I Like Trees

I’ll admit it: I like red lights.

While you’re fussing and fuming at them, I’m cheerfully gliding to a stop. I LIKE red lights, in exactly that way that makes you crazy. I stop on the yellow (that’s what it’s for. Don’t pretend you didn’t see it. All you’re doing is lying.)

            Red lights mean a lot to me. No, they didn’t save my life this one time, or help me move, and they don’t solve injustice or avenge the wrongs of society or listen to me talk about my angst-driven daily life.

          No. stoplights make me happy because they are a social compact. They’re a promise that all of us make when we get our drivers’ licenses. Traffic signals and signs are the single best example I can think of to demonstrate that most people, given a clear choice, do the right thing most of the time.

            Not all the time. I’ve run them accidentally myself. It happens. But like most things, we choose on a daily basis without ever giving it a second thought. People stop at stoplights because that’s how it works. And most of the time, seemingly miraculously, it does work.

          When you were a kid, you played the game. Red light, green light.  One kid faces the wall. They say, “green light,” and everyone scrambles forward. “1-2-3 Red light!” cries the stoplight child, and whirls around. Anyone still moving is “out.” The first to reach the stoplight crier under these rules becomes the next stoplight.  Red light. Stop. Green light. Go.

            That’s the thing about society that amazes me. Not that we’re a bunch of little ants plowing along on our ordained paths, following blindly the rules of our society, but that we aren’t. We’re a swarming, teeming mass of people crowded around the technological fires of our cities, struggling each to our own. Heading for our own destinations, we’re a throng of self-important butterflies, fragile but fanatically determined to make our way in the world. We’re straddling heroically the demands of the group and the call of our own little lives in it. Add in the occasional blasting, overwhelming, daily-life-destroying bit of perspective on how small we are compared to the whole grand scheme of things, and you’ve got a recipe for disaster soup with a side of self-immolation fries.

            And yet, somehow, that usually doesn’t happen.

             Oh, it happens once in awhile, and when it does, it makes the news. It’s rare, it’s noteworthy, it’s the exception, rather than the rule.

            Somehow, most of the time, when it comes down to deciding how to behave, the balance of all those social forces and all our internal compasses pushes most of us in the direction of making it work. Somehow, in spite of the fact that everyone on the road is going to their own life, their own goals, it all just works.

            The lights keep coming on because the electricians do their work. The roads keep being paved, the drivers keep getting born, the roads keep intersecting and diverging, and somehow, it works. We usually stop at red lights. We usually go at green ones. We know the rules of the road, and most of the time, we actually follow them.

            We don’t always, and there’s actually a wide body of research as to why. One of my all-time favourite researchers, Dr. Roy F. Baumeister, is probably the first place I’d send you for an understanding. He’s one of the people putting our common knowledge to the test, and honestly, his book Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty left me feeling essentially optimistic about humanity, despite its painful places. The truth is, while under the right circumstances, almost any one of us can experience the moral erosion which allows for brutal and terrible acts, most of us, under normal circumstances, don’t.

            Let me repeat that. Under the right circumstances, any one of us can become a monster. Anyone. Really. There are some circumstances that would reduce anyone to a monster, and I’m not talking about protecting your wife from rabid wildebeest encyclopedia salesmen during the monster apocalypse. I’m talking about the slow erosion of your moral defenses, with the company of others around you who are on the same train. The Hitlers and Mussolinis succeed because they have help. Lots and lots of help. 

            This happens in small ways, too. Under the right circumstances, any one of us would run a stoplight. I’ve seen it done by people I would never suspect had it in them. Under the right circumstances… which is why we owe it to ourselves to understand those “circumstances,” made of internal and external pressures, and do what we can to avoid letting them ever build up around and within us. It’s no guarantee, but it’s a pretty good start. Stoplights are a part of that. By not running stoplights, we reaffirm that the social agreement is still in place. We promise to follow the rules that we chose. We choose a small interruption in the name of making the traffic work better for everyone.

            That’s pretty good, if you ask me. So I love stoplights, because they’re a sign of us managing to balance the needs of our mighty swarm of people with our own, individual wants and needs, without really needing to think about it all the time. It works, and most of the time, we do what we said we’d do when we got our licenses. We play fair.

            I really, really like that. I don’t always think about it when I’m stopped in traffic, but it’s why red lights give me that cheerful feeling. Yes, they’re annoying. Yes, I’m running late. But we, as a group, are actually getting somewhere, and I feel pretty good about that.

            (As a side note, I’d like to nominate downtown Malden, MA, as one of the most difficult-to-obey traffic light patterns that I’ve ever encountered.)