Over the last decade, much ink has been spilled trying to figure out what it is, exactly, that those who are resistant to progressivism and neo-liberalism—conservatives, classical liberals, post-liberals, integralists, reactionaries, and so on—really want. Of course, in such a disparate group, motives and goals are quite varied. But I’d suggest that one thing that many in this broad political swath want is nobility: more noble communities, which guide one to live a more noble way of life. This term—common in medieval philosophy, but less so today—sums up Matthew Crawford’s vision quite well. Crawford doesn’t call himself a conservative or a post-liberal; in his books, he identifies most with classical republicanism. But he sees something crucial in the modern political landscape: a longing for communities formed around real excellence, which is quickly eroding in the current political and corporate culture.

When medieval thinkers like Thomas Aquinas or classical philosophers like Aristotle talked about noble persons, they had in mind those who are morally virtuous, able to regularly act in excellent ways that lead themselves and their communities to full human flourishing. The noble person is the master of his own actions; he acts in a rational, confident, spirited way, not out of cockiness or to cover his own defects, but because he really does have excellent skills that he can use well in engaging with others. He acts excellently not for his own self-aggrandizement, but because virtuous actions are beautiful, worth doing, worth displaying, and worth enjoying for their own sake. Nobility displays itself in his face, his bearing, his conduct. The noble person can be friends with those who are similarly excellent; even though he passionately needs to excel, he doesn’t need to dominate or assert his power over others, so he can recognize and honor excellence in any other person. The best communities—those that flourish most and are most enjoyable to be part of—are populated by many noble persons. Similar ideas are repeated, for example, in Thomas Jefferson’s idea of an “aristocracy of virtue and talent.”

Crawford shows us nobility, excellence, and moral beauty in places that we might not expect to find them: the demolition derby, the motocross race, the flow of traffic on a highway. In his earlier book, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work, he exalted what he called “aristocratic ideas” like the pursuit of excellence, which leads, perhaps paradoxically, to equality—not the mere equivalence among persons regarded as interchangeable members of society, but the equality of friendship formed around shared pursuit of goods. What Crawford wants—what so many today want—is a community that exalts real excellence, exhibits the solidarity that shared excellence allows, and enjoys this shared pursuit of excellence. His sense of this “aristocratic” (or, in my words, “noble”) pursuit of excellence is displayed to great effect in his careful explanations of building a custom Volkswagen engine or completing a difficult repair of a 1983 Honda Magna motorcycle. These activities offer a chance to develop and exercise intellectual and moral virtues, like practical wisdom and responsibility, through carefully attending to material things. The skilled mechanic must obey the logic of things outside himself; he cannot be captive to mere theory or rhetoric, or he will betray his responsibility to both his craft and his customers. In The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction, he continued this argument, finding similar avenues to virtue in the work of such professions as the short-order cook and the builder of pipe organs.

In his most recent work, Why We Drive: Toward a Philosophy of the Open Road, Crawford continues this exploration of the pursuit of nobility through manual arts and links it more fully to an incisive critique of neo-liberal trends toward safetyism, automation, and the cult of expertise. He argues that marketing—especially in the age of big data and artificial intelligence—pushes our desires toward increasing passivity. Crawford is an advocate for people having greater sovereignty in their lives—not the sovereignty of national borders or military might, but the sovereignty that is at the root of any functioning republic: the ability of each person to have agency in their world. That sovereignty, that self-mastery, is not achieved through governmental structures or abstract rights, but through direct engagement with the world. To have sovereignty in a community is to be “master of one’s own stuff,” not just in the sense of having property rights over it, but in the sense of being able to use one’s things excellently. Crawford emphasizes how that engagement can be achieved through skilled tool use, though he does grant that it can also be achieved through developing excellence in the liberal arts and sciences. His emphasis on the mechanical arts is, in part, a correction of what he sees as a false opinion that those arts do not adequately involve the human intellect and so should be avoided by anyone with higher aspirations. 

