America's Next Motorcycle Philosopher?

In 1974 a fictionalized account of writer Robert Pirsig’s 17-day motorcycle trip with his son in 1968 hit bookstores after surviving 121 rejections, and quickly became one of the all-time surprise publishing hits. Connecting with audiences all around the world, Pirsig could soon claim to have authored the top-selling philosophy-themed book in American history, selling over 5 million copies. This was despite the fact that even its fans rarely knew how to describe the book, with New York Times reviewer Christopher Lehmann-Haupt concluding that whatever its philosophical worth, it was “intellectual entertainment of the highest order.”

Author Matthew Crawford has a bestselling book with a motorcycle, too, although the red BMW R 90/6 on the cover of Shop Class may not be quite as well known yet as the Honda CB77 Pirsig wrote into the Smithsonian. Crawford has been praised for writing a “sleeper hit” and has a connection with Zen, too — see below — but otherwise he’s a very different kind of writer. His Substack site Archedelia contains essays that range from the intensely practical (“Spiritedness and self-reliance: Or, why the automatic bathroom faucet makes you want to punch something”) to the broadly contemplative (“Old cars and the logic of dispossession: Big green wants you to offer a sacrifice to the gods”). Crawford is a source for both information about things like EV development and analysis of the logistical and ideological origins of new tech reforms.

One hesitates to buttonhole him into any category, but Crawford’s texts are a good fit for Substack, as he’s both iconoclastic in tone and hard to pin down politically. A line from his recent “Old cars” piece stood out. “Green,” he writes, “has become an edifice of political legitimation for politicians whose survival no longer depends on ‘performance’ in any pragmatic sense, but on aligning themselves with a grand moral project.” He won us over with his diatribe against automatic faucets: “Why should there not be a handle? A handle works every time.” Our media has gotten so strange, the obvious feels forbidden, making stuff like this a relief to read.

Racket asked him to help readers understand what they might find on his site:

Racket: Tell us about yourself?

Crawford: I started working in the trades at an early age, first as an electrician’s helper. When I couldn’t get a job with my physics degree, I went into business for myself doing electrical work, illegally. My fliers said “Unlicensed but careful.” After more education (a Ph.D. in political philosophy), I took a job at a DC think tank and hated it. So I quit and opened a motorcycle repair shop in Richmond, VA. I’ve often felt more intellectually engaged and challenged doing work that was not officially “knowledge work.” Trying to understand why that was the case led me to write Shop Class as Soulcraft, which came out in 2009. To everyone’s surprise, it was a bestseller. I then wrote The World Beyond Your Head and Why We Drive.

Racket: Why did you start writing on Substack?

Crawford: My sense is that the guardrails on what is regarded as saleable, or even permissible, have been drawn closer in the big, New York publishing houses. I could be wrong about that, but in any case I was drawn to Substack as a venue less subject to the supervisory gaze of a culture industry that increasingly feels like part of the consent-manufacturing machinery.

Also, this is a moment when the ground is shifting under our feet very quickly. So I am thinking of my Substack, Archedelia, as a messier book that unfolds in real time, addressed to a self-selecting audience that doesn’t first have to pass through the filter of a publisher’s guesses as to what people want to read.

Racket: In your three-part series on modern automobile culture, you describe our society’s increasing reliance on others to do what we once did ourselves. Worse, you note that if others can’t fix it, we’re incentivized to throw the whole project away. Do we need to fix that? 

Crawford: You can criticize that throw-away mentality on environmental grounds, and I’m glad people do. But the case I want to make is different. It’s really about the learned helplessness of our material culture. There is a tacit moral education that gets carried along by technology. It often feels like the modern personality is getting pushed in the direction of passivity and dependence, and this is construed as progress. The ideal seems to be that, in the name of convenience, we will be relieved of doing anything at all. At some point, the whole world begins to look like one big “assisted living” facility.

Racket: How exactly does a taillight repair end up costing over $5,000? We used to hear about that from the Pentagon only.

Crawford: That’s crazy, right? It is a result of complexity leading to brittleness, where a single point of failure can lead to cascading problems. Today’s cars may have as many as 70 different computers that must interact, so each subsystem is exposed to the others.

But one has to ask, why have cars become so complex? I don’t think it is in response to consumer demand. I trace it so an engineering mentality of “do-something-ism:” becoming enamored with the possible and losing sight of the basic criteria of function, which were fully met by automotive technology some decades ago. The proliferation of electronic bullshit is marketed in the same idiom I described above: we should be maximally uninvolved with the task of driving.

If you ask why, this ideal always gets defended in egalitarian terms: think of all those people whose necks are too stiff to turn their head and check the blind spot! (That is why we need a radar blind spot detector, located in the tail light housing, which is sure to get cracked and let in moisture, leading to a $5k repair bill.) For the same reason, one must have “trailer back-up assist.” Occasions for the exercise of judgment and skill are to be eliminated. If you criticize this, someone at Wired will call you a heartless Luddite, unconcerned with the least among us. The thing is, 71 percent of Americans have savings of $5k or less. This is some pretty expensive compassion. Salvage yards are full of cars that are in good condition in every other respect, but are underwater on repair costs due to electronic complexity.

