I’ve never been much of an “Amen!” shouter, but Matthew Crawford’s Why We Drive: Toward a Philosophy of the Open Road, very nearly turned me into one. I don’t remember the last time I was more onboard with the ethos of a book.
I think the book is pretty engaging for almost anyone paying attention these days, but I found it deeply relatable on nearly every single page. (With one glaring exception, which I’ll get to.) At one point, Crawford describes an online video of a motorcycle stunt rider getting kicked out of a parking lot by a guy with a clipboard. And the funny thing is, though it’s been over 15 years since I caused any real trouble with a motorcycle, I have been in that exact situation, many times, in many parking lots.
Here are a couple of pictures from that bygone era.
I think I can say that I remember those days fondly, but I don’t miss them. It was an extraordinary thing having an obsession that occupied nearly every day for about four years — even a less-than-supremely-intelligent one like this that nearly got me killed on several occasions. (An 80-mph faceplant on Rt. 84 Texas asphalt is about as enjoyable as it sounds. Thank God for helmets and five-hundred-dollar leather jackets.) I loved bikes, and I learned a lot in that time, but looking back all I can see is something that can only really be enjoyed with a certain (high) amount of youthful obliviousness to any grander picture.
Another thing that drew me to the book is the experience of sitting at a red light when there is no one else around and waiting for the color of green permission. This has often struck me as one of those bullet points on a list titled “This Is Why Aliens Don’t Talk to Us.” I can remember driving home from late shifts at the hospital and coming up to a complete stop at a new light on an empty Rt. 27 at one o’clock in the morning. Then waiting . . . and waiting. Growing rage in the glowing red glare, thinking, “There is absolutely no good reason why I shouldn’t keep driving!” Even if there was a police officer watching me sit there (obediently) at that red light, with no other moving cars or pedestrians within a half-mile radius, I can imagine him tapping his partner on the shoulder and saying, “Look at this idiot just sitting there.”
That was years ago, but I still haven’t quite gotten over it. And it’s not uncommon now for me to make up my own damn mind at many of these traffic lights. I will always stop, and I will never proceed straight through a lighted intersection even after a stop. (Unless, of course, it’s one o’clock in the morning.) I get and appreciate the safety and efficiency they provide. (Though Crawford is not short on examples of the money they provide as well.) But one thing I will almost never do, at any hour of the day, is sit at red left arrow that is telling me to stay stopped when it should be telling me to yield to oncoming traffic as I turn. I am not a robot, and I was not made and did not evolve to act like one.
Meghan actually gives me a fair amount of shit for this. (Though, she does this with a twinkle in her eye that tells me that it’s actually okay and she understands and I’m right and I don’t have to apologize to the traffic light.) We affectionately call this sort of thing my “caveman,” referring to an inner dialogue of sorts, wherein I imagine what some ancient Homo sapiens sapiens might think of some modern behavior or habit. [Insert classic commercial link] This does not always result in the sort of “rebellious” thing that you’ll find in Crawford’s book. My “caveman” is, for instance, perfectly onboard with the anti-straw movement. It’s good that it happens to be environmentally friendly and it’s irrelevant whether or not it makes a measurable difference. The caveman simply looks at me, sitting at a table at some restaurant and being delivered a nice sturdy cup (that could last my entire life), filled with fresh water (that is almost certainly perfectly healthy and refreshing), nicely cooled with ice (if you’re into that), and looking up at the deliverer of this wonderful cup of water and asking with pure clueless and spoiled modernism, “Could I please have a straw?” It’s at this point that the caveman either (justly) kills me for being a danger to the community, slaps the drink out of my underserving hands, or rolls his eyes and walks away, never to speak to me again. He also tells me that I’m ridiculously pampered for needing to be given disposable plastic cups and spoons everywhere I go. But you get the idea.
(Just to be clear, I am aware that the use of drinking straws has very ancient routes. My “caveman” is not anti-straw per se. He’s just anti-“where’s my straw?” I trust you can see the difference.)
None of this is to say that I look down on anyone who uses a straw at a restaurant. Or that if a straw is placed in front of me, I won’t pick it up and use it myself. And, frankly, it’s not to say that you will never find me sitting dumbly patiently in a left-turn lane at a red arrow, not willing to risk the ticket or just too lazy to trust my own senses and make the a priori greenless turn. I’m just saying that when I do any of these things — auto-insist on straws, assume the supply of throw-away cups, relinquish active thought to overhanging light bulbs — I have an inner caveman who makes me question the act. And that that same inner, anti-disposable-cups-and-straws-for-life caveman and I really liked Crawford’s book.
The major theme of Why We Drive is the way in which forms of automation (yes, including the automation of traffic lights, though these are very low on the automation spectrum) not only take over for human actions and capacities, but abolish all the human potentiality of which it necessarily knows nothing.
We don’t give much thought to the moments of release that open up when there is some slack in the plan, but I think we would miss them if our movements were more thoroughly coordinated. Sometimes, what you are doing when you drive your car isn’t very well captured by the word “transportation,” which suggests a simple point-to-point goal to be achieved with maximum efficiency. Such simplifications have always been the price paid for bringing new domains under technocratic control.
In the same way that my vocabulary — and my whole experience of language — necessarily shrinks when I Google the definition of a word instead of searching the pages of a dictionary or asking another human, so also my experience of movement in the world — be it walking or biking or driving — is reduced, in capacity and actuality, when it is automated. (And this movement is reduced in advance when the idea of it is reduced to a word like “transportation.”) Google could map the entire universe and put it at my fingertips; it would still be a shrinking of my human experience of it. (“For profit. For profit. For profit. For profit.”) Rather than removing us from our collective tasks, if technology is to be rightly understood and humanly beneficial, it should be something that, as Crawford puts it, “amplifies our embodied capacities.”
