http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=106513632
Cool.
Buddha.
All Things Considered, July 12, 2009 · Matthew Crawford was on what most people would think was the "right track." Then he left his job as executive director at a think tank in Washington to open a motorcycle repair shop. In his new book, Shop Class as Soulcraft, he makes the case that our society has placed too great a value on white-collar work and not enough value on the trades.
Crawford tells host Guy Raz that the mechanical arts have a special significance for our time because they cultivate the less glamorous virtue of attentiveness.
Excerpt: Shop Class As Soulcraft
by Matthew B. Crawford
Anyone looking for a good used machine tool should talk to Noel Dempsey, a dealer in Richmond, Virginia. Noel's bustling warehouse is full of metal lathes, milling machines,and table saws, and it turns out that much of it once resided in schools. EBay is awash in such equipment, also from schools. Most of this stuff has been kicking around the secondhand market for about fifteen years; it was in the 1990s that shop class started to become a thing of the past, as educators prepared students to become "knowledge workers."
The disappearance of tools from our common education is the first step toward a wider ignorance of the world of artifacts we inhabit. And, in fact, an engineering culture has developed in recent years in which the object is to "hide the works," rendering many of the devices we depend on every day unintelligible to direct inspection. Lift the hood on some cars now (especially German ones), and the engine appears a bit like the shimmering, featureless obelisk that so enthralled the proto-humans in the opening scene of the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. Essentially, there is another hood under the hood. This creeping concealedness takes various forms. The fasteners holding small appliances together now often require esoteric screwdrivers not commonly available, apparently to prevent the curious or the angry from interrogating the innards. By way of contrast, older readers will recall that until recent decades, Sears catalogues included blown- up parts diagrams and conceptual schematics for all appliances and many other mechanical goods. It was simply taken for granted that such information would be demanded by the consumer.
A decline in tool use would seem to betoken a shift in our relationship to our own stuff: more passive and more dependent. And indeed, there are fewer occasions for the kind of spiritedness that is called forth when we take things in hand for ourselves, whether to fix them or to make them. What ordinary people once made, they buy; and what they once fixed for themselves, they replace entirely or hire an expert to repair, whose expert fix often involves replacing an entire system because some minute component has failed. In this book I would like to speak up for an ideal that is timeless but finds little accommodation today: manual competence, and the stance it entails toward the built, material world. Neither as workers nor as consumers are we much called upon to exercise such competence, most of us anyway, and merely to recommend its cultivation is to risk the scorn of those who take themselves to be the most hardheaded: the hardheaded economist will point out the "opportunity costs" of spending one's time making what can be bought, and the hardheaded educator will say that it is irresponsible to educate the young for the trades, which are somehow identified as jobs of the past. But we might pause to consider just how hardheaded these presumptions are, and whether they don't, on the contrary, issue from a peculiar sort of idealism, one that insistently steers young people toward the most ghostly kinds of work.
Around 1985, articles began to appear in education journals with such titles as "The Soaring Technology Revolution" and "Preparing Kids for High- Tech and the Global Future." Of course, there is nothing new about American futurism. What is new is the wedding of futurism to what might be called "virtualism": a vision of the future in which we somehow take leave of material reality and glide about in a pure information economy. New and yet not so new—for fifty years now we've been assured that we are headed for a "postindustrial society." While manufacturing jobs have certainly left our shores to a disturbing degree, the manual trades have not. If you need a deck built, or your car fixed, the Chinese are of no help. Because they are in China. And in fact there are chronic labor shortages in both construction and auto repair. Yet the trades and manufacturing have long been lumped together in the mind of the pundit class as "blue collar," and their requiem is intoned. More recently, this consensus has begun to show signs of cracking; in 2006 the Wall Street Journal wondered whether "skilled [manual] labor is becoming one of the few sure paths to a good living."
This book is concerned less with economics than it is with the experience of making things and fixing things. I also want to consider what is at stake when such experiences recede from our common life. How does this affect the prospects for full human flourishing? Does the use of tools answer to some permanent requirement of our nature? Arguing for a renewed cultivation of manual competence puts me at odds with certain nostrums surrounding work and consumption, so this book is in part a cultural polemic. I mean to clarify the origins of, and thereby interrogate, those assumptions that lull us into accepting as inevitable, or even desirable, our increasing manual disengagement.
