Do Your Pilgrimage in Style.

My Corgi Chevrolet was my favorite model car when I was young.

In a thought provoking article in the March edition of “Top Gear” magazine Jeremy Clarkson ponders the motivation for buying cars. He acknowledges that there are those people whose interest in cars simply goes as far as its “A to B” capability. These people, as Clarkson puts it, “See the car as a necessary evil”. They will, he says, be quite happy with something bland and ordinary because they are really not interested in cars; as long as the vehicle can get them to the shops and back with reasonable comfort and reliability that’s all they're after.

But if you are Jeremy Clarkson (or me) you are interested in cars for a variety of subtle reasons; in fact so subtle that according to Clarkson he is damned if he tell you what they are. For example, he says he has no idea why he loves the Ferrari 458 Italia, but only respects the McLaren MP4-12C. And of Hyundai’s newest car, the Veloster, Clarkson says that it completely fails to be what it’s trying to be, namely an exciting car:

…what the company doesn’t understand is that when you make a car that’s supposed to be interesting, it needs to be interesting. It needs to make a sporty noise, or look good, or corner well. It needs to have feel, a certain unquantifiable something that sets it apart from the herd. An invisible beckoning finger. A come-hither look in its headlights. It needs to feel like it was made by an enthusiast, someone who likes cars. Someone who understands the mechanics of James’ sausage. Because, if it doesn’t what you end up with is Veloster. An accountant in a clown suit.

Clarkson is no doubt right, but just how are Hyundai going to turn his very subjective expression into an objective specification for nuts and bolts engineering? When it comes to reading the sophisticated auto-tastes of the likes of Jeremy Clarkson it seems that Hyundai suffers from a kind of auto-autism.

But who can blame them? What is at stake here is not just engineering, but style and style is about the signals you send out to the rest of society and how society reacts to them. In fact style is also about sending out signals to oneself. Those signals give information about who you think you are, who you think you should be, your standing in society, what you want other people to think about you etc: In short it’s all about image, swank, status and the feel good factor that status brings. A fine piece of engineering judged from purely technical criteria must also double up as a fashion statement and status symbol. This role played by artifacts probably goes right back to the stone age.

Polished stone: The status symbol of the neolithic.

But to engage at this level requires vast knowledge about people and the society around you: Sending out the signals you want is far less an engineering problem than it is a social problem. Much of the knowledge and motivation we have in this area is likely to be quasi-unconscious and instinctual, dealt with by “The Whisperings Within”. As social animals our most important and complex intellectual task in life is to understand and be initiated into the mores of our culture. This is no doubt achieved with mental processing that depends on hard wired neural packages whose results surface into conscious cognition as conclusions without their supporting workings. This may explain why Clarkson has to say “There is not one tangible reason why I love the Ferrari 458 Italia….”. Auto-autistics keep out.

It is probably true to say of Western civilisation that as far as material wealth is concerned humanity has never had it so good. I often ponder then, just what is the nature of our pleasure in material wealth; in particular, what is the nature of the pleasures derived from sophisticated artifacts like houses, cars and numerous technological devices; what is the mix motives that keeps our interest in them? Clearly it is not just practical; as I have suggested above property as a fashion accessory is very important. But just how much of our pleasure in property is for its own sake and just how much is derived from the signals about us that property sends out to rest of society (and to ourselves)? Artifacts and property can be intrinsically enjoyed for their own sake; for example, for the aesthetic experience they give us. But I suspect the intrinsic pleasures here are inextricably mixed with the extrinsic pleasures whereby material objects relate us to the rest of society via status displays. These motives are managed by background prewired neural packages and their workings are difficult to articulate, as Clarkson has found. And yet those motives are both very persuasive and pervasive. For example, consider a prodigy house like say Blickling Hall and one soon realizes that such buildings were for the most part all about swank. (See also here and here)

One way of trying to precipitate out the social component of property ownership and hold it up for examination is to use what I call the “desert island test”: To do this test, imagine oneself to be fantastically rich, so rich in fact that one owns a huge mansion, with all the technical mod cons, expensive furnishings, decor and fine artworks. OK, so you’ve arrived. But have you? What, if it were possible to so contrive things that no one at all knew about your wealth? In fact imagine that you were so isolated that you may as well be on a desert island. In this scenario any pleasure you had in your property could only be derived from its intrinsic pleasure. Without actually running this experiment it is difficult to say just how much contentment a life of such isolation would bring, but I suspect with the loss of that all important component of status display life would lose a lot of its meaning and joy; our pleasure would be incomplete – at least for the more gregarious of us.

But can our pleasure ever be complete? We’ve all heard those stories of celebrities who seem to have everything and yet fail to achieve self actualization and remain discontented and restless, never really finding what they were looking for. My guess is that the human psyche is not really built for the destination but rather for the journey, the journey of striving for goals. When a goal has been reached we want to move on to the next goal; if there are no more goals to score listlessness and aimless can set in, even to the extent that life becomes empty and meaninglessness. When you possess all that this world has to offer and you have made a sufficiently extravagant statement about one’s status, the final question comes home: “What next?”. There is then only one other thing left to do and that is to give it all up, if only in a figurative sense. Material wealth and its accompanying pleasures of social status all too easily become corrupting idols; but in any case these idols are revealed to be ultimately unfulfilling to the heart of (wo)man. In this world our job is to treat the whole thing as a pilgrimage rather than a destination; it is then that we find full satisfaction.

It's better to be on the pilgrim road that at a terminus: Coming from two generations of commercial travelers, going somewhere in a car seems to be in my blood and travelling in style is important. I may have bought the Vauxhall Vectra above because it reminded me just a little of this Bentley……

...I can dream on!