Sometimes I get into a bit of argument with folks online over what kind of activity driving is. People who love cars view driving as a serious matter—one hopes so, anyway—but also as a hobby, a recreation, or just an entirely normal, morally neutral thing. Like cooking or gardening, or like getting around some other way. Whether or not to ride the bus or drive your car is just a question of preference and convenience.

On the other side, some urbanists view driving as almost immoral—something a little bit wrong. They focus on the death toll of driving and on pollution. They see driving as a selfish act, particularly in places where it’s optional. (Most of them understand that in most of America there isn’t really a choice.)

I’ve thought about this a lot, from the starting point a few years ago of what I think is probably the average American: are you “urbanists” and bike people out of your minds?

The idea that driving could have any moral valence at all would have seemed self-evidently absurd to me. Only a lunatic or a commie would believe something like that. “Traffic violence”? Oh, so that’s what you call 1-2 deaths per 100 million miles driven!

But as I’ve thought about all of this over the years, I’ve arrived at a different view. I don’t see driving as immoral or selfish, exactly. I go in a subtly different direction: I see it as a kind of vice or—at best—a potential vice, sitting right on that line.

In particular, I think you could understand driving as akin to something with which you should never do it: drinking.

Alcohol in and of itself is morally neutral, I suppose. But it is very, very easy to abuse. Drinking can be done responsibly, but it takes judgment and effort. Some people, for whatever quirk of their psychology or biochemistry, find themselves unable to drink responsibly. Their only choice, as they come to understand it, is to abuse the stuff or to abjure it. Despite its costs and difficulties, alcohol can be conducive to good things, but it isn’t a good thing, and it isn’t good for us. At best, it is a neutral thing which, when used cautiously, can have good outcomes.

It is something to which the human character is weak; it requires a certain mastery to do it responsibly. Or as I like to distill it: there are some things which can only be used responsibly by resisting their nature.

And I’ve just described driving as I’ve come to think about it.

I think it’s impossible to deny that getting behind the wheel does something to your psychology: seeing that speedometer stuck at 20 when you know it can go to 80 or 100 or 120, sitting in traffic when you can see the road ahead of you, just missing a traffic light. I think the frustration this produces is the “drug” of the car working on us, more than it is a fully chosen attitude of the motorist.

And so I suppose I would say, don’t hate the driver, hate the car. But I don’t mean that I hate cars, or want to ban them. I mean more that the average motorist should think much more deeply about the psychology of driving: about the immense responsibility it entails, the frustration it seems to produce, the temptation it raises to behave badly and in a way that endangers ourselves and others.

It is possible to drink often and also responsibly. (I like a nice beer or a glass of wine with dinner—so do millions of Europeans, and their approach seems in some ways healthier than ours). But I always try to keep some little reminder in the back of my head that choosing to consume an alcoholic drink is…a thing, an event, a choice. Not something to do completely casually or mindlessly. Not something to do for no reason at all.

One of my friends back in college used to stop drinking very deliberately at some point in the night, and he’d say he didn’t want to become an alcoholic. You either are or you aren’t, I’d tell him, and if you can choose to stop, you’re not. So go ahead, have another one! (I was teasing—I respected that attitude and I tried to do the same thing.)

That’s how I think we should think about driving—about operating a deadly, immensely powerful machine. You can drive. You can own a car or two or three. It isn’t a sin. But it might be a vice, and that’s not quite the same thing.

Master it—tame it—and if our minds cannot abide that, maybe we should really think twice.

Related Reading:

The Menace of Cars

The Near Occasion of Speeding

Always Treat A Car Like It’s Loaded

Speeding and the Eucharistic Prayer

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