The Art of Manliness - #619： What Driving Tells Us About Agency, Skill, and Freedom

00:00:00.000 I'm Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.

00:00:11.100 According to Silicon Valley, self-driving cars are the future of transportation.

00:00:15.000 Instead of owning and driving a car, you can just summon an AI-operated vehicle with your

00:00:18.540 smartphone and have this super-powered computer taxi you to your destination.

00:00:22.100 No more car maintenance, no more traffic, no more accidents.

00:00:24.900 It may sound great on the face of it, but my guest today argues that shifting from being

00:00:28.360 a driver to just being a mere passenger represents an existential risk in and of itself, as well

00:00:33.440 as a symbol for the potential loss of much broader human values.

00:00:36.540 His name is Matthew Crawford.

00:00:37.700 He's a philosopher, mechanic, and hot rodder, as well as the author of Shop Class's Soulcraft.

00:00:41.860 In his latest book, Why We Drive Towards the Philosophy of the Open Road, Matthew investigates

00:00:46.480 the driver's seat as one of the few remaining domains of skill, exploration, play, and freedom.

00:00:51.380 Matthew and I begin our conversation discussing how freely moving around in our environment

00:00:54.860 is a big part of what makes us human, and then explore how shifting from being the

00:00:58.280 drivers of our own cars to the passengers of self-driving cars could result in a loss of

00:01:02.280 that humanity by eliminating agency, privacy, and proficiency.

00:01:06.060 As our wide-ranging conversational road trip continues, Matthew and I take detours into what

00:01:10.140 things like hot rodding and demolition derbies can tell us about mastery, play, and competition,

00:01:14.280 and we end our conversation on what driving ultimately has to do with the overarching idea

00:01:18.160 of self-governance.

00:01:19.540 After the show's over, check out our show notes at aom.is slash whywedrive.

00:01:28.280 Matthew Crawford, welcome back to the show.

00:01:39.820 Thanks for having me.

00:01:40.940 So we had you on a couple years ago to talk about your book, The World Beyond Your Head,

00:01:44.540 and you got a new book out called Why We Drive Toward a Philosophy of the Open Road.

00:01:50.520 And it's about driving, but it's about a lot more than driving.

00:01:54.080 I mean, you use driving as a way to explore topics like freedom, agency, privacy, even

00:02:02.140 self-governance and sovereignty.

00:02:04.040 What was the impetus behind this book?

00:02:05.340 What got you thinking about driving in these terms?

00:02:09.480 Well, yeah.

00:02:10.840 So, I mean, I opened the book with a case that's kind of extreme.

00:02:16.080 It isn't sort of everyday driving.

00:02:17.580 And in fact, the book is really about mobility in general and trying to think about, you know,

00:02:23.880 how that hooks into various sort of elements of human experience.

00:02:28.380 So I described riding a dirt bike on a trail through the woods.

00:02:34.560 So there's roots, there's rocks, there's mud, there's steep descents, creek crossings, all this stuff.

00:02:42.800 And I might be going only 15 miles an hour, but I'm at the very limit of my mental ability.

00:02:50.580 It takes total concentration.

00:02:53.560 And when I push it, when I push it a little beyond my current skills or my comfort level,

00:03:00.560 and it goes well, meaning I don't crash, and maybe even I get a little glimmer of some new finesse,

00:03:08.040 I feel justified somehow.

00:03:11.400 I feel a kind of vindication.

00:03:13.320 It's hard to describe.

00:03:14.260 It's almost existential.

00:03:16.700 And in pursuing that feeling, I once had four trips to the emergency room in the course of 12 months.

00:03:24.960 So broken bones, a bunch of them.

00:03:28.420 Now, to ride a bike off-road is, of course, in no way typical of the driving that we do most of the time.

00:03:35.920 So it's an odd choice of anecdote to open an inquiry that ranges widely over the driving experience.

00:03:44.380 But the heightened feeling of exposure you get on a dirt bike, I think, recalls you to something really basic.

00:03:51.700 And that is that we're fragile.

00:03:54.000 We have bodies.

00:03:55.900 And there's a certain risk that's inherent in moving around by whatever means.

00:04:01.220 Now, you know, if you're responsible, you do everything you can to minimize that risk.

00:04:07.900 But my hunch, and what really kind of spurred me to write the book,

00:04:11.600 is that also risk is somehow bound up with humanizing possibilities.

00:04:18.300 And that cuts very much against the ideology of what I call safetyism.

00:04:23.760 You know, where the safer we become, the more intolerable any remaining risk appears.

00:04:31.720 And that seems like that's especially worth thinking about right now because we've got this push for driverless cars,

00:04:40.060 which is part of what I see as a broader kind of shift in our relationship to the physical world,

00:04:46.500 where the demands of competence give way to a promise of safety and convenience.

00:04:55.700 So I just wanted to think about what we're being asked to give up.

00:05:00.400 So it sounds like moving, being able to move on our own free will, however we want, with the environment.

00:05:07.980 It makes us human.

00:05:09.040 I think Aristotle even talked about that.

00:05:10.660 That's one of the features of human beings.

00:05:12.240 Yeah, or even just the difference between animals and a rock, right?

00:05:17.980 Animals get up and move.

00:05:19.620 There's self-moving, I think is the phrase.

00:05:22.620 Often for no apparent reason.

00:05:24.200 It just seems to be part of being an animal means having a body and moving around,

00:05:30.760 as opposed to being carried passively.

00:05:33.700 And there's some great psychological research on that difference and the importance of actively moving in childhood development.

00:05:44.440 It's when you start developing a kind of mental map of the world.

00:05:49.240 Once you start, you know, you're no longer being carried by your mother. 0.89

00:05:53.440 So I like that you use this idea of the self-driving car because, and this is a theme that you explore throughout the book,

00:06:00.880 is that everyone's talking about this is the future.

00:06:04.340 Self-driving car is the future.

00:06:05.540 It's going to happen.

00:06:06.600 But you highlight this survey that says that 70% of Americans actually enjoy driving.

00:06:12.220 So it's like they don't even want this thing.

00:06:13.940 But we're told, no, it's the future.

00:06:16.740 This is what people want.

