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

by Matthew B. Crawford

But the tradesman must reckon with the infallible judgment of reality, where one’s failures or shortcomings cannot be interpreted away.

The quandary was how to make workers efficient and attentive, when their actual labor had been degraded by automation.

Yet their final product improve immensly.

Eventually it was learned that the only way to get them to work harder was to play upon the imagination, stimulating new needs and wants. Consumption, no less than production, needed to be brought under scientific management—the management of desire. Thus, there came to be marketers who called themselves “consumption engineers” in the early decades of the twentieth century.

The purchaser of labor can't dictate what the worker buys/consumes. Don't buy all the Marxist tripe.

Standardized tests remove a teacher’s discretion in the curriculum; strict sentencing guidelines prevent a judge from judging.

But why did this happen? Because people failed in their jobs.

the basic antagonism of economic life: work is toilsome and necessarily serves someone else’s interests.

Apparently mutual exchange doesn't exist.

What is it that we really want for a young person when we give him or her vocational advice? The only creditable answer, it seems to me, is one that avoids utopianism while keeping an eye on the human good: work that engages the human capacities as fully as possible.

The idea of opportunity costs presumes the fungibility of human experience: all our activities are equivalent or interchangeable once they are reduced to the abstract currency of clock time, and its wage correlate.

Uh, no. Such a shallow, cynical view of economics.

personality.

This is all grumpy Grandpa Simpson.

freedomism,

He thinks freedom is an illegitimate ideology.

The expanding empire of electronics covers over the mechanical.

Which mighf have happen sooner had electric cars beaten the internal combustion engine.

If we understand this under the rubric of “globalization,” we see that the tentacles of that wondrous animal reach down into things that were once unambiguously our own: the amount of oil in a man’s crankcase.

More Grandpa Simpson.

But I also want to notice that there is a whole ideology of choice and freedom and autonomy, and that if one pays due attention, these ideals start to seem less like a bubbling up of the unfettered Self and more like something that is urged upon us. This becomes most clear in advertising, where Choice and Freedom and A World Without Limits and Master the Possibilities and all the other heady existentialist slogans of the consumerist Self are invoked with such repetitive urgency that they come to resemble a disciplinary system. Somehow, self-realization and freedom always entail buying something new, never conserving something old.

Yes, when it's used in advertising. Truism.

I believe the example of the musician sheds light on the basic character of human agency, namely, that it arises only within concrete limits that are not of our making.

the doctor and the mechanic have daily intercourse with the world as something independent, and a vivid awareness of the difference between self and nonself. Fixing things may be a cure for narcissism.

So the motor-sport mentality fits easily with a certain nativism. This is based not on racial animosity, but on such considerations as tensile strength and resistance to torque shear. (The cosmopolitan tends to live remote from such considerations.)

Populist arrogance

Countless times since that day, a more experienced mechanic has pointed out to me something that was right in front of my face, but which I lacked the knowledge to see. It is an uncanny experience; the raw sensual data reaching my eye before and after are the same, but without the pertinent framework of meaning, the features in question are invisible. Once they have been pointed out, it seems impossible that I should not have seen them before.

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.”

I hadn’t gone to graduate school for the sake of a career (rather, I wanted guidance reading some difficult books), but once I had the master’s degree I felt like I belonged to a certain order of society, and was entitled to its forms. Despite the beautiful ties I wore, it turned out to be a more proletarian existence than I had known as a manual worker.

He never should have gone to grad school.

what matters is your rank among your peers; it matters not if the whole lot of you are ignorant.

Such stressing out or stewing indicates something amiss with the individual, his idiosyncratic hang-ups, not a reasonable reaction to an unreasonable situation.

Or perhaps the person isn't acting like an adult. Where's the Stoicism here? If it were frustration with a motorcycle, I know what he'd think.

I believe this remedy remains valid, especially if the enterprise provides a good or service with objective standards, as these may serve as the basis for social relations within the enterprise that are nonmanipulative in character.

He's never witnessed the corruption in a small town.

To regard universal knowledge as the whole of knowledge is to take no account of embodiment and purposiveness, those features of actual thinkers who are always in particular situations.

The basic idea of tacit knowledge is that we know more than we can say, and certainly more than we can specify in a formulaic way. Intuitive judgments of complex systems, especially those made by experts, such as an experienced firefighter, are sometimes richer than can be captured by any set of algorithms.

One remedy is to find work in the cracks; work the market rationale of which is fully contained within a human scale of face-to-face interactions. This is what the speed shop offers; it is a community of making and fixing that is embedded within a community of use.

Ironically filled with items produced in mass market factories.

I have argued that real knowledge arises through confrontations with real things.

Author's thesis

People of aristocratic sympathies are alive to rank and difference, and take pleasure in beholding them. I think most of us have this response when we see talent, but we have become inarticulate about it. It seems illegitimate to give rank its due in a society where “all children are above average,” as Garrison Keillor says of Lake Woebegon. Yet it is precisely our attraction to excellence—our being on the lookout for the choicer manifestations—that may lead us to attend to human practices searchingly, without prejudice, and find superiority in unfamiliar places. For example, in the intellectual accomplishments of people who do work that is dirty, such as the mechanic. With such discoveries we extend our moral imagination to people who are conventionally beneath serious regard, and find them admirable. Not because we heed a moral injunction such as the universalist egalitarian urges upon us, but because we actually see something admirable, and are impressed by it.

He wants to be seen as an individual, and recognized as worthy on the same grounds on which he has striven to be worthy, indeed superior, by cultivating some particular excellence or skill.

More snobbery

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.

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

To live well is to reconcile ourselves to it, and try to realize whatever excellence we can.

It is time to dispel the long-standing confusion of private property with corporate property.4 Conservatives are right to extol the former as a pillar of liberty, but when they put such arguments in the service of the latter, they become apologists for the ever-greater concentration of capital. The result is that opportunities for self-employment and self-reliance are preempted by distant forces.

Big is NOT inherently bad.