Engineering and Freedom, Part 7

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It is given among most retailers (especially the large ones) that December is “break-even” month. Not only do most retailers rely on Christmas to make money; they also fail to make money at all other times of the year. 

This must mean they have to borrow money to stay afloat all year, with the promise they’ll pay it back after the buying season. The larger meaning is that a significant portion of the consumer economy could not endure, based on the "normal" patterns of consumer behaviour (i.e. purchases made for oneself, rather than gift-purchases). 

It is only through the bourgeois potlatch tradition known as Christmas, where people compete to spend more money in giving than in receiving, that the consumer sector is as broad as it is. 

This concerns also the trend toward the replacement of the term “holiday” for "Christmas" in annual displays and advertising. This is a trend that began a decade or more ago, when public schools, citing large non-Christian minorities and the separation of church from state institutions, cancelled Christmas pageants, or substituted them with “holiday” concerts in which traditional Christmas themes were absent. 

The attempt by businesses to ignore the religious basis of the “holidays” is aimed to demolish entirely what remains of Christmas as a time to practice the best of Christian values - that is alms for the less fortunate, and love of one’s kin and neighbours. It is true that, as some argue, Christmas is coincidental with some of the other major religious holidays, including of course Hanukkah, as well as the Hindu “celebration of light.” 

However, the tradition in December of gift-giving is Christian, if not in origin, then in practice. While Hanukkah, for example, involves gift-giving, it is of a far less ostentatious and sombre variety than what is seen in all but the most fundamentalist of Christian homes. 

Throughout modern times, the conspicuous consumption identified with December 25th was leavened somewhat by the regard given to Christian values, if only formally. The disuse of the term “Christmas” in “holiday” advertising serves not only to bury the religious value of gift-giving, it seeks also to co-opt the traditions of other religions, as well, by making their winter holidays consumer-oriented. 

As stated, the very construction of the mass media was dependent not on market demand, but upon the subsidy of industrial and (to some extent) state interests. The author Richard Sennett, in his book, Flesh and Stone, compares the experience of driving an automobile to that of watching television:   

It is one result of the great urban transformation now occurring, which is shifting population from densely packed urban centers to thinner and more amorphous spaces, suburban housing tracts, shopping malls, office campuses, and industrial parks ... this great geographic shift of people into fragmented spaces has had a larger effect in weakening the sense of tactile reality and pacifying the body. This is first of all because of the physical experience which made the new geography possible, the experience of speed. People travel today at speeds our forbears could not at all conceive. The technologies of motion — from automobiles to continuous poured-concrete highways — made it possible for human settlements to extend beyond tight-packed centres out into peripheral space. Space has thus become a means to the end of pure motion — we now measure urban in terms of how easy it is to drive through them, to get out of them. The look of urban space enslaved to these powers of motion is necessarily neutral: the driver can drive safely only with the minimum of idiosyncratic distractions; to drive well requires standard signs, dividers, and drain sewers, and also streets emptied of street life apart from other drivers. As urban space becomes a mere function of motion, it thus becomes less stimulating in itself; the driver wants to go through space, not to be aroused by it. The physical condition of the travelling body reinforces this sense of disconnection from space. Sheer velocity makes it hard to focus one’s attention on the passing scene. Complementing the sheath of speed, the actions needs to drive a car, the slight touch on the gas pedal and the brake, the flickering of the eyes to and form the rearview mirror, are micro-notions compared to the arduous physical movements involved in driving a horse-drawn coach. Navigating the geography of modern society requires very little physical effort, hence engagement; indeed, as roads become straightened and regularized, the voyager need account less and less for the people and the buildings on the street in order to move, making minute motions in an ever less complex environment. Thus the geography reinforces the mass media. The traveler, like the television viewer, experiences the world in narcotic terms; the body moves passively, desensitized to space, to destinations set in a fragmented and discontinuous urban geography. (Richard Sennett, Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization, New York and London ,W.W. Norton and Company, 1994, pp. 17-18.) 

No artefact has done more to effect social estrangement than the automobile. That is why it is not only sold, but actually designed, as a corporate technology. Automakers create cars as much as statements of their users’ status and character, as for any strict engineering purpose. 

The automobile industry could never sustain its great capital, promotional and labour expenses simply by making a product affordable to the everyman. To pay for itself, the automobile industry has used every avenue of persuasion, from the traditional (the used-car salesman) to the ultra- modern (broadcast advertising and constant “improvements” in makes and models), to keep sales growing year after year. 

The ad industry grew with the auto sector in a mutually reinforcing curve. Modern advertising’s reliance on the iconic and the irrational suited perfectly the auto industry’s use of visual and superficial styling to sell new cars by making older models appear prematurely obsolete. 

