I am going to try tackling something very technical that may not be everyone’s cup of tea. And, as another disclaimer, I will probably do it quite poorly. While I have some knowledge of what I’m going to say, I am not adequately trained and will make mistakes that much wiser and more learned people would identify and quickly resolve. But, while I will do ill-service to much of the technical pieces, I hope I can capture the essence of the thing and to offer a reasonable set of conclusions as to its meaning.

For some time now, I’ve really wanted to write about traffic lights. I really have. Well, not just about traffic lights but about how they are acting as a current metaphor about a couple of things that concern me. I’ve put off tackling what is really a pretty challenging and complex issue because it is, well, pretty challenging and complex and I didn’t want to mess it up. Then my brother, Grant, yesterday morning basically asked me to do so and here I am. I’ll see if I get enough together to warrant a post right now and to take a brief detour from my Languages theme.

This just wasn’t happening ten or fifteen years ago. I mean we’ve been driving on roads pretty solidly for a hundred years, with some pretty significant congestion for at least the last fifty. I’m not sure when traffic lights became completely commonplace but it’s been a really long time. And, up until the very recent past (as I said, maybe ten or fifteen years but I could make a case that it’s actually only been even more recently) people knew that green meant go and red meant stop. Yellow, of course was the warning that red was going to happen pretty quickly and we weren’t allowed to enter an intersection after the yellow turned to red. We were even trained that we could get a ticket if we specifically accelerated into a yellow light because we were supposed to slow down.

This all made sense for the singular reason that it kept us all safe. At least from someone crashing into us in the middle of an intersection. We also knew that when our light turned red, the cross light would simultaneously turn green. They were directly linked.

Then some things began to change. The traffic engineers saw a problem with people entering intersections after the light turned red so they decided to put a significant pause in place so in actuality for few seconds everyone’s light was red.

I learned a lot in my 35 years working with tens of thousands of students and who knows how many adults. Absent consequences, boundaries are pushed.

Up until relatively recently a red light meant stop … you would be endangering other people’s lives if you entered the intersection afterwards because the green lighted people would be doing the same. And that was universally recognized as “wrong.”

Both our delightful elderly next door neighbor and our eldest son were T-boned (broadsided) by red light runners after they entered intersections legally with green lights. Our neighbor never fully recovered. Our son’s car was totaled but thankfully it saved him from serious injury.

Now, I NEVER go anywhere without witnessing multiple people continuously entering intersections after their lights turn red. Sometimes multiple cars in a line. In other words, they don’t respect the law or the importance of a social compact that says this is important. They are concerned about what they want (a couple of minutes advantage to get where they want) and unconcerned about what that means for other people. “I’m in my bubble and that’s what’s important.”

But this is not about red light runners.

This is about what we believe to be true and how we structure our lives around that truth.

Does that sound way over the top esoteric? Sigh. It can be but I hope that we’re all open to thinking about it. We organize our relationships around the answer. We structure our work lives around it. We empower governments or go to war or not go to war around it. We build and run schools around it. We wake up in the morning with expectations around it. We put people in prison around it and we release them from prison around it. We judge others around it and we judge ourselves around it.

I could go on and on. I have evolved considerably in my thinking on this, remembering the first conversation I had (to my knowledge) as sometime in high school. And the fact that I am now pretty obviously a follower of Jesus when others who read this may not be should not dissuade anyone from considering the issue.

Ironically, all people believe in truth, even those who deny it. All people organize their views and behavior according to a number of assumed things, the absence of which will make their life go wildly off kilter.

For instance, if you run into a guy with a long scraggly beard and a robe standing on a downtown street corner who says “tomorrow the world will end,” you would dismiss him as just plain wrong. His statement is false, even though he may believe it. You REALLY don’t believe the world will end tomorrow. You might believe we’re heading in the wrong direction and that we have conditions that may be bringing the world to end at some point in the long term or even near term but you don’t believe he’s right. He’s flat out wrong. If you thought he might be right, you’d certainly behave differently than you plan to behave for the next 12 hours. The fact of the matter is, he’s wrong and you’re right. Or, to make it even a more stark example, the guy could be shouting “I’m Napoleon Bonaparte!” when every indication is that he’s mentally ill. Or, even worse, the guy is shouting that he can prove the moon is made of green cheese.

Everyone … and I mean everyone … organizes our lives around things we believe to be true.

Here is where it gets tricky and that will lead into the main point of this essay. But first, I’m not done with red lights.

