WHY WE DRIVE ON FREEDOM, RISK AND TAKING BACK CONTROL
MATTHEW CRAWFORD Bodley Head, 368pp, £20, ebook £9.99
Philosopher Matthew Crawford is a passionate advocate of living at full-throttle: ‘there is a certain tonic in being scared shitless’. A previous book made the case for ‘working with your hands’ and now he advances the unfashionable proposition that driving cars is really – dangerously – exciting. As Tim Adams put it in the Guardian, Why We Drive is Crawford’s ‘riposte to the future of driverless cars’. It ‘gets under the bonnet of one of the more insidious assumptions of the artificial intelligence revolution: the seductive idea that most people desire ease, passivity, “frictionless” interactions with the world of objects.’
In the Times, self-confessed petrolhead Melanie Reid enjoyed a ‘part portentous cultural philosophy, part funny anecdote, part evisceration of Big Data’. Crawford, she noted, ‘does a great demolition of Big Data’s vision of progress, the “creeping colonisation of the space for skilled human activity”, leaving us more time to scroll our screens’. It’s the passive submission to the cult of safety that is the enemy of human flourishing. As Adams put it: ‘A well-constructed tweet will never provide the satisfaction of a reconstructed gearbox.’
In the New Statesman, Bryan Appleyard thrilled to the trip. ‘This love of cars spills over into Crawford’s philosophy and his politics, which are neither of the right nor the left and certainly not of the centre. But he is a conservative in the mould of his hero, the philosopher Michael Oakeshott. From him he derives an “affection for the present”, cherishing what actually exists rather than mourning the past or aspiring to the future. And nothing has more actually existed for the past 130 years than the car.’