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

by Matthew B. Crawford

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.