Something is happening when very large groups of people choose to completely ignore a very sensible rule. We could jump to speed limits but I don’t think it’s as good a lead in to my point as running red lights. People who are now regularly willingly entering intersections after lights turn red are faced with a simple decision: “Should I stop or continue?” More and more people are viewing the light as a guide to be followed or ignored based upon their own whim. In other words, “there is just nothing really wrong doing it. Given that no police appear to be around, I’ll ignore it, regardless of how it is inconveniencing or endangering others. In this way, it’s different from driving 5 or 10 miles per hour over the speed limit, which really doesn’t inconvenience others. Red just no longer means stop for an increasing amount of the population. Sure, in the scheme of things, this might not be as bad as other behaviors but I’m choosing to view it on both its own merits and as a metaphor of a greater reality that has widespread implications.”

And that is the issue of what I or anyone believes is the source for determining what is right or wrong, good or bad.

I hope you have the patience to stick with me for awhile. I apologize for the length and roundabout way I’m going to try to deal with this big deal.

Agrarian-based cultures generated institutions such as governments and churches that were largely authoritarian, with a few interesting exceptions (ancient Greece, the early Christian church among others). These societies accepted a reality that was clearly defined, enforced through frequently oppressive means and where people were considered virtual pawns at the whim of those in charge. In other words, liberty was not known in any widespread sense. The order of things was not in question. Things were the way they were for a reason and that’s that.

The Enlightenment is generally agreed to have begun in Europe, principally France and England in the late 17^th century and culminating with the French Revolution in the last part of the 18^th century. Major figures included men by the names of Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Voltaire, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant, Isaac Newton and Adam Smith. Americans Thomas Jefferson and James Madison would have been considered connected. These political, social and economic philosophers rose to prominence about a century after The Protestant Reformation changed the landscape of Europe, the theology of which upended the prevailing notion of faith. As a consequence, within two centuries most all of thought went through a radical shift, the effects of which we are still feeling today.

In great disservice to all of this, I’ll encapsulate what they taught in common and then try to connect that with red light runners, where we are going as a society and culture, and what we might want to pay attention to.

And here’s what they all said: Martin Luther to Rousseau and Adam Smith. Individual liberty is very important. We are not pawns but the sources of great things. When freed from the shackles of oppressive and totalitarian dogmas where we are basically objectified but not considered in our subjectivity (inherently creative beings as well as being created) we can flourish and societies can advance dramatically.

One of the most profound statements expressing this as is the first sentence of Rousseau’s masterpiece, The Social Contract: “Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains.” In other words, man is inherently good and should be free. Unfortunately this birthright is oppressed and human being is not allowed to flourish. (Martin Luther and the Protestants would disagree with parts of this but I’m not going to go there now.)

Together, The Reformation, The Enlightenment and The Industrial Revolution established the concept of liberty and, for some, the belief that mankind was inherently perfectible, if only relieved of the shackles of authoritarian oppression. This can largely be called classical Liberalism, of which I am somewhat, if only partially, an adherent. An adjunct to this line of thinking is the concept of equality. If we really want men and women to be free we must promote certain things and restrain other things that limit their freedom. And, here it begins to get muddy if it hasn’t already. Because there’s a significant difference between viewing equality as in equal opportunity and equality as in ultimate outcome. The former doesn’t expect perfect outcomes for all sorts of reasons and, while willing to cede some freedom in order to promote equal opportunity, there’s not a willingness to cede the level of freedom to achieve a perfect outcome.

The French Revolution (much more a true revolution than its timely American counterpart), was the both the culmination of Enlightenment thinking and its death knell. We can see this in the devolution of the ideals of Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite (The cry of the Revolution: Liberty, Equality, Brotherhood!) into what is called the Reign of Terror, the brutal anarchy wherein the phrase, “a revolution eats its young,” was born. Successive attempts to resolve the equality/freedom dichotomy resulted in the birth of Marxist socialism, later implemented by Lenin, Stalin and Mao as communism, the result of which was the extermination of over 100 million people in the cause of equality. No one had the right to be unequal. It also led to National Socialism which is basically the same thing packaged as Fascism or Nazism (the latter of which was to rid the world of undesirables so as the master race could live harmoniously).

Well, let’s catch our breaths and circle back to red lights, where there’s good news and bad news.