That last line is very reminiscent of Sarah Hendren’s book What Can a Body Do? How We Meet the Built World. (Both these books were published around the same time in 2020.) Hendren does not necessarily share Crawford’s interest in the ways a custom-remodeled VW can alter your driving experience. But she is very much interested in the ways we use (and view!) technology as a means of amplifying our embodied capacities.
In fact, Hendren goes further, saying “The body-plus may actually be the human’s truest state.” Every tool we use becomes an extension of our embodied capacities, and we are almost never not using some tool or other, be it a pencil or a car or a computer.
But, the example of a computer as an extension of our embodied capacities can be problematic. Crawford at one point laments that “technology” has become something of a dirty word, almost always now meaning “tech devices.”
But really, we’re not referring to anything material. Rather, what makes a device “tech” is that it serves as a portal to bureaucracy. You cannot use them without involving yourself with large organizations, each with a quasi monopoly in its domain.
Contrast that to the traditional automobile:
The automobile is a thing, not a device in the sense we are exploring here. It simply is what it is, what it appears to be: an inanimate machine that obeys the laws of physics. You can use it without involving yourself with an office building full of people at some undisclosed location.
We may tend to think of our iPhones as glorified, modern versions of Bell’s Box Telephone or even AOL Instant Messenger. But the thing that makes them “tech” or “devices” is that they are not primarily these things. It might be better to call them glorified versions of slot machines — data-collecting slot machines designed to make you think they’re something else, while they harness, manipulate, and sell every second of attention they can get without any restraint whatsoever. That’s not technology; that’s “technopoly.”
But I’m headed down a rabbit hole, one filled with soap boxes. So let me turn back around.
“Technology” needs a significantly renewed, and broadly understood, definition. And Hendren has her own call for that redefinition. She points out that when we look at individual lives, their stories
beg for us to return our attention to the body and the person as the site of infinite adaptation, but they also beg for an expanded definition of technology — not a simple contest of “better” and “best,” but a broader canopy for how bodies meet the world of tools and environments for getting life done.
Not better and better (nor faster and faster), but personal. Hendren goes on to describe what might sound like a dumbing down of technology. Rather than looking at technology as invention and patented innovation, we can can look at the “long arc” of significance and utility in every-day technologies that get overlooked, broadening and enriching the world of simple technologies all around us — and the embodied lives of those who use them.
I went to a medical conference several years ago specifically to hear a talk by a doctor named Dick Bransford. I don’t remember much about being there, but I remember why I went. I had met Dr. Bransford in Liberia a month before. It was my first time on the cleft lip surgery team. Late one night, chatting in the kitchen of a hospital compound near Monrovia, he told me the topic of his lecture was something like “State of the Art vs. State of the Need.” Since that time I have scribbled the phrase “state of the need” in the margins of dozens of books. And I think this is exactly what Hendren is getting at. (I think she and Dr. Bransford would have got along quite well.)
There is a line from Francis Bacon in the opening to one of Hendren’s chapters:
“Neither the naked hand nor the understanding left to itself can effect much. It is by instruments and helps that the work is done, which are as much wanted for the understanding as for the hand.”
The automation of such things as driving, searching, writing, thinking — as opposed to the embodied extension if these activities — necessarily eclipses any bodily or mental benefit otherwise gained, any experience otherwise suffered. You might say that to meet the world through automation is one way to meet the built world. You might even argue that it’s a bad way to meet it. But you might also say (and I certainly think this is correct) that to meet the built world through automation is to not meet the built world, or any world, at all.
As Crawford puts it:
One wonders about the societal effect of delegation at scale, or rather mass absenteeism, through widespread automation and its attendant outsourcing of human agency. What will it mean to stand at one remove from one’s own doings, not episodically, but as a basic feature of living in a world that has been altered in this way? Can one even speak of “doing”?
It is one of my daily tasks to find ways of avoiding the ever-increasing ubiquity of that “basic feature” of modern living. Needless to say, my caveman and I are talking a lot these days.
As for that exception to Crawford’s otherwise inspiring book . . .
Hendren’s book is wonderful, front to back. But Crawford’s has one section (a half-chapter or so) that I think could be thrown out. In fact, it’s a chapter I think I hated, and it’s a good thing it appears half-way through the book. Toward the end of the chapter titled “The Motor Equivalent of War,” Crawford finally gets to the point of that title. It was quite the change to sit down the with the book one early morning and to realize that all those “amens” had vanished. At best, this chapter is unnecessary and a little naïve. At worst, it was written by a man with no experience of war except what he has read and imagined and played with in his mind — something not far from the opinion of a child in love with cars and G.I. Joes, who has never been to war and certainly never held the dying. (Obviously, I do not know this about Crawford, nor am I the least bit inclined to describe his character in this way. Nevertheless, this is the way that some of this chapter sounded to me.)
I could absolutely grant that there is an experience — often idealized but sometimes even realized — where a fighter sees in his “enemy” something of a worthy opponent. And that this “spirit of hostility and friendship combined,” as Crawford, quoting Johan Huizinga, puts it, amounts to something that is (humanly speaking) quite remarkable. It’s difficult not to think of Adam Makos’s A Higher Call, for instance. But stories like that are remarkable in part because they are so unlike what war always is and always has been: the worst that humanity is capable of. That honor and respect and friendship can be found in war, and even between enemies, says absolutely nothing about war as a feature of natural life but is a testament to the potential depths of humanity’s soul any place it happens to find itself.
So while I highly recommend Why We Drive, I also hope that that chapter gets ignored by its readers and thrown out or rewritten in any future editions.