Ilan Gur-Ze’ev, Haifa University
 

A mighty silence accompanies "traffic accidents", which are conceived in the public sphere (1)  as the sacrifice of victims to the Molokh. A regular ritual is breaking this silence to demand a reduction in the number of victims sacrificed, aided by “technical means” like “stronger enforcement of traffic regulations”, “more investments in the sub-structure”, and “traffic safety education”. Issues such as the institutionalization of car accidents and the rationalization of the “mistakes” that allow / produce them are not addressed effectively. In the standard discourse of traffic and road-safety the enslaving myths of “the car”, “driving”, and speeding” are also ignored. They function dialectically as regulative ideas (“magnificent”, “liberating”, “total dynamic”, “creative driving”) and at the same time as the representation / production of the victim. The sacrifice is not limited to technological progress. It is also an imperative of its ideals and symbols and it is presented in terms of inevitablity: an imperative that, from an impersonal point of view, is rational and desirable. It is not viewed as being non-advantageous, an imperative of Fortuna as a manifestation of the all-mighty Moira, or of other transcendental intervention or heavenly prevention. In contrast to these possibilities, car “accident” victims are viewed as a necessary and even a desirable means for protecting current technological progress and the level / quality of life, which is an aim in itself. This “quality” of life is the essence of “life” at the current historical stage. In this epoch the “quality” of “life” is nothing but an instrument and crystallization of technological progress in a specific form. This form will now be deconstructed and critically reconstructed.

     In this context human beings sink into meaninglessness, being is forgotten, and the “life” of the thing is glorified. The car is endowed with a life of its own; its life is valued and its mythological representations are sanctified. This glory marks the conditions that make it possible: a post-modern anti-Christ, a counter-being that is evolving. The car, the motorcycle, the speedboat, and the plane are depicted as “strong”, “loyal”, “admirable”, “beautiful” and “lovable.” They are “objects of  passion” and they are even perceived as “divine”. They do not manifest the reason for decaying spirituality, but rather indicate its camaraderie with the death drive. Eros is enslaved in the service of Thanatos. The “speeding”, “performance” and “charm” of the motor vehicles, which slay the attendants to the uncontrollable, to the quest for the transcendence and authenticity of man, are the adorable, the admired and the divine -- not even, but rather because they are assigned to death. Death is the nothingness of  “unsuccessful” life. The traffic "accident" takes the form of the meaningless end of “successful” life. It is conceived as a void bereft of any collective “meaning”, value or transcendental dimension. This is to be attributed to the accomplishments of camouflaging the politics of luck. Under these conditions, death is represented as personal, as an active form of the presence of (private) “bad luck” which, psychologically, is totally unexpected. At the same time, this private “luck” is necessary and carefully calculated and productive from the public or rational point of view. The issue of the unexpected, in the sense of the Roman’s fortuna, has its role even in a totally administered society or self-regulated system, but this issue normally gets the attention it deserves in an ironic form. Its presence does not get a name; in the present public sphere, the traffic victims do not receive a name, a place and a “voice”. They are voiceless deaths which, by contributing to the public horizon as commodities and statistical data, lead to reproduction and successful advancement of the present order.
Within present horizons, 'death and the traffic accident' is just one of the representations of the normal technological functioning of the system. It can be controlled to a large degree, statistically, by rational strategies and known manipulations at a cost that is rationally evaluated in determining the life and death balance on the roads. This balance is not a matter of sheer luck, but rather a proof of the effectiveness of the system: its self-control and its systematic operations, self-examination and reproduction potential. The present reality, and the false consciousness it allocates, symbolizes the continued triumph of the present realm of self-evidence (2) to which human beings are attached and by which they are produced. Within its horizons, present human 'normality' and its potentialities are attached to, and reproduced by, instrumental reason’s control and its reproduction activities. They produce, present, advance and reproduce human beings and their normality: they participate in defining it. One of these vital and aggressive manipulations is called “education”. Normality, in the play of the production and reproduction of its self-evidence and regulative principles, needs “traffic accidents”. It needs the “accident” and the (“bad”) “luck” as a productive symbolic energy for the rational organization of truths and meanings, and for the production of objects for interpretation and manipulation.

      The organization, control, distribution and the consummating current normality needs, in the requirement of its being as self-evidence, to be unseen. It is of vital importance that its essential qualities will not be questioned, identified and challenged. The importance of being unseen lies in its need to maintain itself without being perceived as limited, totally controlled and anti-transcendental. For this purpose, the representation of quasi-transcendental predications as “good” and “bad” “luck”, which are uncontrolled, unexpected and unfortunate are very productive. In this manner, traffic “accidents” are part of a special historical normality of the “we” -- which is produced by it, reproduced by it and normally unable to challenge it.

      Contrary to common belief, to a certain degree there is truth in the popular expression that “only a total abolition of transportation will prevent traffic accidents”. That kind of “accident”, as the category of “accident” pinpoints, is not to be totally eliminated, since it is not the intervention of Moira here, not a transcendental intervention against the rational constitution of the order of things. It is, on the contrary, the face of this order itself and its inner logic that appears when facing death and suffering in traffic “accidents”. This logic is especially crystallized in the logic of motor transportation which has peculiarities and localities in its ontology that are not to be reduced to mere crystallizations of a stronger power. Yet, the current realm of self-evidence and its knowledge networks, dynamics and power relations is the only framework within which the logic of motor traffic and its “accidents” is possible. It is not just one of its manifestations. Motorized traffic realizes a certain logic that can be criticized. It contains a system of codes of behavior and values that point to passions, interests, fears and dreams that constitute the reality of motorized road interaction. Traffic also realizes subjects, objects and truths with which certain institutions are authorized to deal. They reveal a power that is beyond their specific and concrete manifestations when they institutionally / legally / expertly deal with traffic “accidents”. Such institutions include the police, hospitals, psychologists and, statisticians. Without death on the roads, without “accidents”, practically and logically, there is no life for these institutions and intervention theories, regulations and practices. Outside or without the existence of those regulations, theories, practices, and institutions there cannot be a network. In the absence of a system and a realm of self-evidence the current way of being is hidden.

      At present, the logic of economic efficiency actualizes the purpose principle. It maintains and reassures the present balance of traffic injuries by avoiding “unproductive” or “unreasonable” investments in symbolic, financial and political changes necessary for saving human lives. It would be a mistake to employ a reductionist explanation, according to which the number of current deaths, injuries and evils is maintained in the present equilibrium. For the living, on the whole, the victims produce values lower than those who were saved -- by not changing the situation that leads to their suffering or death in “accidents”.

      The balance of evils that people suffer is not determined solely by money. Western societies today are willing to suffer many hardships that have nothing to do with monetary gains: what is at stake here is symbolic capital, much more than financial capital. While being distinct, they are integrated in different networks of power / emotions / knowledge relations. These historically-based syntheses determine the balance of evils. In other words, the dynamics of symbolic and financial capital, in their changing context, determine the “good” or “bad” “luck” statistics and the exact range and scope of traffic “accidents” needed to preserve and to develop the present order. By that I do not mean that a change in the rate of traffic deaths and injuries is not possible. I am only showing the procedures and powers determining the chances and the directions of such a possible change. Here one should distinguish between subjective sufferings and evils and the very existence, as individual, temporary and conscious being of human beings in inter-subjective contexts. That is to say, existence as evil and existence within and as part of an objective will and power which manifests itself in subjective wills and power relations in changing contexts. This objective justification of traffic “accidents” also has a subjective dimension, ranging from the maintenance of present and promised commodities, to those motorized participants who have not yet been hit.

