Road Rage and Media Outrage: Inherited Evils

 

         Road rage seems almost like demonic evil--destruction inflicted for no practical advantage--the motive being to hurt a stranger even at risk of hurting oneself. It's lose-lose. No sane driver who calculates long-term outcomes can see road rage as a wise policy, even in the crassest economic (or prison) terms.

         Death threats to strangers on social media are another form of nonsensical evil, intended to hurt strangers without clear benefit to the sender. The outcome is simply an increase of fear and discomfort in the world without any balancing improvement.

         Whatever event prompted the death threat has already happened. Here is gratuitous moral evil--the antithesis of the Golden Rule--actions intended to inflict pain on others for one's own inverted pleasure.  It seems that only joy in destruction could motivate unprofitable evil. It smacks of Original Sin and contradicts the Utilitarian economic man, the idealized person who acts rationally to maximize personal advantage.

Call me naive, but I've always needed a reason to fight. Several times when I was young, I was challenged me fight, and my reaction was always, "Are you crazy? A fight might injure me and, even if I won, injure you. What could possibly be the point?" I've always managed to weasel out. Except for tussling on soft grass with my cousin Randy, a wrestling class in PE, and a brief outburst of temper against a bully on a basketball court at sixteen (the exception that proves the rule), I've never had a fight in my long life and wonder what anybody sees in them--except, of course, in cases of unavoidable self-defense, which I have so far avoided. Why would anybody pick a fight with a stranger, a fight that threatens everybody's welfare and achieves no earthly advantage?

Robert Wright, an evolutionary psychologist, explains this in his best-selling book, Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment (2017). Compulsive aggression such as road rage expresses anger, a feeling that has little or nothing to do with present utilitarian advantage. Such feelings are part of our evolutionary programming, shared with other species, spontaneous products of evolution "designed to encode judgements about things in our environment" (Wright, p. 29), and they function automatically, as independent of morality and utility as the weather. 

           Feelings are bits of behavioral shorthand that function as they do in us because ancestors with these feelings were likely to reproduce. Feelings sometimes help us to survive, but if they do, it is only as a byproduct of their original purpose, which was to help our ancestors replicate their genes. Evolution breeds discontent that directs us toward whatever once helped remote ancestors breed breeders. Our feeling brains evolve very slowly and therefore are optimized for conditions thousands of years ago, for hunter-gatherers in villages of no more than a few dozen friends and relations (selecting even then from feelings grounded in millions of years of pre-human evolution). For this reason, encounters with strangers tend to be anxious and maladaptive.

Imagine that you are a man in an ancient hunger-gatherer village (I say man because women seldom enact road rage), and another man steals your food or mate and disrespects you, humiliating you in front of the rest of the village. If you don't teach him a lesson, no woman will want you for a mate. You need to react violently against the bully or become a genetic dead end. This is true even if the bully is large and almost certain to thrash you, a short-term disincentive. But evolution is about procreation, not personal comfort, and, after your cuts and bruises heal, you will be likely to raise more descendants because you attacked the bully. You made him back off and showed everybody there was a cost for disrespecting you. 

Thus, even as the bully bruised you, it would feel good to bruise him back and make him regret disrespecting you. Heroism is its own reward. Revenge is sweet. That's how we're programmed. Potentially self-destructive rage to "save face" makes evolutionary sense in social units like villages, schools, and gangs where people know you and your abuser. The same rage makes no sense among strangers you will never see again.

Outside of a neighborhood, traffic is anonymous. On a road trip, I often wonder how many old friends, distant cousins, classmates, and friends of friends roll by anonymized in cages of glass and steel. On the highway, even friends look like strangers, but our inner hunter-gatherer still reacts to the insult if somebody cuts us off, say, and throws a bird when we honk in protest. Probably, nobody else noticed the insult, much less cared--in any case, nobody we'll see again. We haven't lost face. Ignoring the insult will not compromise our reproductive efficiency or reputation. It's not even about us. It's anonymous. The bird-thrower is a random stranger. If we ignore him, our lives will continue exactly as if we had never been insulted. And yet, even the mild-mannered feel a flush of anger. At a minimum, the insult burns into the memory as hurtful, and, too often, road rage flows from it with tragic or criminal consequences. This is the price of living in a society where most of the people we meet are strangers.

