Toyota and the price of modernity

Amazingly, the congressional hearings on Toyota were relatively civilized. This was remarkable given the drama of some of the testimony, such as that from a tearful Rhonda Smith, who recounted how, in her runaway Lexus, she called her husband because "I wanted to hear his voice one more time."

Such wrenching and compelling stories might impel you to want to string up the first Toyota executive you find. But the issue here is larger and highly complex.

Industrial society produces an astonishing array of mass-produced products - cars, drugs, medical devices - that are at once wondrous and potentially lethal.

The wondrousness sometimes eludes us. Even the lowliest wage earner has an automobile that conveys him with more luxury, freedom and comfort than any king experienced in the centuries before the 20th. And modern medicines have prevented more suffering and death than anything ever conceived by man.

But these wonders can be lethal. And sorting out the complaints is maddeningly difficult - though sort you must, otherwise every complaint would require shutting factories, and we'd have no industrial society at all.

The question is: How do you distinguish the idiosyncratic failure from the systemic - for example, the single lemon that came off the auto assembly line versus an intrinsic problem in that model's engineering? How do you separate one patient's physiology versus an intrinsic problem with a drug that makes it unacceptably dangerous?

Consider the oddity of those drug commercials on television. Fifteen seconds of the purported therapeutic effort, followed by about 45 seconds of a rapidly muttered list of horrific possible side effects. Sudden death is my favorite because there is something comical about it being a side effect. And how many sudden deaths does it take until we say: "Enough," and pull the drug off the market?

It's not an easy calculation. Six years ago, Vioxx, a powerful anti-inflammatory, was withdrawn by the manufacturer because it was found to increase the risk of heart attack and stroke, but some rheumatologists were furious the drug was forced off the market. They had patients with crippling arthritis who had achieved a functioning life with Vioxx.

And don't imagine that we do not coldly calculate the price of a human life. In 1974, the speed limit was lowered to 55 mph to conserve oil. That led to a drop in traffic fatalities - approximately 3,000 lives every year. This didn't stop us, after the oil crisis, from raising the speed limit back to 65 and beyond.

This is not to let Toyota off the hook. Executives have admitted they underplayed reports of sticking accelerators. They seem to have made a serious effort to correct the floor mat and sticky accelerator problem while continuing to investigate the possibility of an additional electronic glitch.

But it is no disrespect to the memory of those killed, and the sorrow of those left behind, to admit that even the highest technology produced by the world's finest companies can be fallible and fatal, and the intelligent response is not rage and retribution but sober remediation and recognition of the high price we pay - willingly pay - for modernity with all its wondrous, dangerous bounty.

© 2010, The Washington Post Writers Group