      In line with what Heidegger called Ge-stell, the technological one-dimensional world hides the possibility of rescuing the uncontrolled potentialities, both in the compromising settlement in the present order of things and in the revolt against it. Within this existentia, it is not just that spirit is in the Diaspora -- even the reason of protest and revolt has been conquered.(3) Within this order human beings are manipulated, activated and analyzed in all dimensions and levels of their private and public existence, and the illusion of liberation is one of its most needed symbolic energy focuses. This mirage is not an illusion that activates people; rather it is a material dynamic in the network and appears objectively as a commodity that is manufactured, distributed, marketed, purchased and consumed. It even has its market price, and what can be more “real” and objective than that?  What is at stake here is the transformation of human beings and their relative autonomy, the deconstruction of their dialogic essence and their reflective capabilities, and the industrialized destruction of their bodies. On the roads, specifically, it is realized in two seemingly antagonistic manners: on the one hand, participation in the traffic flow, privately and publicly enjoying its fruits, while on the other hand, suffering its evils and limitations to the degree of threatening public prosperity and destroying the individual.

      It is worthwhile to point out the destructive element of the productive dimension of motorized traffic and to emphasize the overall rationality and productivity of man’s destruction, which is deciphered, in the case of traffic “accidents”, as one aspect of a complex process. Here, a greater integration between the public and the private spheres is provided to the degree of the complete elimination of the private sphere. In other words, it annihilates a potentially spiritual and emotional autonomous realm in which Man’s dialogic nature and uniqueness of being enable him to reflect on the conditions of the negation of the conditions for realizing his essence. What is at stake here is not his self-realization, but rather the prevention of his struggle to reflect on the conditions determining his limitations, possibilities and orientations.

      The sterilization of transcendence protects the constitution of a one-dimensional world and one-dimensional man in a realm in which, ideally, everything would be automatized and rationalized with no external threat. Under such circumstances, the energies of reflection, protest, rebellion and transformation are reconstructed and transformed into productive elements improving the efficiency of the present system. The return of this myth within ever-greater rationalization and an increase in efficiency of the system happens while denoting the individualistic elements of the system and the possibilities for competition, self-decision and change as open options for every normal human being in the system. An ideal closed Platonic cave is constituted in an anti-idealistic, anti-collectivist and instrumentalist era: motorized vehicles, especially the fast models, glorify individualistic values in a special context. Within this context, unlimited mobility, total privacy and individualistic control (4)  are praised as part of their destruction.
Within the framework of the current capitalist globalization, technological developments and the representations of the culture industry there is less room for counter-education which strives for reflection, struggles for dialogue and transcendence and offers resistance to the present order of things. The present conditions reduce the social, cultural, conceptual and existential potential for dialogue, and solidarity. Under these conditions there is less room for the individual's struggle to become some one rather than some thing -- to become an ethical I, who not only reflects but also commits herself to transcendence in relation to the Other as part of a responsibility towards the Other. The system reproduces itself by reducing the human being into some thing, a mere agent, an efficient producer / consumer. As such, he / she accepts the present realm of self-evidence, identifies with it and abandons the quest to realize the "totally other" as present in the actual Other. Within the system there is no room for dialogue and solidarian self-positioning, and
self-constitution. We need to ask whether it is possible, within this order, to challenge the present reality through counter-education by offering alternative microscopic and general realities: concepts, experiences and actions which can ultimately change the system and its cultural, social, gender and ethnic formations. The reduction of the subject into a "subject" and the development of a contingent, multicultural, fluid, local and temporal identity, lead to knowledge and value forms that are part of the general reification of the current globalization of capitalism. Within the present culture industry that represents and serves this order, "the individual" is hailed purely in terms of his / her status as a consumer/producer. Free choice and democracy are expressions that find themselves celebrated purely within a rhetoric that serves the reproduction of this anti-humanist order.

     The quest for transcendence and the advancement of reflective power represents a movement that is well suited to the metaphor of vertical movement: a movement that is essentially a potentiality and is aimed toward the not-yet-realized, to the absent. Traditionally, this kind of movement was not conditioned by, but rather attached to a different kind of movement. Traditional movement possibilities were dialectical, while the reflective potential manifested “vertical” (“platonic”) movement and openness to the eternal and the absolute. It was cyclical and part of the eternal movement of the universe that gave dialogue its transcendental possibilities. At the same time, it was based on the recognition of the human limitations of the horizontal movement possible within the framework of “the realm of necessity”.

      In Plato’s Phaedrus, “the being which really is” is in a “region”, “above the heavens,” and real human existence is to be realized only by transcending the human being from the given “up” into it,”winged” as it were: “The natural property of the wing is to carry what is heavy upwards, lifting it aloft to the region where the race of the gods resides, and in a way, of all the things belonging to the sphere of the body, it has the greatest share in the divine, the divine being noble, good, and everything which is of that kind”.(5)

      The present possibilities of movement are different. Today’s fast traffic is taking place in a context in which “vertical” transcendent movement has become irrelevant and has actually disappeared, while “horizontal” movement within the one-dimensional framework of “the same” is no longer looked upon as limited, hard and slow. Motorized traffic does not represent a mere technological change. It represents a totally different metaphysics of movement and different human possibilities”. “...Speeding is precisely elimination of expectation and duration...Shifting the soul this time from the brain to the motor will free man from apprehension about a future that no longer has any raison d’etre, since everything is already there, here and now, present and over at one, in the instantaneous apocalypse of messages and images, in the great old joke at the end of the world!”(6)

     Motorized traffic is necessarily a movement of a new kind: movement that is in principle unlimited and borderless. The (inevitable) absence of limits to this movement has two manifestations: speeding ability, and the ability to drive anywhere ignoring the question of purpose and meaning. The ability to get anywhere overthrows the traditional concept of movement, a concept that received its meaning in light of its purpose according to physical hardships and limitations as well as practical ambient factors and the slow moving nature of locomotion prior to technological acceleration. The new speedy mobility is unique by being represented and conceived as an expression of privacy and independence, in that drivers are supposed to drive their vehicles as a perfect expression of their free will, unbounded by external limitations  or direction. The realization of free will, determination and the ability to change are conceived, or at least they are supposed to be conceived, as an expression of privacy and autonomy. At any given moment,such privacy  may direct itself upon others as an inescapable disaster, or it may generate a form of understanding and cooperation with them, as a way of demonstrating that they are in control of motorized vehicles.

      Traditional traffic mobilized men and women and their assets in a linear axis within a recognition of its limits and its passion for an erotic movement which is essentially different from that characterizing the daily round of life where “everything is the same”. The essential movement to pre-motorized traffic was driven by an erotic power for transcending man from daily life, from the limited and the defective towards the good, the beautiful and the right, the real and the eternal.

      The essence of today’s traffic lies in the void of erotic silence, in the absence that is reproducing “the same all the time”. In the present horizon of self-evidence, the phenomenon “same all the time” is recruited into the dialectic between and within horizontal movement in the realm of space (speed) in which speed inherits the realm of time (eternity) -- a dialectic that characterized the quest for (vertical) transcendence. Historically, the narcissistic being enclosed within the car with the illusion of overcoming time and of the control of external space, and the motorized vehicle as a locus of “excitement” are replacing religious ecstasy, the traditional quest for eternity and the Enlightenment’s devotion for autonomy and reflexive capacities. The illusion of controlling a man-made machine in a completely self-created and self-controlled environment is today’s Tower of Babel. It is different to controlling an animal in the service of human needs. It avoids the question of God, his laws, the problem of not being a God and being outside heaven. However, the realm of self-evidence that the original Tower of Babel builders tried to construct was a religious act of rebellion; it was an alternative to the heavenly enterprise, indeed its foundation, and it was humanistic and earthly.

