(Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

Matthew Crawford believes driving can be a way of being free. Driverless cars and smart cities suppress the human need to steer one’s own life, even at some risk to oneself and others. Like much in contemporary society, they consist of cleverly engineered schemes aiming to replace fallible human judgment by algorithmic certainty. There may be fewer crashes on a smart motorway, and therefore less death and injury. But any significance driving may have had for drivers has been drained away by making their agency redundant.
Applied across our lives, such schemes may deliver a narrowly defined goal of increasing social utility. At the same time they deplete our lives of meaning, and thereby of value for us. Driving is not just a means to the end of getting from one place to another. For many people it is, or can be, an important part of the good life. “To drive is to exercise one’s skill at being free,” Crawford writes at the close of Why We Drive, “and one can’t help but feel this when one gets behind the wheel. It seems a skill worth preserving.”
The case for taking more risks
A research fellow in the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia and a motorcycle mechanic, Crawford first presented his philosophy of human action in The Case for Working with Your Hands: Or Why Office Work is Bad for Us and Fixing things Feels Good (2010; published in the US as Shop Class as Soulcraft, 2009). He developed his account most systematically in The World Beyond Your Head: How to Flourish in an Age of Distraction (2016), where he mounted an attack on what he described, provocatively but to my mind accurately, as “autistic freedom”.
In this view, which Crawford finds prefigured in Immanuel Kant’s understanding of rational autonomy, human beings are free to the extent that they are not exposed to contingency and accident. But such an idea of freedom requires an imaginary separation from our bodies, which are inherently accident-prone, and from the instinctive responses for dealing with their fragility that are built into them. Environments designed to eliminate danger from our lives impair abilities that are essential to our humanity. The need for security and risk-control is real enough, and at times overriding. But displacing human skill and agency does not always enhance safety, and when applied across society it has the dystopian effects to be expected from a technocratic ideology.
Applying this critique, Crawford is sceptical about schemes to prevent reckless driving. In one of many fascinating asides, he notes that though there are no speed limits on much of the Autobahn network in Germany, the country has one of the lowest rates of traffic fatalities in the world. The fact has an interesting backstory. In the 1930s, when the autobahns were being built, the Nazis abolished speed limits. Instead a “traffic community” would practice “chivalry” and “obedience”, and restrictions would no longer be needed. But after the adoption of the Reich Highway Code in 1934, German traffic fatalities spiralled to become the worst in Europe. By 1939 speed limits were back in place.
The lesson of the experiment, Crawford writes, is that “a traffic community cannot be created by fiat. It has to grow organically over time, as it depends on social norms that have worked their way into people’s dispositions.” This is partly a matter of individual traits such as restraint and self-control, but also involves recognising similar traits in other drivers. Low rates of fatal accidents in systems without speed limits require a community in which drivers understand and trust one another. To be sure, not the supposedly innate racial or national community the Nazis imagined. Germans had to learn how to drive fast safely, and did so in the civic order that was reconstructed during the post-war peace.
Lying behind schemes that seek to eliminate risky driving, Crawford suggests, is a dream of harmony. In support of this view, he quotes a passage from Michael Oakeshott:
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
Subscribe