Driverless Cars=Automotive Vasectomy

by Joe Bissonnette (October 2016)

Cars, single family suburban homes and churches are the physical expressions of much of what is great about America. The hopes and dreams of America divide along the questions of whether churches embody our most exalted calling or our greatest deception, single family suburban homes create a nation of kings or a despoiling blight of soulless zombie dormitories, and whether cars are the shiny armour we wear, a sort of missile we ride like Slim Pickens in Doctor Strangelove, a rigid Freudian spear, a ship of autonomy – well, actually both sides agree that cars represent all these things, the disagreement is whether these are good or bad things.

But the big issue, the automotive Rubicon, is the advent of the driverless car. While GPS navigation might be kind of OK, GPS guidance control is to cars what soviet style concrete high-rise buildings are to single family suburban homes. 

Sure, your apartment might make you feel like a fierce bird of prey perched upon a cliff as you survey tiny humans below, but rather than building community, apartments are famous for the misanthropy of the elevator. Years pass without a word between people who live separated by a mere 6 inches of concrete. Solitary and bored, they stand side by side each day, shuttled up and down, facing sliding steel doors etched with pornographic graffiti as they sleepwalk to and from their stacked concrete tombs. They are physically closer, but in every important way, miles apart. The only civic virtue among apartment dwellers is privacy. 

The neighbourhood of suburban single family homes on the other hand is a vast patchwork of kingdoms. Fences and lawns and flowerbeds and sidewalks, kids on bikes, dogs on leashes, road hockey, baseball diamonds, barbecues and lots of churches. All these things are ordered to both the realization of the family as a vested stake-holding unit and the free but harmonious interaction of individuals and families within the community.

In a similar way there is a Red State robustness as we wear the sleek sexiness of a Corvette, the “can do” resourcefulness of a pickup truck, the big dream optimism of a SUV or the realized virility of a family-size passenger van. The car as an extension of self, ennobles. Sure, the driverless car like the apartment building, has an obvious practicality. It will bring with it lower insurance premiums, fewer road fatalities and more efficient traffic streams. They are an inevitability for the millions who spend hours commuting every day and they may become mobile offices – because of course we can never have too many productive office hours. But the real impetus behind driverless cars is a new opportunity for marketers to monetize. John Baruch writes in Nature: “car manufacturers may find that the information they gleen from tracking the lifestyle of their customers is worth much more than their vehicles.” Many of the big players – Google, Apple and Baidu do not think driverless cars should even have a steering wheel. They don’t even get the car part of driverless cars. They just want to maximize online time for commuters.

To drive a car is to wield 2 tons of lethal steel. It requires clarity and confidence, composure and decisiveness. To drive on a highway is to pass thousands of strangers travelling in the opposite direction, sometimes at a combined speed of 150 miles an hour. It is a daily ritual which enlarges us. We feel power, responsibility and a small measure of greatness. The car is the antidote to the cubical. It stakes out an essential position in what conservatives know to be an intractable tension between the state and the individual. And it has been an integral medium through which the United States, in glorious paradox, has defended the greatness of the individual.

______________________________________
 

Joe Bissonnette teachers Religion and Philosophy at Assumption College School in Brantford Ontario. Joe and France have 7 children.

 

To comment on this essay, please click here.

To help New English Review continue to publish interesting essays such as this, please click here.

If you have enjoyed this essay and want to read more by Joe Bissonnette, please click here.