      The illusion suggested by the automobile, represents an alternative to previous stages in the history of Western civilization. It also represents an alternative to the cultural stage of commitment to an ideal of a free public sphere, where reason and free men and women are supposed to flourish within a dialog  of concrete social conditions. This transition from one realm of self-evidence to another is technologically very productive. It is also defines  the self reproductive possibilities of the system that uses human beings as drivers and travellers -- who are transformed into commodities and treated as objects. They become “part of the market” for car dealers, advertisers and the like. In parallel, they become objects in the sense of work power in which it is useless to make a division between the driver and the machine from a practical or rational point of view. That is not to say that motorized traffic has to manifest itself in the same way in any possible world. It is argued that in a different realm of self-evidence, a different set of passions, myths, procedures and criteria would be in operation. There would also be another metaphysic at work where traffic behaviour would be different.

      The productivity of present anti-metaphysics secures the scientific and technological progress within which the myth returns as the sole ruler in science and (instrumental) rationality’s name. This reality manifests a false consciousness that reproduces and advances it within the framework of technological progress where it is useless to make any logical distinction between the accident and the mistake. This is because the accident manifests a personal mistake that is logically necessary and productive according to the inner logic of the system. The new myths that determine the causes of traffic “accidents” are scientifically accurate, socially necessary and technologically productive. In a sense, the highest expressions of individuality have become nothing more than the expressions of the demolition of the subject’s autonomy. This reduction represents the destruction of a kind of ideal commitment to a negation of power fields in which the hegemonic discourses produce a consensus that constitutes an ever-evolving realm of understanding in which subjects recognize other subjects and collectives as partners in solidarity in a common movement towards Utopia.

      In the current false libertarian consciousness, driving functions as a myth that enables one to see the road networks and the regulation dynamics of present society as the antithesis to the penetrating force of the system in the private sphere. The driver functions as a eunuch, protecting the public and the private spheres from being penetrated by new, vivid and young myths. The current system is defended against the rough winds of a new realm of common self-evidence that is about to overrun and conquer the aging, dissolved realm of self-evidence that is under pressure. The castration of the erotic essence of movement in the world where motorized traffic was unknown and instrumental rationality did not rule might be seen as productive. It is productive from the point of view of the capitalistic commodities market.

      Under these conditions, there is such a thing as a normal or an average driver.Every insurance company realizes this possibility. This 'normal' driver who identifies with the speedy driving myth is the one who surrenders himself to the systematic castration that the present capitalistic society imposes on its followers. The struggle for freedom and transcendence has no place in a reality where man conceives himself as one who might be with himself as a driver, as one who “controls the business”, and as someone who “acts in a right manner”, according to rules which he cannot avoid, even for a moment, with no danger of capital punishment.

      In ages when instrumental reason did not reign as sole monarch, driving had a different character. Driving was a manifestation of the gap between the ideal and the present situation. It was conceived as mobilizing and instructing in a reality that is essentially transcendent. For example, in the book of Ecclesiastics 2: 3 “...My heart conducting itself with wisdom, how yet to lay hold on folly”, or in Lamentations..... 3: 2 “...He hath led me and caused me to walk in darkness but not into light”. Today, when traffic and transportation are viewed with an anti-ontological and non-dialectical eye, traffic is conceived as self-regulated movement in an alternative unlimited reality that is self-sufficient -- an aim in itself. The comprehension in fashionable conventions and in dominating and repressive administrative procedures of automatic movement that this traffic represents is taking the place of the erotic quest for absolute truth that traditional forms of transportation have represented since the downfall of the Tower of Babel. Even the Enlightenment’s vision of the human being in the world, traveling within this framework, still held on to some essential elements of the Judeo-Christian realm of self-evidence. In traffic and in the present context, and especially in the “excitement” of driving at high acceleration (e.g., in a “powerful” B.M.W.), the driver can reassure himself that he has sovereignty over reality and time in the public sphere-- overcoming its non-narcissistic regulations -- and drive back home, within and into the endless horizons of himself. Giving the driver the private sphere within the public sphere hides the disappearance of both dimensions. It  presents neither an accident nor good or bad luck, but rather expresses the efficiency of the system's own realization by reducing human beings into drivers or passengers. The system manifests itself through agents and dynamics as exemplified by drivers and passengers in traffic, and there is no other reality or absolute idea outside of it, as there is no reality to systems outside the realms of self-evidence. By this I do not claim that human beings are mere representations and agencies of the systems that create and imprison them. My thesis reconstructs a dialectic between ontological and historical dimensions. Historically, there are various symbolic and extra-symbolic opportunities and limitations for human beings to transcend the system and its limited horizons. Ontologically, it is important to emphasize the centrality of being and the not-yet-realized, the dimension of potentiality, of the “total other” as represented in the “principle of hope”. However, the transcendence and the overcoming of limitations and hegemonic strategic attitudes, symbolic and extra-symbolic dynamics, are historically and locally contextualized. That is why the anti-humanistic tendencies in the relatively prosperous West are so effective, as can be seen in the traffic arena. The world of fast traffic is a place where humanistic potentials have no environment in which to be realized and developed. The constant noise of the engine, the density of the traffic, and the impossibility of a determined attitude towards the environment -- that is both spiritually and ecologically balanced-- contribute to the constitution of the dynamic, speedy intersubjectivity that is an arguable logical and political imperative. Psychologically, speeding and the quest for speed can be characterized as a “quest for danger” and sometimes as a healthy “stress backing”. We need to seek out the ontological sign of the success of Ge-stell within it which hides the uncontrollable. In other words, we must search for the unobservable that traditional Western art and tekhne, in the Greek sense of the word, brought into the light of everyday reality out of the realm of mystery as something that is autonomous in this daily realityand not as part of it. Under such circumstances, human possibilities and limitations were different from the ones confronting the new man of today. Today’s exciting driving as a mystic experience, as poisis in the sense of seeking the limits of the (im)possible, rather than as an expression of the manipulation possibilities of the present system, is a manifestation of stolen freedom and false revolt within a totality where there is no relevance to the concepts of estrangement and repression. On such an earth, there is no place for trying to rebuild the humanist enterprise, as exemplified in the project of the builders of theTower of Babel or in the enterprise of the Enlightenment.

      Within the horizons of the false public sphere, it seems inevitable that, on the public level, rational men and women will contribute their share concerning decisions about issues such as reducing traffic speed, prohibiting driving under the influence of drugs or alcohol, and other regulations of that sort. At the same time, on the private level they are driven both to demand their stolen freedom by the negation of instrumental rationality’s demands and to preserve the well-being of the system and their own safety as agents of that system and its current dynamics and horizons. In practice,  the new man will rebel against the conditions that constitute him, his possibilities, his pleasures and his miseries at the earliest opportunity. The taboo that Ge-stell constituted will be destroyed with extreme joy, real joy, whenever possible, sometimes at all costs. This rebellion is punitive and useless. It reflects the irony of the system that calculated such a reaction and which has called for it under its secret educational agenda.

      In conformity with the present order of things, a person realizes himself as a driver. According to the degree of effectiveness in representing himself as as one who is “successful”, to a large extent the driver is recognized according to the car that he has or does not have. He drives a vehicle that simultaneously enables him to manifest “success” and to rebel against his stolen uniqueness and freedom in the ocean of rules, regulations and control apparatuses that are maintained by the system. From the "outside" this reaction is identified on a scale ranging from “dangerous driving” to “madness”. There are studies emphasizing the incommensurability of the subjective and the objective dimensions in motorized driving.(7)
I do not see an incommensurability manifestation, but rather one of the many representations of normality in the present mythic one-dimensional realm of self-evidence. This is a false rebellion because it is planned and controlled by the system, constituted on private and collective repression and guilt consciousness of a supposed primordial sin (8) practiced daily in the earthly hell of normality.

