In Defense of “Motornormativity”
Is the automobile a tyrant?
At The Lamp, Jon Day reviews Life After Cars: Freeing Ourselves from the Tyranny of the Automobile by Sarah Goodyear, Doug Gordon, and Aaron Naparstek (AMAZON LINK).
In Life After Cars (the title feels sweetly hubristic; one might as well write a manifesto against air, or the seasons) Sarah Goodyear, Doug Gordon, and Aaron Naparstek call this state of affairs “motornormativity”: the uninterrogated assumption that “car ownership is a magic portal to ease, comfort, and personal freedom.” Even though cars have done “far more collective damage to the world, in terms of death, illness, and environmental destruction, than nearly any other invention in human history,” they write, we seem increasingly unwilling to question their role within society.
In the polite academic circles in which I travel, defending anything with “normativity” in the name is now cause for shaming and cancelling. Because speech hurts. So, naturally, I mostly self-censor.
But when it comes to the car, I cannot be silent.
It came as no surprise to learn that Day is a Londoner, while the authors are all Brooklynites. Cities that hate the car. Cities that are designed to make driving unpleasant, parking impossible, and push everybody into the overcrowded petri dishes they call subways or onto the accidents waiting to happen called bicycles.
But out here in the rest of America, cars are necessary. They are a tool. There’s a reason why more than 6% of all country songs are about trucks. Think of the Ford F-150. For over 40 years it has been the best-selling motor vehicle in the USA. And, for most of that time, it’s because it was the essential working man’s tool.1 It’s a reliable, tough, and highly capable instrument for manual labor. Sure, a lot of wannabes have bought high end editions, but when all the white collar jobs are taken by AI, we’ll all be working jobs where a Ford F-150—or its lesser rivals—will be essential.
But cars are more than just a tool. They are an instrument of freedom.
Bruce Springsteen sang about finding redemption under “a dirty hood,” not while riding Day’s “large cargo bike.” Springsteen’s definitive about finding escape and purpose is Racing in the Street, which is about modifying and racing cars. Tracy Chapman remembers “when we were driving, driving in your car,” not when they went riding on a tandem bike. The Beach Boys sang about the girl who would “have fun, fun, fun. 'Til her daddy takes the T-Bird away.” Not the girl who would have fun until her dad took away her bicycle. Chuck Berry sang about “Riding along in my automobile. My baby beside me at the wheel.” Not about riding along with his girl behind him on a tandem bike.
Songs about freedom and liberation always seem to involve cars.
But let’s switch gears to literature. Day hails his favorite writers—C. S. Lewis, Vladimir Nabokov, Ursula Le Guin2—as being non-drivers.
Fine. I like one of the three myself, although not because he didn’t drive.
But I can throw some names into the other side of the balance: Jack Kerouac’s On The Road (Amazon Link), Sinclair Lewis’ Free Air (AMAZON LINK), John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley (AMAZON LINK).
In closing, Day quotes something Margaret Thatcher supposedly said: “Any man who finds himself riding a bus after the age of twenty-six, … can count himself a failure in life.” I like it.
But I much prefer the wit and wisdom of Jeremy Clarkson:
I will probably get taken to task by the authors and their allies for using a gendered term there.
Listing the authors of Narnia, Lolita, and The Left hand of Darkness as being among the writers he most admires suggests a degree of eclecticism I have difficulty getting my head around.