00:06:17.660 So who's driving this narrative that people want a self-driving car where they can just sit and, you know,

00:06:24.580 twiddle on Instagram while they get to Whole Foods or whatever?

00:06:28.480 Well, Brad, it sounds like you're expressing skepticism about, you know, the future has decided it.

00:06:34.040 Are you questioning the future?

00:06:35.440 I think I am.

00:06:37.300 I mean, there's this kind of inevitability that is a big part of the narrative.

00:06:41.680 And I think it's used to sort of try to demoralize any kind of opposition.

00:06:46.340 So, yeah, it's clear that this is very much a top-down project rather than a response to consumer demand.

00:06:54.780 I mean, when they poll people, people still don't trust the driverless technology.

00:07:01.040 Now, in a sense, there's nothing new about that.

00:07:03.460 And the science of marketing has been for 100 years in the business of creating new needs.

00:07:09.740 But I think this time is a little bit different because what we're talking about is a radical monopoly on how we get around.

00:07:20.600 And I think we'll get into that in this conversation.

00:07:23.940 It's because, you know, human beings and robots are not going to be able to share the road together gracefully.

00:07:32.200 So, it's like we're going to have to get out of the way for them.

00:07:35.780 And so, it's got to be either or.

00:07:37.600 It can't be a mixture of the two.

00:07:40.040 That's what's emerging, you know, from all the efforts thus far to make driverless cars work in an urban environment.

00:07:48.060 And the other thing, too, is this idea of sovereignty.

00:07:50.720 What's weird about this push for driverless cars, it's not the state.

00:07:54.420 It's not cities, states, nations who are calling for this.

00:07:59.460 It's private companies like Uber or Google saying, this is what we're going to do.

00:08:04.060 And it's like, hey, I didn't vote for that.

00:08:06.140 But it's like, well, no, this is what we're going to do.

00:08:09.640 Yeah, right.

00:08:10.640 I mean, what we're talking about is all of the infrastructure of mobility being remade according to the dream of, you know, perfect order that is really, you know, a cartel of tech firms will be.

00:08:30.000 They will make the trains run on time.

00:08:33.000 You can be sure of it.

00:08:34.820 But what it means is that we won't have any kind of democratic control over, you know, the cityscape, because what we're talking about is the smart city.

00:08:45.460 That's kind of a necessary complement to the driverless car.

00:08:49.560 You're going to have sort of sensors embedded in everything and all our movements through the city orchestrated by a kind of urban operating system, as it's been called.

00:09:02.040 So, that's, I mean, for some of us, a pretty dystopian picture, given how frustrating your current operating system might be on your devices.

00:09:16.800 Yeah, I mean, let's go down this strain of like, I mean, there's so many things you can explore this idea of private companies sort of doing a top down, this is what we're going to do, making decisions.

00:09:26.560 Because they make it sound like they're doing it for you, and it's like, oh, we're benevolent, we're going to help, you're going to be able to do these things.

00:09:32.300 But there's always an angle with these guys.

00:09:35.200 And not only are they going to reimagine the cities, but because they control the means of movement, they're able to get information about you and use that information to, I don't know, nudge you to go to different places while you're getting shuttled in your little Google car.

00:09:50.500 Yeah, I mean, what is Google?

00:09:54.920 It's, what it is, is the world's largest advertising firm.

00:09:58.580 So, I think the idea is, yeah, all of your movements will be surveilled, and as it turns out, your movements through the world are an especially valuable form of behavioral data for composing a picture of who you are and developing a sort of proprietary science of behavior management.

00:10:23.240 I mean, this is the, you know, the new frontier of surveillance capitalism.

00:10:29.120 And I think what we're talking about is the transformation of the car into a device that will kind of answer to the same logic of surveillance.

00:10:40.380 And not only that, but you're now strapped in there, you're basically a captive audience.

00:10:46.000 So, you can imagine that, you know, maybe there will be fleets of driverless cars trolling around, and you can hail one for free.

00:10:55.740 Well, except it's not really free, because before you get underway, you're going to have to sit there and decline all these offers tailored to your unique lifestyle.

00:11:06.860 So, yeah, there's definitely an angle.

00:11:11.980 And, I mean, this idea, also, it's creepy about this.

00:11:14.420 We already have this to a certain extent with our smartphones.

00:11:17.420 I mean, even if you drive, you're not in a smart car.

00:11:19.360 If you have a smartphone with you, Google knows where you're at.

00:11:22.540 Yeah.

00:11:22.820 And because, like, you lack that privacy, it's like, well, are you really free?

00:11:26.640 I mean, are you really a free human being if you can't go somewhere without anyone knowing where you're at?

00:11:31.240 Right, and, you know, if you raise that point, what they'll say is, well, you know, you're free to opt out.

00:11:38.200 You know, just look at the terms of service.

00:11:40.820 Of course, it's kind of a fault.

00:11:42.000 I mean, you don't really have any leverage.

00:11:44.980 Now, you can decline the service altogether.

00:11:47.840 You could get by without a smartphone, right?

00:11:51.480 But the whole world has organized around these things, and so you would take it a genuine kind of countercultural orneriness to fully opt out of these things.

00:12:05.060 And the terms of service are very one-sided.

00:12:07.900 I mean, to fully know what you're agreeing to, you'd have to read, you know, sometimes literally dozens of contracts because that data is packaged and turned into sort of prediction products used to predict your future behavior.

00:12:28.040 And these are traded on a behavioral futures market in real time, even as you're, you know, going through the world.

00:12:35.880 So, you know, this starts to look like a kind of a new form of government more than a free market or something like that.

00:12:46.060 Right, but it's a government that you have no say in.

00:12:48.660 Exactly, right.

00:12:50.480 What are you going to do?

00:12:51.800 Like, you know, throw the bums out in the next election? 1.00

00:12:55.820 I don't think so.

00:12:56.540 Well, another thing you highlight in the book about how governments and corporations have worked to modify the way we move ourselves, and in the process, we lose something.

00:13:09.140 You talked about this idea, like, you don't see really clunky cars on the road anymore.