       This normality is produced and reproduced by the different elements and dynamics of symbolic energies which enable the destruction of the mere potential of another look at knowledge, man and the world. The possibility of a utopian glance at the possible non-repressive, non-instrumental attitude that could have represented a comprehensive alternative to a totally different concept of movement and traffic is completely obfuscated.

      Within such a utopian alternative, there is room for a different self-motion and intersubjective mobility where there are no rational, calculated, institutionalized traffic “accidents”. The self-driven movement is never independent. It is always contextualized and materialistic, but it can struggle for overcoming limitations by deconstructing the realm of self-evidence that is closed within its horizons. It can try to transcend itself by revealing coded social manipulations and truths, validity parameters and consciousness production operations, by deciphering these codes and by denoting their political meaning. In this sense, the alternative universality and the alternative individualism represented in these terms create a potential for liberation that is met by dangerous alternatives to humanist tradition and whatever liberalism is realized in the present political, social and cultural systems of Western societies. A spiritual alternative to the present order might bring an alternative realm of self-evidence that would be less problematic and more terrible, in light of Enlightenment ideals, humanist values and liberal social regulations to which present Western societies are committed. The history of motorized transportation reveals the openness, if not the quest, of Western culture to this alternative, where there is no place for autonomous subjects, solidary intersubjectivity, reflective discourse and dialogical attitudes toward society’s challenges.

      In modern times, the road networks have become an arena of knowledge that contains its specifications and uniqueness, but basically reflected, tested and reassured the rationality of each driver and that of the entire system. The logic of the present realm of self-evidence is built within the collective consciousness, in symbolic and commodity distribution and consumption practices. They are present in the education of each person to behave within the given horizons of procedures, rhetoric and practices that are both universalistic and one-dimensional. The roads and the behavior on them reveal an educational enterprise and examination process of the universality of the symbolic violence of the present education. It has become an arena in which human rationality is tested, realized and reassured daily by each driver in each second of his or her driving experience. Too much independence, non-conformism, ignorance or luck of practical experience in this field is sanctioned or rewarded not by a personal teacher, a ruler, a class or interest group, but by the system and instrumental rationality in which they themselves function simultaneously as its agents, representations and victims.

     Traffic today represents an important site of instrumental rationality and its successes. These successes are manifested everywhere. However, the success of instrumental rationality  is not totally without problems, as can be seen in ecology, medicine or transportation. On the roads, its failures are of tremendous magnitude: exactly where it is most vital, traffic becomes ever more intense, costly and inefficient, as can be seen in traffic jams in the big cities. Yet, as in other fields, instrumental reason’s failure is recognized solely according to its own standards, and so are the suggested solutions. This proves to what degree a realm of self-evidence is omnipotent - until its downfall. Traditionally, a realm of self-evidence could be destroyed from the outside or stagnate and disintegrate from within, since it includes or could include antagonistic spiritual elements. The uniqueness of the present Western realm of self-evidence is the absence of spiritually antagonistic elements. Therefore, dramatic antinomies that represent instrumental reason’s total control do not endanger its systems or its perpetual advancement -- at all costs, total catastrophe included.

     The traffic that in the West is more or less available to all levels of society represents the erosion of reification, repression and revolt against it. The dynamics of regulations, their realization and their changing conditions, both from the system’s point of view and from the users’ point of view, are not to be divided. The system is one-dimensional and universalistic. There is no repressive group interest or conception to be revolutionized or challenged. In order to survive as a driver, one must adjust to the system and contribute one's share to its well-being. The driver is a manifestation of the commodity exchange in which even death in a traffic accident is a rational requirement of the market, technological advance and the continuation of “increasing the standard of living” among the survivors. These ideals and requirements have evolved out of modernity, but they negate its Enlightenment’s utopia and its concrete social and cultural potentialities.

      The world of traffic is only a fragment of a complicated totality, however, it is a major junction between different networks. Here, there is a perfect manifestation of the almost absolute validity of the universality of the system’s codes, as understood and performed by the representatives of the different sources. This is not to ignore the fact that in present post-modern conditions, more than ever, people can simultaneously participate in different and sometimes conflicting constellations which may be political, conceptual or psychological, modern, post-modern and/or pre-modern. The acknowledged pluralism is promoted essentially as a one-dimensional phenomenon, enabled by an irresistible universalistic logic that there is no open public way to resist it or to revolt against it with no immediate punishment. This argument can be seen in the present conditions and rules of traffic and road “accidents”. The “accident” is thought to be one of two: either a misunderstanding of those involved in the traffic or “bad luck”. The second possibility might take the form of a kind of institutional neglect of road conditions that cause the “accident”, which is systematically represented as a personal issue, or “bad luck”, as if it were a heavenly punishment. Such is the attitude of many of the cases of the first category, when “bad luck” or “mere coincidence” manifest themselves in the form of a drunken or “bad” driver approaching from the opposite direction.

       In contrast to Foucault’s thesis concerning the clinic or the jail, I claim that the traffic space is the best normalization and disciplining site: not as a Foucaultian closed site that determines the limits of normality, but rather as a meeting-point between the different networks. This synthesizing process leads to the production, stimulation and transformation of the various networks and sites as the production of their essence -- which is localized by the realm of self-evidence and the dynamics and borders that are possible within it as its concrete and specific realization. The closure as reconstructed in road traffic, is not the space and disciplinary form that Foucault examines. The closure/stability of the realm of self-evidence is the form that determines the amounts and the conditions of the openness of systems, their pluralism and permitted difference. It is also that which determines the constructive and de-constructive possibilities of codes, concepts and practices. As motorized traffic has shown on the roads, there is not an alternative spiritual foundation or social bearer for the renewal of concepts or the rebirth of ideals or for the appearance of a new relevant critique on the current reality and its systems. Within the framework of the current realm of self-evidence, such understanding has become irrelevant, or even a sign for illness or undeniable weakness. Basically, the obfuscation of the possibility of experiencing estrangement towards the current cultural problem is supplied by the erosion of the antagonistic manifestations between the rationality of capitalistic symbolic and commodity production and the humanist ideals of the Enlightenment, which have been completely integrated into the prevailing realm of self-evidence and its systems.

     Filippo Tomaso Marinetti understood that speed is a new spirituality, a religion,that “will master time and space” that gives rise to “a new morality”(9)  and “a new beauty; the beauty of speed. A racing car whose hood is adorned with great pipes, like serpents of explosive breath - a roaring car that seems to ride on grapeshot - is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace”.(10)  A similar, yet very different myth from the one about which Marinetti dreamed was realized to the degree of mastering the current order of things. Some of Marinetti’s ideas have a place in this order. Yet the dream has been de-contextualized, transformed and takes place in a new realm of self-evidence, where the status of concepts and myths are totally changed. The similarity I speak about is not a similarity within the same system, or within the same realm of self-evidence, rather, it is a structural one on a diachronic level. In our post-modern situation, we have many such similarities between local symbolic or political structures and dynamics, while others are totally foreign to  one another. More concretely, the Futurist, the Fascist and the Nazi conception of movement and transportation are very different from that of the modern-Enlightenment, but they do share central aspects and structures with the current transportational metaphysics. Traffic became a subject for “experts” who dealt with separate aspects of it, and it never attracted a philosophical study of its totality.

