Why We Drive: Get off your Ass and Reclaim your Humanity
Matthew Crawford Book Review
Michael Crawford has written a nice little book, that, as you read it seems like more why we are prevented from driving than why we drive. But in the course of the book, we realize that the reason we drive is under attack from forces in our own government and a cacophony of “experts.”
The central reason we drive? Human agency. It is sovereignty over our own person that the government wants to take away from us.
The one who Protects you wants to be your master
Crawford begins by speaking of the automation of our vehicles. This is a grave development in our daily habits, and undermines our love of doing, not to mention our ability to be aware of our surroundings. The technological takeover of our cars (of everything?) makes us incompetent. Why? Because it makes us lazy—the computer will take care of us!
The development of driverless cars, for example, aims to make us safe from ourselves. It makes us passive, as we allow something other than ourselves control our reasonable capabilities. The more something does the thinking for us, the more we do not think—no exercise of the mind means a lazy mind.
Since the 1990s we have been sold the idea that we need to be made safer. The implied assertion in all this is that humans being are too stupid to do that themselves. The government is saying we need to save you from being the cause of your own death. As a result of these new “safe” cars, driving has gotten boring, thus making us pay more attention to other things rather than where we are in the here and now. We climb into our vehicles and we feel insulated from the world. The car decides more things for us, that we do not need to make decisions. Further, the car has been so “perfected” that we barely feel the road any more. Cars nearly drive themselves now—and the grand goal is for them to actually do all the driving for us. This makes driving a mundane activity, and disconnects our interaction with the world around us.
This “progress” has been ongoing since the elimination of the manual clutch of course. It has made driving a lazy activity. Add to that cruise control, gps navigation, and we have a perfect situational convergence between the motor age and the shutting down of thinking. What’s left to do but text and drive? The aim to be safe has created distracted driving. What’s the solution?—more safety!
the subtext to this little book informs us that the regime of safety has made us in fact more slavish to our masters who claim all they want to do is keep us safe. But they are the ones who are causing the problem by making driving a less than human experience.
The change in how we drive leads to human degradation.
Crawford notes this succinctly:
As with any such practice, a full consideration of it can focus light of a particular hue on what it means to be human. It can also shed light on the challenge of remaining human against technologies that tend to enervate, and claim cultural authority in doing so.
Excerpt From: Matthew B. Crawford. “Why We Drive.”
This applies to the uninspiring design of modern cars. There is something about rolling down the window and sticking your arm out to physically feel the breeze rush past your skin. We are reminded of nature and our place in it doing such things. This simple act is an expression of freedom—I am in control; I am in charge. I have some control of my own destiny. I am owning my space.
The author asserts in no uncertain way that freedom of movement is in fact a “fundamental freedom.” By removing this freedom means to whittle away at human agency. It attacks our sovereignty over our own bodies. And, this is all enacted to make us safer in some way; the deeper meaning is that our overlords think we human beings can be reformed for the better through technological means. Yet, notice, the “experts” have no definition of what it means to be human.
All of this is done in the interest of “progress” of course. The slow and deliberate progress from horse, to auto, to technological control means all this is meant to be, and cannot be resisted. Humans are evolving. but evolving into what?
You will notice that all this “progress” is not coming from the inidivual or human agency. It is coming from our “elites” who are imposing all these changes. People being busy making ends meet have not thought a lot about just what is happening under their noses. They are, after all, distracted by the new gadgets that promise an easier life, but in reality only complicate it. New tech is not making us happier.
The devolution of human agency especially applies to the enthusiast who restorers or maintains, etc., their car or motorcycle. The preservationist is one who does more than preserve the material thing, but secures our memory. He also preserves his own humanity. He makes himself useful, and in the process learns what it means to be human. This persinal knowledge encourages human being to be more self sufficient. We can’t have that now can we?!
The “progress” imposed by our masters erases history, our past, and makes us a trashy throw away society.