The marketing industry would not have achieved its present economic status without the billions spent on advertising by the auto industry. The auto-makers’ promotion of the car was not restricted to the commercials, either. 

Car companies have always provided, free of charge or at low expense, their products to commercial television producers. The relatively meagre losses this incurred were worth, literally, millions of dollars in free publicity to auto firms when some well-known fictional character was seen driving around in their respective makes and models each week. 

The extent and identity of the thorough reformation of society as wrought by motor transport remains undocumented because advertiser-subsidized broadcast and periodical media are an integral part of these vast changes. 

Beyond the fact that the commercial mass media were from the start substantially underwritten by auto companies (not to mention oil-refiners), the media industry would be greatly diminished were it not, for example, for the easy availability of motor vehicles to transport personnel and equipment from studio to location and back again. 

The utility and legitimacy of the motorcar itself is not questioned by the mass media, only the efficiency and “safety” of motor vehicles as a consumer product. The media are unconcerned with the inherent lack of safety of the automobile — that there is no way to avoid the thousands of deaths and injuries caused by car accidents each year — not because of their active complicity with auto or oil companies to censor these facts. 

Rather, it is that the automobile is so essential to the media industry itself, that the machine’s full effects remain invisible even to the people who are supposed to portray or report on society. The public at large thus never has had the chance to get the “big picture” of the car. 

Broadcast technology is thus crucial to the operation of the modern engineered city. Radio listeners are never more numerous than during so-called “drive-time,” when people are looking to be apprised of weather and traffic problems that could be disruptive to a smooth journey to and from work. 

Television sets have only recently started to be placed in automobiles, but broadcast TV has always played a key role in allowing people to overcome feelings of alienation that inevitably arise in the low-population-density settlement of modern urban areas. Since World War II, city-dwellers have adopted “virtual” relationships with their favourite TV actors and hosts as a substitute for real interaction with friends, neighbours and relations. 

To the engineers of the modern city, people without cars are a problem to be dealt with, like dirt in the parts of the machine which must be regularly cleansed to keep the system working. 

Large groups of people collected together, whether for protest demonstration or community festival, stops road traffic from moving entirely. Urban planners have designed the buildings, chiefly shopping centres and the like, which serve the automobile-city by keeping pedestrians away not only from automobiles, but also to prevent them from enjoying any spontaneous contact with one another entirely. 

That today’s urban-dwellers are then forced to find counterfeit social contact through broadcast media such as radio or television, only reinforces the means of social estrangement in the first place. The mass media are technologically complementary to the automobile. 

The car is a means of public conveyance that is also a powerful extension of the private sphere. In his Psychology of the Car, author Peter Marsh noted that people have built rooms for their cars — garages and car ports, and while driving, they pick their noses or apply lipstick, as though they were at home. For millennia, the private has been a space in which people disrobe from their public personae and try to “be themselves.” If this involves the indulgence of baser, “naked” emotions, so be it, so long as normal decorum is replaced once the private goes the public. The cabin for an automobile’s driver and passengers is also a private space, one which encourages analogous behaviour. Normal inhibitions against reacting to public misbehaviour, as occurs with people on the street or in a public building, are minimized within the motorcar. 

Graphic and audio technologies, on the other hand, are public media which are (usually) experienced privately. In the engineered society, as Marsh notes, an individual can live, work, shop without ever stepping onto public property. 

Electronic media ensure that what is public is consumed privately. The lynchpin holding together machine-engineering with electronic-media is advertising and marketing. In fact, the apparent differences between the private and public interest have been obscured through marketing and advertising. 

Government bureaucracies, traditionally drab and unbending, have taken to market research as a way of targeting their “real clientele.” Communications between governments and citizens increasingly take the form of advertising, just as elected politicians never really cease to campaign. 

Big business, on the other hand, has sought to remake itself as a purely altruistic player, through selective, highly-publicized charitable donations, by plastering their brand names on worthy initiatives for the underprivileged, and by paying big bucks for the advertising which employs a folksy and stirring score over beautiful imagery to dull the audience to the realities of the commercial world. 

However, commercial broadcasting has always been a vast, on-going market research survey. The livelihoods of those in the industry depend on the word of a thousand or so households carefully chosen to reflect the demographic makeup of much larger populations. The job of the “representative sample” is to simply and tediously fill out market surveys every few hours or so, giving answer as to which programmes they’re tuned to, which commercials they’ve seen, how many and who are in the room, what are their age groupings (15-24, 25-34...), and so on. 

