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How Would Jesus Drive?
David Brooks / New York Times | 4 January 2018
Over
the past several years we have done an outstanding job of putting total
sleazoids at the top of our society: Trump, Bannon, Ailes, Weinstein,
Cosby, etc. So it was good to get a reminder, from Pope Francis in his
New Year’s Eve homily, that the people who have the most influence on
society are actually the normal folks, through their normal, everyday
gestures being kind in public places, attentive to the elderly. The pope
called such people, in a beautiful phrase, “the artisans of the common
good.”
Small
deeds, he said, “express concretely love for the city … without giving
speeches, without publicity, but with a style of practical civic
education for daily life.”
The
pope focused especially on driving, praising those people “who move in
traffic with good sense and prudence.” As Richard Reeves of the
Brookings Institution points out, driving is precisely the sort of
everyday activity through which people mold the culture of their
community.
If
you speed up so I can’t merge into your lane, you’re teaching me that
the society around here is basically competitive, not cooperative. If,
on the other hand, you give me a friendly wave after I let you in,
you’re teaching me that this is a place where a kindness is recognized
and gratitude is expressed.
If
you feel perfectly fine doing a three-point turn in the middle of a
busy street, blocking everybody else going both ways, you teach me that
people here are selfish and feel entitled. But if you get over to the
right and wait your turn in a crowded highway exit lane, rather than
cutting in at the last moment, that teaches me that there’s a sense of
fairness and equality, and that people feel embedded in the group.
Driving
is governed by law, but it’s also shaped by l norms. If enough people
adopt the same driving style, then that behavior hardens into a communal
disposition. Once people understand what is normal around here, more
people tend to drive that way, too, and you get this amplified, snowball
effect. Kindness breeds kindness. Aggression breeds aggression.
We
all know that driving cultures vary widely from city to city. My
impression is that people in Seattle dawdle, people in Los Angeles get
right up on your tail but are pretty skilled about it, and those of us
from the New York/New Jersey area treat driving as if it were foreplay
to genocide.
Studies
have been done, of course. According to Allstate, the most
accident-prone drivers live in Boston; Baltimore; Worcester, Mass.;
Washington, D.C.; and Springfield, Mass. (Way to go, Massachusetts!) The
safest drivers live in Kansas City, Kan.; Brownsville, Tex.; Madison,
Wis.; and Huntsville, Ala.
A
company called Automatic makes a device that measures how cars race
through traffic. It finds that drivers in Phoenix, Tucson and Memphis
are the most aggressive and those in Honolulu; Portland, Ore.; and
Seattle are the least.
The
cultural gaps among nations are even more stark. According to a 2003
Gallup survey, 65 percent of American and Russian drivers thought they’d
been subjected to aggressive behavior from others, compared with only
26 percent of Japanese drivers. There are significant differences in
driving culture between disciplined northern European countries and the
more permissive southern ones, where lane markers are regarded as
dubious suggestions.
Some
traffic patterns require a tradition of deference to central authority.
According to The Economist, half the world’s traffic circles are in
France, where they work well. In Nairobi, they are a complete disaster.
Driving
means making a thousand small moral decisions: whether to tailgate to
push the slowpoke faster, or to give space; whether to honk only as a
warning or constantly as your all-purpose show of contempt for humanity.
Driving
puts you in a constant position of asking, Are we in a place where
there is a system of self-restraint, or are we in a place where it’s dog
eat dog?
Driving
puts you in a constant position of asking, Are my needs more important
than everybody else’s, or are we all equal? BMW drivers are much less
likely to brake for pedestrians at crosswalks. Prius drivers in San
Francisco commit more traffic violations. People who think they are
richer or better than others are ruder behind the wheel.
Driving
also puts you in a position where you are periodically having to
overrule your desire for revenge. When somebody cuts you off, you want
to punish the jerk and enforce all that is right and good. But that only
leads to a cycle of even worse driving, so it’s better, as Francis
would say, to turn the other cheek. How would Jesus drive?
In
short, driving puts you into social situations in which you have to
co-construct a shared culture of civility, and go against your own
primeval selfishness, and it does so while you are encased in what is
potentially a 4,000-pound metal weapon.
Of
course, we are all appalled at the clowns who are bespoiling our
culture from the top. But I’m going to try to remember one lesson when I
hit the road: Though I may be surrounded by idiots, I’m potentially an
artisan of the common good.
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