A strange thing happened recently on a bright and peaceful Sunday morning in Bleak City, aka the once-great Melbourne. I was walking across an empty Exhibition Street to go to church, and stopped next to a traffic island, waiting for the road to clear. A white-haired, middle-aged female driver pulled both hands off the steering wheel to shake them at me, palms to the window, as she slowed to a stop among cars. Her brow was furrowed, her mouth open and working, her face contorted with rage and hatred. It was the sort of look that gave birth to the phrase ‘screaming harpy’ and is often seen in female protests against the dreaded Trump. Her furious handshakes were a way of saying, WTF do you think you’re doing?

Was I jaywalking? Yes. Who doesn’t? Was I in anyone’s way? No, I had no effect on her or the traffic whatsoever; the street I’d walked across was empty. Her reaction was wholly disproportionate to what she saw as my offence. It was a reaction to someone who wasn’t Following The Rules. Melbourne is excessively conformist, as we saw during the city’s largely cowed submission to Dictator Dan during the Covid lockdowns, and refusing to obey Walk and Don’t Walk signs when it is safe to do so is something of a private protest of mine against the city’s excessive timidity. At an Australian awards night in New York City, I heard a granular scientist explain his field by saying that watching pedestrians filter through and around the clogged traffic in Manhattan streets when the traffic halts is an example of granular physics. So it is not the case in every city that pedestrians hug the kerbs obediently when the streets are empty, waiting for a sign to change. Moreover, a bearded and hoary old fisherman at Karumba once characterised city folk contemptuously as the type of people who get stuck at street corners in a power outage waiting for the lights to change. Real Aussies, bushies, weren’t like that, was the implication. The result is nothing chafes at me more than standing in crowded city streets staring at empty roads and yet waiting for the Don’t Walk sign to change.

Coincidentally enough, the sermon at church that morning (or homily, as seems now to be preferred) centred on the message that a face can convey. The priest told of a widow, who had been married in that church 60 years ago, had her children baptised and married in the church and was now at her husband’s funeral in that church. Her face had conveyed to the priest a message of understanding and valuing the enduring power of divinity in God’s house, the priest said.

By contrast, what message can one take from my female driver’s instant nuclear detonation at casual rule-breaking? The fact of AWFLs –affluent white female liberals – is an issue for another day but there is certainly an outbreak of self-righteous extremism among older women, who lean disproportionately left and intolerant in their espousal of causes. As I pondered this among the ancient and often archaic language of the High Church rituals, with incense, washed over with a capella and choir singing of a glorious standard, and prompted to think of mysteries eternal and one’s minor place in the scheme of things, I thought of the humility that religion brings. One is forced to give voice to one’s own failures, to strive for better things, to think of thoughts that our minds may ordinarily take us away from, such as the superior example that others set, our own petty shortcomings; ‘wash me thoroughly from my wickedness; cleanse me from my sin’. Going to an uplifting church service is like having a soul wash, a refresh of your outlook.

A philosophy that is irreligious, that is entirely individual, offers no personal corrective to one’s outlook and failings. You can be as mean or as nasty as you like, if you think it merited, and especially if you think you have right on your side. My female driver’s attitude was the same as that of those Victorian police who delighted in violently manhandling Covid protesters. It is as C.S. Lewis said: ‘Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies.’

Alas, anger and rage seem to be a US fashion du jour, with anti-Trump protesters days ago in Minnesota acting out in scream rooms, throwing rotten fruit at pictures of the President and Vice President, or performatively smashing up watermelons and TV sets with baseball bats. Reports noted many ‘senior citizens’ attending.

In Melbourne later this same day, thousands were gathering for a Free Palestine rally, no doubt many of them equal in sanctimony and anger to my female driver. Perhaps that’s where she was heading, and just warming up her rage on me.

We can never know the road that others walk, what makes them the way they are, and perhaps she’d had a helluva day by 10 a.m. We must at least allow the possibility of kindness, of not rushing to judgment, of giving others the courtesy and respect that we want for ourselves. But humility and charity are rarely displayed by protesters, who self-righteously – and frequently ignorantly – think they know how people halfway round the world should live. Perhaps they could improve their lives by turning their gaze inwards, and seeing what good a soul wash might do.