Recent Travels
What is it about carnage that attracts people like freaking maggots to meat? My blood always boils when highway traffic gets stopped up for miles because of rubber-neckers hoping for a glimpse of a gurney or puddle of blood. Often there's nothing to see. Today however, I was driving home from a family reunion with my dad and sister, and there was a sudden blob of congestion growing around some lights and sirens on the side of the road. To my surprise, there was indeed a car that seemed to have recently flipped over into the grassy median with paramedics still just running to the scene. Usually, there's not quite that much action at the sight of a crash, but people still sllooooooww down while passing in hopes of seeing even one bent fender. But this time, boy, people were actually stopping there cars up ahead and getting out to watch the rescue.
And I have to say, I sort of felt the temptation to do so, too. I wasn't driving so it wasn't my choice. But what I thought about instead was why people are so drawn to this sort of thing. At once repulsed and attracted. Why not just disgusted? Seb (because I asked him; he's good at thinking about this sort of thing) made the point that we're usually not confronted with scenes of major injury and death in daily life. Homicides are usually designed, if the killer's smart, to be committed out of view. Hospitals hide the sick, dying, and mortally wounded. Wars don't really happen on American soil any more. Car wrecks are just the sort of thing that happen anywhere, anytime, and can be seen by anyone lucky enough to be there. So there is, first of all, just the novelty of it that must catch our attention. But then there seems to almost be this instinctual urge to gawk, to get a little bit closer, to understand exactly what's happened. Freud might call this the death drive; this need to confront our mortality. (I hate Freud but have always thought he picked up on some cool things about people...some people.) The way that people now adays like to talk about things like instincts is to invoke evolution and say that, well, instincts tend to have some biological basis that was selected for over many--thousands of--generations in our forager past. But why was this adaptive? Why has this fascination in mortality survived in our genetic history? How was it beneficial--adaptive, practically speaking-- to our ancestors?
Someone has probably thought about this. I bet it's look-upable.
And I have to say, I sort of felt the temptation to do so, too. I wasn't driving so it wasn't my choice. But what I thought about instead was why people are so drawn to this sort of thing. At once repulsed and attracted. Why not just disgusted? Seb (because I asked him; he's good at thinking about this sort of thing) made the point that we're usually not confronted with scenes of major injury and death in daily life. Homicides are usually designed, if the killer's smart, to be committed out of view. Hospitals hide the sick, dying, and mortally wounded. Wars don't really happen on American soil any more. Car wrecks are just the sort of thing that happen anywhere, anytime, and can be seen by anyone lucky enough to be there. So there is, first of all, just the novelty of it that must catch our attention. But then there seems to almost be this instinctual urge to gawk, to get a little bit closer, to understand exactly what's happened. Freud might call this the death drive; this need to confront our mortality. (I hate Freud but have always thought he picked up on some cool things about people...some people.) The way that people now adays like to talk about things like instincts is to invoke evolution and say that, well, instincts tend to have some biological basis that was selected for over many--thousands of--generations in our forager past. But why was this adaptive? Why has this fascination in mortality survived in our genetic history? How was it beneficial--adaptive, practically speaking-- to our ancestors?
Someone has probably thought about this. I bet it's look-upable.