[S]Car

Society can be destroyed when further growth of mass production renders the milieu hostile, when it extinguishes the free use of the natural abilities of the society's members, when it isolates people from each other and locks them into a man-made shell...

Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality

They paved paradise and put up a parking lot.

Joni Mitchell

There are two things that I can recall from the depths of my being that have relevance here. The first is my grandmother at my grandfather's funeral telling a young five or six year old wide-eyed boy to always mind his health, that health was everything. The second was a little later in life, as a teenager, and my father offering me some sage advice: Never ever buy a car Michael, it will bleed you dry.

It's only now, some forty odd years after the first incident and perhaps thirty or so after the second that I realize how well I received those seminal 'offerings', and how they managed to seed themselves in me and grow.

To be sure, I have driven cars, and been prammed across the land like most people. In fact I used to love driving, as a twenty something who was very much under the motor car's spell of speed and power and dislocation; not to mention, comfort, ease, status, and convenience.
It was only however when I started living and working in other countries (Qatar, Libya, Saudi Arabia) with far worse road accident records than my own, that I realized just how brainless and moronic cars, and the act of being carried, were. It woke me up to the great age of conveyance that we in the west are currently embroiled in. We are conveyed physically as well as mentally. The success of the automobile (or the all-polluting pram if you prefer), is proof enough of this.
Indeed, one's brain suffers remarkably when one gives up one's locomotive force. Locomotion itself is the basis for cognition, its locative and navigational component the basis for memory: I move therefore I think; I locate therefore I remember: remembering as a re-limbing of the open circuit of Being.

When one abandons one's locomotion, one abandons also one's ability to 'think on one's feet'. One interferes with the open circuit of Being, deliberately closing off channels, and thus impeding the flow of local forces and the recognition of a profound chthonic insinuation. As John Bliebtreu writes in The Parable of the Beast:
Electrically and chemically, the world flows through us as we flow through it.

Yet if we do not flow, if we allow ourselves to be carried and prammed... the consequences are biblical. The wits and the wherewithal of the live exuberant entity are the first to go, followed soon after by a critical vision of the world we have made for ourselves. As the paths in our modern world become paved and standardized so too do the pathways in our brain. No longer able to see into or hearken (attributes of a brain tuned into natural commotion), we become like infants, kept in an almost permanent state of pre-maturity: gullible, impressionable, noisy and egocentric.

It's a vicious spiral downwards: the less wits and wherewithal people have, the more readily they buy into being prammed and carried.

Cars are not just the number one source of carbon emissions in many places but they are the biggest killer of our children. Cars directly kill more people than wars (including the oil-wars fought to keep us in cars) whilst indirectly killing many more. 1.25 million people die because of cars each year. 

Never before have humans been this unhealthy, and most of it is down to the car. Not only does the car promote a loss of the locomotive but it promotes too the loss of the local. It allows us to traverse a greater distance than before without the need for our locomotive force, thus dis-locating us and removing us from 'place'. It also allows to carry more stuff, consume more, and generally circumvent Nature's healthy alternatives. The car allows us furthermore to erase space by disembodying us quite remarkably from it. Yet, place, and any spirit thereof, can only truly be felt through the open circuit of Being, not through screen and speed, and certainly not through pollution and noise.

More worryingly, the loss of our locomotive force also extends to a loss of our ability to locate, since the concrete floggings across our tarmacked land now indicate rather unsubtly where we are headed, without us having to encompass ourselves with natural landmarks and the stars.

In short, the car is not a natural way of moving. It is perhaps the least natural way of moving: mechanical pollutive passive-aggressive moving. Which begs the question, how on earth did it become so popular? Michael Zezima writing in Road Kill: 50 Reasons Why Cars Suck, has some ideas:

The automobile and the lifestyle it inspires have risen to prominence through the power of relentless suggestion. There's nothing delicate about car commercials and car toys and the hundreds of songs and movies that venerate the irrefutable gratification of owning an internal combustion engine of your very own. Like cigarettes, television, and the meat-based diet, cars are profoundly ingrained within modern human existence. It doesn't even register when a movie character hops into a car and screeches away from the curb. We no longer consciously acknowledge the presence of cars on the street, the highway, and in driveways from coast-to-coast...

