From Word To Word

Those who have read Ivan Illich, or who have at least read my recent post on Ivan Illich, will perhaps recognize that the title of this post plays with the title of one of Illich’s books, Energy and Equity (London: Marion Boyars Publishing, 1976). The central thesis of this book is that “High quanta of energy degrade social relations just as inevitably as they destroy the physical milieu,” or, in plainer language, dependence on tools that require energy not only destroys the physical environment but also the social environment. For this reason, Illich argues that any increase in energy usage, even environmentally responsible energy, will still result in increased “inequality, inefficiency, and personal impotence,” and that “Only a ceiling on energy use can lead to social relations that are characterized by high levels of equity.”

In the section of the book that is dedicated particularly to transportation, Illich focuses this argument still more, making the startling assertion that people in an equitable society should not travel any faster than the speed of a bicycle or a horse. “Free people,” he says, “must travel the road to productive social relations at the speed of a bicycle,” because the capacity to increase speed always comes at a broader social cost, both economically, in terms of the infrastructure that is becoming an increasing problem for governments of developed nations, but also relationally, in terms of how transportation prevents the formation of communities.

Illich suggests that what the transportation system actually accomplishes is the production of a new sort of person: the passenger. He describes the passenger in detail, and I will quote this description at length, because I think it is still true of most of us today: “The habitual passenger’s inherited perceptions of space and time and of personal space have been industrially deformed. He has lost the power to conceive of himself outside the passenger role. Addicted to being carried along, he has lost control over the physical, social, and psychic powers that lie in man’s feet. The passenger has come to identify territory with the untouchable landscape through which he is rushed. He has become impotent to establish his domain, mark it with his imprint, and assert his sovereignty over it. He has lost his power to admit others into his presence and to share space consciously with them.”

I mention all of this because I am most often a pedestrian, both by choice and by necessity, because our family owns one car, which is mostly used to convey my wife to work. Our intention is to have her transfer her job to Guelph when she can and to have the family go without a car entirely, but I am usually carless even now. This choice is mostly an economic and environmental one. Cars cost me and the environment in ways that I find increasingly unacceptable. Even so, I have lately been experiencing a heightened sense of the social cost that cars impose as a mode of transportation.

This past Thursday I set out with my two sons to meet some other parents in a park across town, a walk that takes us through the neighbourhood where we lived until this past fall. The walk would normally have taken about half an hour, only I had not gone even a block before I encountered some of my neighbours working on a new flagstone path. My eldest son was intrigued by this operation, so we stopped and talked for several minutes, during which time I realized how disconnected they were from their neighbourhood. Not only were they unaware that we had moved in just a few doors from them, but they had never met the woman who had lived in the house before us, not in the eight or ten years that they had driven past each other’s homes on a more than daily basis.

When we finally reached our old neighbourhood, I had a similar experience. There, a street or two from our old house, I encountered the mother of a friend of ours who was working in her garden. We stopped to talk again for several minutes, catching up on each others lives. This woman and I am only acquaintances. She has never visited my home, though I have visited hers occasionally. We have very little obviously in common. She is not a person that I would ever encounter if I did not walk through her neighbourhood. If I had driven to the park, the possibility of my encountering her, or someone else, would never have been opened.

This, to me, is the social cost of the car. It is the cost of letting ourselves become passengers who see the houses next to ours as so much untouchable landscape and who lack the confidence even to share space with their inhabitants. If we only drive through our neighbourhoods, it will never be possible to encounter our neighbours in the way that we can if we are on foot. In fact, in many ways, driving though our neighbourhoods essentially erases our neighbourhoods altogether, because it prevents those neighbourhoods from ever forming.

This is not to say that we cannot drive, of course, though I think that this is a more viable alternative than many people believe. It is to say that we cannot only drive, that we cannot primarily drive, not if we want to encounter those around us in ways that create neighbourhood, that foster hospitality, that enable ethical responsibility. The choice to walk is the choice to be open to encountering others, to share consciously with them the space in which we both live. It is a choice that implies an ethics far beyond economic and environmental concerns, because it implies an ethics of the neighbour.