This is in turn is the make-work for many more people than most might suppose. It was when the decisions were made to commercialize broadcasting media that the information economy was conceived. The owners of mass media had no other choice but to make it happen, if they wanted to know which of their offerings the audience actually listened to, and thus what fee could they charge their customers, the sponsor, to pay for its production. 

For radio or TV, the audience could never be something that was seen or heard, and instead became packets of data passed back and forth for profit. The audience became literally the object or “entertainment” of the mass-media industry, the great crowd whose tastes had to be partially-divined. The value of market research became apparent in short order, and public-relations grew around figures and firms associated with the mass media, like politicians, the media companies and, of course, the industries that use broadcasting to hawk their stuff. The computer industry in the 1960s got a big boost from public and private bureaucracies seeking to crunch all the data they’d been collecting from their market research. A greater proportion of the people in Occidental countries likely have more private information on file with marketers than did the Stasi have of the population of East Germany. 

Part 8 of Engineering and Freedom 

Engineering and Freedom, Part 4

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The motorcar, universally emblematic of freedom, is in fact a very subtle form of social control. 

The automobile could not have achieved its dominance over society and culture without the active intervention of the state in the free market. The industry was pioneered in Detroit, U.S.A., without government assistance, but most auto companies have required direct subsidy or indirect intervention (such as trade tariffs) by the state to keep afloat, and this includes present-day American automobile makers. 

The state also subsidizes the automobile market through road and traffic infrastructure, policing, health care, insurance, and so on. The car industry thrived under the command economy, as much as the capitalist; the Lada, Trabant, Yugo and other Eastern bloc models were reputed as unreliable deathtraps, but this was true also of many of the automobiles produced in capitalist Detroit (ie. the Ford Pinto). 

In the 1970s and ‘80s, the best-quality cars came out of Japan, where the state intervened massively in the civil economy. If motorists in the United States, Europe, Japan or anywhere else, were required to pay for the actual costs of motor transport, including the expense of road infrastructure and insurance from accident, theft and so on, very few people would be able to afford an automobile. 

For decades, economists have been talking about “over-capacity” in the automobile industry, which is to say, there have long been too many cars produced for what is demanded. 

Nevertheless, dirigiste states have viewed the automobile sector as a strategic for trade and “multiplier effects” on other heavy industry. This view prevailed even in the “free market” U.S., where the federal government stepped in to save Chrysler corporation from bankruptcy in the late 1970s (and has, of course, done so again in the last year for General Motors - and Chrysler again). 

There is, no question, a mass market for automobiles, but one which could not exist without the support of the state and “society” for any length of time. In many jurisdictions, the cost of insurance for driving is directly or indirectly subsidized by the state, which entails statutory restrictions upon damage rewards in case of accidental death and injury, in order to make it affordable to many or most drivers. 

Without this subsidy, and associated legal exemptions, the expense of insurance alone would make driving prohibitive to most people. In every country, mass automobile ownership is a result of state planning and intervention. 

Automobile-manufacture is a very precarious for-profit venture, as the fate of hundreds of now-defunct car companies attests. It is estimated that in the early twentieth century in the United States, there were more than hundred automobile makers. A few years later, there were just four. Many auto firms which exist today have faced bankruptcy more than once, and would not be in business without the “charity” of government loans or straight nationalization. 

Car-making is very capital intensive, and requires economies-of-scale in order to be profitable. But this output is met with disappointing sales over even a short period of time, insolvency is inevitable. 

Due to the great operating expenses, bankruptcy can be the fate even of car companies with “popular” models, especially those considered of “good quality”, which are naturally more expensive to produce. 

Auto companies have introduced yearly “models” and invested heavily in advertising, to encourage obsolescence and “trading-up”, to keep sales artificially high. Car ownership itself is a very expensive proposition. There is not only the cost of the vehicle itself, potentially tens of thousands of dollars in the present day. There is also the cost of gasoline, insurance (even if subsidized), maintenance, and of course, depreciation, which renders the machine quite useless and need of replacement in a short few years. 

People bear these burdens, not because they can reliably use the car for its stated purpose, getting from here to there (which is in fact reliably frustrated by traffic gridlock and breakdown), but because it is a necessary prosthetic for living in the modern, engineered society. Such is the rationalization of the environment and people’s lives, that the costs of car use (and much else) is assumed as a staple expense. 

The automobile demonstrates how engineering is often inimical to social and economic liberalism. The automobile could not have reached dominant status without regulation of the market and of society by the state. It diverts material resources, both from the household and from society, that could be more use economically elsewhere. 

