Driving Responsibility

Thoughts on Ross Douthat's driving essay, and more

For those of you on Twitter, yes, I read the Douthat article.

For those of you not on Twitter, Ross Douthat, a conservative New York Times opinion page writer, wrote an article last week exalting driving and the road trip, and arguing that only by driving can one really come to know the fullness of America.

Douthat’s piece features Matthew Crawford’s book Why We Drive, which I didn’t exactly praise in my review last year:

These types of arguments, if they can be called arguments, are usually made by people who would never actually engage in the behaviors they rhapsodize. At least Crawford, whether splitting lanes in his motorcycle, getting up close to a high-speed off-road race in the Las Vegas desert, or wheedling his way out of his latest speeding ticket in a Virginia courthouse, is willing to put some skin in the game.

But the deeper problem—the problem that this folk libertarianism is congenitally incapable of seeing, much less addressing—is that getting from A to B should not require one to put skin in the game. Crossing the street, or driving it, should not entail a meditation on one’s mortality. Crawford does something that right-leaning intellectuals do often, and almost never notice. They find justifications for hardship or risk, and praise the character that can face them, without distinguishing between natural or inherent risks and manmade ones. They treat policy failures, or problems easily remediated by policy, as opportunities to build character. They betray a touch of self-loathing masquerading as self-reliance. They implicitly view solving problems through policy as cheating one’s way through a life that is supposed to be difficult.

Now Douthat does note that Crawford’s book is frankly a bit over the top, which it is.

Some Douthat now:

Learning to drive as a teenager, even without a full-time vehicle of my own, was a clear demarcation point in the journey out of childhood, a fundamental change in my relationship to the grown-up world. Understanding the places I’ve lived through their roadways, even if I don’t quite have the skill of a London cabby, has always been crucial to feeling at home and responsible, an adult and a citizen embedded in a specific place.

The virtues involved in being a good driver — the mix of independence and cooperation, knowledge and responsibility — really are virtues well suited to citizenship in a sprawling and diverse republic. And if driving makes some people distinctly anxious, learning to do it well, or just well enough, is also a tonic for anxiety, an easily available antidote to the sense that the world is pure chaos, beyond anyone’s control.

If you do not drive your neighborhood or region, what form of adult mastery and knowledge are you seeking in its place? If you do not drive your country’s highways and byways, what path do you have to a nonvirtual experience of the America beyond your class and tribe and bubble?

He ends with a paean to the open road—much as I did here, in an early piece where I talk about how the open road and the tight-knit urban neighborhood are both very much parts of American culture, and neither one is more “real” than the other.