Once more into the breach!

Speaking of that whole keep-up-with-the-traffic thing, one situation really screams out for it.  Think of the last time you found yourself at the end of a long line of cars at a stop light.  Didn’t you wish everybody would just go when the light turned green–I mean, hurry, even?  Typically, the drivers at the front know they have a pretty good chance of getting through the light, so they don’t have any urgency about it.  But how about the guys at the back?  Wouldn’t it be karmicly appropriate for the ones at the front to think of the poor schlubs at the back?  Well, of course it would.

That’s sort of banal, I admit, but it gets more interesting.  This simple, everyday situation actually involves all sorts of thoughts, beliefs, fears and associated mental/emotional human what-all.  Take the simple calculation that every car-length that develops as the cars go through the light equals one more schlub who won’t be making it through.  You’d think that would be simple math for most people, and it is in many major cities where the horns start honking three seconds before the light turns green, but it is not the case generally across the country.  What happens more generally is that the first car goes, develops a few car-lengths of lead, and then the second car goes, and the pattern continues in its petty pace on down the line.  We end up getting about one-half to one-third of the cars through as we would have with a little more adroit behavior–all this as people dimly try to recall some rule or other about following distance they learned in high school.  What was it?  Something about car lengths and miles per hour?  Needless to say, the anal specificity of “one car-length for every ten miles per hour” has a way of leaving the normal person cold–or should I say, confused.  Too much math, right?  Let me break it down for you, though:  If you’re hardly moving, you don’t need much following distance.

In the extreme, this slow-mo approach to driving through lights leads to another unfortunate occurrence–the dreaded sensor-in-the-street gotcha.  In this scenario, even fewer people get through the light than might have otherwise, and this is because people don’t consider the fact that lights are set to turn red when it appears no more traffic needs to get through the light.  Sensors in the streets oversee the process, and excessive gaps in the flow of traffic set them off.

I am told (thanks, Lee ) that many people don’t know these things exist, or if they have heard of them, simply “don’t believe in them.”  Maybe these folks come from the country where lights often change according to a pre-planned schedule just as they did everywhere in the early days.  This method often caused people to sit, waiting for minutes, just to cross empty intersections. Time went by, and people were moved to invent methods for keeping the traffic flowing more appropriately. During my childhood in Atlanta, for example, people had invented mechanical devices, treadles built into the roadbed.  The treadles rocked under their sturdy rubber coverings when cars rolled over them on the side streets, and this let the light know it was time to change.  That sturdy rubber covering also let people know something was going on down there.  Nowadays, the sensors have gone “stealth”–they’re harder to see and more scientific.  They now take advantage of electromagnetic fields and induction loops.

It turns out there is a reason that metal detectors are made with those circles at the end of the little poles.  To make use of Faraday’s law of induction, it turns out, you need a loop, a closed circuit of reasonable size. When that loop, which carries a carefully modulated circuit, encounters metal, the circuit’s “harmony” is disturbed in a way that can be sensed and measured.  The disturbance occurs in relation to the size of the piece of metal and its distance from the loop.  See how this works under the road in this article on the control and coordination of traffic signals.  As for any remaining doubters, look at this dry, multi-page writeup by some dry governmental agency.  Would they go to all this trouble to propagate a hoax for no apparent benefit to themselves?  Well, maybe, but I doubt it.  These things are everywhere!

So, leaving aside this dry, scientific, mathematical version of reality–which, if it really had any effect on us here in the real world, would be the end of the conversation–one comes to the crux:  What are people thinking when they sit at the light?  I believe that despite many people’s status as citizens of a 21st century world, many of them are engaging in magical thinking

Out of this I leave the women who wait 44 seconds at a 45-second light before they start digging in their purses or otherwise organizing their lives.  Many people, not just women, drop their humanity at times in this fashion.  They become animals, for the nonce, thinking that the more time that has passed since an occurrence, the longer it will be until the next occurrence of that type.  This line of thought might appear to work well in the randomness of nature, but in a human world, dominated by schedules, the longer it has been since the light turned red, the closer one finds oneself to the toggle being thrown.  It’s really the same with volcanoes, but in a world ruled vaguely, by the whims and fancies of an almost consistent–almost imaginable–overarching force or law, and it can take lifetimes to prove the point.

