Opinion | What’s Lost When We Give Up Driving

I like to drive. It was a pretty big deal to me, learning to drive in the middle of my teens. A kind of step into adulthood. And this is, you know, it is distinctively American in certain ways. We’re a big country where there’s lots of places where mass transit doesn’t work and driving has always made sense. It makes sense that we have this kind of culture. and this form of adult being in the world. Isn’t something lost, if that is all given up? It is a very American thing. The romance of the road. Freedom, independence, the ability to go where you want and be in control of it. There’s another angle to it: We don’t have in contemporary liberal, liberal America, rites of passage for young people anymore. One of them used to be learning to drive. It was a sign that you were an adult. We trust you with this very dangerous piece of machinery, and when you can do it, we know that you’ve arrived. And it’s also what I suppose a philosopher would call embodied knowledge. You aren’t just a brain. You’re also moving this thing, and so you have to pay attention. You’ve got to have good reflexes. These are valuable things. And yeah, we are on track to see them, probably not in our lifetimes, but sometime in this century, we’re on track to see them disappear or become very minor. And there’s — I mean, I should state the driver’s license as a rite-of-passage phenomenon has already weakened in parts of the United States. And it’s a famous part of the larger story of American teenagers being more risk-averse and going around less in the age of the iPhone. So you can fold this story into the larger story of the kind of screenification, safety-focused screenification, right, of American youth. But that’s the trend. not just of youth. That’s the trend of American life. So we need to solve this somehow. But it shouldn’t be regarded as a special burden of our cars. To solve it for us. We need rites of passage. We need more opportunities to live in our bodies and learn embodied skills. But let’s not say that we’re going to draw the line at driving cars. That seems the wrong place to draw it when they can offer us so many offsetting benefits. But that sales pitch is going to be true for any form of embodied knowledge. Doesn’t embodied knowledge by its nature contain risk and peril. Isn’t that what embodiment is all about. It absolutely is. And all I can say is, if we want driving to make us have full and healthy relationships to the world and to ourselves, I think we’re asking too much of driving.