FROM THE PRINT MAGAZINE:
This review of Why We Drive: Toward a Philosophy of the Open Road by Matthew Crawford was originally published in New Polity, Issue 4.3 (Fall 2023). Subscribe for all our best essays.
I live next door to someone Matthew Crawford would like. Crawford is a philosopher-mechanic. My neighbor is a charismatic-mechanic. This means not that he’s a particularly engaging dinner guest but that he hears the Holy Spirit speak to him in a frank and direct manner. He’s technically an architect, but I have no idea how he makes a living doing it. He forgets to charge his clients, and whenever one of the cars belonging to his fourteen children (all fostered but two) makes any strange sound, he ditches “drawing” and spends the day in a harmonious flow state. Our shared garage becomes an explosion of parts and tools which only he can locate, with Christian rock on the radio and an almost uninterrupted stream of sarcasm directed to the vehicle, the parts manufacturers, or the sheepish child—or neighbor—on the receiving end of his impossibly generous help. He is the most useful person I know.
He has made a tao out of the wreck. It is his way, and it is a way of love. I see him hauling in broken car after broken car (“don’t call a tow, I’ll be down there with the Chevy and a strap. It’ll be fun!”) and his children, thirty-something now, handing him the 13/16 wrench while he gives them the same charming mix of car advice and Christian fatalism that he gives me: “You forgot to reattach the vacuum hoses; if God wants to give you something, he’ll give it to you, and there’s nothing you can do about it.”
His work on cars isn’t a hobby. The garage is not an escape from but a condensation of reality, one that lifts my neighbor up from the abstractions of building code and into the physicality of interlocking parts gone all “ass-backwards,” the righting of which realizes his inner excellence, his skill, his charity.
In Why We Drive, Matthew Crawford calls the car a tool that, when taken in hand, “amplifies our embodied capacities”[1]—in this case, our capacity for movement. It is a tool through which we risk ourselves, with others, in the shared effort of overcoming the challenge of traversable space. Driving, at its best, is a training ground in virtue: a good driver is “a confident human individual” with a “spirited readiness to take charge.”[2]
Driving, says Crawford, is an invitation to an increasingly bored world to participate in play, contest, and game—to go out and risk something and so go out and feel something: real rage; real fear; real, exhilarating joy. “One puts oneself up against others in a publicly visible fight for distinction,” Crawford says, referring to “play” in general, but obviously thinking of the “open road” in particular, “while submitting to the common rules of some established game.”[3] Crawford’s conception of driving welcomes the risk of death that accompanies it as part of the fun, part of the point, part of “why we drive.”
I’d like to send a copy of his book to Safety, Inc.— that conglomerate that pretends to care about “saving lives” while obviously caring about this only insofar as it leads to a new commodity that keeps the car, and its world, intact and basically deadly. Against all safety-ism, Crawford calls driving, whereby we take our life into our hands and go, a common experience of “archaic warfare [and] the contempt of death,”[4] and it comes with all the virtue-building qualities that we know warfare to afford. In this way, driving is the moral equivalent (Crawford calls it the “motor equivalent”) of war.
The trouble with driving, according to Crawford, is that there isn’t enough of it. Sure, we all have to either operate motor vehicles or face social isolation and difficulty. We all point the thing down the road and push the gas. But there are drivers and there are drivers, man, and the trend within our society of motors is to efface this latter, italicized category. We have automated and alienated the experience of driving so much that it now resembles playing a bad video game. Cars have gotten bigger and bigger, and their “more enclosing crash structures reduce one’s peripheral awareness of nearby vehicles.”[5]
Crawford admits that certain reasonable safety features have been added to vehicles, but most of our recent “improvements” also remove the driver from the direct experience of taking control of a thousand-pound conglomeration of metal parts and sending it down a mountain at sixty miles per hour. One does not drive so much as activate a computer interface, which includes “lane-keeping and automated braking system[s,] ... speed limiters and data recorders,”[6] as well as rearview cameras, GPS systems, cruise control, and endless things that go “beep” when something has gone wrong—including any neglect of your seatbelt.
In short, contemporary driving is a sad way to carve oneself into any worthy character beyond modernity’s meta-character: a guy who pushes buttons, watches screens, and submits to mechanized directions. New cars make driving boring, thus stymieing it as a source of human growth, and making the open road a mere thing to be gotten through while paying as little atten- tion as possible.
Crawford worries that such cars are also counterproductive, that “safe vehicles” lose their safety by decreasing human skill and attention. The data is not completely in, but we all know that cruise control makes you sleepy and inattentive, GPS makes you stupid and slavish, cameras train you not to look around, and that driving a large, aggressive piece of technology made “safe” (for you, anyways) by unseen mechanisms does not make for drivers who follow the commandment of Scripture: “stay sober and alert” (1 Pet 5:8).
