“To survive in a modern world in which not only traffic engineering but our reigning political and economic systems reward shortsightedness, you learn to think, or to not think, like a bad driver.”
– Jonathan Franzen
This short essay features at the end of Jonathan Franzen’s collection The End of the End of the Earth, a grounded, concerned and sometimes even optimistic take about what it means to be living in dark times. In Xing Ped, he invites us to consider how our social, political and economic architecture not only accommodates short-sightedness but also rewards it. He asks, what might it take for a person to be able to take the time to see beyond the hood of their car to the pulp factory in Brazil that is engineering their disposable cup? And at what point, if ever, will we as a species be able to transcend our hardwiring and finally take the long view?
Xing Ped
We’re told that, as a species, human beings are hardwired to take the short view, to discount a future that may never come anyway; this is certainly the thinking of the engineers who compose the traffic instructions that are painted on city streets. They seem to presume that you’re driving with your eyes fixed on a spot directly beyond the hood of your vehicle. You’re supposed to be like: Oh, now, there’s a PED… and now, whoa, here comes a XING (which looks Chinese but isn’t) … and then—well, here things become somewhat incoherent, because, if you’re taking such an extremely short view, how are you even supposed to see a pedestrian who’s starting to cross the street? It’s weird. When you learn to drive, you’re told to aim high with your steering. But if you see a message in the distance and you read it in the normal top-to-bottom way, as BUS TO YIELD, you are making a mistake. The furiously merging bus is expecting you to yield. Only a bad driver would know this from reading what’s painted on the road.
“We’re told that, as a species, human beings are hardwired to take the short view, to discount a future that may never come anyway; this is certainly the thinking of the engineers who compose the traffic instructions that are painted on city streets.”
And so, to survive in a modern world in which not only traffic engineering but our reigning political and economic systems reward shortsightedness, you learn to think, or to not think, like a bad driver. You YIELD TO BUS. You take the paper cup, you drink your drink, you throw the cup away. Every minute in America, thirty thousand paper cups are chucked. Far away, on another continent, the Brazilian Atlantic rain forest has been leveled to create vast eucalyptus plantations to supply the world with pulp, but that’s way beyond the hood of your vehicle. You have places much nearer you need to be. Your life is complicated enough already without dragging a reusable cup around with you all day. Even if you carried one, you know you’re living in a world designed for bad drivers, and what earthly difference is your 0.00015 discarded Starbucks cups per minute going to make? What difference does it make if the emissions of your vehicle are infinitesimally hastening the arrival of an all but uninhabitable and not so distant future? Human beings are human beings, and hardwiring is hardwiring. We’ll X that bridge when we come to it.
Jonathan Franzen
From: The End of the End of the Earth