In fact, very few of the modern, sophisticated media of communication are economical in terms of liberal supply-and-demand theory. Joseph D’Cruz, a respected analyst of the airline industry at the University of Toronto, has said that as a business proposition, an air carrier is too risky for the rational investor. According to D’Cruz, most airline entrepreneurs have been motivated not by riches, but by a love of flight. Recently, it was calculated that, in the aggregate, the global airline industry has never made a profit. 

There have been profitable air carriers, but the number of unprofitable airlines has been greater. Thus, the airline industry is as massive as it is for one reason: public subsidy. Governments have chosen either to provide grants and “loans” to private airlines, or formed their own state airlines, because it is believed strategic or prestigious to have a “national carrier.” 

The airline industry is the perfect example of what is properly known as corporatism or state-capitalism. Airline entrepreneurs could rarely hope to maintain themselves as going concerns, were not governments willing to underwrite some or much of the cost of airlines for their own purposes. 

Consumers were happy, in turn, to be provided a mode of communication, the fastest yet available to humans, that only a relatively few of them could afford, if airlines were actually run like any other business. As airlines, under government ownership or protection, expanded routes, so too did a large, professional workforce develop around it. 

This workforce became unionized at every level relatively quickly, and as such, the airline pilots’, mechanics’, flight-attendants’, air-traffic controllers’ (and other) unions provided an effective lobby for the continued state subsidy of the industry itself. 

Certainly, in the last twenty years, governments throughout the world have sold off their interest in airlines, or desisted from subsidizing carriers’ business operations. Historically, the airline industry demonstrates that subsidies create their own demand, a market that can be sustained through the continued application of the subsidies. 

Unlike most sorts of economic demand, consumers of markets created by state-subsidy tend to become politicized, seeking to preserve state support by organized lobbying. Thus, airline unions throughout the world have always stood against the privatization and deregulation of airlines. The ostensive reason for this is a professed interest in public safety or technological progress. 

In fact, airline unions (like all other unions) prefer to deal with monopolistic or duopolistic concerns, which are easier to negotiate with, or taken action against, than are markets with a large number of competing players. Unions are themselves a form of monopoly, so that workforces in the markets created by the ultimate monopoly, the state, are everywhere unionized in far greater proportion than workforces in the commercial marketplace. 

If, in the past, governments had always practised laissez-faire with regard to the airline industry, there would scarcely have been an industry — beyond a few heavily populated world centres — extant today. It wasn’t that there was no demand for air travel. 

Rather, the cost of air travel itself would have been too great for most, for the convenience of moving across land and sea at a fraction of the time of any other mode of transport. Airlines are services that are also vast technological complexes, requiring the industrial-style coordination of large numbers of flying machines. As such, the great expense of operating an air carrier can easily cause it veer into unprofitability, debt and insolvency, even where business remains brisk (as was the case with Pan-American airlines of the U.S. during the 1990s, and more recently, Swiss Air). 

The airline industry stands as an exception to the rule that scale leads to cost-economies. Both Pan-Am and SA were global air carriers, and doubtless, at least several other airlines (such as American and United airlines in the U.S.) their size would also go bankrupt if all government supports were removed from them, too. On the other hand, regional airlines have been more profitable than not. 

For example, WestJet, which operates out of Calgary, Alberta, has always turned a good profit. Regional airlines tend to get into trouble when they attempt to become national or international carriers. This happened to the former Canadian Pacific airline, also headquartered in Calgary, when it transformed itself into Canadian in the 1980s, to take on Air Canada as a cross-country airline. Consumers benefited from the ruinous competition between the two airlines — until they merged, after which the ticket prices for Air Canada skyrocketed. 

Even profitable global airlines, such as British Airways, make relatively poor profits (especially when compared to their capital expenditures), and not rarely do they lose money. Airplanes are a means of global communication, but it seems that the greater in size do airlines become, the less economic sense they make. 

It is worth pondering the advice given, with regard to the aviation industry, by Warren Buffett, the “sage of Omaha” whose holding company, Berkshire Hathaway, trades stock worth hundreds of dollars more than the stock of most companies it invests in. 

Buffet said not merely that a prudent investor should have ignored the first airplane flight: he said the whole idea of air travel should have been shot down. The aircraft industry, in Buffett’s view, is not merely a bad investment. Its progress has actually destroyed capital. 

This is why the aviation industry has always been dependent on government subsidy, in one form or another. Aircraft technology itself underwent innovation, as it was used to fight both world wars. All sides had by the second World War, developed prototype jet aircraft, which underwent further development during the Cold War. Most airlines started life as government corporations. 

