If you consider simply what is best at getting people from point A to point B, a road system and the personal automobile work pretty well. But if you’re interested in social engineering, perhaps not.

This point is made clear in an old but still relevant short exchange of essays between James Q. Wilson and James Howard Kunstler. Written for Slate back in 1998, it is still a useful departure point for observing differing views of auto mobility.

Wilson starts out with the observation “The war against automobiles is never-ending .”

Kunstler, while never explicitly calling for a war, does endorse it with some reasons that, as they say, you just can’t make up.

For example, “the problems associated with automobile use are not a figment of the imagination of some supposed snooty elite of irrational car-haters. Rather, these problems, and the issues they raise, go directly to the question of what it means to be civilized.”

What it means to be civilized? I’ve sat in on enough sociology classes to know that technologies and instruments exist within a social environment. But Kunstler attributes far too much power to the auto as the Demon Rum of society, and far too little to the value of mobility.

For example, thanks to personal mobility, “we have created thousands of places in America that are not worth caring about, and these will soon add up to a nation--and a way of life--that is not worth defending.”

A way of life not worth defending? Americans are going to abandon national defense because suburbs (another one of his targets) and Starbucks all look the same?

Against such logic, arguments about cost-effectiveness in moving people around are not dismissed; they are besides the point.