Intersections, diversity and governance

Traffic Lights and an equal playing field

Stopped at a traffic light, a man in his car perpendicular to me (on the right hand side) came out cautiously even after the light turned green for him. I had been glancing at him earlier trying to gauge his body language and glean information on whether the light had changed on his side or not. (This tells you how impatient I typically am in a car.) He was older with a winter cap on and my immediate sense of him would be to describe him as a "tentative" person.

In that moment, I was SO grateful for this invention called the traffic light. It allowed me to not interact directly at all with someone who clearly seemed in a different mind-set from me, and still allowed me to get on efficiently with my day.

It struck me traffic lights were great as a "policy" intervention because they let ordinary people get through their day without any subjective determination or ‘regulatory’ body evaluating  one group’s needs or preferences over another. Rather this particular intervention set objective rules that people could follow to make their journeys on their own terms. That traffic light allowed both of us, in that moment, to not hit each other AND get on with our journeys, even though he was a very different kind of driver than me (tentative vs impatient). And it made me feel that good policy should be like this: to give the largest playing ground, the most freedom for people to navigate as who they are while ensuring a lack of harm to others. 

My stream of thought continued, taking me to India, to a time and place where traffic lights were not a thing (and may still not be in some places). That's part of the reason for the gratitude I felt at the intersection, because I knew the traffic light as a public good was something that doesn’t necessarily exist in all places, throughout all time. 

But my stream of thought had something else to show me, taking me back to where my father's family lived in a neighborhood in old Delhi to when I was a freshman in college and had gone back for my older sister’s wedding. Part of the arrangements my uncle had made involved him commandeering the park down the street for my sister's reception and making arrangements with the tent people, the decorators and the caterers all around that venue. Hmm...I wondered, what made that possible? My mind showed me images of other houses and neighbors around my natal home. Really it was showing me the invisible social structure in the neighborhood that got built over time, over generations between the neighborhood families. Albeit invisible, the relationships are well honed with connections built in part on a strong shared sense of custom and social ritual that are intrinsic to the culture. Going to the neighborhood vegetable market together, the neighborhood wives would have built a connection. The various rites and rituals on religious holidays would build a connection. No one would question my uncle’s access to the neighborhood park. Come to think of it, there would be no need for a permitting process since he would have in effect ‘cleared’ the date with the neighbors by simply inviting them to the wedding as is customary.

This memory juxtaposed on top of the traffic light stream of thought made me realize there is a dependency between invisible social structures and laws: where you don’t have relationships, you have laws. That is, where you don’t have relationships and a common shared understanding, you need laws.

Relationships, rituals, societal customs ….all of these things contribute to governance without explicit codification. Without them, without relationships, we need laws, or formal codification to communicate our rules of engagement with each other in public space. These invisible rules of engagement are more possible in a in a shared, homogenous society. Maybe this is why America is a country of laws. We don't have homogeneity.  In its own way, the beauty of America is that we are so diverse, and come from such different cultural traditions, that its likely more easy to offend than not! I mean, part of cultural affinity is having strong sensibilities about whether or not you use a spoon, fork or a hand to eat rice. Its that basic.

Last thought: all of this brings me to the anti-government advocates in this country. The anti-government movement cannot have it both ways. They cannot say we need less regulation on the one hand and on the other not promote people’s fundamental abilities to form relationships through dialogue, trust, and compromise. We may always need to be a nation of laws more than some others due to our widespread diversity. My customs may not be the customs of upper middle class America, of white America or black America, of Christian America, or any other immigrant community in America.

So if you really want to decrease the extent of government regulation and rules, then rather than attack them, respect what relationships are built on and why they need to be built. Invest in that. Build the kind of society that can work—that can create clear pathways, objective rules of engagement, mechanisms for conflict resolution, which creates the underlying trust and social capital to make that happen. This happens by treating people as if they matter –not by having only some matter and others not -- and by giving them equal choice in how to navigate their terrain.