In the United States, airlines were not government concerns, but nevertheless depended on government subsidy in one form or another. Pan-American airlines, which started life in 1927 as a small Florida carrier, became a national concern through a monopoly charter to deliver U.S. air mail. After it became a passenger service, Pan-Am petitioned Congress for years, unsuccessfully, to be granted exclusive rights to all overseas travel from the U.S. Its main competitor, Trans-World Airlines (for years operated by the whacked-out mogul Howard Hughes) fought against such a move, but it too was dependent upon government subsidy, selling materiel to the U.S. defence department. 

The U.S. airline industry was deregulated in the 1970s, allowing foreign carriers into the American market. After not many years, both Pan-Am and T.W.A. went bankrupt — in each case, in the aftermath of an terrorist attack or catastrophic accident. Pan-American chief Juan Trippe (an aviation buff and Great War flying ace) was correct, if self-serving, to argue that competition in the airline business would be ruinous. 

In any event, aviation technology continues to be dependent on government largess, in the United States (where the main manufacturer, Boeing, has lucrative contracts with the defence establishment), and Europe, where government subsidies are not in the least controversial. 

Boeing and Airbus have designed and constructed “super-airliners” that can seat hundreds, but that have no market due to the costs involved in operating them (part of the recent economizing of the airline industry, as noted by the New Yorker, involves reducing the not only number of aircraft, but their size as well). 

The progress of the passenger aircraft into faster-than-sound travel, was entirely dependent on government subsidy, in its basic research and development (for military jet-aircraft), onto its commercial operation with the Concorde. 

Early on, the Concorde (a British-French concern) was prohibited from flying between American destinations, due to worries that the high-flying craft would damage the ozone layer, and more particularly because most U.S. airports did not have adequate runways to handle supersonic craft, and also because American aerospace firms were not as advanced as the Europeans in passenger-supersonics. In any case, the Concorde was never a successful commercial venture. 

Being too expensive for too little utility (going across the Atlantic in two hours instead of five or more), it remained luxury-symbol of the super-rich. Concorde, too, went bust after an accident in Paris in 2000. In the present day, regular air travel stands accused of contributing to the greenhouse effect, not the least by the eco-chic jet-set. Environmentalists are wont to blame free-market capitalism for pollution and global-warming. 

With the airplane, as with so many other engineered networks that cause pollution, the active intervention of the state was necessary for the technology to be developed. Politicians, reflecting public concern, have proposed taxes on air travel, as a way of discouraging “excessive” flights. That is, they intend to tax a service that people have already paid for through taxes. 

The airplane was developed mainly in order to literally destroy capital — in the two Great Wars and many others. But even in peacetime, the airplane had the effect of destroying capital, both private and public in origin, by the fact that it has never paid as a business proposition. 

Part Five of Engineering and Freedom 

Engineering and Freedom, Part 3

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The automobile has advanced scientific and social engineering, to the expense of personal freedom and privacy, in less obvious ways. 

In particular, as the immediate effect of the car was catastrophic, it was the ground for institutionalization of medicine and medicare in Western societies. Prior to the twentieth century, hospitals were for the old and young, the only people that tended to be habitually ill. However, most people up until the nineteenth century were born, and died, at home. 

When Abraham Lincoln was gunned down in Washington in 1865, there were no special facilities to aid the stricken top elected official of the United States. He was simply removed to a nearby townhouse, where he died several hours later. Victorian times saw a great boom in hospital-building, partly due to advances in medical science, partly due to the evangelical fervour of the time which encouraged Catholic and denominational sects to spend money on mercy houses to save the souls of the damned of the new bourgeois society. Indeed, most hospitals in Western Europe and North America existing today trace their origins in one form or another to the nineteenth century. 

During the first decade of the twentieth century, newly-institutionalized (but not yet socialized) medicine began to encounter the results of the internal-combustion engine: automobile accidents. Westerners today, when travelling in Africa or Asia, always marvel at the reckless drivers they encounter there, but the early auto-age in every country invariably sees a sudden spike in the death rate, as drivers drive heedless of other drivers. 

At least the newer-modern countries have the benefit of the Occident’s initially blind attempt to develop a communications system organized around motorized transport. Conveniences like street markings and stop-lights are relatively recent things, however. In North America, automobile ownership became a mass (but not majority) phenomenon in the teens of the century, a decade or so prior to this happening in Western Europe. 

When, by the ‘20s, most North Americans had access to a car, the rate of death by accident reached catastrophic levels. Today, with improvements in automobile design, policing and road safety, the number of road deaths is lower in absolute numbers than 80 years ago, even though the number of cars on the road, and the number of hours driven per capita, have increased many times since then. 

