Rolled Coal and the Nature of Humanity.
Are people getting meaner than they used to be? Are we as a species getting dumber? Are we evolving into higher beings?
It was definitely my fault.
I pulled out onto the highway and the oncoming care was too close. Not emergency braking put your arm across your passenger close. Too close to be polite.
The truck decelerated and changed lanes. I was sorry to have made the mistake. My vehicle is too short for me to have seen into and across the cab as it passed. I did note the Cummins nameplate, the mark of that triumphant diesel engine. Great trucks.
I was not too surprised by what happened next; the truck swung in front of me and the driver pressed his $500 button, rolling coal onto my windshield.
If you are not a diesel truck aficionado or an anti-Trump protestor, you may not know what rolling coal is. Rolling coal is an intentional misuse of a diesel engine to create a giant cloud of smoke. With older engines that have compression problems, you can pump the gas and make a pretty good cloud. If you foresee needing to express yourself to people behind you on the road, you can spend hundreds or thousands of dollars to install modifications to fuel-air mix that will make a good blinding, cough-inducing diesel universe for whoever you don’t like that follows you.
These exhaust pipes blurted a moderate cloud of grey-black smoke. I was through it in a second. He accelerated away.
Direct hit, wronged driver. You are avenged.
Thanks for listening to my little tale. What an asshole, right? That cloud obscured any feeling of guilt I had for my traffic misdeed. I spent the next few miles armoring my mind for conflict. What if that driver is not done expressing dislike for my decision making? Is he armed and having a bad day?
What would you say happened if you were my friend and I told you that story?
And also…
What would you say happened if you were that driver’s friend and they told you that story?
There’s an asshole in either version, I expect.
The most readily available stories we have to explain what happens on the roads make for very thin simple versions of people. Usually that they are stupid, mean, and lacking in basic skills.
This is what we do to people outside of our group. Strangely, all other drivers are perceived to be outside our group. To some degree or another, we dehumanize them.
I don’t think it is the drivers. I can’t believe that the majority of drivers are dumb, clumsy, and evil at all times. What I can believe is that everyone makes bad decisions sometimes, and sometimes I witness them. Its not the driver, it is our cars that make this situation. It is the system we find ouselves in. In a car, it is not easy to have grace for an unseen threat. In studies, humans are likely to attribute complex emotions to those closely related but only attribute “animalistic” responses to those more distant.
The Upstream Neighbor
The people are not different, we encounter them differently.
A friend of mine has some farmland. Suddenly one year the shared irrigation ditch was regularly clogged and problematic. He and his neighbors could not at first figure out what changed. Its like a tree had somehow moved, dumping more duff and cones in the works.
It turns out that the change was that a neighbor upstream had died. A Trump-voting farmer, had been regularly tending to the works that fed his downstream neighbors. He had never told anyone what he did or asked for compensation. Upon his death the works clogged up and he was not around to thank for all the years of help.
Come at me with your information about online communities, but some things that create better treatment is sharing time and space physically near to each other.1 We can believe the falsified Stanford Prison Experiment2 or we can believe what we see on our own neighborhood streets.
To me, the work of society is fostering systems in which we can be our most human self, because our human self is motivated to have good relationships with other humans. Waiting for the human race to evolve has no scientific or philosophical foundation that I know of,3 but we can see in our own lives that the spaces we encounter each other influence how we treat each other.
Postscript: Digital Spaces
The article below was sent to me by John D as I was writing this week’s Old Truck Good Coffee. It is a deeply researched and convincing take on how a system’s design determines how it fits in society, and that our people are then affected by those systems. If you want to expand this conversation to the digital realm, this is where to go!
I cycled across the US with a friend. We were coal rolled two or three times. In these cases they were truly ass holes and cowards because we have no way to talk with them. Anonymity brings out the worst impulses. In the middle of the US we met many Trumpers who were kind and generous though they may have been coal-rollers too.
It’s a thin social media line that divides us.