I'd Wreck That

toward a theory of everything

I passed a city bus yesterday with FACE COVERING REQUIRED flashing on the front, driven by a guy in a mask. Yes, April 11, 2024. I was on my way to the bookstore to pick up a copy of Matthew B. Crawford’s Why We Drive: Toward a Philosophy of the Open Road, a book I can’t believe I just noticed, and the timing turned out to be perfect.

Crawford is writing about the way we train our minds and develop social knowledge, and he discusses driving as “this one domain of skill, freedom, and individual responsibility.” We’re losing it. Maps require us to figure out a route; smartphones direct us. Self-driving cars render us passive, carried along like sacks of flour while a machine decides how to get there. Memory also seems to bridge place and action, as our brains store what we did in the context of where, so the development of the car will get us there disconnectedness threatens our sense of time and the structure of our internal narrative. We won’t have to do things, or pay attention, and we’ll get a little hazy.

And so Crawford says that he’s writing against “technologies that tend to enervate, and claim cultural authority in doing so.” I sat up a bit, because the theme of enervation has been on my mind all the time. (Maybe you’ve noticed.) Then he dropped the line that tied a bunch of threads together in my — hold on a second.

Sorry, wrestling over a book. Then he said, about the protests and popular movements of the years leading up to 2020, when the book was published, that “these movements are partly a response, at once spirited and rational, to a creeping colonization of the space for skilled human activity.”

How beautifully he says that. And it opens so many doors with a single statement.

Fifteen-minute cities will help us fight climate change by restricting our movements to reduce our carbon footprints. Trans kids are being empowered by the permanent medicalization of their sexual identity, with a lifelong connection to a professional support team. The move to mandatory electric cars, and then to mandatory self-driving cars, will control the climate and reduce traffic, and you won’t have to worry about driving anymore. The decline of birthrates will free people from the burdens of parenting. Your ninth dose of the Covid vaccine will make you safe. You should listen to the experts and realize that five years is much too soon to stop wearing a mask.

Yes, I saw a whole family — mom, dad, two young children — in N95s today, at the store. We’re very safe, now, and taking good care of our bodies.

The common theme in these arguments, which tend to group among the same adherents, is debilitation. We’ve developed a particular politics, an ideological cluster that tends toward the reduction of adult function, the narrowing of the appetite for risk, and the growth of dependency. The purpose of a system is what it does; ideologically, we have a political orientation that can be called debilitationalism, because every view advanced by the faithful has the same effect. Safetyism is the system, debilitation is the result, and debilitationalism is the ideology.

Debilitationalists believe that systems and institutions take care of people, and so people are obligated to primarily protect institutions and systems. Setting aside the meaning of human agency and individual rights, they focus on the science and the authorities and the experts, categories that blur. They are externally directed, gratefully.

Debilitationalists believe in science more firmly and with less effort as scientists express more urgent doubt. See, for example, via John Carter:

Carter writes that “Hossenfelder sees quite clearly the structural problems in academic science,” and she’s not alone. The incentives are broken, hijacked and politicized, and let the NSF show you what science is becoming:

Good science is translational. Engaged research focuses on transforming societal benefits in a governmental context. See what that means? But the science nonetheless has tremendous authority; it’s important to believe in it, because it offers external control in a language of outsider-excluding authority. It debilitates; you can’t argue with it. It offers liberation from personal agency and the task of making an argument, from “the domain of skill, freedom, and individual responsibility.” It frees you by directing you.

Look for the narrative glue, in politics and in media, of the promise to free you from burdens and to offer you support. It’s the language of our emerging politics: the politics of debilitationalism, “a creeping colonization of the space for skilled human activity.” And it’s actually, literally dehumanizing.

So go drive a car.