At first, however, the social response to the casualty rate on the roads was to set up emergency facilities, adjunct to the traditional hospitals. The now-fabled E/R physicians and the departments in which they worked were more than anything responsible for the socialization of medicine. Emergency rooms were at first run for a fee, but the injuries received through automobile accidents could result in astronomical medical bills. 

Soon enough, health insurance was invented to take care of the middle- and upper-classes. This left many people, even relatively comfortable people, without access to medical coverage. Further, as demand for medical professionals increased, the corpus of knowledge that was necessary to learn in order to be legally qualified to practice medicine expanded, the expense of health services steadily increased. 

At the same time, the E/R remade hospitals into facilities used by all members of the community. A hospital emergency room, prepared to treat accidents, could hardly turn away those with other life-threatening conditions, too. And what about those with catastrophic injury who, as it happens, could not pay their bills? How would admitting nurses know if a person did or did not have insurance coverage? Often hospitals would receive bad press when they turned deathly sick or injured children or women away for lack health insurance. 

In any case, the deprivation of the old and poor of on-going medical care came to be seen as a scandal throughout the “civilized” world. Nevertheless, it was less this controversy over health-care access that initially got the state involved in subsidizing health care. Rather, the hospitals themselves, weighed down by the cost of providing emergency care, came to depend on government hand-outs to keep afloat. Many hospitals were saved from closure during the Depression by direct take-over by government. 

After the Second Great War (where emergency medicine was further enhanced in battlefield hospitals), the involvement of the state diminished the profit-motive in emergency and general hospital care, and as governments assumed the medical debts of those unable to pay, the demands for them to assume those who could pay (barely) increased. 

In most places, state-subsidized health care became the norm. Even the “free market” United States could not resist state medicare, and that country’s failure to introduce universal coverage (with "Hillarycare" in the mid-1990s) has less to do with popular distaste for it, than the determination of the for-profit health sector to prevent their nest egg, that is, partial coverage for the poor and the elderly, so they can go on making big bucks charging high fees to others for the relatively meagre care they offer in return. It is not coincidental that the age of emergency-medicine has been the great era of the advance of medical knowledge. 

The emergency room was a dandy way for physicians to gain experience of all sorts of weird injuries and maladies. Medicine was traditionally ineffective because people viewed the body as a temple, filled with all sorts of magical essences (necessitating, for example, the practice of bleeding to “get the humours in balance”). E/R doctors and surgeons had no choice but treat the body as a live cadaver if they wished to save lives at all, and the injuries to most every part of the anatomy became the domain of countless specialist practitioners. 

The new role wrought by the emergency room, that of the doctor as habitual life-saver, has converted a once semi-dreaded professional into the beau of the single world, and self-regarding mortal deity, too. The indifferent and haughty style of the emergency-room doctor, who has little need of bedside manner, was imported elsewhere into the medical profession (most doctors at least train or spend their first few years practising in emergency wards). 

Today’s demand for “alternative medicine”, that is, medicine that runs directly counter to conventional medicine’s treatment of patients as body parts, was reflected decades ago in the lament over the loss of doctor’s house calls, when physicians mostly eschewed this form of treatment as inefficient. 

The impetus for all this was the invention and diffusion of the automobile, a device that not only requires state intervention in civil society in order to be functional in the first place; it inspires yet more interventionism as a "side-effect" of its use. 

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Part 4 of Engineering and Freedom

Engineering and Freedom, Part 2

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The author and journalist Tom Wolfe was among the luminaries who were asked by Rolling Stone magazine at the end of 1999 to name the most significant invention of the twentieth century. Wolfe’s reply: “The German engineer Gottlieb Daimler's invention in 1885 of the first small, high-speed internal-combustion engine. Daimler's engine made possible the car, the truck, the airplane — the tank, the ballistic missile and the rocket. Without Daimler's engine, there would have been no world wars, no atomic bombings, no threat of worldwide nuclear destruction, no space exploration, nor, for that matter, any Vietnam War. Such were the minor byproducts of the man's genius. The serious business has been the explosion of families, communities, entire populations. Just about everyone who wants to now ups and leaves, gets in the car, the truck, the bus, the airplane and says goodbye to home, hometown, hometown restrictions and that old-time religion. More than all the ideologues, philosophers and cynics combined, it has been Daimler's engine that has led to people discarding religion so casually and blithely you can't even give them any such somber, knit-brow name as `atheists.’ Thanks to Gottlieb Daimler ... you're outta there! Nobody can any longer look over your shoulder. After all, which did more to get the sexual carnival rolling, the pill or the drive-straight-to-the-room motel?" (Tom Wolfe quoted in Rolling Stone (December 30, 1999/January 6, 2000): from Internet site http://www.mit.edu/~yandros/doc/collection.txt, November 1, 2001) 

The motorcar, of all internal-combustion devices, has done the most to reorder and re-engineer modern culture and settlement. The automobile is a private possession that is also used as a public conveyance. In order to accommodate this private, but mobile possession, the public (ie. the state) has become involved in various kinds of structural and social engineering. 

