My Life and Thoughts

Editorial outtake from “Safe Laughs” (the New Yorker, August 31, 2009):

Over lunch in the Panda Express, I asked whether Morse had ever considered any other names for his alter ego.  “Like, maybe, Mr. Driving, or Dr. Traffic?”

“No,” Morse said.  “I didn’t have to think about the name at all.  It just came to me.  In those days we had Mr. Carpet, Mr. Tuxedo, Mr. Softy—nobody had a doctorate.  They were just Mr.”

“There’s Dr. Pepper,” I observed.  (I was seated facing the soda fountain.)

Morse didn’t miss a beat.  “Dr. Pepper was a real doctor.  I sometimes talk about Dr. Pepper in class, in the drug and alcohol section.  How Dr. Pepper got started as a competitor to Coca Cola, which replaced cocaine…  Incidentally there was once a Dr. Traffic.  But I wrote to him and told him, that was a copyright infringement.”

“Dr. Traffic,” I learned, had first begun to appear on Internet forums in the early 1990s, discussing “driver personality makeovers.”  Mr. Traffic wrote to him explaining his copyright, and suggesting that Dr. Traffic change his name to “Dr. Driving.”

“It had alliteration,” Morse points out, “and it was a more appropriate name for him.”

Indeed, Leon “Dr. Driving” James, saw the wisdom of Mr. Traffic’s words: “I was interested in the psychology of driving, while he was interested in the social and legal issues relating to traffic laws,” he told me, in an email interview.  “So by mutual agreement we carved out the new Internet world into these two zones.”

In the past decade, Dr. Driving has been a guest on Mr. Traffic’s radio show, “Traffic Jam”; when Mr. Traffic visited Hawaii, he guest-lectured at Dr. Driving’s road rage class.  There even exists a photograph of Mr. Traffic and Dr. Driving standing together near a car in Honolulu.  So, like a real superhero, Mr. Traffic has a kind of doctoral arch-colleague on a remote tropical island.

Leon James was born Leon A. Jakobovitz in 1938, in Romania, to Orthodox Jewish parents who fled the war to Belgium and Canada.  English, learned at age fifteen, was Leon’s eleventh language.  “Today I still speak English with a slight foreign accent,” Leon wrote, in an email signed “Aloha.”  He received a Ph.D. from McGill University in psychology, with an emphasis on psycholinguistics and discourse analysis.

His life underwent a radical shift in 1981 when he stumbled upon the works of Emanuel Swedenborg, the influential eighteenth-century Swedish scientist and theologian.  (In 1744, as a 57-year-old mining engineer, Swedenborg believed that he had been personally inducted by Jesus Christ into a “dual citizenship” with the spiritual world; for the next 28 years, he visited this world “nearly every day,” conducting “empirical scientific investigations” into the correspondences between matter and spirit.)   Influenced by Swedenborg’s Christian mysticism, Leon was baptized in 1981; in 1982, he began publishing papers as Leon James. (He legally changed his name in 1993.)

In a controversial move for a cognitive scientist, Leon openly embraced Swedenborgian dualism, according to which human thoughts are made of “eternal spiritual substances” with no material basis in the physical brain: after our physical bodies die, our “mental bodies” will live on forever.  According to Swedenborg, the kinds of thoughts we have during our lives thus determine whether we spend eternity in a mental heaven or hell.  In 1985, triggered by some comments by his wife’s grandmother, Leon came to realize that his driving persona was full of hellish thoughts, molded by negative influences like Road Runner, Mad Max, Road Warrior, and someone or something called “Road Jackass”: a preview of his own eternal damnation.  He had to change his ways.  He had to become Dr. Driving.

James’s web site has its share of eccentricities—one link leads to “The Sayings and Aphorisms of Leon James, Emanuel Swedenborg, and Jesus of Nazareth”—but Dr. Driving is, like Mr. Traffic, a respected authority in his field.  In July 1997, he gave expert testimony on aggressive driving to the House of Representatives; he has served on the Oahu Traffic Safety Council and the Hawaii Governor’s Impaired Driving Task Force.  In 2000, James contributed, with Steve Verret, to the RoadRageous video course, distributed by the American Institute for Public Safety.  There is truth to Dr. Driving’s claim that he and Mr. Traffic “carved” cyberspace into two realms: James’s website includes hundreds of “Dear Dr. Driving” letters, but he always forwards the legally-oriented letters to his colleague Mr. Traffic.

Mr. Traffic and Dr. Driving are perhaps as different from one another as two evangelical traffic-safety gurus can be.  For Mr. Traffic, the bad driver is above all a hypocrite: the kind of man who always holds the door for a lady, but will not hesitate to cut her off in traffic.  “Driving is a morality play.  Driving is a character test.  You are how you drive.  Who you are behind the wheel is who you are.  Who you are the rest of the time is who you pretend to be.”  Mr. Traffic likens drivers to the Transformers: the Transformers are cars which turn into killer robots; people turn into killer robots when they get into cars.