First, the good news. Freedom is better than bondage, depending upon our definitions of each. Creating opportunities for people to flourish, to be expressive, to live life with hope and love, where differences are tolerated and respected is a good thing. And equality when viewed from the prism that, inherently, I am no better than anyone else, leads to humility and compassion and a view that giving is at least as important (if not more so) than getting.

Then there’s the bad news. If we are totally free to live our lives however we want and/or believe that all things (including values and beliefs) are truly equal as they impact our actual lives, then we are on the slippery slope to something called relativism.

Loosely, Relativism is the belief that all knowledge, morality and truth exist only in relation to culture and individual perspective and that there is nothing in reality that is absolute.

In short, what I believe to be true is true. There is no external metric to determine that my belief is, actually, false. In a similar vein, I have no right to judge the veracity of knowledge or the moral thinking of another. All is equal.

I’m a big fan of a lot of relativism. However, I stand soundly against the excesses of this line of thinking as I do believe in absolutes, as I actually believe all people do, in effect. Even those who work hard to deny it.

What does this have to do with red lights (an absolute) and a degradation in the willingness of people to treat them as such?

And, why is any of this important, for goodness sakes?

For starters, anyone who says there is no ultimate objective (meaning not open to interpretation) truth is stating an objective truth. Pure and simple. As I began, everyone believes in something and organizes their lives accordingly. An avowed atheist is an absolutist and just as much a one as the most fervent monotheist.

A relativist is an absolutist in the sense that he or she says “I am the one who will determine what is right or wrong. That is not the province of someone else.” The “I” is the absolute good. The idea here is a kind of perfect freedom from a perceived tyranny of imposed truth (see back to The Enlightenment, etc…), to be replaced with the standard that everyone has the right to have their views treated equally.

“I want to get home (get to work, get to the store) two minutes faster and it would have been inconvenient to me to leave two minutes earlier because what I’m about is very important so I’m going to ignore this “traditional” rule and no longer treat it as a rule because the rule is now a guide because that’s the way I want to see it because it’s convenient for me to do so and it’s really not that bad and I’m really not that concerned about the impact of my behavior on other people.”

But this isn’t about traffic lights as much as it’s about the trajectory of our civilization. A trajectory I’m convinced is frightening people on both the left and right of the political spectrum. A trajectory where hope waxes and wanes as the notions of freedom and equality and what to do about them keep us in a kind of maelstrom.

The ground underneath us seems not to be dissimilar to one of those rolling earthquakes where we can’t get a firm foothold.

I feel I could go on forever about this which will only ensure that whomever is still reading now will just stop.

As I wrap up this first installment, I’ll make a few observations.

First, the revolution in ideas that sprung up in Europe some centuries ago is still impacting us in enormous ways. Second, the lessons of history and how people live out those ideas and try to create societies around them are often lost as a distant mist. Third, despite the allure of some basic principles like freedom and equality, there is no evidence that either one can exist in anything close to a pure form, for all sorts of reasons. Fourth, many cultures are comfortable with authoritarianism, despite exposure to other forms of organization. Fascism exists very nicely in a number of countries including Iran and Saudi Arabia. Russia is an oligarchy (government controlled by a few powerful elite, whose desires are enforced by severely limiting freedoms). Communism (albeit in a somewhat morphed form) exists very nicely in China and Cuba, with other countries like Venezuela not far behind. Brutal dictatorships abound in Africa and Asia. Meanwhile, the West (Europe and North America) see traditional standards disappearing in the name of “progress” but with no end in sight of where that “progress” will lead. The Absolutism of the Totalitarian states is set up against the Relativism of the traditional Democracies.

We are currently in a place where, increasingly, black can be white and white can be black. Man can be woman and woman can be man. Good can be bad and bad can be good. Obscenity in substance or tone is perfectly acceptable, the normalization of which is perceived as good. All is just a matter of perspective. This is the consequence of strict relativism, of the belief in no objective truth. A strict relativist would see nothing wrong. A lukewarm relativist is conflicted. We are still reacting (and only increasing the pace of the reaction) with an aversion to the tyranny of objective truth. Objective or absolute truth has a really bad name in modern western societies. And, for good reason. Societies framed around absolute or objective truths naturally become authoritarian and, given man’s proclivity for evil, that authoritarianism is manifested as tyranny.

I am a believer in both relativism and objective truth. The challenge is to know the best way to relate them to one another. The challenge is to know what is really happening with red lights and what that means for all of us.

We’ll leave all of that for another time.