Wright doesn't mention the nonsensical death threats that, in the semi-anonymity of social media, are lobbed at anybody who says or does anything high profile. It's seductively easy to type a threat and hit send, especially without any real intent to harm, but why do it? It's not like theft or fraud. There's no profit in it, and it might get you in trouble. I could blame such threats on dark hearts that yearn to cause suffering, on demonic power tripping. Maybe this happens, but Wright's archetype of the hunter-gatherer village suggests another mechanism. The premise is that we are emotionally maladapted to the vast communities most of us live in and compulsively reconstruct our surroundings on the emotional pattern of the archetypal villages that shaped human feeling of over millennia of evolution. 

A stranger on a highway morphs into a village bully. A parallel explanation of online death threats is that we construct private online villages of shared beliefs, echo-chamber hamlets to which we feel loyal. We return to something like the environment that formed our collective unconscious, a sentimental journey home. Hostile strangers who penetrate boundaries pose existential threats to the village--and thus to our genes in the archetypal hamlet of our primal feelings--and so our impulse is to chase the strangers away with death threats. It is, at its ancient roots, a family-building ploy, and so, like sex, it feels good. 

         Of course, threats shouted on social media cause real pain and no reliable benefits. They can't suppress an idea and are more likely to publicize it and even create sympathy for it, but our hunter-gatherer feelings don't care. Their primal aim, like shouting at a bear in the woods, is to repel the threat or, at least, to do something about our compromised boundaries, and that is its own righteous reward.

Both ploys transform unfocused anxiety into focused fear and make it seem manageable. Nothing can erase our knowledge of existential vulnerability, our absolute vulnerability to forces outside our control, our dependence on God in the theology of Friedrich Schleiermacher. In any case, we are ultimately helpless to sustain our existence, doomed to fail as earthly beings. Death waits for us all. But we forget this  painful fact when we battle finite enemies, foes that can be defeated or, at least, resisted, driven back, and survived. Finite dangers mask inevitable doom. Fear anesthetizes anxiety. 

          The distinction between anxiety and fear is central to Paul Tillich's The Courage to Be (1952). Anxiety is the emotional awareness that we cannot sustain our own existence. "This is the natural anxiety of man as man, and in some way of all living beings. It is the anxiety of nonbeing, the awareness of one's finitude as finitude" (Tillich, p. 34). Its object is inseparable from our being. It cannot be defeated. In contrast, fear has a definite external object, an enemy "which can be faced, analyzed, attacked, endured. One can act upon it, and in acting upon it participate in it--even if in the form of struggle. In this way, one can take it into one's self-affirmation. Courage can meet every object of fear" (Tillich, p. 35). 

Dragon-slaying in all its rainbow forms magnifies and eternalizes the selfhood of the hero in a way that bravely accepting the inexorable creep of death and decay does not. In anxious times when the integrity of the social group or the personal ego feels vulnerable, there is a natural compulsion to manufacture external enemies, to assign blame and to attack whatever is blamed. 

         This process, which motivates road rage and death threats, along with many other irrational acts that look like gratuitous evil, is ultimately futile. "The basic anxiety," Tillich concludes, "the anxiety of a finite being about the threat of non-being, cannot be eliminated. It belongs to existence itself" (p. 38). A higher courage is called for to live with the cosmic background radiation of anxiety and not take the easy escape into fear.

References

Tillich, Paul. The Courage to Be. 1954. Third Edition. Yale University Press, 2014.

Wright, Robert. Why Buddhism Is True. Simon and Schuster, 2017.