This trash society was especially noticable in the 1990s when the SCRAP program began—South Coast Recycle Auto Program. It was a unification of business, bureaucrats, and government to remove old cars off the road for new ones. The “promise” was the air would finally be clean because old cars were gross polluters. That was a lie. Notice the air is not cleaner because of it, as if we needed it in the first place. There is always another reason to improve mankind by removing the old and replacing it by the new.
This new reality of scrapping has been going on for a long time. In one of the most stupid things Reagan ever said (and I like Reagan) was “we may need to junk old cars.” This was 1971! Their removal did little to improve our lives.
It is obvious to note that it is not we the people who are the authors of progress, but our unelected “betters.” But are they our betters?
The development of the new fangled gas cans are a case in point: they are unusable. They fail constantly, and are difficult to use, much less fill your tank. They spill gas more than the old cans. Now compare this to the new tech saddled on our vehicles. In the name of safety and progress, we have added more failure points. Not only are our cars more expensive to buy, but they are nearly impossible to maintain, for the same reason—expense. Further, notice how modern truck are massive, but they do not add any modicum of safety. Older trucks are far more well made because they are far better structured [this is my point not Crawford’s].
The author is not a luddite. He wonders if we are too attached to the past for irrational reasons. Things are worse now, but maybe it is us who just cannot accept change. This is plausible, but also not the case in this circumstance. There is another reason we resist—modern cars suck. They are sapped of beauty, are unreliable, and, in the case of EVs, highly dangerous. The human desire to be around and admire beauty in any form, is our participation in something divine—our govt and creators of cars have destroyed that small slice of human life. The human desire to feel the road reminds us our are mortality, and that, this life is real, not some holograph found in the computer.
There is another example of the effort to make us less than human: speed limits. Crawford makes a poignant note that people are in fact learners. By doing, we learn and gain more knowledge, and importantly, skill. Through practice we become better at something. This is in fact a distinct human reality.
On Twat recently, some ruling class shill from Harvard opined that he supported a decrease in the speed limit to make us…you guessed it…safer! He implored the NHTSA to impose this new regulation from his ivory tower of inhumanity.
Crawford notes in this book that crashes are not generalizable based on speed. His example? Germany. The Germans drive very fast, and yet, have fewer wrecks than all of Europe combined. Why? Because they have generational learning of driving at high speeds. It does not take a genius to conclude that removing human agency from driving increasingly automated cars leads to unskilled drivers who are altogether distracted in the first place by the same people who went to Harvard and now work in the bureaucracy of safety.
Crawford spends some time also speaking to the fact that our cars are not really cares, but data collection centers as well—recording and reporting out movements, tastes, and interests. This is somewhat a separate issue, and it is not clear how this hampers our driving experience, until we remember that we are treated as subjects to be manipulated, and our cars are not simply reliable cars—they are now an apparatus for spying on us.
Crawford concludes with these words:
MOVING AROUND FREELY is one of the most basic liberties we have as embodied creatures. That liberty is enhanced by machines that amplify our mobility, from skateboards and bicycles to motorcycles and automobiles—but only because they are not subject to remote control. Further, to be out roaming, giving nobody an account of your movements or whereabouts, is one of those subtle respites from the grid of accountability that tightens in the course of adult life.
Perhaps a more regularized, remotely administered regime of mobility is a bargain worth striking in exchange for the promise of enhanced safety and efficiency; people can reasonably come to different conclusions about that. The question is: who gets to decide?
It comes down to the question of sovereignty.
Excerpt From: Matthew B. Crawford. “Why We Drive.”
This statement is quite insightful. We drive for the human agency and to reclaim our equality—no not that equality [of conditions], but the equality that means we are equal as any other to be our own man and pursue Happiness. Our cars are deeply personal exertions of man (not to put a Marshall McLuhan spin on it). They are an aid to a personally liberty chosen by reasonable men, not constraints to liberty that the ruling elite wants to enslave us in.
We are losing that agency, and hence, we are losing owned space. We are increasingly being owned by an oligarchical elite we did not choose and who despise us. To reclaim the joy of driving, there is a movement to reclaim the best of our past, which means reclaiming our ability to govern and be governed.