Review of Shop Class as Soulcraft

As a kid I remember watching my dad work in our garage, mainly with wood, making things with a table saw, drills and other tools that he handled with apparent ease.  I watched, but seldom participated.  For one, I was often on my way to a basketball or soccer game and simply monitored his progress as a passing observer.  And secondly, to be perfectly honest, I wasn’t too interested.  Maybe it was because I didn’t understand what was going on before my eyes, but I never asked my dad to teach me, though I’m sure at times he tried.

Now, I’m 26 and I can’t make anything.  I can land a $230 million aircraft in the mountains of Afghanistan, but the recent project of putting up a fence in our backyard terrified me (so instead I spent large sums to have other 20-somethings do it for me while I watched suspiciously through my kitchen window).  Lately this has really been bothering me.  I’ve been “struck dumb by my own dumbness,” as William Deresiewicz once wrote.

According to Matthew Crawford, author of “Shop Class as Soulcraft,” I’m not the only one.   It seems to be a trend that more of us our living life with very little control or understanding over the things that we own and operate.   We’ve ceased to be a culture of makers and settled for strict-consumption.  As evidence, high school shop programs are increasingly being cut with their funding redirected to more “modern” endeavors.  We, as a culture, have begun choosing to buy instead of make and replace instead of repair.  In doing so, Crawford contends that we’re losing our grasp on the world around us and ultimately a part of our soul.

Crawford explains in the introduction that he would like to show us what we lose when we no longer work with our hands and to,

“…speak up for an ideal that is timeless but finds little accommodation today: manual competence, and the stance it entails toward the built, material world.  Neither as workers nor as consumers are we much called upon to exercise such competence, most of us anyway, and merely to recommend its cultivation is to risk the scorn of those who take themselves to be the most hardheaded: the hardheaded economist will point out the “opportunity costs” of spending one’s time making what can be bought, and the hardheaded educator will say that it is irresponsible to educated the young for the trades, which are somehow identified as jobs of the past.  But we might pause to consider just how hardheaded these presumptions are, and whether they don’t, on the contrary, issue from a peculiar sort of idealism, one that instantly steers young people toward the most ghostly kinds of work.”

He repeatedly points out that he isn’t trying to attach mysticism to manual labor, indeed plumbing is often just about unclogging drains, but as a burnt-out think tank director turned motorcycle repairmen he delves deeply into what makes manual trades so satisfying.   In doing so he taps into a growing tide of people searching for a measure of self-reliance in an increasingly outsourced and virtual world.

“We want to feel that our world is intelligible, so we can be responsible for it. This seems to require that the provenance of our things be brought closer to home. Many people are trying to recover a field of vision that is basically human in scale, and extricate themselves from dependence on the obscure forces of a global economy.”

Critics of Crawford say he paints too great a divide between office work done in cubicles and manual trades done in shops and construction.  Not all office work is soulless and dull, just as not all manual labor is satisfying and filled with a sense of innocent artisan pride.

I agree that at times Crawford makes it seem as though to work in a white-collar occupation is to leave one’s soul and brain at the door, but he writes from his own life experience.  Growing up in a commune in the Bay Area with a theoretical physicist for a father, Crawford learned to tinker with his VW engine, worked as an electrician in high school and eventually ended up at the University of Chicago where he earned his PhD in political philosophy.

During that time he also took a job writing abstracts for academic journals, a job which he accounts quite hilariously, noting the irony of being forced to dull his inquisitive mind in favor of meeting daily quotas; this in a job that he specifically took for its seemingly intellectual slant.  All this to say, the mix of the academia and manual labor gave him unique opportunities to judge the merits of both ways of life and it’s these personal experiences that make for an authentic discussion.

However, to paint this book simply as a debate between two different types of work would be severely misleading.  Thanks to Crawford’s background in philosophy, he craftily plumbs what is means to be human, quoting Aristotle, Heidegger and others while slowly digging away at the very roots of how we acquire and use knowledge.

He contrasts the very objective truths of motorcycle repair and other manual trades, either the bike starts or it doesn’t, to the often ambiguous and subjective truths found in most knowledge economy jobs where the status quo is often to, “…avoid making decisions, because they could damage your career, but then spin cover stories after the fact that interpret positive outcomes to your credit.”

Francis Fukuyama reviewing the book in the New York Times sums this aspect of “Shop Class” in much more fluent prose than I could muster,

“Crawford argues that the ideologists of the knowledge economy have posited a false dichotomy between knowing and doing.  The fact of the matter is that most forms of real knowledge, including self-knowledge, come from the effort to struggle with and master the brute reality of material objects — loosening a bolt without stripping its threads, or backing a semi rig into a loading dock.  All these activities, if done well, require knowledge both about the world as it is and about yourself, and your own limitations.  They can’t be learned simply by following rules, as a computer does; they require intuitive knowledge that comes from long experience and repeated encounters with difficulty and failure.  In this world, self- esteem cannot be faked: if you can’t get the valve cover off the engine, the customer won’t pay you.”

It’s in the depth of this argument that many will find the words they’ve been searching for to describe their general unease about everything moving to a knowledge economy, team-building activities and all, where everyone is a manager, a manager of other people’s stuff and ideas.  Rather than simply moving things around and repackaging them in the ether of the markets Crawford stands as an educated voice warning us not to abandon our manual competency in search of admittance into a theoretical, creative class that is often more concerned with consuming rather than actually creating.

It’s true that not everyone can be a motorcycle repairmen or electrician, nor should they, but for those who have slipped into passive consumerism as a lifestyle, this may be the best argument yet as to why we all need to spend a little more time in the garage, building things, not to mention ourselves.

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