Parte the Seconde: Autogeddon II

July 2002

'I regard Henry Ford as my inspiration'. This succinct and rather
chilling quote came not from a motor racing connoisseur, nor from that
permed, jacket and jeans-wearing wit (or is it git?) Jeremy Clarkson.
Nor was it your brother polishing his new Escort. The originator was
none other than Austria's most infamous son and eternal symbol of the
entrepenuerial spirit (at one stage he was a tramp!), Adolf
Hitler.

Let's face it, there is something contradictory about our relationship
with the automobile. We love the concept of reaching what our forebears
saw as 'mad speeds' simply by increasing foot depression on an
innocuous pedal. We love turning up the radio and charging down the
motorway with the wind in our hair. We almost drool when we see our
longed for, favourite model cruising past us (or any model, as long as
its new). Driving cars represents the ultimate in favourable
effort-to-effect ratios, it is instant gratification in a nutshell.
When we think of our cars we think 'let's drive to Mexico!'
The change in human outlook and the sheer scope of human relations
affected by the increasing prevalence of the motor car since 1885 has
truly been startling.

Hitler intended his remark to be interpreted quite differently. If the
outlook of humanity was becoming more ambitious and governed by the
possibilities offered by speed, it was also becoming more
individualistic. By its very nature the car enclosed families in boxes
of steel and transported them to their friends and relatives in a
comparative instant. If the human beings of the 'thirties were attached
to communities, there was a growing sense that these communities could
be chosen to a certain extent. Gone forever was the pre-industrial
lifestyle governed almost entirely by walking and by slowly evolving
relationships with the same thirty or forty people. The car seemed like
the ultimate blow to a slower, gentler and perhaps more humane and
thoughtful mode of civilization.

As our blood pressures have soared along with the scope of our travel
plans, we can reflect that to a certain extent the car was divorcing us
from our human selves. Hitler undoubtedly concluded that if one can
divorce mankind from himself, in both a cultural and a materialistic
sense, one can divorce him from other men. Community has been one of
the greatest losses of the twentieth century, and individual motorized
transport is the chief suspect. Toffler stated somewhere in his 'Future
Shock' (1974) that what often made the modern world so ephemeral and
unreal to so many was the proliferation of geographically dispersed
individuals one deals with in an average working day. Human
associations - even to a certain extent familial ones - have become
fleeting and businesslike, and the onerous task of commuting to work
has separated us even further from our homelives, which should be rich
and fulfilling.

In a more straightforward sense Hitler viewed the auto industry as the
epitomy of the kind of highly industrialized, Totaliatarian society he
strove to create. In Henry Ford's factories the future mass society was
laid bare, with workers reduced to unthinking cogs in a vast and
forbidding production line. The development of the 'masses' from the
early twentieth century was greeted by onlookers and protagonists alike
with a mixture of fear and awetruck excitement. Mass production
developed to feed mass markets, with a mass culture to entertain them
and mass architecture - occasionally aesthetically pleasing but mostly
hideous - to house them. Mass solutions to the century's real and
perceived problems, chief amongst them fascism and communism, came to
prominence with horrifying speed and violence.

One would like to think that mass thinking became terminally ill in
1945 and died after a long and depressive illness with the Berlin Wall
in 1989, but this is not so. Through proposals for nationwide
road-tolling and the increasingly aggressive persecution of the mildest
exceeders of the speed limit, the Government is blaming motorists en
masse, as it were, for the ecological damage and yearly death toll
(roughly 3000 in the UK) wrought by the automobile. This kind of
liberal arrogance transfers blame away from architects, road-builders
and capitalist profiteers for the destruction of that hub of civilized
urban activity since the Middle Ages, the town square, by concentrated,
out of town shopping complexes reachable only by car. Apparently it is
also our fault that local industries and cultures have disappeared over
the years. Driving from shop to shop and commuting to work are
obviously so joyous and desirable that we have brought them about
democratically!

Road-tolling will simply not work. It is draconian, punitive,
ill-thought out and un-ecological. Car exhaust fumes are at their most
ecologically damaging when the vehicle is stationary with the engine
switched on. The move will not price drivers out of their cars - it
will simply increase the sum total of stress and hardship for ordinary
working people. Many drivers would undoubtedly prefer to 'let the train
take the strain' but the prospect of boarding a British train seems
pretty unbearable, even for a regular victim such as the present
writer. The rail network has succumbed to the same malaise the affects
the roads - profit before society and ecology. Since the Thatcherites
broke up British Rail and turned the enterprise over to profit-seeking,
buck-passing mutual back-slappers such as Virgin and First North
Western (I speak from bitter personal experience!), passengers have
been beset by 'temporary' delays that in time drift into permanence,
and carriages so unhygienic as to be a threat to public health and
safety in the legal sense.

Perhaps the depressing state of transport in the UK will spark some
urgently needed debate on the desirability of endless motorized travel,
although such a debate would make those in power uncomfortable to say
the least, as it presupposes that Englishmen reclaim their homes and
communities from the distant bureaucrats and profiteers of Whitehall,
Brussels and the Global Corporations of Washington and Tokyo. We need
to consider some of our wisest philosophical forebears and
contemporaries. Power should not eminate from far away legislative
offices, but from our own back gardens, for the protection of
individuality, privacy, family life and humane culture generally;
against the grandiose, centralized harbingers of bureaucratic
regulation, brutalist and profit-mad architectural planning and
draconian laws. We need to re-capture something of ourselves from the
hyperactive careerist rush hour aesthetic that dominated the previous
century.