00:13:14.420 And it's because, or even like in driveways, and if you do, it's like, oh, man, it's on cinder blocks, it's an eyesore.

00:13:20.240 The homeowners association is going to, you know, send you letters, but it's because there's been this movement within the governments and corporations to this, like, where there's a cash for junkers program, where we get old cars, you know, off the streets, off the driveways.

00:13:35.060 And they'd say it's for environmental reasons, but then you're like, well, what's the angle here?

00:13:39.640 They're always like, what's the angle?

00:13:40.640 Yeah, so, right.

00:13:45.300 So, it's interesting.

00:13:46.000 This started back in 1990, and the first cash for clunkers program was started by Unical, which is an oil refining company.

00:13:58.560 And it was sort of an experiment.

00:14:00.200 They were facing the need to have expensive retrofits to their refineries to clean up their emissions.

00:14:06.060 So, they tried this PR stunt where they said, we're going to destroy, well, it went like this, anyone who wants to give up their old car, meaning before 1971, we will give you $700 and a month-long bus pass.

00:14:24.340 And the idea was that it's the old cars responsible for most of the pollution.

00:14:28.780 And this led to, you know, a lot of rust-free Southern California old cars being destroyed.

00:14:37.040 Now, the bigger picture here is that as this caught on, you know, in a lot of different states, and it actually created this regime of carbon trading, where sort of all sources of carbon emissions are considered fungible or equivalent.

00:14:54.400 What it did is it created a kind of false environmentalism that, in fact, enforces obsolescence, sort of accelerated obsolescence, getting these cars off the road.

00:15:08.080 Now, when you think about all the sort of energy and material flows involved in creating new cars, as opposed to just, you know, fixing an old car, the environmental picture is very mixed as to whether this is doing anything for air quality.

00:15:26.820 And I actually was involved in air quality stuff as a physicist a little bit back in 1989, so I was kind of right there as this was going on in Southern California.

00:15:37.780 But the other part of this is there's this kind of suburban aesthetic of tidiness, and someone with an outdoor inventory of used auto parts is not part of that equation.

00:15:53.180 So, I actually got a letter from my insurance company telling me I needed to remove all the debris around my house, as they called it.

00:16:01.720 So, what they meant is all this, my stash of auto parts, you know, I've got all kinds of stuff.

00:16:09.660 And this is a pattern where municipalities, often they're acting on behalf of real estate interests against established residents, will declare it a nuisance.

00:16:22.420 They'll sort of harass you bureaucratically to make you get rid of this stuff.

00:16:26.180 And the reason that's significant, I think, well, a couple of reasons.

00:16:31.000 One is just kind of at the level of sentiment.

00:16:34.320 When you're taking care of old stuff, there's a kind of moral sensibility of stewardship.

00:16:43.320 And, I mean, sentiment attaches to the things that you've had in your life, you know, they've been with you through a lot.

00:16:50.000 It's almost a kind of loyalty to stuff, which sounds a little nutty, but I think it grounds a sense of the continuity of the world.

00:17:01.060 And they can serve as a shelter from the relentless onslaught of the new.

00:17:06.240 And then, of course, also, this bureaucratic piracy is dispossessing people of a real form of wealth, you know, frugal and resourceful people who might rely on a parts car or two parked out back.

00:17:22.180 And again, there's, yeah, there's that sense of you're not in control anymore.

00:17:25.220 There's like a reduction of your agency or what you're able to do in the environment.

00:17:30.980 Yeah. And, I mean, it began with good intentions.

00:17:36.360 So, Lady Bird Johnson, back in the 60s, sort of agitated for cleaning up the road and getting eyesores out of the way. 1.00

00:17:46.320 And it was, for the most part, it was a good idea because there was actually a lot of litter back then.

00:17:50.040 People forget that we sort of had to learn to not litter.

00:17:53.520 And also, there were salvage yards that weren't screened off from the road.

00:17:57.580 So, it was a beautification effort, but then it kind of shaded into something a little more ruthless, namely this, you know, not in my backyard, no junkyards, no salvage yards.

00:18:10.160 Even though it's places like that that are kind of keeping alive the ethic of repair, which is, you know, what could be more environmental than cobbling together a car from salvaged parts that have been cast off that you're sort of foraging locally?

00:18:29.300 I mean, that's a pretty positive environmental thing.

00:18:35.380 We're going to take a quick break for your words from our sponsors.

00:18:37.060 And now, back to the show.

00:18:40.820 So, you started off talking about this conversation, talking about you riding your bike, your dirt bike, and sort of exploring the intersection of risk and safety and, you know, sort of existentialism and, like, what it means to feel alive.

00:18:53.760 But you have this whole section of the book talking about the history of car safety.

00:18:58.100 And cars are a lot safer than they were, say, 40 years ago.

00:19:03.100 I mean, what are some of the stuff that's happened that we kind of take for granted and how cars have gotten safer?

00:19:07.420 Well, the biggest improvements came with seatbelts and then airbags.

00:19:16.980 That was the low-hanging fruit, and it was a massive increase in the safety of the car.

00:19:23.960 And then, you know, there's traction control.

00:19:26.400 There's anti-lock brakes and now sort of automatic braking.

00:19:30.620 And these are slightly different in nature.

00:19:34.840 They help at the limit, you know, in a kind of panic situation.

00:19:38.980 But they can also have a slight de-skilling effect where you're no longer sort of getting familiar with the behavior of the car at the limits.

00:19:47.120 And it was interesting.

00:19:49.660 There was a study of automobile safety way back in the 70s that discovered that some safety improvements in the car lead us to drive less safely.

00:20:04.980 And the idea is that we have a risk budget.

00:20:08.480 So if we're getting more safety from the car itself, we feel like we don't need to drive as safely.

00:20:14.720 So it's a kind of a messy picture when you consider the effects of safety improvements in the car itself on driver behavior.

00:20:25.220 And certainly now with the sort of partially automated driving, I mean, you'll see videos on YouTube of Tesla drivers going down the freeway reading a newspaper or something.

00:20:36.380 Of course, the fine print tells you you have to be ready to reassume control at any moment because the automation really isn't at the level you can just trust it to take care of things.

