In a Hurry to be Nowhere: A Society’s relationsh...

Summary

• Someone jumps a queue, another blocks an intersection because he cannot bear to wait for the traffic ahead to clear, and a horn is answered not with an apology but with aggression.
• Most people stop at a red light not merely because there may be a policeman nearby, but because somewhere within them exists an acceptance that the rule serves a purpose.
• A functioning society depends upon millions of small decisions in which people choose not to exercise every advantage available to them: the car that waits, the motorcycle that does not squeeze through, the driver who lets another vehicle merge, the person who absorbs an accidental horn without turning it into a question of honour.

AI Generated Summary

By Harris Jamil Alam Khan

A motorcycle squeezes through a gap that barely exists. A car overtakes from the wrong side only to stop at the same red light fifty metres ahead. Someone jumps a queue, another blocks an intersection because he cannot bear to wait for the traffic ahead to clear, and a horn is answered not with an apology but with aggression. Everyone appears to be in an extraordinary hurry. The strange part is that most of us do not have an emergency or an urgent chore, yet the daredevil driving is on display everywhere.

Perhaps our roads deserve to be studied as more than a traffic problem. They may be telling us something about ourselves. The road is one of the few places where almost every section of society meets under the same basic rules. The SUV, the rickshaw, the motorcycle, the bus and the pedestrian eventually arrive at the same intersection. There is supposed to be an uncomplicated social contract between them: stay in your lane, stop when required, give way when another person has the right of way, do not endanger someone merely because you can and, most importantly, accept that occasionally you will have to wait. Increasingly, it is that last requirement that seems to have become unacceptable.

A few seconds of inconvenience can produce extraordinary reactions. A horn becomes an insult. A lane change becomes a challenge. A minor collision can become a physical confrontation. The issue ceases to be traffic and becomes ego. To dismiss this simply as bad driving is to miss something more important. What we may be watching is an erosion of tolerance for inconvenience, accompanied by an equally troubling erosion in the expectation of consequences. Law works partly because people fear punishment, but functioning societies do not survive on punishment alone. Most people stop at a red light not merely because there may be a policeman nearby, but because somewhere within them exists an acceptance that the rule serves a purpose. When enough people discover that the red light is optional, the helmet optional, the wrong side of the road available, the queue negotiable and aggression largely without consequence, something begins to change. The law remains in the statute book, but on the street it becomes a suggestion.

Plato confronted essentially the same question more than two thousand years ago through the story of the Ring of Gyges in The Republic. Glaucon asks what a person would do if he possessed a ring that made him invisible. If there were no possibility of being seen, caught or punished, would he still behave justly? That question remains remarkably relevant. The true test of a traffic law is not whether a driver stops when a warden is standing at the intersection. It is whether he stops at two in the morning when the road appears empty. It is not whether a motorcyclist wears a helmet because a checkpoint is ahead, but whether he values the rule when nobody is there to enforce it. A society cannot police every intersection, every lane and every decision.