I will be making frequent reference to my own work experience, most recently as a motorcycle mechanic. Seeing a motorcycle about to leave my shop under its own power, several days after arriving in the back of a pickup truck, I suddenly don't feel tired, even though I've been standing on a concrete floor all day. Through the portal of his helmet, I think I can make out the edges of a grin on the face of a guy who hasn't ridden his bike in a while. I give him a wave. With one of his hands on the throttle and the other on the clutch, I know he can't wave back. But I can hear his salute in the exuberant "bwaaAAAAP! blum- blum" of a crisp throttle, gratuitously revved. That sound pleases me, as I know it does him. It's a ventriloquist conversation in one mechanical voice, and the gist of it is "Yeah!"
The wad of cash in my pants feels different than the checks I cashed in my previous job. Following a doctorate in political philosophy at the University of Chicago, I took a job as executive director of a Washington "think tank." I was always tired, and honestly could not see the rationale for my being paid at all—what tangible goods or useful services was I providing to anyone? This sense of uselessness was dispiriting. The pay was good, but it truly felt like compensation, and after five months I quit to open the bike shop. It may be that I am just not well suited to office work. But in this respect I doubt there is anything unusual about me. I offer my own story here not because I think it is extraordinary, but rather because I suspect it is fairly common. I want to do justice to intuitions that many people have, but which enjoy little public credit. This book grows out of an attempt to understand the greater sense of agency and competence I have always felt doing manual work, compared to other jobs that were officially recognized as "knowledge work." Perhaps most surprisingly, I often find manual work more engaging intellectually. This book is an attempt to understand why this should be so.
My examples are drawn mostly from the mechanical repair and building trades because that is what I am familiar with (I used to work as an electrician), but I believe the arguments I offer can illuminate other kinds of work as well. It so happens that most of the characters who appear in this book are men, but I am sure that women, no less than men, will recognize the appeal of tangible work that is straightforwardly useful.
Allow me to say a word about what this book is not. I want to avoid the kind of mysticism that gets attached to "craftsmanship" while doing justice to the very real satisfactions it offers.
I won't be talking about Japanese sword makers or any such thing, and generally prefer to use the term "trade" over Introduction "craft" to emphasize the prosaic nature of my subject (though I won't observe this distinction rigorously). Compared to any real craftsman, my own skills are execrable, so I have no basis for talking about the higher spirituality that is alleged to arise from a perfectly fit mortise or whatever. As a rough working formula, we might say that craftsmanship, as an ideal, provides the standards, but that in a mass- market economy such as ours, it is the tradesman who exemplifies an economically viable way of life, one that is broadly available and provides many of the same satisfactions we associate with craftsmanship. Also, we tend to think of the craftsman as working in his own snug workshop, while the tradesman has to go out and crawl under people's houses, or up a pole, and make someone else's stuff work. So I want to avoid the precious images of manual work that intellectuals sometimes traffic in. I also have little interest in wistful notions of a "simpler" life that is somehow more authentic, or more democratically valorous for being "working class." I do, in fact, want to rehabilitate the honor of the trades, as being choice- worthy work, but to do so from within my own experience, which I find is not illuminated by any of these fraught cultural ideals. Hardly any of the people I have worked with as an electrician or a mechanic have fit the stock image of "blue collar." Quite a few have been eccentrics—refugees from some more confining life. Some drift in and out of the work, as I have, as their circumstances dictate.
This book advances a nestled set of arguments on behalf of work that is meaningful because it is genuinely useful. It also explores what we might call the ethics of maintenance and repair, and in doing so I hope it will speak to those who may be unlikely to go into the trades professionally but strive for some measure of self- reliance—the kind that requires focused engagement with our material things. We now like our things not to disturb us. Why do some of the current Mercedes models have no dipstick, for example? What are the attractions of being disburdened of involvement with our own stuff? This basic question about consumer culture points to some basic questions about work, because in becoming less obtrusive, our devices also become more complicated. How has the relentless complication of cars and motorcycles, for example, altered the jobs of those who service them? We often hear of the need for an "upskilling" of the workforce, to keep up with technological change. I find the more pertinent issue to be: What sort of personality does one need to have, as a twenty-first-century mechanic, to tolerate the layers of electronic bullshit that get piled on top of machines?
