17 KiB
Why We Drive -
Pt 1: Flourishing
Matthew Crawford, author of a few great titles including Shop Class as Soulcraft, wrote a book back in 2020 that's just excellent, and right for the time we are in: Why We Drive. I could probably read through this a number of different ways but I am fascinated by a certain train (or perhaps road) of thought - let's get going.
(All quotations are from Why We Drive)
We are in a unique spot with automobiles, entering the very real possibility of self-driving cars on the road in a serious way. Crawford is pausing and asking: why do this? He isn't asking so much why we move from place to place, but rather, why do we do the driving rather than outsource it? Is it just because we haven't gotten there yet, or perhaps, there are real goods that the car as we know it (or knew it) provide us.
Crawford strikes right at the heart. This isn't a book about the numbers or feasibility of automation. He is asking if automation is a noble end. Crawford seems to think that cars help our spirits live - not just our bodies.
But remember, all rats die. Not every rat lives.
The goal we are after is not continued existence - but flourishing.
Flourishing - that of rats and humans alike - seems to require an environment with "open problem spaces" that elicit the kinds of bodily and mental engagement bequeathed us by evolution and cultural development.
The road as we know it - as opposed to rails or self-driving cars - can be such an open problem space:
When the traffic lights go out during a storm, it sometimes feels like waking up from a long slumber. We realize that we can work things out for ourselves, with a little faith in one another. Recall that 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 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.
Crawford again echoes here that the development of virtue is not something we can enact or force with technology. It is only something we can provide the soil for which it to take root and grow in.
In the Aristotelian perspective as elaborated by William Hasselberger, virtue doesn't consist of a collection of true propositions that can be combined with circumstantial detail and entered into a moral calculus, to be solved by the application of universal principles, yielding an output consisting of the right action. Virtue is more like a skill, acquired through long practice in the art of living.
Life - true life of virtue - is risky.
The openness of the problem space is opened really when we remove the traffic lights and stop signs, or when we operate equipment more at the limits. Crawford at points even proposes interesting alternative policies: could we have graduated drivers licenses, where how fast you are allowed to go is determined by how proficient you are at driving? The rules of the road have already sacrificed some of the open problem space for flourishing at the technocrats' altar of security.
Crawford recounts many stories of men's (and women's) interactions with machines - mostly inspiring. But he closes with a beautiful one:
It was a slalom through the redwoods, dappled sunlight playing on perfect black tarmac as I came hard out of a corner, front wheel lifting off the ground. On this stretch of road, there are several serpentine sections where you can see, in a single take, a series of three corners ahead in their entirety, with nowhere for surprises to hide. These chicanes have a bodily rhythm to them that is sublime, when taken at speed. I have never been a good athlete, and can only admire those who move with natural grace. But on a sport bike on a canyon road, for a brief spell I feel raised up from my God-given mediocrity. By a machine! What a miracle.
I think that Crawford sells this short at the end - because the mastery on display is not like that of an athelete: it is that of an athlete. And I think it is even unfair to say that he is lifted by a machine - rather, he elevates the machine into such a beautiful display. This is obvious - the bike does nothing of its own volition. It needs a driver. This creates a relationship between him and the bike that is sublime.
Rollercoasters are neat, but they have nothing on road vehicles. A passenger and driver may experience the same G-forces, but the relationship they have to them is wholly different.
To drive is to exercise one's skill at being free.
Pt 2: Feel and Direct Connection
(Continuation of a review of Matthew Crawford's Why We Drive. Read Part 1 here.)
Cars have gotten a lot more high-tech in the past century. Is that all good? Does that help us to be free? Crawford sees some problems:
Such minders [as antilock brakes and electronic stability control] can save you in a panic situation, but they also have a slight deskilling effect. They prevent a driver from learning the behavior of his car at the limits of traction, and how the car's chassis dynamics can be made to work for him or against him in the timing and modulation of steering and brake inputs.
When we don't exercise our muscles, they atrophy. If we let ABS and ESC take care of knowing our car's limits - we cease to upkeep our understanding of the limits. Sure, the engineer might know intellectually the calculations - but he has no feel. And the expert driver who gets into a car with ABS and ESC - feels that there is something wrong. Crawford talks about his experience driving an Audi RS3:
It took my shift commands as a general statement of mood, a request to be given due consideration when the committee next convenes. The car never spoke rudely to me of being wrong, as when I nearly rolled my 1963 Beetle. It was more like "Your opinion is important to us".
