As I was driving around town, have you noticed the death of the turn signal? Perhaps I am just now coming to see this…maybe in your mind this habit died some years ago. To me, though, here in Central Florida it feels like just in the past 18-36 months, there has been a noticeable change. More and more people drive on our streets and rarely use the turn signal on their vehicle. Whether it is changing lanes or even making an actual turn, few drivers use them. Perhaps it doesn’t matter how long its been going on….though my noticing it matches other concerns I have with cultural change that has appeared in the past 5 years. But what does the decline of the turn signal mean?
There are at least 3 implications or meanings behind the death of the turn signal, and all of them signal a troubling trend (“signal”—see what I did there?). 😎 The first major implication is the change, or some would say loss, of communication among humans. I don’t know that I would call it the “death of communication” because at another level, through social media and mobile computing, people have an ability to communicate in more instantaneous ways than ever in human history. But, even with this, it seems as if more and more people has worse communication habits than ever. At the same time, there seem to be more instances of people having relational issues, whether with friends or at work, due to failures in communication.
The turn signal is the main way that drivers can communicate with the other cars around them. Ensconced inside your metal beast of burden, there is no other easy way to “speak” to the others around you about what you plan to do, where you plan to go. It is one thing when your communication gets lost or misunderstood, but quite another to simply take the stance of “why should I try to communicate with you.” I see this at my work and even in my church where a large portion of the community chooses openly to NOT communicate, whether through not reading information or messages sent to them (even intentionally not checking the tools provided for the communication) or by not communicating themselves. We have always prided ourselves as a nation of being based in community, with literate citizens, front porch society of open communication to one another. Today, if the car is any evidence, in place of that we have apparently decided we are just too busy, too self-absorbed or moving too fast to communicate with others.
The second implication is this: the failure to use a turn signal really is rude and implies the growing death of civility. In other words, the driver seems to be taking the position of “I don’t care about you.” Worse, the driver could be saying “it doesn’t matter to me if you are safe while I drive.” The turn signal helps keep the roads safer as all the other drivers know that you intend to pull into a new lane. Even when sitting at a traffic light, in a marked turn lane, it helps others know what you plan to do. You plan to turn and you want others to be aware. That desire for “awareness” is a level of social caring that our society used to have, at least somewhat.
It may seem a stretch for some, but I do think there is a linkage between something simply like not using your turn signal and the rise of violence towards others. Whether you consider the larger acts of violence we have seen, often connected to guns or bombs, or merely just the level of vitriol verbally between people, we are living in a time when people seem to have no restraint in expressing their violent thoughts. There are many reasons for this, far more than we have time to address here (read my initial thoughts about the tragedy in Connecticut here), but certainly the lack of care about the “other,” that “I” don’t even think about what my lack of using a turn signal could mean to you, implies at least a loss of worry about how my action will be perceived. And, if you don’t like it, well “screw you.”
Finally, the third implication is the biggest. As I teach my students, the core idea that Thomas Hobbes, and then later John Locke, proposed that was transplanted here in the “colonies” was “the social contract.” Regardless of the fact that Hobbes and Locke came down on opposite ends of the best way to protect the social contract, both political theorists agreed that a civic society starts with an unwritten contract between the citizens. At the root of that contract lies an understanding that each citizen is connected to each other, and they need each other. For the social contract to work, then, each has to believe that the other will equally choose to obey the laws or concepts of the society together.
I tell my students that it is easy to get a basic understanding of a society’s subconscious grasp of the social contract by watching how they drive, how they obey or fail to obey the traffic laws. Here in the United States, you can go just about anywhere in the country, at any time of day, and stand by a stop sign and watch people stop….without any police officer in sight….and without any other cars in the obvious vicinity. Meaning, that at least for now, as a society, we still have that grasp of the social contract. We don’t need a police officer to be standing by the stop sign to force us to stop. We do it because we want to be safe, because we want to avoid hurting anyone else, and at least at some level, we stop because we believe others are going to stop. Having driven or been driven around in other countries, the same cannot always be said there.
The turn signal is a part of driving, obviously, and as such, the lack of use points to hints about the tearing of the fabric of our social contract. When I simply choose to drive in a way that only is best for me, taking little concern or thought about the “other,” we can see the coming death of the social contract. I have written elsewhere about how each Great Crisis ultimately led to a massive shift in how the society understood government, the formal expression of the social contract. I still believe we are on the verge of entering such a crisis, though it could be true that we may be in the middle of it….I wonder if the death of the turn signal is more evidence of such a change. Our society that no longer works on a social contract becomes a very different, far worse, more coarse, more selfish society….if not a more dangerous place to be, then a culture that gives little concern for our mutual journey together as a civic entity.
Well, perhaps what I am seeing is on the start, only a symptom, something that we can notice now and become more self-aware. Maybe its not as dire as all that, but even if not, I hope you will start using your turn signal. At the very least, all the other drivers will thank you for that!