00:20:47.560 But, you know, that's not realistic to expect people to do that.

00:20:51.220 They're going to get interested in something else.

00:20:53.440 Well, the other thing, too, is with those sensors that tell you if you're drifting into another lane.

00:20:59.620 Yeah.

00:21:00.360 Yeah.

00:21:00.820 What happens is, like, it's a safety feature, but it can actually make you less safe because instead of paying attention to your environment, you're paying attention for the signal that says you're about to mess up.

00:21:12.060 And this, I mean, they found this also in airplanes.

00:21:14.240 As airplanes have gotten more automated, they found this with pilots.

00:21:17.920 Instead of actually focusing on what's going on in their environment, what their automation does is it trains them to just focus for the signals to let them know that something's wrong.

00:21:28.600 Yeah.

00:21:28.940 They call that task inversion, right?

00:21:31.640 So instead of, you know, paying attention to what the plane is doing, you're just listening for these little chimes and beeps.

00:21:38.040 But another problem is that sometimes it's chiming and beeping at you so gratuitously that you just tune it out.

00:21:47.540 So there's a whole literature, it's called the human factors literature on this problem with airplane pilots.

00:21:55.320 And now we're kind of starting to develop a similar literature for driverless cars.

00:22:01.840 But I think we need to get a little bit into kind of the logic whereby human beings and robot cars are not going to be able to share the road.

00:22:14.240 Should we get into that?

00:22:15.060 Yeah, let's get into it.

00:22:15.900 Let's talk about that.

00:22:16.900 Yeah.

00:22:17.260 So there was this one incident where a Google car came up to an intersection and it was a four-way stop.

00:22:28.900 And so it stopped and it waited for the other cars to come to a complete stop before it went through.

00:22:35.620 But of course, that's not what people do.

00:22:37.600 So the Google car just froze and got sort of paralyzed and melted down.

00:22:46.320 I mean, sort of software meltdown. 0.99

00:22:48.580 And what the chief engineer who was in charge of this project said he had learned from it is that human beings need to be less idiotic. 0.98

00:22:59.700 By which he meant, of course, they need to behave more like robots. 0.60

00:23:04.340 And that's an inference that comes very easily if you think that the mind is basically an inferior version of a computer, namely following rules.

00:23:17.880 That's the picture of reason that they have here, that reason consists of following rules and we don't do it very well.

00:23:24.960 But what do you see at an intersection?

00:23:26.940 Well, you see people make eye contact.

00:23:29.560 Maybe one person sort of waves the other through in those ambiguous cases of right-of-way.

00:23:35.400 There's almost a kind of body language of driving.

00:23:39.000 So here's a form of intelligence that is socially realized by people together.

00:23:45.780 You know, they're cooperating.

00:23:47.300 They're working things out on the fly.

00:23:50.100 It's a little bit improvisational.

00:23:52.540 It's a little bit messy.

00:23:54.120 But for the most part, it works just fine.

00:23:56.400 But that kind of social intelligence is very hard to replicate with machine processes.

00:24:02.740 So the conclusion is, well, either humans need to become more like computers, which is not going to happen,

00:24:10.400 or we need to clear the road of the humans to make the machines sort of operate smoothly according to their own kind of method.

00:24:19.080 So that's the basic problem.

00:24:23.000 Just two, artificial intelligence and human intelligence are just, they're so different in kind that they don't play very well together.

00:24:32.480 Yeah, and that idea that driving is a very social thing, even though we don't think of it as social because we're sort of in our little bubble.

00:24:39.360 But the other problem that you talk about that the automated cars are having is that every community has their own social norms for driving.

00:24:48.380 So in Pittsburgh, I think you talked about in Pittsburgh, there's the Pittsburgh left turn.

00:24:51.960 They let someone, you know, if you're at an unprotected left turn and there's a car going straight, the car going straight lets the left turn guy go first.

00:24:59.540 And that's only, it's like a Pittsburgh thing.

00:25:00.880 But like a Google car would be like, no, it has to be the same everywhere.

00:25:04.260 So it doesn't allow for like bottom up sort of governance.

00:25:08.020 Yeah, and it's interesting, there's a whole new kind of thing emerging in cognitive science that emphasizes that the human mind is exquisitely good at predicting others' behavior.

00:25:22.120 And it's a kind of circular thing where we mutually predict one another's behavior.

00:25:27.940 And social norms help to anchor our expectations of what others are going to do, and it makes that task a little bit easier.

00:25:38.020 So, when you think of how exquisitely fine-tuned the human mind is for predicting each other's behavior, it starts to seem a little bit gratuitous to replace all that with, you know, rolling supercomputers, basically.

00:25:56.740 If you look at an intersection at Rome, you know, Americans are often horrified, or they travel to Rome and they come back, it looks like chaos.

00:26:06.580 Of course, they're also kind of admire it because it's such a, you know, it's just such a different way of proceeding.

00:26:13.820 And so, it's very improvisational.

00:26:18.420 They're not really following any kind of rules, at least not any rules that would be apparent to you or me as a visitor.

00:26:24.820 But here's the interesting thing, that the traffic fatality rate in Italy is actually lower than it is in the United States.

00:26:32.020 Now, if we had driverless cars, from an aerial view, an intersection might actually look quite a bit like the Italian intersection because you wouldn't have to have stoplights, right?

00:26:46.980 The cars would just mutually adapt and find their way through.

00:26:52.520 But at this point, it starts to look like we want to spend billions of dollars in order to recreate the flow and efficiency of an old world intersection, which it seems like a failure to appreciate that human beings have already solved this problem.

00:27:11.560 And they're pretty good at it.

00:27:13.300 So, let's talk about, let's get a little bit more, you know, we've been talking sort of big picture societal stuff, but let's get a little bit down to the more personal.

00:27:23.960 So, one of the things about, you talk about how cars have changed, the experience of driving your cars change.

00:27:30.540 And you talk about the difference between this hot rod, you know, 60s VW Beetle bug that you worked on yourself and the way it drove, between a high-performance Audi RS3.

00:27:43.800 When you drove those two cars, like, what was the difference?

00:27:46.680 How does it feel different to drive a modern car compared to an old car?

