campaigns IMO come from a real problem of the past (I’ll be frank, I suspect more than a few of my old teachers got off on watching the schoolyard conflict and rationalized that to the rest of the teachers as some type of half-assed Darwin based theory) combined with helicopter parenting pouncing on anything that might threaten their kid in the race for status.
Obviously we’re not spending infinite money to reduce all radiation to zero. The question is are we spending a lot more money or are we a lot more frightened than we need to be. LNT doesn’t directly stop nuclear reactors, but it does have a significant impact on storing radioactive waste.
Yes, we don’t live in some weird hyper-safe dystopia, but we also live in a world very different than the world I (and probably you as well) grew up in. In Coddling their recommendations are more along the lines of free-range parenting laws than some sort of Lord of the Flies type situation, and I don’t think they even recommend spanking. I question whether that sort of recommendation will do anything, but at a minimum I think we’re definitely emphasizing different dangers, with potentially different outcomes.
I think LNT is a bit of a straw man when it comes to nuclear power. There’s a key difference between kitty litter and a nuclear explosion or reactor. There are lots of ways to get doses of radiation from the latter roughly equal to kitty litter; just be far enough away from the blast, have proper shielding between you and the reactor, have the waste properly sealed up and stored etc. There is, however, no way for kitty litter to do what either of the other two could do, though. Critics, for the most part, are not so concerned about radiation when everything is working normally but are more worried about the commitment that things will continue to work normally and how fast things can get out of hand.
Note if LNT fanatics were an issue we’d see a lot of other activity that we don’t. For example, how often do you see people protesting hospitals and medical imaging centers? These use low level radioactive materials that often need to be disposed of and accidents do happen. Also nuclear enthusiasts seem to violate those principles you like to cite from Taleb. For example, waste disposal is being advocated by people who literally have no ‘skin in the game’. Privately owned plants enjoy what is essentially liability immunity because the gov’t subsidizes their insurance. I think we should use nuclear power however there is a governance issue here where we trust experts who we pay today to assure us their designs will hold for thousands of years….if they don’t who do we sue? What do they have at stake?
I agree ‘danger concern’ has changed . For example, we care a lot about child abuse but except for Qanon nitwits no one really worries about secret cabels of Satanists like they did in the 80’s.
But consider some ‘danger concern’ is just posing. For example, is the guy really concerned about his dog’s mental health or does he just not like the idea of being near a slaughterhouse and possibly isn’t quite enthused about Muslims either? How many in the 80’s were really worried about kids getting to the Playboys rather than simply wanting to control the ‘tone’ of the shops in their town?
On the other hand consider too that some dangers have gone up. For example, consider the ‘dick pic’. A lot of women at some point receive unsolicited ‘dick pics’ from men. Was that a thing in the past? Well I remember when I was young a stock character in comedy sketches was the ‘flasher’ who walked up to a woman in public wearing only a trench coat and ran off after shocking her with a flash. I guess this must have been a real thing that happened back then. It probably is a sort of childish things that guys like to do on some level…but I doubt a large portion of women actually ever encountered one. It is kind of awkward to roam the streets naked but for a coat all day, after all. The bar was set kind of high for flashing. There was also ‘obscene phone calls’….and perhaps that was a warning of what could happen with the Internet. Of course ‘dick pics’ were possible but I think you are old enough to remember what photography was like before digital cameras. Now, of course, the bar is set very low with technology hence this is the ‘new normal’ for women.
What I’m getting at here is that you’re measuring the rise of ‘coddling’ against an old baseline without accounting for our ‘communications democratization’ and the loss of privacy. The whole world is inside your pocket and the worse elements of the world is able to mass communicate on a scale they never were before. Another example is racism. I would say it was much worse in, say, 1970 but in the past there were few avenues for non-physical communication. A black person, could at least return to his community and home and few whites would bother him there at the end of the day. Policing was not as universal so yes you could have, say, some white teens roll through town yelling racial epithets….but if their car broke down they would be on their own for quite a while.
Here’s what I think has happened. The average person behaves better. Men are more respectful of womens’ body integrity, people are less prone to at least overt racism. When, however, people want to be bad they can now mass produce the bad on a scale that either wasn’t possible in the past because technology didn’t exist or because they would have gotten themselves beaten to a pulp. While you see a rising fetish for ‘safety’, they probably see as an overcrowded bar filled with knuckleheads throwing chairs and breaking bottles hiring maybe a bouncer or two to at least take down the nasty a notch or two.