The most obvious effect of the automobile has been its transformation of cities from dense, centralized places into highly dispersed, decentralized “cores” surrounded by suburbs. Suburbia came about not only because the car made lengthy daily commuting possible. The noise, dirt and danger of automobiles forced the “sub-division” of cities, such that residence was far removed from work, and work far removed from leisure, leisure from residence, and so on. An unanticipated effect of the shift to low-rise building, due to the automobile, was that it made possible “wheelchair-accessibility.” 

The geographical specialization and spread encouraged by automobile communications, has made everyone a paraplegic, such that dependence on a prosthesis, the motorcar, is essential to getting around. This is how the car became a staple of modern life. Rural parts have been affected as much, or much more, than the urban, by the car. In the twentieth century, internal-combustion technologies (including farm equipment) caused the massive centralization of farm-holdings and small-town settlement. 

For decades, possession of an automobile has been essential to participation in rural life (a disproportionate number of Model-T Fords were sold to farmers), such that country folk are as helpless as city slickers, even more so, when deprived of this feat of modern engineering. 

For country people, the automobile has been a boon. Urban-dwellers experience the true drawbacks of the automobile the most of anyone. The car is supposed to be a utility, a method of “getting from A to B,” but motorists in larger cities are reliably frustrated in this simple goal by the fact of other motorists, their number and their behaviour behind the wheel. 

Traffic jam and gridlock are an inevitability, one that is only temporarily relieved by the construction of new roads and highways, which only encourage further dependence on automobile communications, and thus, further gridlock. Cars effect paralysis when they malfunction and break down, as they frequently do. When breakdown occurs before destination, the motorist is left with the inconvenience not only of stranding, but also of worry about the now-useless prosthesis dead on the highway. Gridlock and breakdown have also created a new sort of crime, “road rage”, countless incidents of law-abiding citizens, when stuck in traffic, lashing out violently at other motorists or pedestrians. 

This kind of aggression is provoked by the necessity of identifying each motorist merely as a car. The private enclosure of the automobile prevents the normal course of society from taking shape in the car-dominated milieu. 

Thus it is that motorcar-mores must be enshrined in law for the most part, and subject to strict enforcement by police patrol. Freedom from arbitrary questioning and detention by police was a hard-won right in liberal societies. There is no legal obligation for people to carry identification when in public, but as the car is an essential instrument in contemporary society, every motorist not only must possess proper certificate at all times, but produce it on demand when stopped by police on the road. 

The car is a private possession, although its function as public transport brings it into the realm of the regulatory state. As such, people in liberal societies have subjected themselves to a degree of control by government, traditionally seen only in authoritarian societies. 

The car breaches the traditional line between public and private in other, more paradoxical ways. The automobile furthers state intervention into the very bodies of people in modern society, and it simultaneously diminishes the “republican” (that is, what belongs to the public) character of any community it dominates. 

There is a prosperous community in Fairfax county, Virginia, near Washington, D.C. Thousands work there, at many upstart and well-established firms belonging to the new economy. Some live there. Yet, to borrow a phrase, there is no there there. Literally: on any map, it is just a particular freeway interchange. The automobile has made it acceptable for people to work and even live in places where there is apparently nothing resembling what is known as “civic feeling.” 

But then, why should there be? In the “Five Corners,” as this business park has come to be known, the prospective patriciate — the business leaders who were the engine of city incorporation during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries — have no real motive to form an actual an town or city because they already are as barons in their own domains: they are undisputed, often dictatorial, masters of their workplace offices and “campuses,” virtual small towns to themselves. 

Civic feeling is missing among New Economy executives in the Five Corners because the service environment of the car, with its large parking lots and giant expressways, minimizes psychological connect between people who merely happen to work and live in proximity with each other. 

In the commercial/high-tech “parks” that take up more and more land space at the edge of every North American city, there is a discernable lack of comfort for going anywhere without one’s car. Since driving to the next building or two over would seem wasteful, and few wish to walk there, it is often the case in these industrial parks that the closest neighbours remain as strangers except through occasional telephone call or e-mail. Pedestrian traffic is utterly discouraged in the high-tech parks, which rarely bother to construct sidewalks. 

