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

by Matthew B. Crawford

I believe the mechanical arts have a special significance for our time because they cultivate not creativity, but the less glamorous virtue of attentiveness. Things need fixing and tending no less than creating.

The truth does not reveal itself to idle spectators.

Piston slap may indeed sound like loose tappets, so to be a good mechanic you have to be constantly attentive to the possibility that you may be mistaken. This is an ethical virtue.

But getting outside her own head is the task the artist sets herself, and this is the mechanic’s task, too. Both, if they are good, use their imagination “not to escape the world but to join it, and this exhilarates us because of the distance between our ordinary dulled consciousness and an apprehension of the real.”

But a more public-spirited calculus would include a humane regard for the kind of labor involved in each alternative: on the one side disciplined attentiveness, enlivened by a mechanic’s own judgments and ethical entanglement with a motor, and on the other systematized carelessness. Further, the decision is inherently political, because the question who benefits is at stake: the internationalist order of absentee capital, or an individual possessed of personal knowledge.

This can be understood by analogy with our food choices: having a motor rebuilt would correspond roughly to the decision to buy food from a local farmer versus a distant agribusiness. This is a practice the bohemian consumer already has in the cultural tool kit he uses, not only to construct his dissident self image but to give expression to his genuine public-spiritedness.

He would answer his phone with a high-pitched “Service!” I loved the generality of that greeting, and started doing the same at my shop. What is being serviced, exactly? Among other things, the psyches of people with irrational attachments to old motorcycles.

Frank talk, even a little abuse, is part of the repertoire of every therapist.

Acquiring practical wisdom, then, entails overcoming the self-absorption of the idiot, but also the tunnel vision of the curious man whose attention is indeed directed outside of himself, but who sees only his own goal.

A lot of academic work has this quality of curiosity without circumspection;

Absurdity is good for comedy, but bad as a way of life.

But in the last thirty years American businesses have shifted their focus from the production of goods (now done elsewhere) to the projection of brands, that is, states of mind in the consumer, and this shift finds its correlate in the production of mentalities in workers. Process becomes more important than product, and is to be optimized through management techniques that work on a deeper level than the curses of a foreman.

James Poulos writes that in the office, “mutual respect and enthusiasm [have] reached new levels of performed social intimacy.”

The contemporary office requires the development of a self that is ready for teamwork, rooted in shared habits of flexibility rather than strong individual character.

work is necessarily toilsome and serves someone else’s interest.

Managers are placed in the middle of an enduring social conflict that once gave rise to street riots but is mostly silent in our times: the antagonism between labor and capital.

The intent of this kind of language is not to deceive, it is to preserve one’s interpretive latitude so that if the context changes, “a new, more appropriate meaning can be attached to the language already used. In this sense the corporation is a place where people are not held to what they say because it is generally understood that their word is always provisional.”

The escalating demand for academic credentials gives the impression of an ever more knowledgeable society, whose members perform cognitive feats their unschooled parents could scarcely conceive of.

As Labaree writes, “Formal characteristics of schooling—such as grades, credits, and degrees—come to assume greater weight than substantive characteristics, as pursuing these badges of merit becomes more important than actually learning anything along the way. . . . Teaching takes a back seat to the more socially salient task of sorting, and grading becomes more important for its social consequences than for its pedagogical uses.”

When the point of education becomes the production of credentials rather than the cultivation of knowledge, it forfeits the motive recognized by Aristotle: “All human beings by nature desire to know.” Students become intellectually disengaged.

college habituates young people to accept as the normal course of things a mismatch between form and content, official representations and reality.

Workers must identify with the corporate culture, and exhibit a high level of “buy-in” to “the mission.” The division between private life and work life is eroded, and accordingly the whole person is at issue in job performance evaluations.

There is pride of accomplishment in the performance of whole tasks that can be held in the mind all at once, and contemplated as whole once finished.

The more children are praised, the more they have a stake in maintaining the resulting image they have of themselves; children who are praised for being smart choose the easier alternative when given a new task.37 They become risk-averse and dependent on others. The credential loving of college students is a natural response to such an education, and prepares them well for the absence of objective standards in the job markets they will enter; the validity of your self-assessment is known to you by the fact it has been dispensed by gatekeeping institutions. Prestigious fellowships, internships, and degrees become the standard of self-esteem. This is hardly an education for independence, intellectual adventurousness, or strong character.

Heidegger famously noted that the way we come to know a hammer is not by staring at it, but by grabbing hold of it and using it.

If thinking is bound up with action, then the task of getting an adequate grasp on the world, intellectually, depends on our doing stuff in it.

an external reward can affect one’s interpretation of one’s own motivation, an interpretation that comes to be self-fulfilling.

any job that can be scaled up, depersonalized, and made to answer to forces remote from the scene of work is vulnerable to degradation, even to the point of requiring that the person who does the job actively suppress his better judgment.

real knowledge arises through confrontations with real things.

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.

I have tried to make a case for self-reliance of a certain kind—being master of your own stuff. This requires a basic intelligibility to our possessions: in their provenance, in their principles of operation, in their logic of repair and maintenance, in short, in all those ways that a material object can make itself fully manifest to us, so we can be responsible for it.

But viewed from a wider angle, self-reliance is a sad doctrine, arguably a consolation for the collapse of institutions of mutual care.

To fill the void that comes with isolation, and give it a positive cast, we posit the ideal of the sovereign self, unencumbered by attachments to others and radically free.

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.

When the conception of work is removed from the scene of its execution, we are divided against one another, and each against himself. For thinking is inherently bound up with doing, and it is in rational activity together with others that we find our peculiar satisfaction.

We in the West have arranged our institutions to prevent the concentration of political power, with such devices as the separation of legislative, executive, and judicial functions. But we have failed utterly to prevent the concentration of economic power, or take account of how such concentration damages the conditions under which full human flourishing becomes possible (it is never guaranteed).

It is time to dispel the long-standing confusion of private property with corporate property.

The alternative to revolution, which I want to call Stoic, is resolutely this-worldly. It insists on the permanent, local viability of what is best in human beings. In practice, this means seeking out the cracks where individual agency and the love of knowledge can be realized today, in one’s own life.