The rather lax updating schedule around here has had to do with a string of long weekends on the archipelago and a move. Regularly scheduled blogging will resume shortly, though I really should finish off that site redesign first. It’s impressive how soon after acquiring a bicycle, which I did last week, one becomes a bicycle fascist. Those ample biking lanes that snake through the center of Stockholm — you know, the ones that until last week, in my pedestrian ignorance, I would wander onto for extended periods of time — have now become hallowed ground, to be defended from the promenading proles by highly aggressive cycling tactics, strafing past them at rakish angles so that they know, they must know, that if they venture onto bicycle lanes they are doing something terribly dangerous and very very wrong.

Never mind that I’m not wearing a helmet (yet), and that my light doesn’t work, and that the sense of exhilaration I feel after far too many years of not cycling is making for crazy cruising speeds, and that frankly, other cyclists are going a bit too slow for me and not paying enough attention to those overtaking from behind at great speed. But these are but minor quibbles I have with myself. I am simply impressed by the ease with which I have managed to switch my allegianceNot unlike the manner in which Kungsholmen, the part of Stockholm I have just moved to, has suddenly eclipsed Södermalm as the undisputed happening place in Stockholm. towards the becycled, of which I am now one.

What’s going on? I believe the technical term for my mental processes here is “asymmetric accounting”, whereby the wrongs done to me and my particular clan are always perceived as more grievous than the same wrongs I do unto others and their clans. Conversely, favors I do for others are worth more than the same favors done for me. An everyday word for this is hypocrisy, though it is only ever blatant in those cases when you get to switch clans at short notice — me buying a bicycle, for example, or aggressive drivers who become militant pedestrians once they park their car.

Asymmetric accounting is deeply ingrained in all of us — every parent knows it is impossible to reconcile sibling rivalries with appeals to an objective notion of fairness. I suspect a genetic origin: A perennial sense of injustice, of deserving more, of needing things at the expense of others — these are healthy instincts from an evolutionary perspective. It may not be that greed is good, but it certainly is good for you.

At the level of the clan, the ethnic group, and the nation, asymmetric accounting has driven history. The divergent popular histories in the Balkans, of the Semites and in the Caucasus, to name a few, all accentuate those wrongs that were suffered, not those that were meted out. American perceptions of US foreign policy over the last 100 years tend to accentuate the positiveBelgian perceptions of its colonial policy have long suffered from this effect too, of course, lest anyone try to levy accusations of asymmetric accounting at me beyond my cycling crimes, to which I’ve now owned up., leaving it to others to accentuate the negative — among Muslim countries especially, as Bernard Lewis likes to point out. This observation is not the same as the relativist assertion that the truth usually lies somewhere in the middle: I’m saying that asymmetric accounting is a mental process that everyone is susceptible to, irrespective of where the truth lies.

For asymmetric accounting to do real harm, it needs to be coupled to the notion that members of the opposing group are fungible — that all are guilty by association for perceived transgressions, and hence that any are fair game for retributive justice. Such dehumanization of the enemy is a prerequisite for modern terrorism, as it has been for traditional warfare until recent examples came alongExamples of recent humane wars: US intervention in Somalia and ex-Yugoslavia.. And so Beslan happened, and 9/11, and before it, World War II, and I.

Is there any chance that an awareness of our biases in the tallying of grievances might lead us to correct for this, rationally? If and when I stop cycling through red lights across zebra crossings, you’ll be the first to know.