If you've been hanging around here for a while, you will know my long-standing admiration for Matthew B. Crawford's excellent work. (I have a whole tag dedicated to my ramblings about it!) So it should come as no surprise that his latest book,
Why We Drive: Toward a Philosophy of the Open Road, is just as excellent as his previous work.
The title may seem like a strange one, particularly if you are like me, and you don't especially love to drive or tinker with old cars. Crawford owns a custom motorcycle shop and has spent a lot of non-academic time messing around with engines. His book is about the joy of driving and tinkering (what he calls "folk engineering"), but it is also about the dangers of automation on human flourishing.
It is this last bit where the book really has my interest. I'm not a gearhead by any stretch of the imagination, and to be perfectly honest, a lot of the technical stuff he writes about engines sails right past my head. (Although, it must be said, I am mechanically-minded, and do a lot of the heavy-duty fixing around the house, so I'm not completely without interest in the inner workings of an internal combustion engine).
Crawford uses the real experience of driving (and pushing the limits of a car's capabilities through driving skill acquired through time and testing) to illuminate how handing over our brains to automated processes actually takes something away from us. When we complete mechanical tasks, the ideal is a task that requires enough skill to engage the brain, but not so much that it drains the energy for sustained work.
As our cars have been taken over by computers, flashing screens and alerts, our brains have less to do, which mean that most people have a difficult time resisting the dopamine glow of their smartphones while driving. With the predictable consequences we've all experienced on the road. Crawford notes that as long as many of us drive
as if our cars were already self-driving, it makes sense to push self-driving cars (5). On the other hand, if driving required more skill (skills that humans
already had), then self-driving cars would be unnecessary.
Our cultural creative energies would be better served in making skilled demands of people, rather than cultivating some consumer experience. "Manufactured experiences are offered as a substitute for direct confrontation with the world, and this evidently has some appeal for us. We are relieved of the burden of grappling with real things--that is--things that resist our will, and thereby reveal our limited understanding and skill. Experiences that have been deisnged around us offer escape from the frustrations of dealing with other people and with material reality. They allow us to remain cocooned in a fantasy of competence and empowerment that is safe from the kind of refutation that routinely happens when you...ride a skateboard, for example" (114).
Why does it matter? Some people are enamored of the idea that big cities could be free of traffic jams and congestion; commutes could be productive work times instead of frustrating time lost behind the wheel. But Crawford warns that such thinking is dangerous. The time behind the wheel can be a great time of mental freedom--to let the mind wander and think. It is in that sort of quiet thinking time that solutions present themselves, or we can rejuvenate our souls. I personally find I get a lot of good thinking done while driving.
But it is more than for just the freedom to quiet the mind that Crawford advocates retaining skilled driving. He is not anti-technology; he freely acknowledges the improvements in automotive technology that have made cars safer, but those changes largely occurred in the 1950s and 1960s, invisible to the average driver. Whereas the automation changes occurring now actually impede safety to a degree by disengaging the driver's mind, and invite further incursion on the driver's autonomy in the name of safety.
But embodied skill is important, and contributes heavily to human happiness and flourishing. "The new skills that we add to our repertoire when we learn to use tools and prosthetics become indistinguishable from those of the natural human body, in terms of how they are treated by the brain that organizes our actions and perceptions. The crucial fact that makes this integration possible is that there is a closed loop between action and perception: what you perceive is determined by what you do, just as it is when we make use of our own hands. Or a 1963 Volkswagon" (111).
There is a growing body of research that finds physical effort gives psychological rewards that lead to greater human resilience. The basic tasks of securing our bodily needs, long a labor-intensive process involving the whole body, has largely been outsourced to automated processes. Crawford speculates that the concomitant rise in rates of anxiety and depression may be a partly a result of this disengagement with the physical world, particularly the work of our hands (64). As our work has gone online and turned to computing and knowledge skills, the loss of skilled embodied work has been a disaster, both economically and culturally. We were not meant to live in the world of the Jetsons, however attractive the wiz-bang technology of that landscape seems. Our brains crave agency over our environment and ourselves, and when denied it through effortless-driven rewards, turn to maladaptive practices instead. The same body of research also finds that when we inhabit the natural world, with the resistance to our will and real-consequences problems to solve, we thrive on solving those problems with far less stress (64).
It is also true that our management of the road requires a certain level of social cohesion that our culture is rapidly losing. Writes Crawford, "...our ability to share the road together smoothly and safely is based on our capacity for mutual prediction. This is a form of intelligence that is socially realized, and depends on the existence of robust social norms that can anchor sound expectations of others' behavior. Automation may become attractive, then, as a response to declining social cohesion: it is an attempt to replace trust and cooperation with machine-generated certainty....this is an approach that is likely to cause the further atrophy of our skills. Among these are the skills of collective self-government, rooted in shared habits of cooperation. A science of behavior management becomes necessary" (121).
The basic point is that if you never learn to share your toys, to negotiate the complexities of social interaction in the real world, and let things get messy, as life is wont to do, you will have no idea how to react when there is no algorithm to guide you through a menu of predetermined options. Crawford repeatedly cites the humans in the Pixar film Wall-E, who have so forgotten the basic embodied skills of humanity that they must be hauled around on automated flying saucers, talking only to screens instead of face-to-face. He also notes the level of social control the humans allow themselves to be subject to, and cautions his readers against it, for this way lies madness.
Which brings me to the next point, that of embodied life. Humans were not meant to serve an algorithmic life, mediated by screens and whatever our Tech Overlords want us to think and see and do. We were not meant for "cultivated consumer experiences" or the inscrutable wisps of whatever exists in the cloud.
We were meant to fully inhabit our bodies and our world, in all the messiness that entails. We were meant to stick our hands into actual dirt to grow things. To care for actual animals to rear for food and clothing. To raise our children, with all the bodily fluids
that entails. To stand on the shoulders of giants to move and progress. "But tradition can itself be an engine of progress. It organizes the transmission of knowledge. It also provides an idiom for some shared endeavor, and a set of historical benchmarks, such that one can imagine oneself outdoing particular human beings who came before, and who worked within the same basic limitations. Tradition thus provides a venue for rivalry in excellence, the kind that sometimes bring a whole community to new and unexpected places" (136). There is a thingness in embodied space, physical habitation, and real things that simply cannot be replicated online without some loss of ontological self.
There is a role for technology and the Internet in our world, but we must never lose sight of the fact that it is a tool, and we the wielders of it, rather than the other way around. When automation becomes a way to deskill humans and rob them of the flourishing that comes with skilled, meaningful work, it has overstepped its purpose. A tool can become an extension of our bodies through long use and acquired fluency, but it can also get in the way. Does technology allow us to remain in touch with far-flung family members and to maintain relationships that would otherwise wither? Yes, undoubtedly. Does it also get in the way of in-person interaction by inserting itself loudly into intimate conversations? Absolutely. Does it allow us access to an unimaginable wealth of knowledge and information? Of course. But it also provides platforms that debase our common humanity, and reduces the quality of our interactions by increasing the noise in our heads.
I suppose the (long, rambling) point to all this can be boiled down to the following: Do stuff with your hands in the real world. Learn to fix things that are broken, how to mend that which has ripped, develop new skills beyond a keyboard, and get your hands dirty while doing so.
There is much more to say about this book, and I hope to revisit it in a future post.
