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

by Matthew B. Crawford

The satisfactions of manifesting oneself concretely in the world through manual competence have been known to make a man quiet and easy. They seem to relieve him of the felt need to offer chattering interpretations of himself to vindicate his worth.

The craftsman is proud of what he has made, and cherishes it, while the consumer discards things that are perfectly serviceable in his restless pursuit of the new.

Craftsmanship entails learning to do one thing really well, while the ideal of the new economy is to be able to learn new things, celebrating potential rather than achievement.

Craftsmanship means dwelling on a task for a long time and going deeply into it, because you want to get it right.

Socially, being the proprietor of a bike shop in a small city gives me a feeling I never had before. I feel I have a place in society.

These seem to be the categories that inform the educational landscape even now, and this entails two big errors. First, it assumes that all blue-collar work is as mindless as assembly line work, and second, that white-collar work is still recognizably mental in character. Yet there is evidence to suggest that the new frontier of capitalism lies in doing to office work what was previously done to factory work: draining it of its cognitive elements.

the degradation of work is ultimately a cognitive matter, rooted in the separation of thinking from doing.

In The Rise of the Creative Class, Richard Florida presents the image of the creative individual. “Bizarre mavericks operating at the bohemian fringe” are now “at the very heart of the process of innovation,” forming a core creative class “in science and engineering, architecture and design, education, arts, music, and entertainment,” joining “creative professionals in business and finance, law, healthcare and related fields.”

The truth, of course, is that creativity is a by-product of mastery of the sort that is cultivated through long practice.

approach college in the spirit of craftsmanship, going deep into liberal arts and sciences.

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.

The facts of physics have not changed; what has changed is the place of those facts in our consciousness, and therewith the basic character of material culture.

Somehow, self-realization and freedom always entail buying something new, never conserving something old.

the problem of technology is almost the opposite of how it is usually posed: the problem is not “instrumental rationality,” it is rather that we have come to live in a world that precisely does not elicit our instrumentality, the embodied kind that is original to us. We have too few occasions to do anything, because of a certain predetermination of things from afar.

If the gatekeeper at some prestigious institution has opened a gate in front of us, we can’t not walk through it. But as a young person surveys the various ways he could make a living, and how they might be part of a life well lived, the pertinent question for him may be not what IQ he has, but whether he is, for example, careful or commanding. If he is to find work that is fitting, he would do well to pause amid the general rush to the gates.

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.

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.

If occasions for the exercise of judgment are diminished, the moral-cognitive virtue of attentiveness will atrophy.

There seems to be a vicious circle in which degraded work plays a pedagogical role, forming workers into material that is ill suited for anything but the overdetermined world of careless labor.

But by the mere fact that they stand ready to fix things, as a class they are an affront to the throwaway society. Just as important, the kind of thinking they do, if they are good, offers a counterweight to the culture of narcissism.

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.

The idea that culture can be managed entails a reversal of the usual idea of culture. “Culture, as social scientists use the term, is a mostly subterranean force, taken for granted, assumed, inarticulate. We are born into cultures, which teach us how to see, speak, and think. It is only through great effort that we can bring our own culture into view and then only partially. Corporate cultures, however, can be diagnosed, evaluated, and altered.”24 Managers needed to become anthropologists.

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.

“If you don’t vent the drain pipe like this, sewage gases will seep up through the water in the toilet, and the house will stink of shit.” In the trades, a master offers his apprentice good reasons for acting in one way rather than another, the better to realize ends the goodness of which is readily apparent. The master has no need for a psychology of persuasion that will make the apprentice compliant to whatever purposes the master might dream up; those purposes are given and determinate. He does the same work as the apprentice, only better.

On a crew, skill becomes the basis for a circle of mutual regard among those who recognize one another as peers, even across disciplines.

The current educational regime is based on a certain view about what kind of knowledge is important: “knowing that,” as opposed to “knowing how.”

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.

It is a community of consumption that overlaps with a community of work.

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. Here work and leisure both take their bearings from something basically human: rational activity, in association with others.

When the maker’s (or fixer’s) activity is immediately situated within a community of use, it can be enlivened by this kind of direct perception. Then the social character of his work isn’t separate from its internal or “engineering” standards; the work is improved through relationships with others.

The work cannot sustain him as a human being. Rather, it damages the best part of him, and it becomes imperative to partition work off from the rest of life. So during his vacation he goes and climbs Mount Everest, and feels renewed. The next summer, he becomes an ecotourist in the Amazon rain forest. It is in this gated ghetto of his second life that he inhabits once again an intelligible moral order where feeling and action are linked, if only for a couple of weeks.

You can earn money at something without the money, or what it buys, being the focus of your day. To be capable of sustaining our interest, a job has to have room for progress in excellence. In the best cases, I believe the excellence in question ramifies outward. What I mean is that it points to, or serves, some more comprehensive understanding of the good life.

My point, finally, isn’t to recommend motorcycling in particular, nor to idealize the life of a mechanic. It is rather to suggest that if we follow the traces of our own actions to their source, they intimate some understanding of the good life.

In this conversation lies the potential of work to bring some measure of coherence to our lives.

There may be something to be said, then, for having gifted students learn a trade, if only in the summers, so that their egos will be repeatedly crushed before they go on to run the country.

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). The consolation we seek in shopping serves only to narcotize us against a recognition of these facts, even while contributing to the Giant Pool of Money.

Too often, the defenders of free markets forget that what we really want is free men.

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.