     In the second half of the 20th century, a new realm of self-evidence started to form, and man was therein reduced to a function as a producer/consumer. This reduction was provided by the same dynamics that lead to the constitution of emancipatory humanist utopias in the Enlightenment era. Intensified and transformed, these dynamics changed the modern realm of self-evidence into a new realm in which the conceptual possibilities and the ideals, values, dialog and struggle possibilities that were open in modernity were systematically closed and eroded. If in modernity the human subject was conceived potentially as a site of reflection, dialog, solidary and emancipatory social action in the second half of the 20th century, this ideal has now been transformed into a mere sign of a function. Man has become a sign of a function in the context of his producer/consumer abilities: and only as such is he relevant to the self-reproduction of post-industrial society and the development of its symbolic world. This is the context of the flourishing rhetoric about preserving and protecting human life and the awakening of sensitivity regarding the fatality of traffic accidents in an era of their indisputable decrease if we look at the terms of the percentage of casualties.

    At the same time, the vitality of traffic “accidents” has become increasingly important for the system. The mass production of commodities has become committed to a vast interchange that has led to the rapid devaluation of goods through the promotion of new fashions and technologies  thereby eliminating ineffective producers and problematic consumers or socially unproductive groups. Their destruction has many modes and, as the system becomes more sophisticated, it is less direct, vulgar and explicit and ever more efficient. This distraction ensures the continuing production and consumption of new fashions that increase the exchange of commodities and the system’s self-reproduction. It protects the work-places of men and women -- though not the people themselves -- who become owners of cars, motivated by passions and dreams shaped by the automobile as an agent and as an ideal.

      It has become unprofitable to produce cars that will last for a long time. Their rapid replacement is built into the system. The intensified dynamics have been transformed from the means of the system into an end in itself. The movement of commodities increased and revolutionized in many ways by modernity has become, in the new realm of self-evidence, a vital element in stabilizing its systems and protecting its horizons. Therefore, just as human beings have to reflect and advance the system by being agents of increasing dynamism they are also caught up in the same matrix of disposability and become increasingly worn out, rapidly and totally. From the capitalist i.e., rational point of view, traffic accidents are a necessity, a matter of life or death. Yet this is but a manifestation of a deeper development, of progress within the framework of Thanatos, of being hiding from human beings without God, without the possibility of utopia and without anything mysterious or uncontrollable with which they might engage. A real solution to the traffic problem and a dramatic reduction in the number of victims and the attitude toward them is a serious threat to the current order of exchange and the current symbolic understanding space, as well as the mental constitution and the attitude of the drivers.

      It is worthwhile, in this context, to denote the connection between a reduction in speed and a reduction in accidents and casualities. “All the empirical data prove that whenever and wherever a speed limit had been introduced, the number of accidents decreased”,(11)  argues Hans-Georg Retzco. There are exact details showing the dramatic link between the decrease in the number of accidents, especially in deaths and serious injuries, and the decrease in traffic speed.(12)  Spolander argues that the reduction in traffic speed will result in a significant drop in the number of casualities in the accidents that will remain to a ratio of 4:3,(13)  even in the case of a minimal reduction of the speed limit.

      Accidents are to be understood within the context of interpreting the essence of traffic and the new status of movement in the current realm of self-evidence. This is the starting-point for understanding the link between the mistake and the accident, the personal and the public spheres. This is the current status of the realm of understanding and communication possibilities as they are manifested in an era in which the traffic space is a communicative network. It is where the functions of the newest false human subjectivity are produced, represented, destroyed and reproduced. Men and women become relevant -- are alive -- as reproducers of motorized movement and as the victims of the symbolic reproduction of the extinction of their human essence. It is a process that is carried out by the very same subjects who are the agents of their systems and manifestations.

      On a more political level, why and how is it that there is no agreement on reducing the speed limit, investing more resources in infrastructure, improving the safety dimensions of cars and implementing regulations that will lead to a significant drop in the number of victims? My argument is that philosophically and politically, the present level of suffering among casualties and the continuation of road-deaths represent a rational equilibrium, from the point of view of the existing order. Traffic safety education is of special importance because it has the quickest and the largest rhetorical impact while being politically the least expensive and, philosophically, the least problematic. In the Israeli arena, this might be exemplified by Eliahu Richter, a traffic researcher who says that “the myth that there is a need to increase safety education and drivers preparation education in order to decrease the slaugther on the roads by higher awareness has been proven wrong again and again”.(14)  Another Israeli researcher, Irit Uchmann, presents a similar argument. She maintains that while the National Israeli Institution for Driving Preparation gives courses for about 90,000 drivers annually,  the usefulness of these courses is never actually checked. The manager of the Israeli National Institution for Safe Driving declared frankly that “Most of the course is directed towards re-studying traffic regulations... It is nothing but a waste of time, and even a terrible waste of money and energy.”(15)

      The American economists, Lester and Charles Law, calculated that the cost of saving one person’s life from a traffic “accident” is worth 850,000 hours of extra driving time. And since the average life of an American is equal to 600,000 hours, they have “proved” that it is irrational to save a person’s life at the cost required under present conditions. Saving one victim under such conditions is described (somewhat un-scientifically?)scientifically as a lousy deal.(16) They also state, explicitly, that society is clearly not prepared to increase traffic safety by decreasing the mobility and comfort of people. Society is unwilling to deprive poor people from the right to drive unsafe cars if the alternative is that they would not be car owners at all.(17)  According to these researchers, this is the reason for the lack of investment in a sub-structure that would drastically lower the number of victims. I do agree with their conclusion that a substantial decrease in the number of traffic victims is possible. To a certain degree, I even share their conclusion that “society” is not interested in reducing the number of casualities. As things stand today, the demand for lowering the injuries ratio is completely irrational. However, in contrast to these researchers, I do not think that we should see this issue as a manifestation of society’s free will, or as a manifestation of genuine social and cultural progress.

      By claiming that a substantial reduction in the number of traffic victims is irrational from the point of view of the system, I do not mean that such a reduction is in itself irrational, since the current system does not value life and does not view the victim’s life since it does not consider the life of the victim as anything that is  valuable in itself. My claim refers to the economic and symbolic energy that the system has to invest in order to change the present balance. The symbolic energy and economic cost of creating social, cultural and physical conditions that will substantially reduce the number of traffic victims is irrational, under the current system. The level of rational control is such that in facing the data of the experts, the conditions of society would have already changed.unless such a change was merely irrational, as it seems to be according to the present order of things. Normally, hegemonic rhetoric masks this imperative of the current system, but sometimes the functionalist symbolic exchange reveals its truth. Treating the internal rhetoric of researchers working for insurance companies, transport and road works might be of some use, but even their public publications are sometimes good enough for this purpose.

     A. D. Reynolds and R. F. Dawson’s rhetoric might demonstrate instrumental reason in action, in their devotion to an “objectivist”, “neutral” and functionalist attitude. Already in the 1970s, they were occupied in calculating the rationally justified investment in preventing car accidents and their victims. In their report, they treated the problem in such terms as “the cost of a death is not less than the loss of the output which the deceased person would have produced” if he or she had not been killed in the accident.(18)  The experts’ discuss questions about the economic worth of the life and death of a car accident’s victim and in these reports “It is sometimes argued that if society loses an accident victim’s output, it also gains the consumption that he will no longer need”. An accurate calculation of the economic value of one person’s life is very precise in such reports; in addition, they even differentiate between the value of women’s and men’s lives. Dawson, for example, found that the British economy loses L 4360. in each fatal accident in which a man is the victim, but gains L 1120. in the case of the victim being a woman: “Since the work done by housewives was given a low value in the calculations, society could be said to gain on average...when women are killed in road accidents”.(19)