What follows is an attempt to map the overlapping territories intimated by the phrases "meaningful work" and " selfreliance." Both ideals are tied to a struggle for individual agency, which I find to be at the very center of modern life. When we view our lives through the lens of this struggle, it brings certain experiences into sharper focus. Both as workers and as consumers, we feel we move in channels that have been projected from afar by vast impersonal forces. We worry that we are becoming stupider, and begin to wonder if getting an adequate grasp on the world, intellectually, depends on getting a handle on it in some literal and active sense.
Some people respond by learning to grow their own vegetables. There are even reports of people raising chickens on the rooftops of apartment buildings in New York City. These new agrarians say they get a deep satisfaction from recovering a more direct relationship to the food they eat. Others take up knitting, and find pride in wearing clothes they have made themselves. The home economics of our grandmothers is suddenly cutting edge chic—why should this be?
With hard economic times looming, we want to become frugal. Frugality requires some measure of self- reliance—the ability to take care of your own stuff. But the new interest in self- reliance seems to have arisen before the specter of hard times. Frugality may be only a thin economic rationalization for a movement that really answers to a deeper need: We want to feel that our world is intelligible, so we can be responsible for it. This seems to require that the provenance of our things be brought closer to home. Many people are trying to recover a field of vision that is basically human in scale, and extricate themselves from dependence on the obscure forces of a global economy.
I would like to consider whether this poignant longing for responsibility that many people experience in their home lives may be (in part) a response to changes in the world of work, where the experience of individual agency has become elusive. Those who work in an office often feel that, despite the proliferation of contrived metrics they must meet, their job lacks objective standards of the sort provided by, for example, a carpenter's level, and that as a result there is something arbitrary in the dispensing of credit and blame. The rise of "teamwork" has made it difficult to trace individual responsibility, and opened the way for new and uncanny modes of manipulation of workers by managers, who now appear in the guise of therapists or life coaches. Managers themselves inhabit a bewildering psychic landscape, and are made anxious by the vague imperatives they must answer to. The college student interviews for a job as a knowledge worker, and finds that the corporate recruiter never asks him about his grades and doesn't care what he majored in. He senses that what is demanded of him is not knowledge but rather that he project a certain kind of personality, an affable complaisance. Is all his hard work in school somehow just for show—his ticket to a Potemkin meritocracy? There seems to be a mismatch between form and content, and a growing sense that the official story we've been telling ourselves about work is somehow false.
The time is ripe to dwell on this unease rather than dismiss it. The scope of the economic crisis is still uncertain as I write this, but it appears to be deepening. We are experiencing a genuine crisis of confidence in our most prestigious institutions and professions. This presents an opportunity to reconsider some basic assumptions. The question of what a good job looks like—of what sort of work is both secure and worthy of being honored—is more open now than it has been for a long time. Wall Street in particular has lost its luster as a destination for smart and ambitious young people. Out of the current confusion of ideals and confounding of career hopes, a calm recognition may yet emerge that productive labor is the foundation of all prosperity. The meta- work of trafficking in the surplus skimmed from other people's work suddenly appears as what it is, and it becomes possible once again to think the thought, "Let me make myself useful."
Back to basics, then. The cover is cracked. It is time to rip it off, look directly at the inner workings, and begin to fix things for ourselves.
Excerpted from Shop Class As Soulcraft by Matthew B. Crawford. Reprinted by arrangement with The Penguin Press, a member of Penguin Group (USA), Inc. Copyright (c) Matthew B. Crawford, 2009.
Machining is a great trade. Recommend it to anybody.
Awesome! I feel better validated about charging people* hundereds of dollars to work on thier bikes. Why shouldn't I make as much money as they do?
* CEO's/white-collar workers.
Yes I am shafting a few doctor types around here ...