Crawford has a PhD in political philosophy, and he has also done extensive work in the mechanical arts as a motorcycle repairman, an electrician, and a builder of custom cars. He is an aficionado of activities involving any machine that goes fast and can be driven with skill. It’s that mix of backgrounds that makes his books such a pleasure to read. They are rooted in classical political thought, but there is also a sense that we are reading someone who really knows whereof he speaks, and who really enjoys what he does, both in his intellectual writing and in his repair work, which is, he reminds us again and again, no less intellectual, no less engaging to the mind, than academic pursuits. 

Though I love to drive, I do not do my own repair work on my cars. I know little about the parts of an engine. But Crawford lovingly shows even the uninitiated reader just how beautiful a well-crafted engine can be when it is honed to produce maximal speed. I have never attended a demolition derby. But after reading Crawford’s account, which shows how derby culture can exemplify numerous moral and civic virtues (and how derbies are just a lot of fun), I intend to do so. Indeed, Crawford’s spirited narratives of automotive excitement have caused a small tension in my marriage! He spends a good deal of space in the book talking about controlled drifting, the driving maneuver in which one turns a corner in such a way that all of the wheels of one’s car slide sideways. Even if you don’t know the term “drifting,” you’ve seen this happen in car chases in movies. Crawford’s narrative skill in describing this move—and in describing his interactions with the spirited community that exists among those who drift competitively—made me really want to try it. My wife suggested that this would probably not be best for our minivans. She won that argument.

Like those ancient and medieval thinkers whom I mentioned above, Crawford sees just how much our ability to reason and act responsibly is shaped by the tools we use. Thomas Aquinas observed that our minds are open to grasping pretty much anything, so long as we can take in information about that thing through our senses. But when we use tools of any kind, we modify how or what we sense. (The same thing is true of the words, concepts, and intellectual systems we adopt.) The tools we use thereby shape how we think or what we think about. Crawford describes well how this happens in the car or on the motorcycle. In a car that doesn’t have lots of computerized sensors, traction control, automatic transmission, and so forth, one can feel the road through the steering wheel and respond directly; in responding to how one senses the world through the car, one gains skill in driving, and grows in virtues like practical wisdom. In a more modern car, one’s interaction with the road is mediated through sensors and a computerized display, which models or represents how the world is. One no longer connects with the world through skills that are simultaneously physical and intellectual; rather, one engages with the world in a way determined by those who wrote the software for the car. Something is lost in terms of agency and sovereignty; one becomes passively subject to experts’ efforts to nudge and shape one’s behavior.

In her now-classic work, The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt distinguishes three modes of interaction with the world, which are decisive for the shape that political life takes in a community. “Action” involves free persons revealing who they uniquely are by great words and deeds. “Work” involves making excellent, enduring objects as a result of skilled craft. “Labor” involves a cycle of producing consumable goods and consuming those goods. While all three are necessary for a flourishing human life, Arendt criticizes modern society for being centered entirely around labor—we mostly just produce and consume. But a stable republic of free persons requires those persons to make things that endure and give continuity to the world, and it requires them to be able to act in spirited, sovereign, unique ways.

Crawford’s project is, in many respects, much like Arendt’s. He wants to caution us against the exclusively laboring culture we are building, one that he finds, for example, in the way most offices function, in the activities of the managerial class, and in the drive toward greater automation. The person whose life is centered on consumption may, in a certain sense, be more autonomous than those whose lives are centered on skilled making. For example, the consumer can purchase machines and services that make it unnecessary for him to worry about many aspects of life, making him, in a sense, more self-directed, with more time on his hands to do as he likes. But the consumer thereby loses some of his sovereign agency; he turns over many aspects of his life to those who run the services he purchases—those who drive his cars, make his entertainment, and so on. 