...The efficacy of the car culture is based upon a façade, on billions of dollars of advertising, on the insecurity and gullibility of humans living in a society that feeds on and cashes in on insecurity and gullibility. 

Some forty years before Zezima wrote that, Ivan Illich wrote this:

The typical American male devotes 1600 hours a year to his car. He sits in it while it goes and while it stands idling. He parks it and searches for it. He earns the money to put down on it and to meet the monthly instalments. He works to pay for petrol, tolls, insurance, taxes and tickets. He spends four of his sixteen waking hours on the road or gathering his resources for it. And this figure does not take into account the time consumed by other activities dictated by transport: time spent in hospitals, traffic courts and garages; time spent watching automobile commercials or attending consumer education meetings to improve the quality of the next buy. The model American puts in 1,600 hours to get 7,500 miles: less than five miles per hour. In countries deprived of a transportation industry, people manage to do the same, walking wherever they want to go, and they allocate only three to eight per cent of their society's time budget to traffic instead of 28 per cent. What distinguishes the traffic in rich countries from the traffic in poor countries is not more mileage per hour of life-time for the majority, but more hours of compulsory consumption of high doses of energy, packaged and unequally distributed by the transportation industry.

So, not only have we established that you're just as quick walking, but we've also established that relying on high doses of external energy to power us is unsustainable. The car in other words with its whole panoply of add-ons is a disaster in the waiting. The world cannot sustain every adult driving a car or being carried in some form of pollutive external-energy-consuming transport. That much is clear. So why do we celebrate it? Simply for the wealth it creates for the few, and who, with this wealth, glamorize and sell the car as a necessity of living.


Yet, the car is possibly the least essential item on anyone's list. There is always a non-pollutive alternative. As a cyclist whose bicycle wheels have over the decades melded with my legs, I am deeply aware of how much better the bicycle is on every level compared with the car. Everyone knows this, not just me. But it's testament to how weaned we have become on the car (and not the bicycle and our own steam) that we are all ferried about in pollutants and celebrate the fact. We convince ourselves that it gives us independence and freedom, but these are just words advertisers and manufacturers use to ease our deep-seated guilt that we are all complicit in the desecration of our environment. If you want freedom, cycle; walk. If you want independence (or even interdependence), use your own steam. Grace emerges out of this galvanizing of Being. The car, on the other hand, as a pollutive carrying device that divests, distorts and divides, is one of the most disgraceful inventions ever. Saints cycle, madmen drive. Grace cannot enter via a pollutant. To enter a car is to hold hands with a known serial killer. 

Conversely, a bicycle engages; it galvanizes. It creates 'you' as you pedal. Even at a leisurely pace a slow cyclist will cover 6-8 miles an hour, a speed that would appeal to a trotting camel. Endearing, open, inviting, and curious, a cyclist will always attract the attention of children precisely because the cyclist is open, and is there. A car driver by contrast is absent, is not there. Even in a convertible a car driver will be sealed behind speed and screen, and pollution, not to mention a huge hunk of metal (and his ego). There is no screen between the child and the cyclist. 

In allowing his self to be carried at speed, a passenger in his own body - man, the car-driver, has thus miniaturized the world, and in so doing made his pollutive 'footprint' inarguably bigger. 'Participatory democracy', writes Illich in Energy and Equity, 'demands low energy technology, and free people must travel the road to productive social relations at the speed of a bicycle'.
Man no longer gathers his self through his own locomotion, collecting and recollecting as he goes. To 'gather' for modern man means to be brought together by vehicles. Yet, to gather can only be done through your own energy. Togetherness, thus, is a function of organic forces not mechanical ones. This may explain why the western world is forever in conflict in spite of its supposed affluence: its practice of gathering has been infected and deformed by the machine. Yet, if man cannot gather together naturally, he will forever remain alone and 'vivially separate'. This is the state of modern man: a vivisected entity who has designed his own aloneness and dementia through abandoning his locomotive force to a life-destroying pollutant. 

Car is short for carnage, never forget that.

My small contribution on Bell's Bridge to raising awareness of the monster hidden in plain sight.