Plain Trains and Automobiles

By training I’m a geographer. Geography’s a fairly amorphous subject – if you push it too far in any one direction it becomes something else: ecology, demography, vulcanology, etc. It exists in the blurred, smudged area where dozens of different disciplines overlap. It’s a pretty good fit for me in that respect, in that I’m interested in quite a bit and I know a reasonable amount about a fair number of fields, but I’m certainly not an expert in any one thing. Plus I really like maps.

There's a turtle under there, somewhere

Geography is fundamentally about change. Change across space and change over time. Now, space and time are also things which overlap a lot, especially as we humans conceive of them. For all that Japanese learners sometimes get frustrated with the lack of a future tense, English doesn’t have one either. Not really. We don’t conjugate the verb (the strict expression of ‘tense’) to indicate the future, we throw in an extra word or two.

Those words express movement through time in the same manner as they express movement through space: ‘I’m going to…’ Steve Pinker writes about this in The Language Instinct – how we use space as a metaphor for time. For all that we’re four dimensional creatures, it’s hard to break out of three. Like a square trying to describe a cube.

Even scientific enquiry is about metaphor. Once you move away from the numbers, at least, and there are precious few people who can deal solely with those. My old physics teacher once asked us what colour electrons were. They’ve not got any colour, of course, and they don’t really wizz around in neat little loops; those are just simple ways of visualizing them. Once you get smaller than things you can see with the naked eye, or bigger than things you can manipulate with your body, then you have to use metaphors to talk and think about them; be they waves and particles (or both), tiny selective demons, or murdering cats.

Pinker eventually goes beyond the space/time metaphor and talks about how we use metaphor itself as a metaphor. ‘The Metaphor Metaphor’ he calls it, which is like, sooo meta.

All of which is by way of saying that I’ve got a little metaphor I’d like to share with you myself. I’ve been kicking it about for a while now, and reckon it works quite well (for once). See what you think.

Ringo Starr's Greatest Achievement

Japan has a railway system which is the envy of the world, and the USA (the archetype for all things ‘western’) has a continent spanning road network. I put it to you that these transportation systems are pretty accurate and robust metaphors for their respective cultures.

Trains are excellent at getting large numbers of people from point A to point B relatively quickly, relatively efficiently, and relatively cleanly. If they’re going where you want to go, at the time you want to go there, then your journey will be smooth and almost effortless. You’ll have to make concessions to the presence of your fellow travellers, but the earlier you got on, the greater the chance you’ll get a seat and travel in comfort. People getting on further down the line will just have to bide their time until someone else gets off.

However, if you’re not starting at point A, or if you don’t want to go to point B, you’re in for a lot of difficulty. And it doesn’t matter if you’re 30 minutes or 30 seconds late, if you miss your train you’ve missed it. It doesn’t matter if you got to the platform 30 minutes or 30 seconds before departure either, you’ll still get to the other end at the same speed as everyone else.

For all that ease and comfort you have to delegate/give up flexibility and control. You are in the hands of those who run the network. If those few in charge screw up, then the entire network is affected and can grind to a halt. The actions of individual travellers are far less influential though, which obviously cuts both ways.

If this picture included a Geisha, I'd never need
another clichéd image of Japan

Road networks are, in comparison, dirty, inefficient and slow, at least at larger scales. Every individual traveller requires shitloads of metal and fuel to get them from A to B. But it’s easier to go to C as well, if that’s what you want, or even to start at X and work your way round.

Road users are also free to choose a bike, or a Prius, or even a Humvee if they like, and if they have the necessary individual resources. This of course means that everyone is traveling at different speeds, some because they choose to, some because they can, and some because they must. If you leave a little late it’s possible make up time through clever route-planning, or maybe ignoring a few rules.

The people who run the network are also less important. They’re still a factor, of course. They’re responsible for maintaining the roads and ensuring the cost of fuel stays at (un)suitable levels, but it’s easier to forget that they’re there as individual travellers have more control of, and more impact on, the system as a whole.

And all we're missing here is a morbidly obese
man holding a gun 

That’s it. I’m sure there are many ways you could embellish it, and equally as many ways to pick holes in it. It helps me think about stuff though. For all that the methods might be different, with better or worse aspects, the goals are essentially the same. There’s more than one way to skin a cat.

Sticking them in boxes and waiting for them to die though, that’s just cruel.

But still kinder than this

Credit where it is due.