So we get a pass for missing that.  Sitting–daily–at traffic lights?  And not figuring out how they work?  Not so much.

But back to magical thinking.  It’s an interesting area, and we see people engaging in it everyday, even in this new century when people are much given to thinking how advanced we have become; we also see people expressing aggravation that this kind of thinking hasn’t worked out that well for them.  What I’m trying to say here is, “Why the hell should it?”  (More specifically and for example, why shouldn’t the various sectors of the economy be suffering after so much magical thinking went into getting them in the shape they’re in?)

So, OK, I “get” that we are little more than a very advanced animal, one who has come to a place in this almost-orderly world where the problems of our own making are the most insurmountable.  At its basis, magical thinking, as well as other widespread flaws in human thought, has its basis in the notion of mental causation.  It’s an interesting notion based on our human tendency to project our reasoning mind’s sensibility upon an essentially random world.  Things happen, and because we have been canny in predicting them, or whether random chance put the components together in just the right way, we get the impression that the thought preceded the act, that the mind had caused the event to occur in the world.

And I’m not saying that human life can’t appear to happen just that way.  The actions of human beings can seem like the inexorable workings of a mind-directed, yet inscrutable, destiny.  Think of how countless cossacks must have felt, slaughtered in their thousands in the snow.  And for their part, the Bolsheviks must have felt just the same.

The world has always provided us with the human antidote to this kind of thinking–not to say they always got it right.  The geniuses of the Enlightenment, for all the good they did reversing centuries of superstition-induced misery, still imagined that a supreme being had established laws of the universe, and had charged us with discovering them.  What a fine, gracious, generous way to refer to the rare instances in our natural world that somehow manage to fall into some sort of predictable order.  Go on a few centuries, and existential phenomenology evolves to answer the same questions from a different perspective, one that was willing to accept the absence of a supreme being.  One sees the roots of this thinking in the writing of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 – 1900).

Nietzsche has been known for many ideas and statements in addition to the one that causes the majority of Americans such angst.  The assertion that, “God is dead” was a shocker when he wrote it, and it still is, perhaps especially in a country in which the majority of the population believes uncritically in the creation myth related in Genesis.  Yet this notion is as freeing as anything any person has ever said.  I don’t mean this in a negative sense, such a thing as a child might think:  “All right!  God is dead so I can misbehave all I want and never have to worry about going to hell!”  It is, rather, freeing in the sense that we can stop thinking of the world as the orderly place we imagine it to be and see that most of the order we perceive is something we have created to comfort ourselves in the dark of some cold night.

But the human world, created as it is by humans, retains a certain order, even in times of upheaval.  The rules of physics function predictably, most often, and the laws of man do not often vary chaotically.  Thus, traffic signals change under the control of sensors in the streets put there by human beings.  We can figure out the rules that govern them; we can contact the humans who developed the rules that govern them; we can be active in tweaking the rules or adapting our behavior to make the most of them.  Or we can sit there and let a lot of room develop between us and the car ahead of us and screw the people in the back of the line, while we drive through under a yellow light.

I’m thinking this is where the magical thinking comes in.  Such people must be thinking rather highly of themselves for having been able to reach out the power of their minds to keep the light green for just long enough.  Oh, would it were that I had such powers of the mind.

Or we can say that such people offer more proof that Nietzsche was onto something.  Oh, not with that “God is dead” business.  That’s so 20th century in this postmodern world.  I was talking more about his book entitled Human, All Too Human.  The subtitle, ” A Book for Free Spirits,” goes on at length extolling the need for seeking one’s own view of life while at the same time pointing out facets of human life and humankind that make such things impossible for the mass of humanity.

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