Risky Business: Playing the Numbers Game

Eric Weiner: On the intersection of place, politics and culture

03.27.09 | 9:49 AM ET

Visitors at the Iraqi National Museum. REUTERS/Thaier al-Sudani

Two seemingly unrelated items in the news recently caught my attention. Actress Natasha Richardson dies in a skiing accident in Quebec. The first Western tour group in Iraq safely complete a 17-day excursion of that besieged nation.

What do the two stories have in common? They speak directly to a vexing question every traveler faces: is it safe to go there?

By all accounts, Richardson was engaged in a prudent, tame jaunt at a ski resort near Montreal. She wasn’t helicopter skiing down K2. She wasn’t hot-dogging it. She was taking a beginner’s lesson on a bunny slope. Yet she is dead, after falling and developing a blood clot in her brain. The Iraqi tour group, on the other hand, was engaged in what most of us would consider a far riskier trip. Yet they are all fine.

Natasha Richardson, we conclude, was just unlucky. Or, as some armchair critics charge, imprudent. They question why Richardson waived off the initial ambulance that was dispatched. Why, they wonder, did it take four hours before she was seen by a doctor?

This sort of blame game is common. Pilots are quick to pin the blame for an air crash on the dead pilots. Why? By assigning a human failing as the cause of an accident, we maintain the illusion of control. That pilot flew into a thunderstorm, so I can avoid his fate by being a better pilot. Natasha Richardson waited too long to get medical help. Her death was avoidable, and therefore so is mine.

Of course, we’re kidding ourselves. We have less control than we think, and that is especially true on the road. A country can be safe one second and a deathtrap the next. Thailand was a relatively safe destination on Dec. 25, 2004, but a terribly dangerous one the next day, when the Asian tsunami slammed into Phuket, killing thousands of people, including many foreign tourists.

The fact is we humans are not very good at assessing risk. We worry more about dying in a plane crash than an auto accident, even though, statistically, driving is much more dangerous (65 times more dangerous, according to the magazine American Scientist). Why are we so off-base? Again, it’s about control. We feel in control behind the wheel of a car, not in the back of an airliner.

We also tend to disproportionately fear ancient, outdated risks. Many people, for instance, report an intense fear of snakes, even though the odds of being bitten by one is infinitesimally small. That’s because the fear of snakes resides deep inside our primitive brain—the amyglada, to be precise, an almond-shaped bundle of tissue that resides just above the brain stem. It is a primal fear, and those are the most intense.

Tolerance for risk is a very personal matter. It depends not only on who we are, but where we are in our life. Most of the adventure tourists on the Iraq tour were middle-aged or older. None had families. That is no coincidence. During my time as a foreign correspondent for NPR, I traveled to Iraq many times, as well as Afghanistan, Sudan and other “hot spots.” I didn’t give it much thought. It was my job. Now, as the father of a 4-year-old, I think twice before going to these places.

I don’t base my travel decisions, though, on those State Department advisories. They are largely useless—snapshots of the recent past, not the present, let alone the future. Besides, our minds tend to latch on to the most dramatic, terrifying aspects of these warnings, just as a hypochondriac can always find a website, somewhere, that will confirm that they have some terminal illness. For instance, I’m about to depart on a trip to Kyrgyzstan, so I checked the State Department advisory for the capital, Bishkek. It included this dire warning: “The Kyrgyz Republic has a high rate of violent crime due to unemployment and a large number of organized gangs. Muggings often occur after dark and can be quite violent, leaving the victim severely injured.”

That sounds scary. Really, though, it could be describing many American cities. Besides, places almost always seem more dangerous from a distance. From suburban America, all of Iraq seems equally dangerous. That is not the case. The Kurdish enclaves in the North are relatively safe.

So is the answer to just stay at home? Not necessarily. Each year, some 600 Americans die falling out of bed. Another 320 drown in bathtubs. Imagine if the State Department issued warnings for our homes, and not just foreign countries. We might never get out of bed, let alone into a car.

The best traveler, I think, is a fatalistic one. We can meet our maker in the alleyways of Fallujah or the bunny slopes of Quebec. Or, for that matter, the bathtub in our home. Best not to think about it too much.