The virtue of feel - perhaps there is a better more technically precise word - is one that modern technology seeks to wipe out. At times this is inadvertent. At times it is misunderstood. If you have driven a car - especially a racecar - without power steering, you'll understand. There is no simulated feedback that could replace what you feel through the steering wheel. Skilled users of tools are doing something fundamentally different than someone pushing a button on a machine.
An expert hockey player's attention isn't directed to his stick, it is directed *through* his stick to the puck, just as a piano player's attention is directed not to his fingers, nor even to the intrument's keys, but to the notes he is playing. A real "driver's car" is one that accomplishes a similar disappearing act, becoming a transparent two-way conduit of information and intention. But there is a tension between this ideal and the trend to introduce ever more layers of electronic mediation between driver and road.
This distinction is important - the good tool (if we are interested in developing the virtue of feel) is not necessarially more effecacious: it is just more transparent! It provides more direct access to feedback and more opportunities for input. The good tool has fewer layers - not more!
When we add more layers, we have to start adding feedback - artificial feedback.
Often what [ABS, throttle/brake by wire, etc.] amounts to is a genuine poverty of information reaching the driver, and filter between intention and execution. What's more, an overzealous damping out of mechanical "transients" has made it necessary for the car to keep us informed by other means, rather than by the seat of the pants.
When there is a filter between intention and execution, the driver may not be aware of their harsh or extreme inputs. They might shake a steering wheel or mash the throttle in such a way that on a more barebones car would cause both feedback (harsh accelerations) but potentially even damage. The driver is unaware of this, though, and is deprived of the chance to refine their feel.
The growing size of automobiles also is a form of this filter, removing us from the effects of poor decision-making.
From my own unscientific observation, I have been struck by the inadequate following distances often maintained by a driver in a typical six-thousand-pound SUV. As though the possibility of bodily harm were a pure abstraction.
All of these innovations are to make cars safer, but aren't we fighting 'distracted driving'? If this is so, perhaps there is a different way toward safety:
Going forward, the design principle that could help us mitigate distracted driving, and recover the joy of driving, would be one that exploits the sensori-motor capacities we have developed through human evolution.
This is a great shift in direction from what the West, especially America, has been moving towards. I like to call this "couch culture": a shift away from the active and towards the consumptive.
In the affluent West, many of our energies of innovation seem to be channeled into creating experiences for the consumer that will make him feel good without making demands on him.
But this is not why we drive.
The pleasure of driving is the pleasure of doing something; of being actively and skillfully engaged with a reality that pushes back against us. Only then do we feel the progress of our own mastery.
Pt 3: Automation's War on Virtue
(Continuation of a review of Matthew Crawford's Why We Drive. Read Part 2 here.)
Modern technology is opposed to the development of virtue.
Machinery that humans operate has been moving away from manual gagues and towards automated alerts. While the manual gague, or even moreso, the seat of the pants, puts an imposition on the driver to pay attention, the automated alert does not - instead it invites us to have faith that the alarm will sound when there is a problem. But what if it doesn't? Then, the driver is thrust from their liesurely couch-sitting into a disaster where all the automation is falling apart.
Human factors research shows how making things too easy for people can backfire, because our "attentional capacity... shrinks to accommodate reductions in mental workload." This is especially worrying because it is hard to detect. The operator simply tunes out because he or she doesn't have enough to do. Further, when the driver (or pilot) is understimulated during routine operation, he is more likely to panic when overstimulated, as happens when dealing with a failure of the automation.
As much as I think we get overstimulated by media, I think Crawford is absolutely onto something here. In productive endeavors, especially those that use the hands, we are chronically UNDER-stimulated.
No wonder we want to watch TikTok while driving.
The cars aren't fun anymore - and not just because we've gotten used to them - they demand less of us. Now, the Lord asks us to stay awake and keep watch. Is there a level of automation that encourages us to not do this?
The virtue of alertness is one front, but there are others. Machine thinking despises prudence - it writes it right out.
If there is an overall lesson to be learned from the human factors literature, perhaps it is this: automation has a kind of totalizing logic to it. At each stage, remaining pockets of human judgement and discretion appear as bugs that need to be solved.