      Norbert Elias is one of the few thinkers that has placed the traffic issue in a non-marginal place in his social and cultural critique. In the spirit of Aristotle and Kant, Norbert Elias presents an essentialist concept, according to which human essence is manifested in self-control and self-regulation. For Elias, this is realized within the framework of present reality, with the traditions and regulations shaping its formations and dynamics. Unlike Aristotle and Kant, however, he identifies self-control and regulation with technical control. More specifically, self-control is realized and tested functionally on the motorized road traffic: “Controlling the car (which includes its maintainance) is nothing but an extension of the driver’s self-control or self-regulation”.(20)  For Elias, cultural development is a universal educational process of humanity. One of the major forces of education, according to Elias, is the progress of technization of a given society. Here, he places technization -- the historical process of transportation -- in a special position. The supreme trial of every culture is its ability to develop an ever-higher degree of self-control, and this is manifested in the issue of traffic in general and accidents in particular. In consonance with the thesis presented here, Elias also argues that it is wrong to make a division between traffic accidents and the status of knowledge and the dynamics constructing the present shape of society.(21)

      Elias maintains that it is not only that the victims of traffic accidents in the developed culture of Western societies are inevitable, the truth is that they are an indication of the extent to which Western culture has gone in making technological development one of its most important parameters. He sees a connection between further advancing technization of traffic and improving self-control as indications for cultural progress. His findings show that it is possible to identify a considerable gap between the rate of traffic accidents in Western societies and that in non-Western societies.(22)

      Elias uses his data in order to defend the special stand of Western culture and the advantages that Western societies have over non-Western ones. The differences are substantial and noticeable in the effectiveness of social standards that concern self-control and regulation. The major cause of traffic accidents, according to Elias’s thesis, is the driver, and the degree of self-control of the driver is an outcome of the level of his cultural development. The degree of cultural development is evident in the self-control of the individual, a component responsible for causing the accidents and responsible for their victims.(23)
I do agree with Elias that road accidents are not a matter of luck or chance and that, in fact, they are not “accidents”.

      Elias refers to the cultural progress of the West as a manifestation of the progress of rationality and the advancement towards a higher degree of integration. From that respect, too, traffic accidents are a manifestation of rationality (or the degree to which society has been rationalized), on the one hand, and a justified punishment or a pedagogically necessary treatment that non-Western societies have to suffer, on the other. Although his thesis has to be rejected on a few grounds, his thesis is still an important one. It is important since it implicitly presents the road as an arena in which rationality is tested objectively, by manipulating the vehicles, drivers and their communication abilities with other drivers in the context of their intersubjectivity. They are examined in parallel on their ability to know and understand agreed conventional codes and regulations, and on their ability to do this by realizing the needed amount of self-control in the equalization of man with the car, airplane or speedboat.

     I do not agree with Elias'sconclusion, when he claims that the degree of traffic efficiency reveals the degree of a culture. However, his studies are useful,  for the deconstruction of the cultural context and philosophical essence in the transformational (re-constructive) transformation of its potentials and cultural essence. More than that, I can make use of some of his findings as an example for my argument concerning the success of the purpose principle within the framework of advancing instrumental reason that develops vital elements of hegemonic forces in post-industrial society. This rationality has a special presence in interchange networks: transportation, the representation of knowledge, its agents and other commodities. The efficiency of the system is manifested by motorized traffic and not in the cultural and social stage, as Elias tries to convince us. Thus, the level of traffic accidents does not represent any punishment, or luck or “accident”, in which its essential characteristics lie in its being an incident, an inevitable catastrophe. In contrast to Elias and other conservatives defending the present anti-humanistic Western order of things, I see in traffic “accidents” the logic of the system, the forces constructing its rationality and its self-presentation and manipulations. Since this rationality is instrumental in its essence, it is not determined by values and is attracted to the mission of the anti-transcendental being, an aim of self-reproduction and advancement of nothingness, of Thanatos. This concrete representation of instrumental reason has social, economic and technological results in the public sphere and in the remains of what could have been the public sphere of the individual.

      Therefore, the implementation of a policy that would lead to a real reduction in traffic “accidents” might clash with the purpose principle, which is indifferent to any value-oriented obligation. It would also be at odds with transcendental ideals, as the supremacy of preserving and developing human life and its well-being and preferring it over further technological advancement possibilities, as well as other elements of protecting the life of the control and repression potentialities of the system. Four possibilities are to be raised in referring to the limits of the rationality of a praxis that will substantially reduce the number of traffic “accidents” and their victims.

       A. A further reduction is needed in the speed of  traffic. In such a case, the symbolic function of driving might bring the driving and other related networks into total chaos. This should be understood in terms of a space where killing time and extrinsic controlled self-constitution have become central and productive educational and political dimensions of prolonging the life of the system.

      B.  Substantial changes will be needed in traffic organization, in car structuring, and especially in the representation of the producer/consumer as man-machine. In such a case, the erotic passion between the driver and the car might be confused, and a demand might come to constitute different social borders, relations and dynamics in which an erotic state between human beings might be constituted. There is even the danger of lightening the educational contribution of a false erotica between man and motorized vehicles under the new cultural conditions. Such a critical light might reveal the part that modern speed driving plays in the self-forgetfulness of man in his refusal to transcendence and in his forgetfulness of forgetfulness
.
      C. The dangers of the traffic routes as sites of knowledge exchange and realization. A consideration of the dangers involved in fast driving and an essential change in the ways in which the dangers on the roads are represented might damage its economic, social and cultural production. The productivity of the relation to the danger involved in speedy traffic is based on the dual structure of this kind of danger: as an enemy and as an object of strong passion. This danger is represented as something that has to be overcome. By the same token, as a dimension of “otherness” in the heart of a one-dimensional world it demands the release of surplus energy and frustration in such a way that in the final analysis it will secure present normalization strategies, power hierarchies and dynamics. These elements protect, serve and hide themselves as self-evidence. Life on the edge, as philosophy on the edge, might be an erotic reflection of health, as Nietzsche proclaimed. However, in certain systems like ours, looking for the danger and running away from unplanned and uncontrolled life are two dimensions of one and the same trend: Thanatos’s track of self-forgetfulness, which is also the forgetfulness of being, the nothingness. “And so everything rushes at man, man-target is assailed on all sides, and our only salvation now is to be found in illusion, in flight from the reality of the movement, from the loss of free will...”(24)

      D. The changes about which I speak threaten the very possibility of struggling for the realization of human freedom, solidarity and dialog in history. This is the case because there is not a way to totally ignore the essential difference between self and intersubjective understanding / realization and freedom, between Eros and Thanatos. Traffic is an arena where the possibility of dialogical solidarity and alternative communication is tested daily. Today’s roads provide an exemplary manifestation of rationality, of “healthy” competition and cooperation between people as if there were a vivid dimension of a free and democratic public sphere. The aforementioned possible changes in symbolic and traffic operation might crack the self-understandability of some apparatuses and strategies of the system, endangering other entities -- that of traffic -- and thus endangering the entire system. Cracking vital self-evident dimensions will question the ways of production and reproduction of the conceptual apparatus, the hegemonic collective consciousness, normalization strategies and educational manipulations responsible for reproduction of the necessary public attitude and criteria and so forth. Essentially, different forms of approach to evaluation, communication and intervention might penetrate along radical alternative driving and traffic philosophy. As such, they might bring about an alternative human condition. Such an order must represent a different intersubjective grammar and a different human attachment to human beings, technology, and ecology as well as toward the unspeakable or uncontrollable. The object of such a transformation is not identifiable within the borders of the current realm of self-evidence. Such a transcendence must be of a utopian order that philosophically denotes the primacy of the potential over the actual: it must be politically aggressive or be smashed by the hegemonic educational dynamics of the system and its despair.

      A radical examination of motorized traffic and the reconstruction of the function of accidents, as well as a study of the possibility of alternative education for safe transportation, all demand a critique of instrumental rationality, its context and its operation. What I am suggesting here engages only one dimension of the issue: the political dimension; and it is at odds with the philosophical one.