00:27:50.020 Well, for one thing, an old car lets you know right away if you've done something wrong.

00:27:57.440 So, you know, there was more than one occasion when I almost rolled the bug.

00:28:03.520 And, you know, it's very, it's crude, right?

00:28:06.400 It is very direct mechanical connection to the road, which just makes it exciting to drive.

00:28:12.900 You know, you're not insulated from the road by all these sort of forms of electronic mediation that dampen out all the sort of fuzzy information that's usually coming into the seat of your pants from the road.

00:28:28.260 With a car that's really light and primitive and everything is sort of direct mechanical connections, after a while, it starts to become almost like a prosthetic.

00:28:39.800 In other words, it kind of disappears from your awareness and you're just feeling the road.

00:28:46.900 So, think about the process of learning to play ice hockey, where initially the stick and the puck is all very awkward and obtrusive and you have to look at the puck.

00:28:59.420 And, but eventually, as you become more skilled, the stick essentially becomes an extension of your own body and you can feel the state of the puck through the stick.

00:29:11.980 And so, the stick just disappears and becomes a kind of transparent conduit for both your intention on the puck and for sensing the puck.

00:29:22.480 Whereas, in a modern car, when everything is passing through electronic mediation, it means that the only way you can stay informed about the state of the car and the state of the road is through various representations.

00:29:37.140 You get these, you know, chimes and little bit of text on the dashboard.

00:29:42.000 So, I had a Scion XB and for the first five years, I had no idea why it was beeping at me when I went around the corners kind of fast.

00:29:54.280 And finally, I saw there was a little tiny bit of text that said stability, meaning that the stability control was kicking in.

00:30:02.000 And, and I didn't even know I had lost traction because I just couldn't feel it.

00:30:07.300 So, no, and I've, I've, when you mentioned that, when you talked about in the book, I was like, I was trying to think back when I've driven an old car.

00:30:13.640 I've had that same experience when I've driven an old truck without any power steering, out any, uh, anti-lock brakes.

00:30:20.600 Like, at first, it's very disconcerting because you're like, what the heck is going on?

00:30:23.880 Like, it doesn't feel, but then after a while, you start, as you said, you start to feel the road.

00:30:29.240 And then when you like in a modern car, it doesn't feel like you're like,

00:30:32.000 you're, you can feel the road.

00:30:33.780 You're sort of, you feel like you're just sitting in a car and kind of guiding it with the steering wheel.

00:30:37.760 Uh, it's a weird difference.

00:30:39.020 It's hard to explain.

00:30:39.660 It's a subtle thing, but there's definitely a difference.

00:30:42.280 Yeah.

00:30:42.720 And the windshield almost starts to seem like one more screen and, uh, it can't really compete with all the dopamine candy coming through your other screens.

00:30:53.700 And so obviously as cars get more boring to drive more, you know, abstracted,

00:30:59.840 this has definitely contributed to distracted driving because it's just not much to engage 0.99

00:31:05.600 your interest because you're, you know, and an old car, it's your ass that's going 60 miles an hour. 0.93

00:31:12.280 You're not, you're not cocooned in 4,000 pounds of plushness with, you know, the sort of elevated tank-like enclosure. 0.99

00:31:20.900 I mean, cars have gotten so heavy and so enclosed.

00:31:24.780 If you get in the car from the 80s or earlier, you'd be shocked at how much visibility we've given up.

00:31:33.440 It's like all glass.

00:31:35.960 So now backup cameras are required since 2018.

00:31:41.560 And it makes perfect sense that they are required because we've given up so much visibility and peripheral awareness.

00:31:48.800 So yeah, the, the new cars give you like lull you into a false sense of security.

00:31:52.980 So it allows you to, I can look at my phone because you don't, you don't have to pay attention.

00:31:56.960 You're not getting any feedback from the road.

00:31:58.400 But what's interesting too, is that while car companies have made cars safer and sort of taken the road from the driver,

00:32:06.340 what they, what they've had to do is they've had to artificially inject things back in so that it feels like you're driving a car.

00:32:14.520 So I'm, I forgot which one.

00:32:15.540 I think it was like a BMW.

00:32:16.440 Like the engine is so quiet, I think, or even like on electric cars, they'll, when you turn it on,

00:32:22.320 like they'll have like an artificial room sound.

00:32:25.240 So it feels like you're driving a car.

00:32:27.520 Yeah.

00:32:27.820 So, so BMW and a few other car makers, they actually pipe engine sounds into the cabin through the sound system.

00:32:35.340 So it's like they're trying to remedy this abstraction with basically a, you know, a falsification,

00:32:42.780 which is a curious sort of dynamic.

00:32:46.400 So let's talk about, you took a deep dive into hot riding culture.

00:32:50.500 And this is something you do.

00:32:51.400 You geek out on cars and modify them the way you want it.

00:32:54.940 And in this chapter, you got really geeky trying to explain some of these technical aspects of hot riding,

00:32:59.820 but you do it to make a point.

00:33:01.200 And you talk about that it's getting harder and harder to actually, for individuals to modify a car the way they want to than it was, say, 40, 30 years ago.

00:33:14.960 What's, what's changed?

00:33:16.060 Well, it's, it's a mixed picture.

00:33:19.380 So there was sort of the first golden rod of hot riding or golden age rather that went from like after world war two, right up until the eighties.

00:33:28.640 And then electronic engine management made things a little opaque under the hood for the typical shade tree mechanic.

00:33:36.440 But then an interesting thing happened.

00:33:39.180 The internet happened.

00:33:40.320 And now you have these technical forums devoted to all these different kinds of cars and people have figured out how to hack the software and, and turn it to illicit purposes.

00:33:51.580 So this is actually, I would call the second golden age of hot riding.

00:33:56.780 People are getting crazy horsepower out of engines these days.

00:34:01.640 So one thing that when you, when you go really deep, like I'm, you know, this bug I'm building right now is so, it's going to have, let me put it this way, five times the horsepower it was designed for, which means you have to rethink every aspect of the car.

00:34:18.780 And the thing is, you can't just look for available parts.

00:34:23.800 You're often, you're mixing parts from many different manufacturers and you're sort of cobbling things together.

