Technology Sometimes Can Change Cultures
The individual was rich, and had a mania for fast cars, which were a new innovation in his time. He drove recklessly, crashing seven times, being hospitalised three times and eventually landing in prison, leaving his home to be overrun by intruders. In prison, believing himself to have turned over a new leaf, he escaped and promptly went back to his old ways, but another crash eventually showed him the error of his past ways. Eventually, after another ignominious escape, he regained possession of his house and, much humbled, threw a banquet for his long-suffering friends.
Perhaps the funniest example of a person diving too deep into new technology, this tale of Toad of Toad Hall was written over a hundred years ago by Kenneth Grahame in The Wind in The Willows, and is just one of the many stories in literature about how people responded to the increased speed and mobility that cars brought.
It may seem like a truism that people’s responses to new technologies can run the gamut from Toad’s enthusiastic adoption to various degrees of skepticism or even outright dislike. From an anthropological view, this is conditioned by how useful the user perceives the new technology to be, and how easy it is to use, along with other factors like cost, the demonstration effect of adopting it, and its potential cultural impact. Moreover, while the development of technology is most often a slow evolution and accretion of innovations, certain developments become turning points in our cultural history.
An interesting aspect of human adaptation to advances in technology is how contemporary literature and cultural criticism react to them, whether by echoing existing ideas about their significance, imagining a future made brighter by their widespread adoption, or outright rejecting them and nostalgically praising the prevalent ways of life that they had replaced.
This literary and theoretical commentary on technological innovation, and its impact on humans, has existed perhaps since the time of Plato’s comments on the nature of artisanship, and how it evoked the Demiurge whose constant shaping and innovation had created the universe. Another significant work chronicling the impact of changing technology on society was Charles Dickens’ commentary, as the Uncommercial Traveller, on how innovation was leading to the obsolescence of traditional professions like that of the post-boy to assist travellers, or the lamp-lighter.
However, the advent of the automobile in particular led to a dramatic change in people’s worldview, making distances seem shorter and allowing for greater geographical mobility than ever before. It was one of many innovations in technology, like the aeroplane and the railway system, that suddenly made the world less mysterious and more realizable to the average person, changing their worldview and becoming part of an almost radical break with tradition. The Cubist poet Blaise Cendrars wrote of the new avatar of travel as something that seemed to conquer human limits and even rewrite history: “Poetry dates from today / The milky way around my neck / The two hemispheres on my eyes / At full speed / There are no more breakdowns.”
The automobile’s impact on social stratification was a point that many authors sought to understand, albeit without much consensus. Early drivers were almost without exception wealthy, given the high purchase and maintenance costs of the vehicles. Grahame, writing in 1908, portrayed Toad as a “rather rich” heir whose foray into motoring was just one of the many extravagant schemes in which he was “squandering the money your father left you,” as his relatively less well-off friends chide him.
The general view about motorists in the era was that they were obnoxiously showing off their wealth; the philosopher C.E.M Joad said that the motorist merely “desires to advertise to the world at large that he has amassed enough money to hurl himself over its surface as often and as fast as it pleases him.” U.S. President Woodrow Wilson meanwhile worried in 1906 that "Nothing has spread socialistic feeling in this country more than the use of automobiles. To the countryman they are a picture of arrogance of wealth with all its independence and carelessness."
However, as production of cars increased, they became more ubiquitous, leading to different narratives of what they could mean for society and culture. For example, Sinclair Lewis portrayed the automobile as the great leveller of society in his book Free Air, which was written in 1919 and dealt with the friendship and ultimately the romance that burgeons between two young people driving across America. Claire Boltwood is the daughter of a railroad magnate and Milt Daggett is a poor garage owner, but on the road between Minnesota and Seattle, they gradually come to trust and respect each other, and the equality associated with cars and driving eventually leads to the erosion of the social boundaries between them.
While the book was praised by many and became an important influence on the Beat generation of writers, to a modern reader, the car does not lead to an erosion of social norms, but rather exacerbates the existing class divide. Milt's increased mobility and love for Claire only lead him to Seattle, where he is patronized and othered by Claire's family and social set. Instead of the car transcending class norms, it becomes another symbol of status and differentiation; while the car brought Claire freedom from her circumscribed life, it hardly did the same for Milt.
Other works depicted a less favourable view of motorcars as a disturbance in villages, part of smug city-dwellers’ attempts to encroach on bucolic peace. For example, L.M. Montgomery’s Rilla of Ingleside, set during the First World War in a small maritime town on Prince Edward Island in Canada, features a character, humorously nicknamed Whiskers-on-the-Moon, who believes that “the Government should be turned out of office for permitting them to run on the Island at all.”
Another character narrates the story of Whiskers’ encounter with an agent in an automobile as follows, “The other day he saw one coming along that narrow side-road by his wheatfield, and Whiskers bounded over the fence and stood right in the middle of the road, with his pitchfork. [...] He made the car come to a halt, because there was no room to pass him on either side, and the agent could not actually run over him. Then he raised his pitchfork and shouted, 'Get out of this with your devil-machine or I will run this pitchfork clean through you.' [...] that poor agent had to back his car clean out to the Lowbridge road, nearly a mile, Whiskers following him every step, shaking his pitchfork and bellowing insults.”
However, one of the most amusing aspects of rural adaptation to motorcars during this era were people’s attempts to cash in on the perceived extravagance of drivers. William K. Vanderbilt, possibly a worse driver than Toad, was the subject of several attempts by farmers on Long Island to get rid of worn-out horses by pushing them out into the road as Vanderbilt drove by, knowing that he would knock them down and then pay compensation. In France, a new breed of poultry was humorously discovered by Le Figaro in 1913 - the ‘automobile chicken,’ which would dash under cars just in time for their owners to turn up and demand compensation.
Again, as cars became cheaper and more easily available, this too changed, as rural folk found themselves able to buy automobiles too. Given how isolated many villages and farmhouses were from public amenities, it soon became a necessity. During the 1920s, an investigator from the U.S. Department of Agriculture encountered a rural family that lacked indoor plumbing but had recently invested in a car, an anomaly that the woman of the house dismissed, saying, “Why, you can’t go to town in a bathtub!”
The car thus became an indicator of a number of changes and shifting equations that marked the beginning of the twentieth century, and literary and anecdotal evidence encapsulates this. The rise of the automobile became a prism through which to view the shifting rural-urban relations, changes in class dynamics and increased geographical mobility that were an important part of the early twentieth century in many countries. Even today, cars and automobiles are litmus tests for some of the most pressing issues of our time, whether it is the role that their catalytic convertors have in greenhouse gas emissions, or ethical debates about artificial intelligence that focus on self-driving cars. Moreover, the same reactions - whether that of a Toad, a Claire Boltwood or a Whiskers-on-the-Moon - prevail.
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