Sir, - Your Editorial of April 15th rightly deplores the mayhem on the roads ("Speed Slaughters") and you are correct, I believe, in identifying the prime causes as quicker cars and even faster drivers. Many of the new cars, despite having a safe limit on engine capacity, are possessed of a power-to-weight ratio approaching that of Formula One.
Speeders might be restrained if fresh laws, for example, saddled them with a racing handicap. So many concrete blocks in the boot, depending on the age of the driver; or a special down-rated, octane-negative petrol for drivers under 25. Perhaps compulsory courses in driver education and in ballistics might be begun in the secondary schools. But these measures are likely to fail. For a variety of reasons, they are unlikely to influence dangerous behaviour on the road.
You lean to the view that the remedy lies in a reinvigorated public opinion and the pressure of robust social censure. Perhaps the point is that these once effective social controls no longer work. It is all too plain that many drivers think that speeding is a misdemeanour, easily justified. Why is this? Perhaps it is because - as you say - there has been a "shift in cultural attitudes".
Social censure worked so well in the past because conformity has brought its rewards: honour and a recognised place in the community. The small community recognises wrongdoers as people with a history. The larger society, for reasons of efficiency, does not do this. It is easier and simpler just to count heads. As society must apply one law equally to all cases, it is only a matter of time - and saving time - before persons become "cases" and all "cases" apparently the same.
Uniform law and regulation in the interests of administrative efficiency yield a uniform person. As a consequence of a subtle shift, we have redefined the human person; someone loosed from common ties, but welded to efficiency and material progress.
This optimised, new person is an entity governed, not by fellow feeling, but by the uplifting lure of a room for him at the top. He is accountable, not to kindred flesh and blood, but to the board and to bloodless, distant bureaucrats. He is accountable, too, to an anonymous crowd called "society" much enamoured of the law as a tool of behavioural engineering.
He is in society's good books or bad books and in the books of accountants. He is enrolled, registered, recorded and documented. He has been "booked". His number has been taken, and he is a veritable cipher himself, made to the uniform measure of systems of mass entertainment, management, marketing, credit and education where he integrates nicely without ever getting involved.
By thus reinventing the person as an efficient, legal-economic construct, the law estranges him from all familiar background; it alienates him from his origins and his fellows. Law - whatever the intentions of its makers - thus puts him out of reach of censure, often placing him outside the bounds of common attachment and feeling. He is likely to be in a place where social censure cannot touch him and the short-handed police power will never reach him.
Perhaps his fast driving is an assertion of power and place in a world which does not recognise him? Perhaps, too, alienated or dangerously wayward youth are yet another of the inevitable tributes exacted by that heartless god, Efficiency. - Yours, etc.,
Ned Bright
Cooragannive, Skibbereen, Co Cork.