As cars become more and more “smart,” drivers become more and more stupid, perversely speeding up the need for more automation, which has a “totalizing logic to it.” Once we reach the self-driving car—made “inevitable” by the stupefying and deskilling automations that preceded it—the act of driving will cease to exist, and so will whatever virtues the act built up. In this, the car travels the well-worn road of all automation, that does not begin with the invention of some flashy new automaton, but with a “division of labor” that degrades human work into discrete, stupid, and repetitive actions that can only then be performed by machines. Automatic grocery check-outs did not replace the greengrocer; they replaced the drudgery of the “checkout girl,” produced by dividing the labor of the greengrocer into several hundred discrete, soul-sucking “jobs.” As the industrialist Andrew Ure proudly confessed, the primary invention of the industrial process did not lie in any “self-acting mechanism” but
in the distribution of the different members of the apparatus into one co-operative body, in impelling each organ with its appropriate delicacy and speed, and above all, in training human beings to renounce their desultory habits of work, and to identify themselves with the unvarying regularity of the complex automaton.[7]
It is not true that machines replace labor unless labor has already been lost to a machine-like drudgery. Cars become automatons to the degree that we drive like automatons. The result: the destruction of the open road as a school of social trust—trust in the “individual competence” attained by risking life and limb together in a common world.
Crawford has me convinced. We are ruled by a boring techie class snapping the reins of Progress, trained by the perversities of West Coast “startup culture” to see every human competence, every joyful exertion of labor, and every skill that operates without the Internet as an under-utilized field of automation and monetization. These dolts are building a world in which “doing” is minimized in order to maximize the amount of time spent watching ads; and when confronted on their determined course of ruining everything fun about living they take on the gravitas of the medical man: What, are you against safety? Do you want people to die?
But as I read Why We Drive, I was struck by the book, not so much as an ode to awesome driving— which it is—but as a long observation of two modes of being in the world, two political stances that I have increasingly come to identify as Liberalism and Catholicism. I don’t know if Crawford is Catholic, but if ever a driver was barreling, brakes squealing, engine overheating, along the road to Rome, it’s our man.
His book gives many answers to its titular question: we drive for freedom, for animal joy, for democracy, for the perfection of our powers, for love. But to wrap up the whole shebang, Crawford calls on the current pope and a dead priest for a final description of “the two cities” set before the driver:
Pope Francis called the prudent drivers of Rome, who “express concretely their love for the city” by moving through it with tact and care, “artisans of the common good.” The common good may be understood in this way, as something enacted by particular people who are fully awake. Alternatively, it may be understood as something to be achieved by engineering herd behavior without our awareness, in such a way that prudence and other traits of character are rendered moot. Our role [in this latter instance] will be to step out of the way gracefully, and in this way help “optimize the output of large tools for lifeless people,” as Ivan Illich wrote.[8]
There are two different goals one may take as the purpose of life, two fundamental attitudes which dictate what “regime of mobility” we will appreciate—call these goals “perfection” and “preservation,” if you like.
If we are creatures panting after perfection, we will believe that we have a certain nature as men and women, and that we can be drawn into the heart of life by striving to fulfill “standards that aren’t simply the emanations of [our] own will.”[9] Driving, in this view, is worthwhile insofar as it helps us meet the challenge offered by life and life’s Author: become who you are. The way of perfection subordinates the values of safety and even life itself to the goal of excellence: not “safety first” but “virtue first.” To reprimand the one who seeks excellence with warnings about “safety” is a waste of breath: the preservation of life is not his primary goal. This is not to say that the excellent driver is not safe, but that he attains safety as a fruit of his excellence rather than by limiting his aspirations for excellence out of fear for his safety. Crawford waxes poetic about this through- out the book, and anyone who watches a master at his craft knows he is quite correct. To gasp as the car just makes it around the corner, to wince as a chef deftly disintegrates a carrot with a deadly blade, to hold your breath as a carpenter’s fingers work deftly half-an-inch in front of a spinning table saw—in one sense, we gasp at risk, but in another, we gasp at the incredible safety achieved by incredible skill.
Alternatively, we may take preservation as our goal in life. Here, safety is the ideal, rather than the surprising fruit of the pursuit of an excellence that transcends it. Such a pursuit of safety for its own sake is rebuked by Crawford as by Jesus: “Whoever wants to save his life will lose it.” In life as in driving, the fearful desire to save our own lives produces hedging, risk-minimizing, dependent behaviors that, taken in their sum, do not produce people capable of mastering the world and its challenges. In fear, we presume ourselves and our brothers and sisters to be incapable and vicious, and so we inordinately trust ourselves to promises of safety that seem to come from inhuman sources (money and what robotics it can buy). Thus given over to machines, we are kept safe from without, not from within. When such systems fail, the results can be catastrophically absurd: Crawford recalls that “following the directions given by a flight-management system, the crew of a Boeing 757 flew [their] plane into a mountain in Columbia in 1995.”[10]
Crawford loves the “flowing” intersections of Rome (which he calls the Old World) as he does the helter-skelter beauty of the roads of Adis Ababa (the Third World) over against the legalistic uniformity of the United States, the New World. In the New World, we have done for our intersections what we have done for most of our economic and political institutions: we have presumed that the people who use them are vicious.