00:34:31.300 And what that means is that the parts numbers that are used for inventory are not going to help you because what you need to know is like the actual dimensions of something.

00:34:41.060 And can I make this fit?

00:34:42.740 And that's very hard to find on the internet.

00:34:46.460 You often end up, you know, it's making the part yourself.

00:34:49.720 You know, if you have the machining and welding capabilities.

00:34:52.840 Because it's just easier than hacking a bureaucracy where you, you know, you don't know the part number.

00:34:59.720 You just need, you try to just go to a parts counter and describe what you need and you're not going to get anywhere.

00:35:06.120 Yeah, you talk about how you use this sort of explore this idea that knowledge in a weird way, it feels like it's democratic, but we've also made it more medieval in a lot of ways.

00:35:16.660 Where only certain like high priest of, of say gearheading, like car parts, like actually know the dimensions of a particular gear, whatever.

00:35:26.360 Whereas before, you know, because you have, you can assign a part number to something.

00:35:29.580 Anybody can just say, oh, part number, like you could just put anybody there.

00:35:32.720 But like, if you really want to know that, like how big it is, you had to call like three different people to finally find someone who knew the size of this part you were looking for.

00:35:41.640 Yeah, there's also this sort of opposite thing where the world of parts numbers only makes sense within some company, within their kind of bureaucratic parts inventory system.

00:35:54.680 Whereas when you're talking about, so that's a kind of form of priestly authority, right?

00:36:00.360 You have to go through, you have to go through the, the, the, the bureaucracy.

00:36:05.920 Whereas if you can express something in universal units of measurement, then you're talking about a form of knowledge that's accessible to anyone with a few basic measuring tools.

00:36:19.400 And it's interesting that that's the ideal of knowledge that we get from the Enlightenment, that, you know, we should be, get out from under the authority of priests and trust our own eyes and our own instruments.

00:36:34.120 And that's kind of the dynamic I see with, with gearheads.

00:36:38.580 You know, they don't, they're not depending on the bureaucracies that, that sort of want to provide things ready made.

00:36:46.780 They're, they're going all the way back to basics and measuring stuff and making stuff and figuring it out.

00:36:57.360 And this also kind of speaks to this movement you've seen with not only cars, but tractors where you're not really buying a track.

00:37:05.940 This happens by, I guess, with John Deere, sort of the big example.

00:37:07.960 You're not really buying a John Deere tractor anymore.

00:37:09.900 You're leasing the right to use the software.

00:37:14.160 And so, like, it's hard, it's becoming harder and harder for farmers to fix a tractor themselves and just use a part from another tractor.

00:37:21.880 Because the terms and agreements of, you know, you, when you bought that, when you thought you were buying a John Deere tractor, don't allow that.

00:37:29.360 Yeah.

00:37:29.780 There's been a movement called Right to Repair.

00:37:32.440 Have you heard of that?

00:37:33.580 I have, yeah.

00:37:34.240 Yeah, so the idea is that, you know, a lot of the car manufacturers are claiming intellectual property rights over the diagnostic software, which means that unless you work at the dealership, you're not going to be able to fix it.

00:37:49.320 Or if you're an independent shop, you have to pay a huge kind of, huge rents, basically, every month in order to have access to that updated diagnostic software.

00:38:00.720 So, you know, then it really does feel like it doesn't belong to you, that you're just kind of allowed to use it for a while.

00:38:09.080 And that's a very different picture of ownership.

00:38:11.820 And I think people aren't very comfortable with that for good reason, because it, I don't know, to be fully master of your own stuff gives you a kind of feeling of independence.

00:38:25.240 And in so many areas of culture, including material culture, we're kind of sliding into this passivity and dependence, which doesn't sit that well with sort of the democratic personality as it has existed thus far, the spirit of self-reliance and the spirit of self-government.

00:38:52.140 Well, yeah, I mean, a perfect example of that, instead of owning physical books, you own books on your Kindle.

00:38:58.840 You think you own them, but, you know, in the terms and agreements of Amazon, they can delete that for whatever reason they want, if they want to.

00:39:06.360 Yeah.

00:39:07.160 Yeah.

00:39:08.160 Let's, so I thought one of my favorite sections is when you explore this idea of play.

00:39:12.480 Yeah.

00:39:12.720 And you use, you know, drifting, you've used demolition derbies, soapbox derbies to explore this idea.

00:39:20.620 And we typically think of play as just sort of light and frivolous, which it is, but you use the drive, these driving sports to highlight the fact that play can be very aggressive and competitive.

00:39:31.780 Can you flesh that out a bit for us?

00:39:34.160 Yeah.

00:39:34.720 So play, it's, so I rely a lot on this Dutch historian who wrote a book about play as the basis of civilization.

00:39:47.480 So he says that to dare, to take risks, to endure tension, this is the spirit of play.

00:39:55.740 So it's a mix of hostility and friendship combined.

00:39:59.940 So he found this in sport, in ritualized combat, in competitive dances and stylized insult trading and boasting matches.

00:40:13.480 Think of the rap battles of the 90s, right?

00:40:17.840 He talks about the human need to fight and he connects that to the need of man to live in beauty.

00:40:25.720 And I want to read a passage from him because it's just so great.

00:40:30.680 This is Heusenge.

00:40:32.300 He says,

00:40:32.780 I love that.

00:40:59.020 And I think if, you know, dogs playing resembles human play, we could just as well say the opposite, that human play expresses the animal spirits in us.

00:41:11.600 And as such, I think it stands against the ideal of rational control that has become so pervasive in contemporary culture.

00:41:20.820 And play in this way, I think answers to a very basic need, but it's expressing this part of the soul that sits uncomfortably with the contemporary taste for order.

00:41:34.640 So it's subject to censure as irresponsible on safety grounds, or because it's competitive as a threat to the ethic of equal esteem.

00:41:46.320 It doesn't, you know, it doesn't sit very well with egalitarianism because it's basically a thirst for distinction among the other players.

00:41:54.880 So it's like this closed circle, it's inherently exclusive, it stands apart from the rest of society.