      Motorized traffic and accidents are but one mode of being’s games of revealing and hiding: its way of motivating man into realizing himself as “being towards death”.(25)  Within this questioning, I think that we should try to understand the philosophical dimension of technological and transportational progress. Heidegger’s ontological questioning, as well as the understanding of the procedures of the human body, soul and truths according to Foucault, still leave room for the Habermasian critical reconstruction and that of Adorno’s critique on instrumental rationality. These elements are vital elements of the theoretical attitude that I suggest. The theory suggested here is “pessimistic” but, by the same token, it is Utopian. It understands the current advancement of transportation and education for safe transportation as manifestations of nothingness. At the same time, it treats the contingent historical stand of concrete systems as a real world. It is where happiness, falsity, possibilities of hope and concrete opportunities are present and deserve protection in the struggle for their development, especially through the de-construction of the current realm of self-evidence to the greatest possible degree.

      Education on the issue of safer transportation and the call for more careful behavior on the roads might become an important part of a struggle against the powers manifested in the slaughter on the roads, namely countering the logic of the current Western realm of self-evidence. Such an education, even under the present circumstances, might be aided by presently existing antagonistic sites in the system, or newly developed focuses that contain the potential of becoming vital elements of the coming realm of self-evidence. Specifically, I am referring to the destructive / educational potential of the tradition of the free public sphere in modern Western culture.

      Essentially, this tradition is conservative in its self-understanding, but for our purposes  the more central issue revolves around the very separation between the public and the private sphere. This rich tradition contains (and might reproduce) the explicit and implicit codes and parameters that guide behavior in the public sphere and the alternative possibilities of the human subject. Normally, this is the basis of producing and controlling the subject in accordance with the hegemony concepts and interests, or power balance in the system. At the same time, however, this power might be directed against the system, might serve as part of a transformation that would enable a more autonomous and less controllable subject and intersubjectivity. Human life might thus become richer and contain new possibilities, as part of an enterprise that opens new horizons and drives towards new dangerous normalization systems and opportunities for liberation.

      Countering the present reproduction of traffic accidents, resisting the current ways of distribution and consumption of “the problem” and its suggested solutions, might become parts of such a utopian struggle. Such a struggle must become a radical political and philosophical praxis. It is important here to denote some conservative elements and pinpoint the possibility of their transformation within this Utopian struggle. After all, the alternative education for safety transportation is but one of its bearers and builders. Such an alternative education is impossible without maturity manifestations such as a new type of communicative action that is not under the control of the purpose principle, overcoming anti-narcissistic self-forgetfulness and the reestablishment of refinement in the public sphere of behavior. However, all these elements and their attributes are impossible in the face of the absence of dramatic change in concrete social and cultural conditions. I do not share Habermas’s optimism and positive utopianism concerning the possibility of communicative action and scientifically-based advancement towards the “ideal speech situation” that would constitute a solidarian partner in dialog. In this instance, I see more relevance in Jean Baudrillard’s conception of a communication which cannot see a way out of our present situation. However, that is the end of Baudrillard’s truth and the opening opportunities for an alternative communication / traffic education. It is a project that  targets the realization of new ways of driving -- as a representation of a reasoned solidarity of aesthetic motorized movement-- as part of the entrance of a new spirituality and its alternative power / knowledge relations.

      The term, derech eretz (the way of respect), contains in Hebrew a vital importance for any education for safe driving and for any alternative communicational praxis. It exceeds the traffic issue and completes it. In Judaism, there is a unique synthesis between Torah (the Jewish written law) and Torah Shebeal-pe (the Jewish oral law) as a reflection of the dialectic of the earthly life and the heavenly world, nature and man. In Judaism, the heavenly world does not reduce earthly life and material things such as the body to something of a lower degree. The written Torah proclaims the sanctity of the ways of this world and the sanctity of the human soul, the body and its passions and needs. That is why Judaism praises human worldly ways of conduct as an autonomous dimension that is not of a lower degree and is never totally separated from heaven In principle,the written Torah and oral tradition -- Torah Shebeal-pe-- cannot be separated. These worldly ways and man’s conduct in earthly matters are not to be separated from God’s imperative, from the truth of the Torah and and from heavenly eternity. In this sense, while having its history, different interpretations, educational and political manifestations,(26) derech eretz delineates a religious dimension. While representing the earthly dimension in human life, derech eretz manifests the redemptive aspects in our daily life. As such, it also represents the general human Utopian axis of humanity’s enlightenment as developed by figures such as Schiller, Kant, Hegel and Marx. They represented a mature conception of derech eretz in which acknowledging the absence of the traditional God does not negate utopia or the moral value of daily matters and the acknowledgment of different ways of life. As it was written in Masechet Derech Eretz Zuta, 71, 2: “Kol drachecha yieyu leshem shamaim” (Let all your ways be for the sake of heaven).(27)
I would like to develop this concept into a general humanistic educational attitude, as exemplified in the traffic issue. That is to say, alternative traffic education is connected to an alternative conception of movement and to an alternative, utopian conception of the public sphere.

      The concept of derech eretz on the roads has two aspects: one of knowledge and the other of action. Each of them is contained in two different contexts: private and public. In the public sphere, derech eretz is conditioned by the recognition of an epistemological system that is conceived as legitimate and is enabling knowledge concerning relevant codes and norms in the current public sphere.

      Unlike mere politeness, behavior manifesting derech eretz is conditioned not only on the act being conceived as polite, but that other men and women might be trained to behave in accordance with it. This follows because it is conditioned by knowledge; therefore, it is not a matter of making people behave “properly”(which would leave open the issue of repression), but rather it is a question of a real educational enterprise. Under this interpretation, derech eretz is not merely an epistemological issue, and it cannot be realized only as a concrete moral, obligatory, conscious action. In this sense, derech eretz is not a mere epistemic function  or a framework. It is conditioned by a special sort of knowledge, one that is morally oriented, namely, courteous behavior that is shaped by the acknowledgement of the other’s identity, needs, rights, hopes and limits, and ultimately directed towards a common transcendence. According to this perspective, education for derech eretz on the roads might be realized only as the politics of overcoming the purpose principle, which constitutes the heart of instrumental reason and capitalist practice.(28)  Marx suggests the utopian movement in sexual relations between free men and women as a concrete criterion for true communism,(29)  namely, for the overcoming of the purpose principle that is the essence of both capitalism and vulgar communism. This kind of intersubjectivity, which is determined by recognition of the other as another, as different, and as a partner for critical dialog and solidarian creativity, is manifested in the Jewish category of derech eretz.

      The derech eretz education that I am suggesting is but a revolt against the totality of the present reality and is directed towards its questioning and deconstruction. In contrust to postmodern educational rhetorics, however, such an education is committed to overcoming the driver as an ego with no essence that realizes itself by negating the other’s ego. This kind of education has a Utopian axis: a commitment to the revelation of the idea of a human being as an autonomous site, an agent of solidarity and a creator of reason that is realized in the public sphere. This humanistic renaissance avoids being just one more manifestation of the narcissistic power that is produced by the current culture industry. This humanistic Utopia connects, again, the private man to a public sphere that is realized in solidarity, criticized and re-formulated daily by the individuals creating it. Human beings become social again, namely, real human beings, individuals.

     Today, the very possibility of educating people against the current trend toward de-personalization and indifference in regard to the other is conditioned by the effectiveness and strength of instrumental reason’s manifestations. Education for derech eretz on the roads brings man home to himself, and can liberate him from the system’s hegemony, as a piece of statistical data and as an almost totally controlled function. This “almost” is important for any possible counter-education. Education for derech eretz on the roads transcends the level of treating the issue as a mere private, or economic “safety” matter to a political, moral, philosophical and existential one. Even as a utopian enterprise, this is impossible when one is deprived of any tradition. Therefore, the educational project that I suggest must be established via a hermeneutic approach to the tradition or traditions denoting the moral and spiritual dimensions of manners and making it possible to demand that derech eretz be realized.