And this becomes a political question as much as a technical one.
The contest for control between humans and computers often looks like no contest at all, as a political reality.
We have conditioned ourselves to expect this!
Wherever large groups asseble there is an imperative to control every aspect of the environment, and prescribe every move - every allowed use. Usually it is some private entity that does this, not the government. Worse, it becomes an unthought posture we adopt for ourselves, having been trained to think of ourselves as consumers of manufactured experiences rather than as rational creatures capable of dealing with the world in an unfiltered way.
And of course the desire to not exercise virtue is one of laziness.
This is a laziness that the technocrats of our time are well aware of. Eric Schmidt (of Google) told the Wall Street Journal:
"One idea is that more and more searches are done on your behalf without you having to type... I actually think most people don't want Google to answer their questions. They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next."
We want rest and freedom. Of course, true freedom is not to be found through faith in machines, but in development of virtue.
Qualities once prized, such as spiritedness and a capacity for independent judgement, are beginning to appear dysfunctional. If they are to operate optimally, our machines require deference. Perhaps what is required is an adaptation of the human spirit, to make it more smoothly compatible with a world that is to be run by a bureaucracy of machines. Or maybe we need to burn that house down.
Pt 4: A Better Way
(Continuation of a review of Matthew Crawford's Why We Drive. Read Part 3 here.)
I love Crawford because he isn't just a critic. All the way through, he's showing a positive way, typically through example of people on the margins: the rat-rodder, the offroad-racers, and the like. It's a revolutionary way, a way that goes against all our instincts, but it is a positive way!
It begins with us - and reclaiming our place at the table in making decisions about the technology we use and develop. A habit that we Americans were once proud of - not 'liberty' but self-governance:
"Children in their games are wont to submit to rules which they have themselves established, and to punish misdemeanors which they have themselves defined." Thus did Tocqueville marvel at Americans' habit of self-government, and the temperament it both required and encouraged from a young age. "The same spirit," he said, "pervades every act of social life."
We should act the same with our technology. When problems arise, we can look to ourselves first and our neighbor next to solve them. We need to exercise our muscles of self-governance once more and act as masters over our technology.
And yes - look to your neighbor! Because:
Rules become more necessary as trust and solidarity decline in a society.
If we want less rules and more self-governance, we need more trust and solidarity.
All too often I hear people lament that their phones are too addicting or their cars are too fandangled. Maybe the perfect solution doesn't exist, but you are not at the unbridled mercy of manufacturers. Buy an old car and keep it running. Use an old flip phone. Buy a new car and rip out the television in the middle of it - heck, rip out the electronic throttle; replace the ECU! Take matters into your own hands. Tired of your laptop breaking? Buy an old ThinkPad and enjoy the ability to actually fix the thing.
The revolution begins not with legislation but by changing your own oil.
Technocrats get away with stuff because we let them. Real Americans don't stand for that. Real Christians are not of this world. We set our sights higher.
What if we pursued automotive safety not by forcing safer cars but enabling safer drivers by making "driver's cars" - cars that are lightweight and have good responsiveness?
"The world is its own best model." This could be taken as the motto for a new direction in automotive design. To do so would be to accept the existence of two very separate classes of automobiles with different design criteria: driverless cars and driver's cars.
It's worth noting that a driver's car isn't a Lamborghinni - it's more like a Honda Civic. A Civic built with advancements in metallurgy, fabrication, combustion, and other sciences - unencumbered by the weight of sensors, extra-wide bodies, and automatic transmissions. Such a car would not only enable its driver to grow in virtue but would have material benefits - it would be profoundly more fuel-efficient.
I wouldn't advocate for such a law, but outlawing the sale of automatic transmissions could enable drivers to burn less fuel, cause less crashes, and spend less money, than Tier-4 emissions standards and backup cameras. But most importantly, think of the spiritual development!
It certainly feels strange to talk about technology in terms of virtue rather than material but we have to, or we will find ourselves infantilized by our machines.
The secular world may not have ears to hear about Christ, but it does have ears to hear about virtue. I think we can gain something here, and something worthwhile. I think many of us - myself included - have found conversion by a desire for virtue. Let it be so with our technology, too.