Racket: What’s behind all these “cars for clunkers” programs? Is there a scam there that the public isn’t aware of? 

Crawford: These began in the 1990s, first as a PR project by petroleum companies who were facing mandates to reduce emissions from their refining operations. Instead they proposed to destroy thousands of old cars, on the premise that older cars are “gross polluters.” This was never empirically established, but it is how we got the concept of pollution abatement credits that can be traded. Today, perfectly serviceable cars are being destroyed to usher in the EV future. The renewable energy sector is a curious case of an industry lobbying operation that sprang up and claimed massive subsidies before the existence of an actual industry to support.

One result is incentives to turn in a “clunker” that may get 35 mpg and be serviceable for another ten years. Nowhere in the calculus of this kind of “energy Lysenkoism” is the environmental cost of making all these new cars taken into consideration; it is the throw-away mentality dressed up as Green piety. And of course, there is little political will to upgrade the electrical grid and increase generating capacity, as one would need to do to accommodate all these EVs, even in California which has mandated their adoption.

Racket: What’s your beef with automatic faucets? Or is the right question, who doesn’t have a beef with them? 

Crawford: Show me one person on this planet who prefers them. They seem contrived to break the connection between a person’s will and his environment, as though he had no hands. Waving your hands under the faucet, trying to elicit a few seconds of water from it in a futile rain dance of guessed-at mudras, you feel like you are being punked. Why should there not be a handle? A handle works every time. Instead we are asked to supplicate invisible powers. And this is somehow progress.

It’s true, some people fail to turn off a manual faucet. With its blanket presumption of irresponsibility, the infrared faucet doesn’t merely respond to this fact, it installs it, giving it the status of normalcy. There is a kind of infantilization at work, and it offends the spirited personality.

Racket: Didn’t Ted Kaczynski warn that we would eventually become indentured to our own inventions? He wasn’t right, was he?

Crawford: Of course he was right. If you prefer a more respectable source, Hannah Arendt’s first husband was named Günther Anders. He spoke of “the rising cost of fitting man to the service of his tools.” And Ivan Illich, the renegade Catholic priest, spoke of the “radical monopoly” that comes about when we come to depend on opaque, complex systems to do what we once did for ourselves. This leads to an atrophy of skills and a degradation of the human spirit. And these guys were writing before the advent if AI, which takes things to a new level.

Racket: Apologies if you get this a lot, given your clear love of both motorcycles and philosophy, were you influenced at all by “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”? What do you think of that book? 

Crawford: Pirsig was maybe the first to bring a counter-cultural reflection on technology to a mass audience. I had the honor of writing a preface for the 50th anniversary edition of Zen, which is just out. A comparison is often made between Zen and Shop Class, but I think it is fairly superficial. I liked the bits about motorcycles, and the narrative of the road trip.

Racket: You describe how car manufacturers are always on the lookout for ways to eliminate the “weak link” — people, and their judgment. Do you see this as applicable in the wider context of the Internet age, and if so, what are the implications of that in a society going forward?

Crawford: Human beings are spoken of as being essentially inferior versions of computers, and therefore the weak link in any system. To pick just one example, human beings are said to be terrible drivers — that is why we need driverless cars. The first thing to know is that the push for driverless cars is not in response to consumer demand; it is a top-down effort. When Pew polls people about their attitudes on this, majorities express reservations about autonomous cars, and many people say they prefer to drive themselves.

There was a case where a Google self-driving car came to an intersection with a four way stop. It came to a stop and waited for other cars to do the same before proceeding through. Because apparently that is the rule it was taught. But of course, that is not what people do. So the robot car got completely paralyzed, blocked the intersection, and had to be rebooted. Tellingly, the Google engineer in charge said that what he had learned from this episode is that “human beings need to be less idiotic.”

Let’s think about that. If there is an ambiguous case of right of way, human drivers will often make eye contact. Maybe one waves the other through, or indicates by the movements of the car itself a readiness to yield or not. It's not a stretch to say that there is a kind of body language of driving, and a range of driving dispositions. We are endowed with social intelligence, through the exercise of which people work things out among themselves, and usually manage to cooperate well enough.

Tocqueville thought it was in small-bore practical activities demanding improvisation and cooperation that the habits of collective self-government were formed. And this is significant. There is something that can aptly be called the democratic personality, and it is cultivated not in civics class, but in the granular features of everyday life. But the social intelligence on display at that intersection was completely invisible to the Google guy. And this too is significant.

There is profit to be had in remaking the world so there is less room for the exercise of human intelligence, including social intelligence. When the Google guy said that human beings need to become less idiotic, he meant, “More like computers.” That is, more legible to systems of control, and better adapted to the need of the system for clean inputs. This is the soft despotism Tocqueville warned us of, an “immense, tutelary power” that wants only what is best for us. Like Nurse Ratched.