Have cars made us stupid?

In a New york Times Sunday Review piece, A Stroll Around the World, Pulitzer Prize winning writer for the National Geographic Paul Salopek, blasts the motorization of human civilization, especially in the Global North.

Salopek is on a mission to travel the world on foot, as his goal is to stray off the beaten "paved" path taken by motorists and stroll those paths of the globe that human's have ambulated along since the Pleistocene age.

He struggles to put himself in a "Pleistocene state of mind." Such a state of mind is un recuperable with the advent and subsequent hegemony of the car. 

While strolling through Saudi Arabian deserts, Salopek experiences motorists with "car brain" and thinks of how unsuitable a car brain is for navigating the Middle Eastern terrains. Yet not too long ago, the ancestors of the species saddled with car brains were Bedouins, or nomadic strollers who had a different sense of space and time.

Like drivers everywhere, their frame of reference is rectilinear and limited to narrow ribbons of space, axle-wide, that rocket blindly across the land.

One suspects, Salopek would have prefered to meet the Bedouins on the backs of camels instead of Sheiks inside air conditioned cars.

To the placeholder of the car brain, the earth’s surface beyond the pavement was simply a moving tableau — a gauzy, unreal backdrop for his high-speed travel. He was spatially crippled.

Those with car brains, separated from those with plain brains, have an acquisitive attitude to space:

Cocooned inside a bubble of loud noise and a tonnage of steel, members of the internal combustion tribe tend to adopt ownership of all consumable space. They roar too close. They squint with curiosity out of the privacy of their cars as if they themselves were invisible.

Cars are without a doubt the defining artifacts of our civilization, having reshaped our minds in ways that we have stopped thinking about a long time ago, says Salopek.

Cars, Salopek acknowledges are indispensable and have in history built the middle classes. However, they have also severed a natural and limbic connection humans had developed with both the earth and fellow humans that reach back to the basement of time. 

The internal combustion engine has affected more drastic changes on human culture — flattening it through the annihilation of time and space — than the web revolution. Indeed, the century-old automotive revolution prepared the way for the rise of the Internet, by eroding the capacity for attention, for patience, by fomenting a cult of speed.

I wonder what Nicholas Carr would say to the discovery that a flattening of the brain had already been set in motion before we took on the habit of outsourcing our brain's primordial functions of deep thought and memorizing to the Internet.