All this week, Front Porch Republic is holding a symposium on Matthew B. Crawford's acclaimed new book, "Shop Class As Soulcraft." Patrick Deneen sets the stage here. Excerpt:
In the book, Matt Crawford argues on behalf of the virtues of crafts - those forms of work that require skill of hands, a storehouse of knowledge and experience, patience, improvisational ability, and creativity. His book is a searing indictment of the alienation and deforming nature of much of what constitutes modern work, whether those "manual" jobs that tend to be modeled on mass-production models of assembly line, or "brain" work that more often than not results in workplaces that resemble "The Office" or "Dilbert." He argues fiercely against the notion that there ought to be a conceptual separation between "manual" and "mental" work, noting that the crafts require a high degree of thought and creativity. The book argues for a reconsideration of many modern assumptions about the superiority of certain kinds of educational tracks and life paths, and ably points out that many modern office jobs are just as intellectually deadening as the assembly line jobs that once required 93 job offers for every one position being filled. There was a time when men and women had a sense of the dignity of work that most people refused to remain in a job that degraded and alienated its holder. Now, Crawford suggests, many regard such work (especially its white collar iterations) as a badge of success.
Here's my entry: "Gumbo as Soulcraft," in which I discuss how Crawford's attraction to mechanical things remains alien to me (as does the craft of home improvement, which many men are drawn to), but how I am able to tap into the kind of soul-benefiting aspect of working with one's hands through my love of cooking. And here's Samuel Goldman's friendly skepticism about the philosophical underpinnings of Matt's project (e.g., where's room for the ladies?), concluding thus:
But Matt, now that you're on TV and, I hope, can get a healthy advance for your next project, what's going to happen to the shop? It's when one has the opportunity to really live from one's own thoughts, rather than providing the best arguments money can buy, that the choice between manual and knowledge work gets difficult.
Go thee thither and read, all week. And whatever you do, don't miss what surely must count as the strangest blog apology of the year. That's some family you got there, Katherine! I bet you've got some stories. All us Southerners do.
UPDATE: Here's a link to those hilarious STP radio "I'm tired of being That Guy!" rants. When That Guy in the commercial said he's the kind of guy who has three kinds of cooking oil in his kitchen but doesn't know how to change the oil in his car, I crawled under my desk. At long last, I have been found out. Of course, this is an insidious, genius marketing campaign aimed at mechanically incompetent metrosexuals who are told that they can compensate for their masculine deficiencies by purchasing STP and putting it into their gas tanks...
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I don't think Crawford has it exactly right (in fact, I think he misses by quite a lot.) His emphasis is on what you do, rather than how it is done. There are lots of bad "craftsmen" out there. There are lots of "craftsmen" who are every bit as demoralized as the office drones that Crawford criticizes. How you do the work and the qualities that you bring to the work are far more important than what you do (at least if the measurable is personal satisfaction, which seems to be what Crawford is talking about.) For me, the book that I go back to every four or five years is Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. The subtitle to that book is the key--An Inquiry into Values. It should be a crunchy classic.
Re: As long as I have the money to hire people to work on my car who actually knows how those damned things work nowadays I am content to be "that guy."
True enough! The days of the backyard mechanic are long gone.
I'm no good at all with cars. But I can repair a bicycle, and I'm good with plumbing and electrical work around the house, within reason. I guess I'm not totally useless. :)
Several years as the impoverished grad student forced me - a female - to learn oil changing etc - I once even replaced the thermostat in my radiator in a snowstorm. I felt triumphant. Somehow now the look of my engine is different though - and intimidating. However, I did put up book shelves today and last week I replaced on broken handrail. Cause like Rod's Dad - I hate paying for stuff I should be able to do myself! And yeah it feels good once completed. It is funny how us overeducated souls feels so great doing something manual - and I bet the manual laborers of the world feel great if they can accomplish something academic.
I cringed a bit in self-recognition at those STP ads, too, but I take comfort in the knowledge that I know more computer languages than all my handy forefathers put together. And I may yet be looked upon in awe by my descendants who will know nothing about the underlying zeroes and ones that make our digital world tick.
My favorite interview comments from the author himself were twofold: that he found out when you were with a think tank, you didn't have to think much, and that the difference with motor cycles is that your theory on fixing the motorcycle might seem right but could all of a sudden prove false once you tried your theory and the motorcycle didn't work.
With the neocons and Obamunists, it would seem they can just keep on setting up democracies in Muslim nations or quadrupling down on Bush's deficits with Keynes as their muse, and yet when it doesn't work, they just keep on doing the same thing anyway which would get them FIRED from a "real" job. The author's book to me seems not solely about indicting an educational system that only rewards "work that doesn't involve your hands" but about indicting both an educational system and subsequent forms of employment where there are either no testable hypotheses or where you're paid the same regardless of whether your hypotheses bear fruit.
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