Nicholas Higgins 26/06/2020

Philosophical Ridings

‘Tom: Aren’t you scared you’ll kill yourself if you crash?

Burt Monro: No. You live more in five minutes on a bike like this going flat out than some people live in a lifetime’, The Worlds Fastest Indian (2005)

Motorcycling is surely a foolish thing to do. Motorcyclists represent only 1% of all traffic, yet account for 20% of all deaths and injuries; motorcyclists are statistically 40% more likely to be killed than car drivers. Talk to a non-motorcyclist about life on two wheels and the first thing you get is some kind of horror story about someone they know who’s son in law’s head came off. 

But stats must always be contextual. You’re more than twice as likely to die having sex as riding a motorcycle. Yet still we’re relentlessly told that getting grindy is the single most important thing in life. Twice as many of us die after falling down stairs than riding a bike, and I’ve yet to see any carpenter hounded for building these wooden death traps. So next time some public transport hero throws some anti-biking factoid at you, please remind them as to why they’re not celibate and why they don’t live in a bungalow.

Biking is nevertheless risky business. William Arthur Ward reminds us of the perils of being risk-averse:

Lives lived without risk are timorous, furtive and spiritless; they’re comfortable lives of wasted opportunity and unmet expectations. You might as well watch the world go by from the comfort of your couch. Consider for a moment that all great heroes embraced risk, and not just winners of the Victoria Cross who charged up hills amidst whizzing bullets. Martin Luther King chanced being thrown in prison for his beliefs. Charles Darwin gambled his whole career on his new theories. By not making peace with the Nazis, Winston Churchill risked an entire German invasion of the United Kingdom. 

This is not an advocacy for being blind, impulsive or reckless. The biker who doesn’t wear a helmet or protective equipment, and who wheelies and lane splits at 70mph, is foolish. By embracing risk the biker also has a duty to control it. Indeed, the greater the hazard involved the greater responsibility required. So perhaps motorcycling is a way to start taking calculated, measured risks in all of life? What if it was the starting block for a life lived more daringly and courageously? To live not some watered down, dress rehearsal reality, but the real, dangerous thing.

Living so does us a service by reminding us of our own mortality. When you ride a bike, one little nudge of the handlebars or a lean to the side is all that separates you from your maker. You become startlingly aware of the fragility of your life. Unlike the car driver, the train enthusiast or the pedestrian, the motorcyclist is constantly made aware of the great inevitability that awaits us all. For many a biker, the buzz this brings is the very reason for riding. It satiates what Freud called our ‘death instinct’. 

But it’s also more than empty thrill. As has been said in a previous post, living in the shadow of Dr. Death is always a healthy thing to do. Hurtling along at high speed reminds the rider that life is short, transitory and painfully fragile. Something that should not, therefore, be taken for granted.

Still the anti-motorcycling brigade choose to ignore these reasonings. Not only is it dangerous, it’s expressive of the most toxic forms of masculinity. The media and advertising remind us that straddling a motorbike is all about machismo, virility, toughness and independence. A pitiful attempt to bolster some perceived character deficiency. A Harvard medical school pshyciatrst went as far to claim that enthusiasm for motorcycle riding was ‘a hitherto unrecognised emotional ailment’ and that he found the same basic symptoms in all his sick cyclists’, such as promiscuity, impotency and ‘always worried about discovering they were homosexuals’.

But motorcycling does not have to be some burly, whisky drinking affair. It’s the pursuit for all those who want to be free. Not just in the sense of independence that comes from going places a car can’t. On a motorcycle, it's just your little head inside that helmet. You are in control of you, totally and completely. Twist the throttle, weight the peg - you feel the immediacy of your actions and decisions. This is a breath of fresh air for those who feel everything they do is at the service of someone (family/spouse) or something else (career); that every action they take is directed by something external.

Motorcycling might also be said to (briefly) free you from troublesome thoughts. So all consuming is the task (a motorcyclist in traffic makes more decisions per minute than a fighter pilot in a dog fight), your thoughts are occupied by the moment, and only the moment. You can’t reach for your mobile phone, listen to the radio or have a smoke. So concentrated are you on staying alive, there’s simply no space to start thinking of your looming mortgage repayments or your tiff with the Mrs. It’s a sort of forced mindfulness; a space where you can forget everything that’s been bothering you.

Soon you’re only aware of your surroundings. The wind in you face, possibly the flies too if you have an open face helmet. You smell the fresh spring air, and not some jelly bean air freshener. You connect with nature in a way that can’t be replicated when you’re cocooned by steel. As many Eastern philosophers have pointed out, union with nature is the great salve for man’s feelings of fear and anxiety. In today’s abstracted digital age, it’s experiencing life a little more first hand and a little less secondhand.

Sometimes it’s useful to re-examine practices that have bad reputations. Often it’s all too easy to reel off old platitudes about something, ‘you must be mad to ride a motorcycle, one day you’ll kill yourself!’ But these are shallow judgements that pin down one aspect of motorcycling, its danger, and tar the whole practice with that brush. Dig beneath these ominous cliches! If we choose to really think about why a motorcyclist does what he does, there are entirely plausible, even philosophical, reasons for doing so.

As an old saying has it, ‘4 wheels move the body, 2 wheels move the soul’.