Now, Crawford is in no way advocating individualism; he is very much in favor of the interdependence produced by rich communities. He does worry that automated systems (like corporate bureaucracies) are so complex, or their inner workings so secret or opaque, that they may hamper the development of skilled engagement with the world. With an older car, one can take it apart and make it one’s own, together with others; with a driverless car, one must be more passive. The user of automated machines is more likely to be a prey to constant tweaking of his desires by marketers, corporations, and government bureaucracies. When we have less ability to have control over the products we use, we are less able to hold their makers and controllers responsible, and our shared republican life suffers as a result.

Crawford’s solution is not a wholesale rejection of automation—he recognizes that many people don’t like driving or don’t want to develop driving skills, and for them, driverless cars might be fine—but to advocate building a society in which there is more room for what Arendt calls work and action. In the area of work, Crawford promotes finding and building communities of skilled work. He promotes these communities not in a spirit of moralistic advocacy, or even by telling the reader what to do, but just by showing the beauty of these communities—the rough and deeply human communities that have formed around desert car racing in Nevada, or that form in any old-school auto mechanic’s shop—and by narrating stories about his interaction with them. Rather than just presenting data about what is effective in production, pursuing excellent work with others requires finding one’s place in a beautiful story among beautiful things and skills. 

Old artifacts, like classic cars, display a beautiful patina of authenticity which provides a “focal point for a way of orienting to the world and finding meaning in it.” Because they find meaning through these artifacts, the communities of work that build and improve them can develop virtues of skilled work, but they also turn work into play and leisure, pleasant activities that engage our highest powers and are worth doing for their own sake. (Here, there are resonances of thinkers on leisure and play like Josef Pieper and Johan Huizinga.) Developing these communities and this skilled work is not possible when we are beholden to corporate cultures, with their proprietary rights over parts and software. As an alternative, Crawford holds up examples of “folk engineering,” ways that ordinary people have worked together to build the machines and tools they want and enjoy. While the focus is entirely on skilled making and not on its political benefits, these activities are crucial for a free society. Crawford wishes to preserve the promise of Enlightenment liberalism, bypassing proprietary systems managed by a corporate or governmental clerical class and instead having things available to everyone.

In Arendt’s telling, action is a matter of noble words spoken in a political assembly or great deeds done in battle. But Crawford sees action as possible in all areas of life. If we saw the road as he sees it, our perception could be transformed, enabling us to see driving in entirely different ways. The flow of traffic along a highway or through a complex intersection is ideally an expression of civic friendship and the pursuit of common goods. When done well, as an interaction among free persons—and not as a result of impersonal, automated systems—it is a beautiful dance, an expression of our life together in society. In this light, even road rage can be seen as an expression of healthy political action—that is, the action of free persons interacting in the polis. Likewise, demolition derbies, motocross races, and competitive drifting can be done as great deeds. 

Excellent human beings do not succumb to their appetite to passively consume; rather, as Plato recognized, they exhibit spiritedness, thumos, the feelings that motivate one to assert oneself and to overcome difficult challenges. The desire for contest, competition, and even war is sometimes not a desire to dominate or have power but a desire to excel and to be honored for that excellence. Controlling or tamping down the spirited pursuit of excellence out of, say, a desire for safety, leads to arrested development of free persons, and passive reliance on experts and automated systems (as has happened, for example, in those plane crashes where pilots were unwilling to challenge the faulty autopilot). Excellent driving, especially competitive driving, can be “the motor equivalent of war,” that is, an opportunity to grow in the virtues of spirited action with others. The ability to act in a spirited way is a key feature of nobility, of that excellent life for which so many long.

Every summer, when the academic year ends, I always feel a need to get out on the road and drive a couple thousand miles. My family and I go to national parks, great cities, and the homes of family and friends. But my favorite part of this annual pastime is the driving itself. I understand better why I have this longing after reading Crawford’s book. Driving itself, as an expression of skilled activity, done together with others on the road, is a way of pursuing human excellence. The same is true, I’d suggest, of lots of other things we do—things that we might ordinarily think of as mundane, not intellectual or leisurely. Ordinary tasks, if done with skill and spirit, have the potential to transform our own lives and that of our republic in the direction of much greater nobility.