     The project suggested here is a Jewish one while emphasizing its multicultural, yet generalist-humanist implications. Judaism might be interpreted in an anti-ethnocentric way, as part of a universal enterprise of edifying, transcending and liberating. It can avoid ethnocentrism and cultural neo-colonialism by avoiding the mistakes of both current conservative universalist and multiculturalist discourses. As a humanist alternative, it should cross the existing borders between classic critical theory and Foucault’s project in suggesting the possibility of a new critical dialog and political praxis. Reinterpreting concepts such as derech eretz and educating for alternative transportational reality and traffic education, against its conservative understanding, on the one hand, and as part of a dialog with other cultural concepts, on the other, might evolve into a meaningful defense for reason and a more human order of things.

      An alternative education of the kind I suggest is very different from the prevailing one. Such an education must deconstruct the inner logic of the current realm of self-evidence and subject it to interrogation. It must be questioned if there is to be the possibility of redeeming a sense of estrangement toward it to the degree that it may become enlightened. Instrumental reason and ethnocentrism must be challenged in order to reestablish human attachment to one another and to utopia through the opening up of a dialog.

      Deciphering the essence of “traffic accidents” must face the contingency of the formation of the realm of self-evidence and the systems reflecting it.(30)  A realm of self-evidence creates or is being realized in local social-cultural systems which struggle and communicate with one another and which are violent by their nature. The system is not to be identified with a national sovereignty. It crosses political borders and is much closer to cultural spaces, but it is not identified with it since it includes local social hierarchies, their financial and symbolic power struggles and political praxes. Systems can change characters and borders, and the direct dynamics and limits within their subjects, consciousness and working political strategy.

      The utopia overcoming the present realm of self-evidence and deconstructing local systems and their power relations is based on the principle of hope that is about to storm it every minute and every day. However, this concrete utopia cannot but rely on and refer to the concrete capitalistic and nationalistic reality in order to challenge it by counter-education, as by derech eretz on the roads. Here I do not refer to an abstract individual as a contingent supreme standard. I speak about the constitution of new values, new myths and a new heroism of sacrifice for the totally different, the transcendent. In its nature, such an education is opposed to the “education for safe driving on the roads”. Such an approach is determined to de-construct present reality and transcend itself. It aims to generate this project without being non-humanistic, but with the determination to transcend humanism and to save it from the presence it wants to deconstruct. Such a determination requires considering institutionalized “accidents”, their production, selection and designing apparatuses even on the roads.      Counter-education must support itself on this acknowledgment and on making use of interests and dynamics that are currently shaping the local systems. On one level, it has to use insurance companies and other interest focuses that are for the moment opposed to those of the car industry, importers and the government. On another level, it can make use of the remains of the nation-building myth and Kantian moral conceptions in anti-conservative contexts, which can be directed towards concrete action against this aspect of the death industry known as “normal traffic conditions”. The remnants of national fanaticism may be of some use, too, in a counter-educational action against the world of “traffic accidents”.

      Such an action is conditioned by the refusal to accept the forgetfulness of  forgetfulness, against the refusal to rebel against the self-understood and specifically against hegemony trends in the Israeli system. One might assume that such an education is really going to decrease the number of traffic victims. Such an instrumentalist might succeed, but only by acting in such a way that will ultimately advance and fortify the system in which a revolt functions in the form of actual or potential “traffic accidents”, i.e. as any commodity. The counter-education is fed by the hope principle, from the transcendental impotence that has no power to reduce the number of casualties. In principle, it cannot be “successful”. It can only appear as a refusal for “success”, normality and self-understanding, as a negation of nothingness that the present reality manifests.

      Even so, we have to demand education for a negation of the current ways of the Western system and a total refusal of its self-evidence. Such a refusal must include the acceptance of the liberation of the oppressed (intellectually, psychologically and economically) potentialities. The realization of the demand for such an education is possible only if the entire social horizon can be changed and a real public sphere can flourish. In such a utopia, a new place for technology and transportation will be provided by the new human being. There is the place for an essentially different kind of traffic, which has a different telos  to the current one. There and only there will an equal status be attained for all traffic victims. Even then, will they be victims of a way that is not theirs? And what will be the form of an alternative that we cannot positively describe? All that we can do is act against  the negation of its possibility and rebel against the Evil Industry that constitutes the one-dimensionality of the present reality.
 

Notes

(1)  Juergen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Cambridge 1992.

(2) Ilan Gur-Ze’ev, The Frankfurt School and The History of Pessimism, Jerusalem 1996 (in Hebrew).

(3) Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, London 1964, p. 123-143.

(4) Mary Tiles and Hans Oberdiek, Living in a Technological Culture, London and New York 1995, p. 130.

(5) Plato, Phaedrus, translated by C. J. Rowe, Warminister 1986, p. 61.

(6) Paul Virilio, The Art of the Motor, Translated by Julie Rose, London 1995, p. 92.

(7) Lester and Charles Lave, “Barriers to increasing highway safety”, in Peter Rothe (Ed.), Challenging the Old Order; Towards New Directions in Traffic Safety Theory, Transaction Publishers, New Brunswick and London 1990, p. 78.

(8) Sigmund Freud, “Totem and Tabu”, in: The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological  Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 18 Translated by James Strachey, London 1971.

(9) Filipo Tomaso Marinetti, “The new religion-morality of speed”, in: R. W. Flint (Ed.), Marinetti; Selected Writings, London 1972, p. 94.

(10) Filipo Tomaso Marinetti, “The founding and manifesto of Futurism”, Ibid., p. 41.

(11) Hans-Georg Retzko, “Speed and accidents in German motorways”, in: International Proceedings Conference on New Ways and Means for Improved Safety, Tel-Aviv February 20-23 1989, p. 6.

(12) Krister Spolander, “How to reduce speeding”, Ibid., p. 73.

(13) Ibid.

(14) Eliahu Richter, “A natioinal or a scientific failure?” in: Universita, Jerusalem 1993, p. 9 (in Hebrew).

(15) Irit Uchman, “A rational approach toward traffic accidents,” Tnua Vetachbura, 27, 1990, p. 21 (in Hebrew).

(16) Laster B. and Charles A. Lave, "Barriers to increasing highway safety", in: Peter Rothe, Challenging the Old Order, p. 89.

(17) Ibid., p. 23.

(18)  C. H. Sharp, Transport Economics, Tiptree 1973, p. 67.

(19) Ibid.

(20) Norbert Elias, “Technization and Civilization”, Theory, Culture & Society, 12 (1995), p. 25.

(21) Norbert Elias, “Technization and Civilization”, in: Theory, Culture & Society, 12, 3 (August 1995), pp. 8-9.

(22) Ibid., p. 23-34.

(23) Ibid., p. 24-25.

(24) Paul Virilio, The Art of the Motor, Translated by Julie Rose, London 1995, p. 132.

(25) Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, Tuebingen 1957, p. 265-266.

(26) Mordechai Broier (Ed.), Persons and Roads, Tel-Aviv 1987 (in Hebrew).

(27) Rabbi Asher Frizker, Masechtot Derech Eretz, Tel-Aviv 1950, p. 19 (in Hebrew).

(28) Karl Marx, “On the Jewish Question”, in: Early Texts, Translated by David Mclellan, Oxford 1971, p. 114.

(29) Karl Marx, “Economic and philosophical manuscripts”, in: Early Texts, Translated by David McLellan, Oxford 1971, p. 147.

(30) Ilan Gur-Ze’ev, The Frankfurt School and the History of Pessimism, Jerusalem 1996, p. 222-224 (in Hebrew).