Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work

by Matthew B. Crawford

The net effect on me is often the same as it was on Bob: “This is bullshit.” The digital multimeter, together with the procedure in the book, present an image of precision and determinacy that is often false. What the procedure in fact demands of you is a real effort of interpretation, one that is nowhere acknowledged in the service manual.

The intimacy of such a collaboration is part of the surplus that gets gathered as labor is fragmented. The writers of modern manuals are neither mechanics nor engineers but rather technical writers. This is a profession that is institutionalized on the assumption that it has its own principles that can be mastered without the writer being immersed in any particular problem; it is universal rather than situated.

It is common today to locate one’s “true self ” in one’s leisure choices. Accordingly, good work is taken to be work that maximizes one’s means for pursuing these other activities, where life becomes meaningful.

Everyone is progressing in knowledge, through a shared dialectic. The dialectic is between people, but also between iterations—you break things, and learn something new by taking them apart and talking it through.

I like to fix motorcycles more than I like to wire houses (even though I could make about twice as much money wiring houses).9 Both practices have internal goods that engage my attention, but fixing bikes is more meaningful because not only the fixing but also the riding of motorcycles answers to certain intuitions I have about human excellence. People who ride motorcycles have gotten something right, and I want to put myself in the service of it, this thing that we do, this kingly sport that is like war made beautiful.

I try to be a good motorcycle mechanic. This effort connects me to others, in particular to those who exemplify good motorcycling, because it is they who can best judge how well I have realized the functional goods I am aiming at.10 I wouldn’t even know what those goods are if I didn’t spend time with people who ride at a much higher level than I, and are therefore more discerning of what is good in a motorcycle.

Those who belong to a certain order of society—people who make big decisions that affect all of us—don’t seem to have much sense of their own fallibility. Being unacquainted with failure, the kind that can’t be interpreted away, may have something to do with the lack of caution that business and political leaders often display in the actions they undertake on behalf of other people.

A student can avoid hard sciences and foreign languages and get a degree without ever having the unambiguous experience of being wrong.

Such an education dovetails with the pedagogical effects of the material culture inhabited by the well-to-do, which insulates them from failed confrontations with hard reality. Such failures often force you to ask a favor of someone else, like when your car breaks down somewhere and you have no cell phone, and you have to flag down a motorist or knock on a door. Such an experience of dependence makes you humble, and grateful.

Such standards have a universal validity that is apparent to all, yet the discriminations made by practitioners of an art respond also to aesthetic subtleties that may not be visible to the bystander. Only a fellow journeyman is entitled to say “nicely done.”

It is in doing the job nicely that the tradesman puts his own stamp on it. His individuality is not only compatible with, it is realized through his efforts to reach a goal that is common.