Driving While Morally Outraged

My wife didn’t sleep well last night, so I drove her to work this morning. And after I dropped her off and waited my turn in the metered lane of the onramp to get back on the busy freeway, I saw several cars whiz past me in the unmetered carpool lane, none of which contained the required two occupants or more for that lane.

I felt resentful and wished there were a CHP unit stopped somewhere nearby monitoring these blatant violators and preparing to sock one of them with a costly ticket that would, henceforth, deter them and others from taking advantage of highway amenities for which they didn’t qualify while the rest of us dutifully abided by the law.

Of course, if all those drivers who disregarded the law obeyed it instead, the metered lane would have backed up even more than it did, and my wait would have been even longer. So was it really such a bad thing that some drivers illegally took advantage of the carpool lane? Was that really so different from infractions I commit all the time such as breaking the speed limit?

My first inclination is to think improperly using a carpool lane violates Moral Foundation Theory’s principle of fairness in a way that exceeding the speed limit doesn’t. And, being the political liberal I am, I’m purportedly more insistent on people treating each other fairly (and caringly) than are my more conservative fellow humans who are said to place equal if not greater value on other innate foundational values such as liberty, even when I arguably benefit from some people acting unfairly and using the carpool lane when they shouldn’t, thereby decreasing the traffic and wait time in the metered lane for those of us who act fairly.

Yet, how is it really being unfair to me if I’m actually being helped by it, and, if it is unfair, why don’t I think it’s unfair of me and others to exceed the speed limit when others don’t? Why don’t I stay at or under the speed limit and feel angry when others fly past me?

Am I maybe just resentfully envious of drivers who improperly use the carpool lane when I don’t have the nerve to do it, although I do have the (less) nerve required to speed?

Maybe if I spend more time thinking about all of this, I’ll be able to discern a significant difference between speeding and misusing the unmetered carpool lane of a metered freeway onramp that justifies my indifference to the former and aversion to the latter. Or, failing that, maybe I’ll either stop speeding, or I’ll stop feeling upset and self-righteous about carpool lane violators and go on about my driving with greater equanimity.

San Junipero and Artificial Paradise

I grew up watching the original version of the television anthology series The Twilight Zone, and I still consider it one of the finest television series ever. Now there’s a worthy successor to it in the brilliant British anthology series Black Mirror. It focuses on the dark side of modern technology.

Last night, I watched an episode from the series that I found extraordinarily moving. It was titled San Junipero. If you haven’t seen it yet, you might want to before reading the rest of this post.

The basic storyline can be found here, so I won’t bother offering my own inferior summary. But what I will say is that right after I watched this episode, I felt so moved--overwhelmed with emotion actually--that I posted the following to Facebook: “I just finished watching one of the most beautiful and moving stories I've ever seen on a TV or any other kind of screen! I am just blown away with equal parts sadness and joy! It's an anomalous episode from the third season of "Black Mirror," the brilliant British TV anthology drama series usually focusing on the dark side of technology. The episode is "San Junipero," and I recommend it in the strongest terms to anyone reading this who can watch the show on Netflix or some other way, because it's THAT extraordinary.”

I watched this episode last night because I wanted to hear afterward what the Very Bad Wizards had to say about it in Episode 102 of their outstanding podcast series. I listened to the podcast this morning.

I must say that I was so overpowered emotionally last night that I didn’t spend much time reflecting on the deeper issues raised by “San Junipero.” But Sommers and Pizarro spurred me this morning to ponder the story in more depth.

Until last night, all the “Black Mirror” episodes I’ve seen have painted gloomy if not frightening portraits of technological dystopias, but “San Junipero“ seemed much more upbeat and ended with Heaven is a Place on Earth (lyrics here) ringing joyously in the sonic background as the two protagonists drove blissfully off together into their cloud-based paradise. But is the story really as happy as it seems outwardly?

What would it be like to have one’s consciousness posthumously uploaded to the Cloud where one could experience for as long as one wished a place or era or perhaps any number of places and eras as though one were still embodied but know that one was not?

Tamler and Somers surmise, and the episode reinforces this, that at least some of those who choose this fate could end up jaded, bored, and emotionally numb in an “afterlife” where one can do pretty much what one wants without consequences and eventually runs out of novel experiences to spice up life and make it worthwhile, finding oneself trapped in empty, hedonistic decadence.

This reminds me of a famous Twilight Zone episode in which a petty criminal dies in a shootout with police and ends up in a place he thinks is heaven because it’s filled with every hedonistic experience--like having beautiful, adoring women at his beck and call and always winning at gambling--that he craved in life, yet he quickly becomes bored and even miserable and jarrringly discovers that he’s not where he thought he was.

Not only that, but knowing before one dies that one can be transported to cyber-paradise and even being able to preview it on a weekly basis beforehand could cause one to look forward so much to the artificial reality of the afterlife that one ceases to be fulfillingly engaged in the reality of this life.

Yet, come to think of it, how different is this from the monotheist focused on escaping this earthly vale of sin and tears into everlasting heavenly bliss? Moreover, the people who ended up in San Junipero were already old and/or dying before they went there, and many of them, like Kelly, had lost their spouses and/or children to the grave. They had very little left to look forward to in their current lives, and poor Yorkie had been a motionless quadriplegic for forty years and now had the chance to run joyfully across the sand with her gorgeous lover for as long as the two of them wished.

By the way, everyone who elected to be uploaded to the Cloud after they died had the ability to opt out and die completely or, perhaps, to change their artificial locale, era, and circumstances whenever they so chose. That is, if heaven turned into hell, they could exit into a new virtual reality or into oblivion at any time.

So, it’s hard for me to see “San Junipero” as a typical “Black Mirror” dystopian nightmare. And if I were given the chance to do what Yorkie and Kelly did, I’d probably take it. After all, not so unlike Yorkie, I’ve lived a life that, while very comfortable by worldwide and historical standards, has been quite bereft of rich experience. If I could artificially reinhabit my youthful body and go back to my teenage and early adult years of the sixties and seventies knowing what I know now, I might have quite a time of it. And when I got tired of it all, I could do what I suspect we all end up doing anyway.

The only thing that might give me pause would be uncertainty about just how trustworthy and foolproof the process actually was. For if we humans are intrinsically flawed, it would probably be foolhardy to assume that any of our technologies are impervious to failure or, perhaps, misappropriation, and a failure or misuse of the technology discussed here could conceivably turn San Junipero into a ghastly nightmare one could never escape.