Life & Times – Road rage

In this column not long ago I wrote about the ever-increasing number of vehicles on the road and how that was causing ever-increasing difficulty in finding places to park them. I pointed out that this was a function of the capitalist system’s relentless quest for ‘growth’ – growth of all goods and services and at all levels. I also pointed out that people having more or even better things doesn’t in itself lead to satisfaction or happiness and doesn’t have the power to tame or overcome all the negative factors that may arise from the instability and unpredictability of the system we live under (job reorganisation, unemployment, recession, poverty, war, etc., etc). All ‘growth’ does is to satisfy the system’s built-in quest for profit that never stops regardless of social need or long-term consequences.

Angry and not so angry
What has all this got to do with ‘road rage’? Well, journalist Sophie Gallagher recently wrote an article in the i newspaper entitled ‘I was a victim of road rage – it is everywhere and getting worse’. She explained how a driver wanting to overtake her ‘exploded with rage’ when he couldn’t and then tailed her for several minutes, managing to box her in and then getting out of his car and approaching her threateningly before she was able to pull away. This brought a considerable response from readers agreeing with her and recounting their own experiences of other angry road users. Her article also happened to coincide with an incident I was involved in myself when sitting in my parked car in a local shopping centre behind a large van. The van suddenly started to back up and it worried me that the driver might not have seen the car behind him and would back into me. I hooted in warning – just in case. The driver then stopped his van, got out and walked towards me. When he got to my car, though he did not threaten me, the look on his face told me he was angry, and there was a hint of intimidation in his voice as he told me that, yes, he’d seen me and that his van had ‘loads of cameras’. As he walked way, got back into his van and drove off, I thought I should have replied that I’d hooted ‘just to be on the safe side’. Hindsight is a fine thing.

But, on reflecting afterwards, I also thought how rarely this kind of thing actually happens – and what that says about ‘human nature’ considering how stressful driving is these days and how often awkward situations arise involving more than one vehicle. The fact is that on the road most people most of the time are extremely patient and even go out of their way to be considerate, civil and helpful to others – whether drivers or pedestrians. And that is the general expectation, so that, when something untoward does happen (ie, when another driver behaves in an unkind, inconsiderate, or angry way), we’re taken by surprise, and that may loom inappropriately large in our overall mental picture of what driving a car is like.

News, bad and good
This would go some way towards explaining the journalist’s generalising conclusion that, because she has experienced anger or threatening behaviour a couple of times when driving, ‘it is everywhere and getting worse’, and for her then casting around for ‘evidence’ of this from newspaper reports, insurance companies and various academic ‘experts’. Not surprising either that her article also brought considerable feedback from readers, announcing that they’d had similar bad experiences on the road and thereby ‘confirming’ the journalist’s conclusions. Yet, turning this on its head, is it not also worth asking the question how effective her article would have been if she had stated the opposite reality, ie, that very few people indeed experience road rage from other drivers and that ‘road kindness’ rather than ‘road rage’ was motorists’ predominant experience? The fact is that, for the media, news overwhelmingly means ‘bad news’.

One of the academics consulted by Sophie Gallagher is quoted as saying that ‘driving is dangerous and anxiety-provoking’ – something most people would agree with. That being the case, is not the most noteworthy thing that relatively rarely do drivers manifest anger, or even irritation, towards others road users, even when they find themselves in untoward situations or where someone else’s manoeuvre or decision clearly leaves something to be desired. On the whole, we live and let live – and usually help and cooperate if we can – just as human beings do in most daily interactions, even when these are manifestly stressful.

Everyday socialism?
And in fact, regardless of the ‘bad news’ that the news media tend to focus on, people do also like ‘good’ news, as shown by the countless examples posted every day on social media which show people coming together to help members of their community and generally to assist others in difficult circumstances. So, when socialists put forward the idea of a whole society organised this way (ie, on the basis of voluntary cooperation and from each according to ability to each according to need), it can be hard for us to understand that people should scoff, as they sometimes do, and say things such as that it is against ‘human nature’. As the sometimes mundane but countless day-to-day examples, on and off the road, of what has been labelled ‘everyday communism’ (perhaps we should call it ‘everyday socialism’) show, such a society could work – but only when a majority of workers across the world have developed the consciousness and understanding to bring it into being and to organise production and distribution of everything that people need according to socialist principles.

HOWARD MOSS