Last week, NR played host to a lively debate about self-driving cars. It began with Luther Abel rejecting (with limited exceptions) Jordan McGillis’s praise of autonomous vehicles. This earned him a stern rebuke from Mark Wright, whose appropriately anecdotal rant lamented all the wasted hours of commutes, as well as a dissent from Rich Lowry, who noted that past sticks-in-the-mud have romanticized forms of travel we now consider obviously outmoded. Looming over it all was the wry specter of Kevin Williamson, who argued that debating the pros and cons was pointless: We are fools if we “think that the social engineers of the future are going to give them a choice about it.” In this prognostication, he was preceded by Charlie Cooke, who in 2017 predicted that “at some point in the future, be it years, decades, or a century hence, the federal government will seek to ban driving,” and thus proposed a constitutional amendment to forestall the possibility. And on the first episode of The Editors this week, Rich briefly revived the debate by praising Mark’s response to Luther.
Kevin and Charlie are, at the very least, right to be worried, and Charlie’s proposal is worth enacting. The car has been a bugbear of progressive planners for decades. During the high-speed-rail bonanza of the Obama administration, George Will explained why:
Forever seeking Archimedean levers for prying the world in directions they prefer, progressives say they embrace high-speed rail for many reasons—to improve the climate, increase competitiveness, enhance national security, reduce congestion, and rationalize land use. The length of the list of reasons, and the flimsiness of each, points to this conclusion: the real reason for progressives’ passion for trains is their goal of diminishing Americans’ individualism in order to make them more amenable to collectivism.
To progressives, the best thing about railroads is that people riding them are not in automobiles, which are subversive of the deference on which progressivism depends. Automobiles go hither and yon, wherever and whenever the driver desires, without timetables. Automobiles encourage people to think they—unsupervised, untutored, and unscripted—are masters of their fates. The automobile encourages people in delusions of adequacy, which make them resistant to government by experts who know what choices people should make.
In the future, the self-driving car will distinguish itself from mass public transit only by the fact of ownership. But, as Kevin rightly notes, there is reason to worry that the self-driving car will lend itself quite well to top-down directives that will further elide this distinction. “Wait until you tell your car to take you to someplace the Man thinks you shouldn’t be going, and it replies, ‘I’m sorry, Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that,’” he writes.
There are other objections to consider. Rich is right that sticks-in-the-mud (such as myself) have resisted past innovations and come to look foolish. Sometimes they have done so out of attachment to the old. Other times, more out of fear of the new; Russell Kirk, who never learned to drive, called the automobile a “mechanical Jacobin.” But the driven car may represent a kind of peak of human progress, beyond which we begin to fall back toward older modes of transportation, in spirit if not in form. A car, used properly, is a tremendous source of freedom — and a tremendous responsibility. Prior modes may have required similar responsibility but were less liberating (in that they had lesser capabilities); future modes may be more liberating but entail less responsibility (in that they demand less of the individual, or are less directed by the individual because of increasing technical complexity). How much of the American spirit is tied up in the centrality of the driven automobile to our culture? A great deal of it, I reckon. That is not so easily dismissed.
As for Mark: He is undoubtedly a busy man, and would gain time from the liberation of his commute. I do not doubt that he would use that time productively, as he has in the past. What of others? Technology has already so invaded our lives that the likeliest use for the time driverless cars give us will be to waste it on idle diversions. Driving remains a forced interaction with a reality that many are fleeing. It can be an unpleasant reality, to be sure, and sometimes an outright dangerous one. But it is a reality nonetheless, one we should not so readily discard.
Another point worth discussing is that the driverless car is not being forced on us, and will not be, but is rather being asked for, and demanded. The prerogative of the driver is being eaten away willingly at both ends by technology: Outside the car (and, far too often in it – and even at the wheel), distractions by devices beckon. And within the car itself, technical improvements — automatic parallel parking, blind-spot indicators, rear-view cameras, even cruise control — have gradually chipped away at the responsibility of the driver himself. I would respond to the former by urging a small, healthy dose of Luddism that would reduce driver exposure to phones (now a leading cause of accidents and deaths from driving). And I would accept the latter as means to enhance the safety of the driver experience short of a driverless car itself.
Indeed, despite my exhortation here, I would still be open — in theory, eventually — to a limited incorporation of driverless cars in our lives. I would want us to do so carefully and gradually; as Dan McLaughlin also noted last week, we still have much to learn about this technology and how it would change our society. Again, however, I have serious doubts that a moderate spirit of acceptance will be possible in this matter. This will likely prove an all-or-nothing proposition. Thus, the case for resistance remains strong.
On this, however, resistance may be futile. Already, younger generations are driving less. The freedom — and concomitant responsibility — of driving, and the rite of passage of getting one’s license, are apparently of diminishing value to young people. If the trend continues, then there won’t be much we can do to salvage this aspect of American culture. Laws might not even be necessary to affirm a culture-wide proscription. But if driven cars were ever to be banned, either de jure or de facto, and this literal engine of freedom to be taken away, I like to think I would not be alone in still finding attractive the possibility of riding around in “a brilliant red Barchetta, from a better, vanished time . . .”
