Driving recently, I found myself enraged at the behavior of a stranger. This would be a better story if I remembered what the offense was, but perhaps it’s a realer tale because I do not. Tailgating, maybe, followed by passing on the right, then weaving in and out of traffic as I watched, left in the proverbial dust and shaking my actual head. What I can say for sure is that I was immediately angry. My anger was partly a response to perceived endangerment by this person’s actions, and it was partly a wish for a recognition of something else entirely.
Our engagement was momentary, and then it was over, and neither I nor anyone around me was harmed. But even so, I was furious—the stress of these seasons, it lives in our bodies— and I was amused and humbled to note that only a committed, muscle-bound practice cultivated across these years of parish ministry stifled my rage impulse. My body wanted to go there, and while it’s tempting to frame an urge to give someone the finger as a reflex based on a reptilian survival instinct, the more real (and vulnerable) truth is, of course, that it is not. Simple survival instinct would mean leaving the person, who in the space of a moment’s thought had traveled long past me, to have their accident elsewhere. My anger was, instead, largely ego instinct, and it was born of a sense of being unseen and treated as less-than by another person.
It was born, in other words, of a sense of entitlement. Which I want us to think about a bit in terms of how we provide for the collective welfare, and probably not quite in the way you imagine.
First, a traditional view: I felt entitled to be treated a certain way, and when I wasn’t accorded that deference, I felt outrage. Road rage, we might say, and I suspect the seed for such a thing lies in the hearts of most of us. I imagine, in fact, that the potential for outrage is present not only in our cars, but everywhere, as we move through life in community with other humans. We receive the blessings and burdens of others’ responses to us, and sometimes we feel, for better and worse, either owed a particular gesture or entitled to its forbearance. The circumstances under which those feelings are provoked and the consideration of what we might do next are at issue in dealings as mundane as interactions around the office water-cooler and as dangerous as Amy Cooper’s murderously racist one-upmanship of Christian Cooper in Central Park.
What do we owe one another, and what should happen when what we feel owed is not delivered? These are sometimes covetous questions, and they are also-inherently- covenant questions. And a further inquiry, one that we as progressives often forget to acknowledge, much less to ask, lies underneath these first considerations. To engage with care and relevance in the three-dimensional world as we meet it, we need to get better and braver at naming the next question: What should happen when rights are in conflict?
How will we proceed when what one person and another are respectively owed is at odds? This is the fundamental complication of American property law and economic scarcity theory, but it doesn’t stop there. Defining and resolving rights-in-conflict also lies at the heart of the seven (soon 8) principles of Unitarian Universalism, of our promises and our covenants, and also of our liberty and the necessary safety with which it is invisibly yet inextricably intertwined. And we sense a danger here, and also an opportunity. We want to know that we agree on what the rules are, and we know also that rules can be used, can always be used, to expand an opportunity and open a door, as well as to enforce a hierarchy and blockade the path to power. None of this is neutral.
But it can be more fair. We are people who hold multiple interests and complex and layered values, yet we engage often with dialogues and policies and entire institutions that root themselves in fictional worlds of single interests. We each contain multitudes. And a core piece of this inescapable diversity is our individual and shared expectations about how our divergent values—and at root, our own inherent value—will be engaged by others.
And here we might benefit from a different lens on entitlement and its merits in our collective life. In the psychology literature, entitlement is a bedfellow of narcissism; the word evokes not only rudeness but at least the hint of a personality disorder. In the legal context, on the other hand, to have been entitled is simply to be invested as rightful owner of property, and with the documentation to prove it.
Legal entitlement and its theological and moral analogues are born of situations in which an everybody-wins solution is not possible. This dilemma is, in fact, why we have rules in the first place. Sometimes a valuable thing is up for grabs, and only one of us can have it, at least at the same moment. This obligation to pick a winner also lies at the heart of the phrase “right of way,” which we might also think of as “privilege in proceeding.” We meet one another at the literal and metaphorical intersections of our lives, and if we prefer not to crash into each other and are also uninterested in sitting at the crossroads indefinitely, someone must go, and someone must wait.
So how might we determine who, in any particular moment, is who? And how will we communicate the rules?