I prolly make near as much being a software engineer ... but I like anything extra ... muhahahahahahaha .... hahahahahahah ....
Cool.
Buddha.
If I didn't know better I'd say you are Buddha Loves youing?
That's why I never would've survived as a bike mechanic. The two years that I did it, I never wanted to charge anyone more than $5 for something I considered to be standard knowledge or my time. Sometimes I could've cared less if I knew how much some of those people made, but still.
I end up killing myself for pennies too ... I was kidding ...
Carbs - yea take near an hour on average, I barely clear 20 after the parts.
Cool.
Buddha.
I made 60 bucks off a neighbour who saw me jetting my carbs last friday.. he needed brakes on his malibu (badly).. I managed to fix em in an hour flat.
not bad for a white collar about to nab a second degree.
i dont think there's a point to this post other than to gloat that I wear both collars. :)
There's a lot of similarity between working on a bike and doing biological experiments - different scales, different levels of precision, but the awareness of the system and how the job of the moment fits into it is the same.
What's funny is that many of my significantly-post-graduate-educated colleagues are very impressed that I can work on cars and bikes, and don't dream of doing it themselves. It's a system, like any other - less complicated than an immune system, at that.
And its about to get worse. a lot worse, think housing bubble worse.
Why ???
Obama and many of the administration bigwigs are pushing college education. Big time, they want people to get degrees, associates at a minimum.
Couple that with the fact that the entire world is creating things that you cannot see the innards of ... like the extremely sanitary look of the chick robot "Eva" in Wall-E compared to the clunky look of wall-e ...
We are building a whole freaking second generation of "college educated super stars" who wont know a spanner from a wrench and in England/India, a spanner is a wrench in US and a wrench is a pipe wrench in the US ... ha ha ...
Like the en-masse graduation of criminologists from 2001-2007 due to the popularity of CSI types on TV. The country needs 500 max ... There are 100,000 who have graduated as criminologists. "Nice work education system".
Anyway, I think a wave is comming, people will shy away from anything that potentially could get their hands dirty ... and we'll have a field day.
Cool.
Buddha.
I just don't see those two things as being in conflict, though. Having an education, knowing how to work something complex - and also knowing how to work with your hands and get them dirty.
I think the problem is the divide, not the education.
Keep pushing those degrees and people will feel entitled, only problem is there are only so many upper level jobs. If everyone has a degree but no skill in a trade then we end up with college educated taxi drivers. That guy was on the Daily Show recently, very interesting interview really.
Considering a college education ... heck even saying the word costs $$$ ... costs you 30-100K+ ... yea its a huge pay off ... yea right idiots.
Cool.
Buddha.
As someone with 3 technical degrees who can also hold his own in a machine shop, composite shop or woodshop, I have to say that getting a degree CAN have a payback. But it isn't always the case.
If you spend $160K on an english lit degree and have no idea how it might apply to employment, that's a bad situation.
I spent about $40,000 on my 3 degrees. State schools, a little bit of scholarship money. A lot of working while in school to pay rent. And deciding that college is something I would have to pay back so I maximized my bag for the buck.
Some of the higher end schools will essentially pay to have you go there if you are a good student, so a $35,000 a year price tag isn't real. Again, if you deserve it.
Also, as far as technical degrees go, most of those how I have worked with do something that looks vocational at home. Like the MIT grad who writes microcontroller firmware by day, but restores London taxis at home.
Not all of them are Bob Vila, but most can do something. In my experience.
Quote from: The Buddha on July 16, 2009, 01:00:30 PM
Considering a college education ... heck even saying the word costs $$$ ... costs you 30-100K+ ... yea its a huge pay off ... yea right idiots.
Cool.
Buddha.
original NY Times article: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/24/magazine/24labor-t.html?_r=1&emc=eta1
its not going to change anytime soon. people who do are bad at thinking, and people who think are bad at doing.
Quote from: cd on July 16, 2009, 03:27:06 PM
its not going to change anytime soon. people who do are bad at thinking, and people who think are bad at doing.
I was going to disagree with you. I was thinking and thinking about what to write. I didn't write anything for a long time. So I stopped thinking and just wrote this.