The parks are often financed by a consortium of the firms that locate there, which also construct their own individual office buildings to be convenient only for those coming and going by car: exterior pathways lead only to the parking lot, with the outlying street accessible only by a driveway, for example. Given that geography organized around the car leads to such an estrangement of pride in and belonging to one’s community and fellow citizens, New Economy firms have moved in to provide the leisure and even marketplace needs of their employees. 

All but the dinkiest of companies these days includes at least a small kitchen with a fridge and adjacent dining area for the comfort of employees, and the firms of the information economy, especially - the ones most likely to locate in industrial parks great and small - tend go a lot farther in catering to their employees’ needs. The Ottawa headquarters of Nortel Networks, for example, is a virtual (in the older sense) community to itself. 

However, it pales in comparison to the services offered by the edge city firms in the U.S., such as those located in Fairfax county, Virginia or Silicon valley, California. Edge city companies have sought to make the workplace as homey, as domesticated as possible, as compensation for the lack of society of industrial-park culture. They make it comfortable and ergonomic for employees so they don’t mind as much working the twelve and fourteen-hour days demanded by most high-tech firms. 

One can ask, if most people in the New Economy spend most of their waking hours at work, and if their social network is composed mainly of people with whom they work, do they actually “live” at their homes or at their workplaces? 

The domestication of the work environment is seen everywhere around the new-style firm: from the loss of honorifics for superiors, so that everyone down to the custodial staff is addressed by first name only, to the adoption of casual office dress, to the ritual of distribution and signing of birthday cards, to work-related “retreats” in the woods or in the mountains, to workplace courtship and extra-marital liaisons. 

All this was unheard-of for the vast majority of employers a century or even fifty years ago. Camaraderie among colleagues and co-workers has been a feature of work life for all time, likely. But the spirit that existed among co-workers in former times, as compared to today, tended to be as exclusive and non-domesticated as possible. 

Until recently, of course, the sexes rarely mixed in the workplace, and so associations which naturally developed among craftspeople of either sex were exclusive of the other, and thus not domesticated. The majority of people employed right outside the home, that is men and boys, wanted to make their workman’s associations as undomesticated as possible. 

The modern bourgeoisie in particular mastered the strict division of the domestic and professional life, a split that was reflected often in the personalties of members of the middle class (schizophrenia is often referred to as the “middle-class disease” for the disproportionate number of sufferers who come from that background). It was, ironically, the automobile, a result of the bourgeoisie’s industrially-based civilization, which put private life into obsolescence as it proceeded to domesticate the social environment completely. 

The very fact that the car is private property, and very expensive at that, creates constant demand for its use. The environment of the automobile (which includes everyone whether they drive a car or not) is thus reorganized to assume a domesticated form. The car extends in a limited way the creature comforts of home, and so people come to demand such comforts outside the home, too. 

The standard-model automobile, whether mini-van or sport-utility vehicle, is itself beginning to appear more and more like home. But even more humble cars are now built with ergonomic cup holders, cushioned seats and standard cassette/compact disc players, to approximate the home as much as a car can. One new line of mini-van even includes a digital television set mounted on the back of the driver’s seat. 

The paradox of the car is that while it extends vastly the geographical reach of what is formally called “public,” it simultaneously diminishes opportunities for true public contact between people. 

The car reversed the bias of Western society from privacy and relative economic autonomy to state intervention in the personal and social lives of all people. Property rights and bodily integrity were abridged by the automobile through the vicissitudes of highway construction and highway accident-inspired emergency medical care. 

The current bureaucratic control of public education is also in large part a result of the motorized transport, in the form of the school bus, the only vehicle on the road that can, by itself, legally block traffic coming behind it. The humble school bus, practically on its own, closed the local schoolhouse, shipping kids off to one- or two-thousand student primary and secondary schools that could only be governed by ever-expanding “administration.” Now, rural and small town kids receive much the same education (or at least the same form of operant conditioning) as do urban kids. In this sense, rural folks have become as urbanized as actual city kids, just as the urban environment itself has become domesticated. 

 The automobile has created a catacomb world where the public has been refashioned to appear as much as possible like the private, while the incursions of the state and public into private life are everywhere but go mostly unobserved. The world of the car isn’t all for bad, in spite of what its critics may believe. The very act regulating traffic, in terms of zoning laws and so on, has created beautiful, safe neighbourhoods that the average worker can afford. And the suburbs are not just great collectivities of square boxes full of people made square by their living in such a homogeneous environment. Nevertheless, the “edge” civilization of modern times is entirely dependent upon engineering, the greater part of which in turn is dependent on regulation and subsidy by the state. 

Part three of Engineering and Freedom