According to Mr. Traffic, people drive recklessly because they are trained to “get away with” as much as they can.  Making them change their ways is a matter of making them see that, by driving recklessly, they aren’t getting away with anything at all.  Mr. Traffic strives to convince all his students that it is stupid and selfish to break the traffic laws; that the benefits never outweigh the risks.  It may feel liberating to drive over the speed limit on the way to the grocery store, while not bothering to wear a seatbelt; “but when you’re lying in the hospital, are you gonna think, ‘It was worth it’?”

For Dr. Driving, being a good driver has little to do with rationality or the law. Rather, bad driving derives from all the most deeply ingrained, most universal flaws in human nature.  Mr. Traffic despises bad drivers for holding themselves above the law, Dr. Driving pities them for their inability to overcome a powerful, evil force.  Leon personally experiences driving as a struggle between “the ‘Jakobovits’ driver,” who is “selfish, competitive, hostile, and impatient,” and “the ‘James’ driver,” who is “peaceful, cooperative, emotionally intelligent, and rational”: the Jakobovitz driver knows, but does not care, that he is irrational, stupid, and selfish. For Dr. Driving, being a good driver is like being a saint: an uphill slope, down which it is possible to fall at any moment.

Mr. Traffic has a much less tormented relationship towards his own driving.  He meets his own goal: he follows the law to the absolute best of his ability.  Both Mr. Traffic and Dr. Driving use the metaphor of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, but in characteristically different ways.  For Mr. Traffic, Dr. Jekyll is the hypocritical, “civilized” mask, used by a selfish and calculating Mr. Hyde to deceive the rest of the world.  For Dr. Driving, Mr. Hyde is the universal force of evil lurking in the soul of every man.

Dr. Driving’s driver improvement program centers around the practice of “self-witnessing”: monitoring one’s own behind-the-wheel mental and physical behavior with a voice recorder.  Witnessed behaviors might include: justifying one’s own driving errors; believing that it is “reprehensible” to be overtaken; fantasizing about “having a gun and spraying bullets”; feeling compelled to menace laggardly pedestrians at crosswalks; feeling “elated” to get away with minor infractions; experiencing anger when obliged to brake; being insulted when a passing driver revs his engine.

Dr. Driving’s own self-witnessing transcripts convey with Dostoevskian vividness the deep hurtfulness of such perceived slights.  “I have to maintain my distance from this car in front,” Dr. Driving writes:

But this guy behind me is following me so close. He doesn’t like me to leave so much space ahead of me… I can just hear him mutter, “Oh, what’s the matter with you. Get off the road if you can’t drive like everybody else.” Oh how cruel. That hurts me.  No, sir, no, sir. Please don’t think that.  I mean it’s my right, isn’t it, just as much as yours to be here on the road?

Much of the Nevsky Prospect material in Notes from the Underground are remarkably descriptive of the psychological hell of driving in L.A.  “I felt convulsive pains in my heart… ceaselessly giving way to everyone, humiliated by everyone, insulted by everyone,” Dostoevsky writes.  “‘Why is it invariably you who swerve first?’… I kept nagging at myself.”

Then there is perverse joy—Dostoevsky’s special area of expertise—in thwarting the aims of one’s fellow man.  Dr. Driving: “What is this attachment I have to foiling the wishes of other drivers? I’m sure it’s perverse.”  Dostoevsky: “It’s their sickness that everyone takes pride in, and I, perhaps, more than anyone.”

The difference between Mr. Traffic and Dr. Driving is vividly illustrated by their reactions to Princess Diana’s fatal traffic accident in 1997. Mr. Traffic blamed Diana for not wearing her seatbelt; he called her behavior stupid and selfish, since her needless death made so many people unhappy. Dr. Driving, by contrast, was more interested in the rage that must have seized the driver, who allegedly called to the paparazzi, “You won’t catch me!” “What would make the driver go 80 mph around a curb in a tunnel?” Dr. Driving wrote, pointing out that the car was being chased, not by gunmen, but by photographers: “How do you explain the chances he took? Justified to escape the camera flashes?”  What Mr. Traffic sees as a simple, mechanical action, a click of the seatbelt, Dr. Driving sees as a clash of human wills, as complicated and pointless as a duel.

Dr. Driving’s comments to this effect on the rec.autos.driving newsgroup, referring to Diana’s death as “the road rage tragedy of the century,” provoked hundreds of oddly hostile emails from members accusing him of “using a fad term” in order to “support his personal agenda”: “Leon,” one user wrote, “if you were to get into a car after slapping yourself on the back so hard and your sore arm caused you to crash the car and kill your passengers, you would probably blame that on road rage too. Stop trying to justify your existence.” (Dr. Driving’s replies to these increasingly personal posts are unfailingly polite: “Friend, I do you no harm! I’m engaging in rational communication for the benefit of understanding a societal epidemic.”) Reading these postings, I was reminded anew that anonymity must be a crucial factor in “road rage.”  The only place I have ever seen such wrathful behavior is in the similarly anonymous space of the Internet discussion group.