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“Matthew Crawford is a college educated, modern man who landed a job at a Washington think tank, thus ostensibly achieving the new American dream: to earn money not by doing hard work, but by trading in our country's much lauded "knowledge economy". But then something happened. He quit. Not only did this man with a doctorate in philosophy drop out of his Information Age career, he also started his own business as a motorcycle repairman, working at first from his own garage. Strangely enough, he felt happier working with his hands, getting dirty, and fixing things than he ever did doing his supposedly intellectual work.
Shop Class as Soulcraft is a very interesting examination of the intellectual, practical, and aesthetic value and worth of manual labor; the uncanny and artificial division between conception and labor, between thinking and doing, and where and when it arose; and the changing economic climate which is starting to revert back to reality, giving better value and credence to manual trades. It is without a doubt one of the sanest books I have read in a while, and while it does have its flaws its sheer wealth of wisdom recommends it as one of the best new nonfiction books a reader can buy today.
One of my favorite things about the book is that Crawford values, as I do, the ordinary, perennially undervalued lower classes, not just of this country, but of foreign cultures as well. He sees in their poverty, humility and directness of experience a brilliance which I have long admired. Though he doesn't always make the connection, many of the ideas he argues for best fit into traditional, small-scale lifestyles. Typical is his argument for agency, not as activity directed by the self, but as directed toward a real, objective good "not something arbitrary or private...[flowing] from an apprehension of real features of the world." Crawford champions for humility in our work and our outlook on life in general, a humility educated by periodic failure, knowledge of our fallibility, and the continual revelations which one who is attentive to and engaged by meaningful work routinely experiences. He sees that we need work which not only engages our attention, but is relevant to and has real context in a community, rather than work whose results only affect an abstract and distant economy one never really experiences. Most of all, Crawford argues against the "characteristically modern" delusion under which we believe the world can be subjectively manipulated to our -- or others' (such as corporations') -- personal whims, leading increasingly to a feedback loop of increasing privacy, loneliness, and autonomy of self.
Perhaps one of the most relevant aspects of Shop Class is its contrast of all this to what we are so used to in our modern lives. The white collar worker's office or retail store, he shows, usually requires him to submit to an arbitrary and abstract code or quota that is not real or external in any meaningful way, leading to learned irresponsibility, listlessness and a sense of being trapped in contradictions. The chronic blame-shifting and manipulation which he so observantly describes is familiar to anyone who has done almost any kind of desk or sales job.
Also explored in the book is the history which has led us to this puzzling predicament. Crawford traces the decline of apprenticeship in the early 1900s, in the face of rising mass-production techniques, and explores how the workers of that age rebelled en masse against Henry Ford's new system: to meet a need of 100 workers, Ford had to hire 963, because most of them, used to an intellectually stimulating and satisfying manual career, found the factory work simply boring, and just walked out. It is only when one becomes used to this kind of work, Crawford shows us, that it seems to us inevitable and we resign ourselves to it.
As I mentioned before, the author holds forth that most white class jobs today fit more the mode of factory labor (characterized by highly managed, abstracted labor requiring very little actual brainwork, and judged by completely arbitrary and subjective standards) than do the manual trades which his book champions. This really makes a lot of sense: after all, it is the carpenter, the plumber, the repairman and electrician, etc., who must actively use their minds to meet the challenges of always unique situations, while the office worker deals with abstract regulations and codes and standards which have very little to do with reality, which, as C.S. Lewis said, is always iconoclastic.
Crawford also echoes, at times, such writers as Lewis and the Twelve Southerners, when he writes about how modern industry and corporatism controls our consumption through advertising, by maintaining a continual dissatisfaction necessary for the continuation of the industrial system. (Think about it: if you were ever suddenly completely happy with what you had in your life, you wouldn't participate very much in the economy.) This was the root of our consumeristic culture, and the beginning of debt viewed as a common and everyday thing: the idea that we need and deserve certain comforts, distractions and dalliances. And it is an idea, contrary to the economic mode of history widely prevalent today, which is decidedly new. Heretofore, people had had less comforts not because traditional life did not afford them, but because they chose to forgo them, to "be frugal and free" (Benjamin Franklin). The new culture of consumerism meant that people had to produce more, both to meet newly engorged demands, and to make enough money to fulfill their own demands.
There are also echoes of classic conservative thought in places where Shop Class argues against the technocratic/meritocratic view of education, maintaining that higher education is not for everybody, sometimes not even for the smartest of people. Once he even echoes Edmund Burke's argument for prejudice (not, of course, in the sense of racism, but in the sense of having a decision ready at hand for a situation before it actually occurs, provided by experience, or, in Burke's case, inheritance of experience) when he describes a typical mechanic's intuition of which method to use to eliminate resistance: DW-40, or compressed air. "I say 'intuit' rather than 'conclude' because he may not draw any explicit connections in his mind....Rather, he is familiar with typical situations, and their typicality is something of which he has a tacit knowledge."
As others have pointed out, Crawford does fall short in some areas of his treatment of work. For example, he fails to connect localism, personal integrity, and traditional ways of working with one's hands (all things he praises in the book) with their obvious sister, agrarianism. Perhaps this is because his fascination with motorcycles, engines, and mechanical work precludes any censure of industrialism. (As reviewer Conor Williams wrote, "his argument for localism and 'mastering our stuff' seems very much in tension with several of motorists’ key ideals: easy mobility and freedom from place.") Crawford shows us the basically unhealthy aspects of scientific management, corporatism, the separation of thinking from doing, and many related modern work phenomena, but does not see that all these aspects stem from our industrial society. He also claims that "work is necessarily toilsome and serves someone else's interest." Certainly this is true within industrialism, and has been one of the system's biggest indictments from its enemies since the writings of the Twelve Southerners. But whether it is necessarily so across the board seems to me debatable at best, and ahistorical at worst. This idea should be something Crawford's book would naturally oppose.
Nevertheless, the wide exposure of such a realistically grounded book is an encouraging trend, as it speaks against the progressivism, abstraction, corporatization, and globalism that are such damaging forces to both our community and individual lives. Crawford's call to personal responsibility, his exhortation that we seek agency instead of autonomy, and his insistence that experiencing reality directly rather than through the filter of media or technology, are splendid marks of sanity, the popularity of which cannot be a bad thing. While there are quite certainly better and more complete books out there, I'd hazard to say that Shop Class as Soulcraft is one of the best new releases one can read right now. It is at least quite a good starting point; and as I've pointed out to a friend, once the bubble of hysterical optimism is punctured, it cannot be long before a reader will begin to notice similar flaws inherent in the ideology of the modern age in many other places. ”
Michael wrote this review Sunday, July 26 2009.
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