00:42:02.920 You see something like this in the movie Fight Club, you know, which really revived this idea of a basically masculine form of play that is, you know, can be violent.

00:42:15.900 And motorsport, it sort of exemplifies that, I think.

00:42:20.300 It's almost like, well, I have a chapter called The Motor Equivalent of War, where I'm seeing these war-like energies get channeled into motorsport.

00:42:31.440 And like that sort of, what's interesting, that aggression of play, it's just aggression.

00:42:36.880 It's not about dominance, oftentimes.

00:42:38.640 It's not about, you're not trying to destroy the person, but you want to, I don't know, you want to aggress against them because it gives you something to push against and allows you to feel, I don't know, like you're a person, really.

00:42:52.380 Yeah, I think we kind of confuse the will to distinguish yourself from, we confuse that with the will to dominate others.

00:43:02.280 And so, the thirst for distinction gets, you know, a bad rap because it looks like the will to tyranny.

00:43:08.960 And I think the irony here is that it's the effort to clamp down on play is itself a kind of tyrannical need to control everything.

00:43:20.720 And you see that, you know, for example, in sort of affluent progressive schools where you have these playground minders who are, you know, on the lookout for signs of trauma to the fragile cells that they're busy cultivating.

00:43:38.820 And yeah, in a weird way, like clamping down on that competitive spirit and trying to make everyone feel safe and equal, in a weird way, can actually end up disrupting like the social order and like you get chaos.

00:43:50.720 Yeah, because, well, Heusengew points out that play is the origins of social order.

00:43:57.220 Because think about it, games have rules.

00:44:00.900 You have to submit to the rules of the play community.

00:44:05.600 So, these rules are not just emanations from your own will.

00:44:10.140 So, he finds the origins of institutions historically in these sort of competitive play fields.

00:44:18.800 And it's interesting, you know, at one point in the book, I speculate about maybe this clamp down on play has some kind of connection to phenomena like, you know, the mass shooter.

00:44:32.680 Where here you have some kid who is not able to find any way to make a name for himself, to distinguish himself.

00:44:41.980 But through this eruption of infantile rage, that strikes me as the opposite of fighting and playing, where you're coming up against the civilizing influence of other people who push back against you.

00:44:59.220 It's sort of radically solipsistic.

00:45:02.760 You did this one diversion I thought was interesting.

00:45:04.300 You go to something that's called a hair scramble race.

00:45:07.700 And inadvertently, you were able to see, you met like the true feminist. 0.91

00:45:14.140 Well, yeah, hair scramble is a race through the woods on motorcycles.

00:45:18.660 And so, you know, before it gets into the woods, the start is in a big open pasture.

00:45:26.360 And once you get into the woods, it's very hard to pass.

00:45:29.000 So, the start is really crucial.

00:45:30.740 They're all trying to get to the first corner first.

00:45:33.320 And it's a free-for-all.

00:45:34.760 I mean, there's wheelies off the line, people going down in the mud.

00:45:39.140 And there's no authority figure to appeal to, to say, oh, false start or, you know, foul.

00:45:46.100 It's just a bunch of grown-ups doing it for themselves.

00:45:49.580 And that was attractive about it to me, the sort of absence of bureaucratic sort of supervision.

00:45:56.220 And I was struck that there was quite a few women at these races. 1.00

00:46:00.920 And some of them are super fast.

00:46:03.540 And so, you know, this is a kind of redneck-y crowd, right? 0.91

00:46:09.440 And it seemed like there was an unforced ease of gender relations going on here that was interesting.

00:46:18.140 The women just show up and race. 1.00

00:46:21.000 There, you know, there isn't some entity making sure there's gender equity in the sport. 0.96

00:46:26.240 They don't think of themselves as overcoming oppression.

00:46:30.040 They just find their satisfaction in meeting the demands of the craft.

00:46:37.560 And it's interesting, there was one woman, she was not a racer, but her son was.

00:46:45.260 So, she looked a lot like Roseanne Barr. 0.95

00:46:48.580 And so, her teenage son is all suited up for a race, but he's got this hesitant look on his face. 1.00

00:46:54.800 And I hear her bark, quit being a fucking vagina. 1.00

00:47:00.720 And I had never heard this expression before. 1.00

00:47:04.100 It was a little taken aback.

00:47:05.660 But I think it was maybe a saltier version of this saying that Plutarch records among the Spartan women.

00:47:15.280 He relates another thing where the Spartan army had gone out to fight and they got routed.

00:47:30.960 And now they're running back to the city and the mothers of the city, they get up, they close the gate against them.

00:47:39.220 And they get up on the wall and they lift their skirts and they say, what are you doing trying to climb back in here?

00:47:48.280 And the army goes back out to fight and prevails.

00:47:51.920 So, in all of these, it's like the women are demanding strength of their men, you know, man up. 1.00

00:48:02.000 And the sociologists tell us that that's fairly typical in the working class, that the women prefer their men to be manly.

00:48:10.640 Whereas in upper middle class society, both men and women adopt more feminine norms. 0.91

00:48:17.380 So, that struck me as quite a contrast to the more polite precincts of society where, you know, sort of the meritocracy where you're dependent on these institutions and gold stars to sort of keep moving forward.

00:48:34.140 And there's this kind of propaganda program of girl power and female empowerment that doesn't seem to work very well. 0.99

00:48:42.380 Because it creates these very fragile young women and a kind of sexual paranoia on campus where it's all about, you know, trying to protect their feelings.

00:48:52.000 So, it just, the contrast was really striking.

00:48:56.080 And it was a nice picture of a community kind of working things out for themselves that I think we kind of do well to keep it, you know, in mind as a, as a kind of, for a critical perspective.

00:49:09.860 Yeah, that Roseanne Barr lady who demanded strength from her son, like she herself was a strong lady.

00:49:15.120 You probably wouldn't want to mess with her.

00:49:18.060 Yeah, so it doesn't, it doesn't really look like patriarchy.

00:49:20.480 It looks like matriarchy. 1.00

00:49:22.800 It's funny.

00:49:24.060 Yeah.

00:49:24.460 Well, this idea, so I want to hit on this really quick, but this idea of these races that you go to, they're often self-governed.

