The Peril of a Safe Theology

Extract

The multiplication of safety appliances for the protection of human life is a marked characteristic of our age. No humane ministry to society is more consistently and forcefully urged than the providing of automatic safety-devices to supplant the older method of reliance upon personal attention and intelligence. “Such accidents will happen until we eliminate the whole human element by means of automatic provisions,” observed a railroad operator after a recent disaster. He followed the statement with an informing discussion concerning the installing of safety-appliances on his own line of road, in response to the demands of the public conscience. There is always a position and a premium for the inventive genius who can substitute for fallible human attention an automatic response that works infallibly. The disabled switchman, the drunken watchman, the recreant employee, can be more and more dispensed with as his services are supplied by the mechanical device which never sleeps nor drinks whiskey, and whose integrity does not call for any subjective processes. Lives of employees and of patrons by the thousands are thus guarded and saved every year. And the principle is so humane and sound that we do not propose to halt while inventive skill is unexhausted or the reluctant employer remains unpunished.

Our object here is not to question the beneficence of these things; we are concerned rather with a by-product. What are the moral consequences of safety devices—their effect upon character? and what are the limitations of mechanical safety in the complex and responsible activities of human achievement? Does the elevator man become a more or a less responsible person when he feels that not his own skill and attention, but an automatic device, stands between his passengers and disaster? Do railway employees, when relieved of personal responsibility, develop the types of character that under the old system fitted them to advance as conductors, engineers, and managing officers? What is the effect upon a board of directors of knowing that they have provided “every device for the safety and comfort of their patrons”? In short, does the movement contribute to responsible character or does it not?