One July afternoon when our family lived in Salt Lake City, we left the scorching valley floor to attend a free night at the Deer Valley Music Festival. It was a delightful outdoor adventure, but the traffic jam we encountered on the return trip lives in family infamy even 14 year later. We were on the interstate on a steep downhill grade, and for two hours, with a toddler in the car, we alternated between a standstill and a slow crawl. And then, suddenly, the source of the bottleneck was upon us. I-80 on our westbound side was reduced to one lane and the problem was that everyone had to merge together in two sequential chokepoints. Before the final transition, people were sitting, honking, some driving on the shoulder. It was an unholy mess. But what I found fascinating was what happened after the transition, which is simply that we descended the mountain and were back to the city in fifteen minutes.
I understand if this seems an anticlimax; what occurs when a group of cars finally begins moving is that everyone drives. But I couldn’t stop thinking about the revelation—an astonishment, honestly-- that nothing had been in our way. I had imagined all sorts of frightful scenarios, but the truth is that there was simply nothing: no accident, no construction crew, and no flagger either. The only problem was the need of a huge group of car-bound people to organize ourselves into a smaller space, and once that was accomplished it turned out that we all fit just fine. We, thousands of us, could drive in only one lane swiftly and uneventfully; the hours-long point of impossibility was the negotiation.
Put another way, a massive group of people in cars was asked to collectively decide and wordlessly negotiate how to make a space change, and the really remarkable thing was we had significantly more road square footage available to us when we couldn’t move. Three lanes: no driving. One lane: everything fine. It was never the total number of cars relative to the amount of road that was the problem, but the need to agree among ourselves how we would move from one familiar pattern to another and in particular, who in each moment was entitled to proceed.
I have never forgotten it, and I thus notice with something like religious fervor those rare examples when construction zones supply a flagger and a sign providing clear directions: “TAKE TURNS MERGING.”
This is a story about group dynamics and resource allocation: it matters tremendously whether instructions and (imagined or actual- they function roughly the same) accountability are provided. What is important for collective success is not so much who holds an entitlement in any given moment, but that we know who does, and when. And here, oddly, I find some hope for us all, though it may seem easier to engage traffic jams as sites of futility. “Nothing can fix that” or “Why are they doing construction in the first place?” or, more simply, “People are idiots.”
What we do not often consider- perhaps two hours on the slope of a mountain with a restrained and angry toddler is the thought inspiration we need?- is that ideas about allocation of rights created this scenario, and effectively communicating about rights allocation can solve it. Perhaps the highway, and not the sheep pasture, should be “the common” of our modern cultural imagination. A reasonable path forward in commoning also becomes clearer on the highway, in that our vision in that place is less clouded by our mythos around property rights. “The road must be privatized to protect it” or “Prioritizing industry interests help us all drive together well,” those worn tropes of a libertarian theology best known as “this is why we cannot have nice things,” offer nothing for the traffic jam.
And in this nothing, what’s left is we ourselves, wanting to move forward and needing clarity in our entitlements to do so. What’s clear is that we need guides for allocating rights, and underneath that, a recognition that collective life isn’t something that happens only on days where we all “decide to be nice.”
Where we work well together, privileges are being granted and shared and then shared again, and our small moments are bettered when that sharing flows as smoothly and predictably as possible. Not only this, but where we share equitably with those previously left out, we begin to remake the world.
Things that help us to accept that we all have to share, and often to wait include a reasonable expectation of equality of need and opportunity over time (spoiler: this is the literal opposite of TSA pre-check). Guaranteed equality of need whispers to our communitarian souls, “You will have a turn. Sometimes you will be on the left side. Sometimes you will be on the right. We all help each other get there.” These are, quite frankly, kindergarten skills.
And it’s true that some among us (including me, sometimes, driving on Massachusetts highways) need a kindergarten refresher. But the great news is, we have the ability to provide that in nearly any time and place: we do it by making clear how we’re allocating space, and by inviting people to modify their movements accordingly. Put another way, we make the rules clear, make them as universally applicable as possible, and communicate them in the moment where a specific behavior is needed.
Our faith in one another finds root in the little things, the kind that show up reliably at the places where your travels through the world meet my own. We need not invent or enforce scarcity, and even so, a truth of life in this world is that we in fact cannot always have all of our wishes met, especially at the same time. But we can be clearer and fairer about the ways that we’re sharing through the privileges we’re granting, and we can be more egalitarian about the queues we construct.
It is, in these fraught seasons, a small thing worth doing better.