The Coddling of the American Behind

On the Substack Archedelia, Matthew B. Crawford has an incisive essay titled “Spiritedness and self-reliance: Or why the automatic bathroom faucet makes you want to punch something.” Crawford, the same guy who wrote Shop Class as Soulcraft (2009), is a particularly keen observer of the mechanization of modern life. Through an analysis of automatic faucets, Crawford recognizes that

there seems to be an ideology of freedom at the heart of consumerist material culture; a promise to disburden us of mental and bodily involvement with our own stuff so we can pursue ends we have freely chosen. Yet this disburdening gives us fewer occasions for the experience of direct responsibility.

His article got me thinking about something I love to hate: rational control. Through forced automation and bureaucratic hegemony, the Left seeks to form a society that always acts according to its will, despite the choices or actions of the individuals within that society. Central planning, i.e., rational control, remains the preferred instrument to achieve such ends. By removing the locus of choice, the grounds for assent or dissent are removed. The citizen becomes more and more conformed to the choices made by the long-forgotten specter who actually controls the levers of society.

The Coddling of the American Mind, a 2018 book by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, focuses on the immense consequences of rational control wielded by a university administration. Harvey C. Mansfield, the famed professor of government at Harvard University, has wry observations on this topic as applied to, shall we say, modern “facilities.” As Jack Butler noted in 2022, Mansfield argued on a podcast:

[When] you settle into a kind of centralized bureaucracy, where the government does everything: it takes over from you the pain of living, Tocqueville says. It lives things for you. This is aided by modern technology: for example, toilets that flush themselves. Even this elementary duty of disposing of your effluvia is taken over from you. We see this with the great advance of bureaucracy in the universities and, during COVID, all the ways in which our lives are planned for us, and we are given experts who mainly show us how, not why, to obey different rules, and not how to act on your own.

This was not the first time Mansfield used the prevalence of automatic toilets as a foil to our bloated, centralized bureaucracy. In “Rational Control,” a masterly essay written for the New Criterion in 2006, Mansfield argues:

The simplification accomplished by rational control issues in a number of devices of governing we can recognize as characteristically modern. Before mentioning them we should note their common spirit of indirectness. Rational control does not care to reason with you. It does not want to explain why you should flush the toilet or, more comprehensively, develop your character so that you will do it habitually or with a flair. It wants results. Its method is not to argue or to educate but to make a bargain with your unreason, to shut out the interference of your reason that comes from forming opinions.

In short, the widespread presence of automated sinks and toilets in public restrooms is a perfect analogy to the mission of rational control. Rather than rely on the choices and actions of individuals — thus encouraging citizens to be responsible and self-reliant — evangelists of rational control prefer that a machine (whether bureaucratic or mechanical) do it for you. As Mansfield said, “rational control has replaced individual virtue.”

While running faucets and unflushed toilets are certainly less likely to be caused by human error, automatic fixtures subtract the basic responsibilities of the individual. In addition to negating the virtue of the citizen, the introduction of further complexities into automated systems means they are that much harder to fix. If, say, an automatic faucet keeps running because of some glitch, an observer cannot simply turn it off.

I find automatic toilets and sinks infuriating. The mere act of hanging one’s coat on the hook in a bathroom stall will make the toilet flush. (This must waste water, no? Where are the environmentalists when you need them?) Most automatic sinks have no function whereby one can manually adjust the temperature of the water. (Who doesn’t love washing their hands at the airport with either scalding or numbing water?)

Patrick Deneen, famously a “postliberal,” responded to Mansfield in a First Things article from 2009, also titled “Rational Control.” While Deneen embraces the communal mission of rational control, even he rejects its tools:

We inhabit a society in which lights are turned off, in which shades are lowered and toilets are flushed, but in which we effect none of these actions, and in which we are not required to even think why we would take such actions. We act socially without socialization; responsible actions are effected albeit without responsibility. . . . I imagine that in hell, all the toilets are automatic flush, though the sewer pipes lead right back to the people who couldn’t be bothered to pull the lever.

I have to agree with Deneen on this one — hell is undoubtedly full of automatic-flush toilets.