Assuming that people are greedy little bees, we have given them capitalism, a system that is supposed to transform their self-interest into social gains. Assuming that people are all would-be tyrants, we have maintained a liberal political system, which assures us that the individual who inevitably corrupts due to the splendor of power and office will be duly “checked and balanced.” And assuming stupidity and incompetence in the people using our road system, we have minimized the opportunity for any one driver to use his head and make his own decisions as to where and when and how to go.
Sure, the “don’t trust people to be virtuous” mentality leads to absurdities: men, in the prime of their life, quietly idling at a red light with no other cars in sight; cities cleaning up on speed-traps that nab people for driving (safely) at 45 mph in a (posted) “35”; red-light cameras that increase the number of accidents, as people slam on their brakes at the sight of yellow lights to avoid the fury of the fine rather than that of the fender behind them. These little acts of submission to a mindless machine are supposed to get us the net-positive effect of safety. But, just as our reliance on safety mechanisms makes us unsafe “from within,” so our reliance on a strict legal regime to enforce good driving makes us only kind of good drivers.
In the Old World Roman intersection, that “spectacle of improvisation and flow,” the underlying presumption is that people are capable of governing themselves, of exercising prudence out of “love for the city,” and that order comes from below, according to custom. Drivers learn to make eye contact, to signal their intentions, to alternately give way or take over according to a felt communication with everyone else on the road. Whether or not one is breaking a posi- tive law and whether or not the police are watching is rather beside the point when safety is the fruit of your personal excellence behind the wheel and everyone’s obedience to the customs held in common.
In America, this is not the case. Driving is not so much a mental effort of figuring out what to do for the other driver as of what to do for the cops. Good behavior on the road is enforced by fear of an extrinsic law—not by what Pope Francis called “love for the city” or even a healthy fear for one’s life and limb. Thus, when the police ease up on giving traffic citations—as they have since the police shortages following the George Floyd riots—America experiences a corresponding spike in “traffic deaths,” which are “18% higher now than in 2019,”[11] a phenomenon not mirrored in other Western countries. Reliance on mechanism and coercion creates not virtue but submission, and submission is a half-assed habit that turns into “getting away with it” whenever the threat of coercion that first inspired our submission appears lax.
But there is a reason why the pope guides the ideal here; a reason why Rome, and not DC, is a preserved form of the way of perfection. It is because the world Crawford wants is essentially Catholic, shaped not by the presumption of human depravity and vice—which is the Protestant form—but by the revelation that, through grace, all of humanity really is capable of virtue, including virtuous driving. This is the unshakeable optimism guarded by the Catholic Church: Christ frees us from the law and its bonds, because, in becoming one with Christ in His Church, man is restored in his capacity as a lawmaker. Freed from sin, he can freely and creatively choose the good. As a member of the Church, which is a real, physical Body, he does not simply wait for a spiritual, heavenly future in which he will be made virtuous, but rather, he receives the grace—in the real, physical sacraments of the Church—that makes it possible for him to be an excellent person, and so an excellent driver, now.
This is why such a thinker as Thomas Aquinas can say that “custom has the force of a law, abolishes law, and is the interpreter of law,”[12] not because he is some sort of anarchist, but because man’s goodness and adoption by Christ mean that it is possible for him to be ruled by his own pursuit of virtue and his love for others. This is why the same thinker could argue that human law is fundamentally dispensable in accordance with person and circumstance—the law never needs to be treated as a machine. People can be trusted to take the particular circumstance into account. They can be trusted to use their heads. If the roads born out of the Old World still drive in this manner, it is because they are driven over by carriers of this tradition, by people who have inherited these most basic truths, however quickly they are working to forget them: that virtue is possible, and that we were each made for love.
It is the Catholic faith that actually allows for social self-governance, precisely because it affirms us as a people most fundamentally made for each other, for unity in “one Lord, one Faith, one Baptism.” If we can be trusted with anything, it is to govern ourselves according to this most fundamental ground of our nature. It is another tradition, best expressed in Hobbes’ Leviathan, but present wherever the Church is lost, that imagines man as an individual who most fundamentally seeks his own preservation and self-interest. Here, man must be managed through fear into something like “social behavior,” which is, after all, fundamentally unnatural to him. The latter attitude gives us law and mechanism. The former gives us people who can be trusted to drive.
Notes
Matthew Crawford, Why We Drive: Toward a Philosophy of the Open Road (New York, NY: HarperCollins, 2020), 11.
Ibid., 125.
Ibid., 172.
Ibid., 178.
Ibid., 94.
Ibid., 95.
Andrew Ure, The Philosophy of Manufactures: Or, an Exposition of the Scientific, Moral, and Commercial Economy of the Factory System of Great Britain (London: Charles Knight, 1835), 15.
Crawford, Why We Drive, 313–14.
Ibid., 171.
Ibid., 100.
Martin Kaste, “America’s roads are more dangerous, as police pull over fewer drivers,” NPR, April 6, 2023, www.npr. org/2023/04/06/1167980495/americas-roads-are-more- dangerous-as-police-pull-over-fewer-drivers.
Aquinas, Summa theologiae I-II, Q 97, A 3.