00:49:30.120 There's not some corporation putting them on.

00:49:31.780 It's just people getting together and doing it.

00:49:34.440 And you talk about how you're seeing less and less of this these days because people have forgotten how to self-govern.

00:49:42.500 Like that idea that Tocqueville saw in Americans, Americans can get together and they do things together without some government or some entity telling them to do that.

00:49:51.900 We've lost that in a lot of ways.

00:49:53.700 So, yeah, I'm going to, I'm going to read a little passage from Tocqueville here.

00:50:02.900 So, as your listeners probably know, he was this French guy who came to America, traveled around and reported what he saw back in the 1850s.

00:50:12.320 He writes, children and their games, he's talking about Americans, are wont to submit to rules which they have themselves established and to punish misdemeanors which they have themselves defined.

00:50:26.920 So, he's marveling at Americans' habit of self-government and the temperament that it both requires and encourages from a young age.

00:50:37.100 He writes, the same spirit pervades every act of social life.

00:50:41.480 Now, it used to be that Americans had a lot of voluntary associations, things like volunteer fire departments, fraternal organizations, mutual insurers, trade associations, labor unions, where they had the habit of this kind of, you know, like the town hall meeting in New England.

00:51:06.260 But at some point, that way of life more or less collapsed, and there's a Harvard political scientist who documented that in a book called Bowling Alone.

00:51:18.800 We still have voluntary associations, but they're now usually run by salaried professionals, not the members themselves.

00:51:26.680 So, I described this desert race out in Caliente, Nevada, where the same families have been coming to, you know, participating in this race for generations.

00:51:37.880 And so, at the driver's meeting the day before, they're kind of going over the terrain, they're going over sort of land use issues, because, you know, they have this relationship with the ranchers that allow them to do this, and with the town.

00:51:52.680 And this phrase kept popping up in the driver's meeting, it was, use your head.

00:51:59.940 You know, there's no, this isn't like a certified safe experience, this is being handed to you.

00:52:06.720 It's, you know, you're out in the desert amidst the rattlesnakes, use your head.

00:52:12.100 And it was sort of a bracing idea that you would use your head, and that this community would be self-governing in this way.

00:52:23.860 And it's funny, the spirit of it, it's not like these are kind of vandals wrecking the desert.

00:52:30.360 They have a very keen awareness of kind of stewardship, not only for the desert itself, but for the relationship with the townspeople.

00:52:39.100 This is an activity that gives meaning to these families over a long period of time.

00:52:47.020 So, it's, they're basically taking care of something, and fully invested in it, and fully responsible for it, and for themselves.

00:52:57.680 And that struck me as a, very much what Tocqueville was describing.

00:53:01.600 But as you, yeah, you said that we've lost that, because now we have organizations that just tell you all the rules, take care of everything, and it's convenient.

00:53:09.400 But in the process, you lose, you're like de-skilling yourself in a way to, that allows you to govern, or take part in the democratic process.

00:53:18.340 So, self-government, I think you can think of that in at least a couple of different ways.

00:53:24.420 One is just self-command.

00:53:27.440 So, self-government can mean the ability to skillfully control your car, the ability to temper your impatience with other drivers,

00:53:38.620 the ability to keep your attention directed to the road in the face of multiplying distractions.

00:53:45.080 And on the other hand, I think self-government is a question when you're talking about who gets to decide what sort of regime of mobility we're going to have.

00:53:58.600 And these two different senses of self-government kind of are, they imply one another.

00:54:05.040 So, for example, if we're so distracted behind the wheel that we're already driving as if our cars were self-driving,

00:54:12.580 I think that suggests, you know, we need some benevolent entity to step in and save us from ourselves

00:54:19.120 by automating the tasks that we're no longer capable of doing for ourselves.

00:54:25.060 So, I guess my book is an attempt to kind of defend everyday practices and the forms of intelligence that are on display in them,

00:54:39.120 if you look closely, and say that, in fact, we're pretty good at cooperating and improvising when we're left kind of to our own devices.

00:54:52.820 Now, this is not simply a libertarian argument because one thing that's most impressive to me on the road is the kind of social trust that you see.

00:55:04.520 And that's not a concern you see much articulated by libertarians.

00:55:09.400 So, for example, if you're leaned into a blind curve on a two-lane country road on a motorcycle,

00:55:17.360 it becomes very clear that the road is a place of mutual trust.

00:55:22.500 And I think that's one of the most interesting things about it.

00:55:27.020 So, I guess I'm trying to understand this fragile thing while it still exists in sort of little pockets of daily life like driving.

00:55:36.420 And maybe such pockets can hold clues that could guide our hopes for the renewal of social trust more broadly.

00:55:46.720 Well, Matthew, where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

00:55:49.900 Well, the book is called Why We Drive, and it's just out, and it's sold wherever fine books are sold.

00:55:58.340 Yeah. So, check it out.

00:56:01.060 Fantastic. Well, Matthew Crawford, thanks so much for your time. It's been a pleasure.

00:56:04.180 Yeah, thanks for having me, Brett.

00:56:05.400 My guest today was Matthew Crawford. He's the author of the book Why We Drive.

00:56:09.060 It's available on Amazon.com and bookstores everywhere.

00:56:11.280 You can find out more information about his work at his website, MatthewBCrawford.com.

00:56:15.540 Also, check out our show notes at aom.is slash whywedrive, where you can find links to resources,

00:56:19.900 where you can delve deeper into this topic.

00:56:28.400 Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM Podcast.

00:56:30.840 Check out our website at artofmanliness.com, where you can find our podcast archives,

00:56:34.400 as well as thousands of articles we've written over the years.

00:56:36.340 And if you'd like to enjoy ad-free episodes of the AOM Podcast, you can do so on Stitcher Premium.

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00:56:49.240 And if you haven't done so already, I'd appreciate it if you take one minute to give us a review on Apple Podcasts or Stitcher.

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00:57:00.640 And until next time, this is Brett McKay, reminding you not only to listen to the AOM Podcast,

00:57:03.860 but put what you've heard into action.

The Art of Manliness - June 15, 2020

#619： What Driving Tells Us About Agency, Skill, and Freedom

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