Gandhi said that problems like war, economic
injustice and pollution our problems are not inevitable - they are not the necessary side effect of civilization - but they are the result of our error in judging who drives whom. For example, do we drive the car or the presence of car drives us? He called it "knowledge without character".
Despite our
powerful data and intellectual apparatus, we lack the ability to live wisely. We send sophisticated
satellites into space that beam us startling information about the destruction
of the environment, yet we do nothing to stop it. Martin
Luther King said we live in a world of “guided missiles and misguided men”
where few technical problems are too complex to solve but we find it impossible
to cope with the most basic of life’s challenges: how to live together in peace
and health. In our lucid moments we see that we are doing great harm to
ourselves and our planet, but somehow, we cannot seem to change the way we think and live.
The problem is simply
that we have not yet completed our education. We do not understand what our
real needs are and we are unable to use our technology in a
way that makes our lives more secure and fulfilling.
Over the past fifty years, the automobile, like so many of
our appliances and machines, has sped down the now-familiar psychological
highway from desirable luxury to basic necessity to tyrannical master. We no
longer choose to drive a car—we have to: there are so many things to do, so
little time to do them, and so far to travel in between. We rush about from
place to place, caught in a perilous game of catch-up, and the price is high:
nearly fifty thousand Americans lose their lives in traffic accidents every
year. The irony is, we are often in such a hurry that we can’t get anywhere. I
have read that commute time in Tokyo and London now is often less by bicycle
than by car; and to judge by rush hour on our freeways, our situation is not
much different.
Worse than the loss of time, of course, is the threat to our
health. In each of those cars, according to recent research conducted in Los
Angeles, commuters are exposed to two to four times the levels of
cancer-causing toxic chemicals found outdoors. And as it idles there on the
freeway, the average American car makes a significant contribution to the
greenhouse effect, pumping its own weight in carbon into the atmosphere each
year.
These things are not secrets. We have all heard them many
times before, but we find it hard to do anything about them. Our cities and
towns have grown in such a way that we feel helpless without a car. And as our
cities expand ever farther into the surrounding countryside, the situation
promises to get even worse.
The problem is that the roots of our dependence on the auto
go deeper than the desire for a convenient mode of transportation. There is a
much more powerful force at work here—a force that characterizes almost every
activity in industrial society: profit. Under the relentless domination of the
profit motive, we have remade our country in the image of the automobile.
As
the political historian Richard Barnet writes, describing America in the middle
decades of this century, Buying highways meant buying motels, quick food
eateries,…and the culture of suburbia….The highway system was the nation’s only
physical plan, and more than anything else it determined the appearance of
cities and the stretches in between. In choosing the automobile as the engine
of growth, the highway and automotive planners scrapped mass transit.
Oil shortages and higher gasoline prices have led us to
regret turning a blind eye toward such practices, yet we go on driving more and
more, drilling new oil wells, making and buying more and bigger cars. In just
one hundred years, urged on by the profit motive and the media conditioning
that driving is entertainment and our car is an extension of our personality,
we have used up nearly half of the world’s known petroleum reserves, fouled our
air, and put our oceans and beaches at continual risk from oil spills.
Now, I have nothing against automobiles. I have a car, and I
appreciate its utility. All I would say is, it is important to remember who is
serving whom. If we were the masters of our machines—and our lives—we would
have good, well-made cars and good roads on which to drive, but wouldn’t we
also use them sparingly, so our children and our children’s children would have
enough oil left to heat their homes?
Nor am I suggesting that there is anything wrong in a
businessperson making enough profit to support his or her family in
comfort—everyone should have this opportunity. But we have exaggerated the
importance of profit out of all proportion to its natural place in business. We
have become addicted to it, and that is a very dangerous situation.
Most addictions begin innocently enough. “Just one more
helping, one more bowl of ice cream, one more cigarette, one more drink for the
road.” That is how it starts—just one more: “Let’s sell just one more new car,
make one more dollar, pump one more gallon of gas.”
When we give in to that desire repeatedly, with a second
helping, a second smoke, a second drink, or a second sniff, it becomes a
habit—not just one more but one every day: “The stockholders want to see this
quarter’s profits rising above last quarter’s. Get the general manager on the
phone and tell him to increase production, bolster demand, and heat up
consumption. And do it yesterday.”
With a habit we still have a choice whether to give in or
not, but when a habit continues long enough, we lose our power to choose. Our
feeling of security becomes so closely attached to the thing we crave that we
must have it, whatever the cost. The habit has become a compulsion, and we have
become its servant. We will do anything for a profit, even if it means
sacrificing our children’s precious seas, air, and earth. This is what Gandhi
means by knowledge without character—a lack of connection between what we know
to be in everyone’s long-range best interest and our ability to act on that
knowledge. It has become the cornerstone of much of our business and our lives.
