Shop Class as Soulcraft
Still, the best parts of the book are where Crawford talks about what working with the hands can do for a person’s mind and soul. When he describes the satisfaction of hearing the roar of a motorcycle leaving his shop, knowing that it arrived in the bed of a truck, it is clearly heartfelt. His desire to share that experience with others is palpable. Well, maybe that not exactly it. More the desire to say “there is another path” to the members of our society, in particular those about to shuffle off to college because that’s simple what one does after high school. To them I would say: read his book, and consider how your brain might be engaged by the thoughtful application of experience and labor in a trade. Decide if the potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars of college and years of debt really return enough value to your life to make college worthwhile.
For the rest of us, now past that decision point, consider Crawford’s thoughts on freedom and specialization. Maybe it _does_ make financial sense to contract out our projects and repairs, but does that necessarily make it wrong to try to fix things ourselves? Are we truly free if so much of the technology we depend on is beyond our ability to repair it? Perhaps Crawford has a point, that there is more to work than simple money and time. Maybe dirty hands will be good for our souls.
There are two problems. The first is the ‘Malcolm Gladwell problem’. Remember when our founding fathers published pamphlets? Let’s bring that back. This first appeared as an essay and probably should have stayed as one, it’s just not full length book material.
The other problem is that he presents a simple truth which is only half the story. To the author, there is hand-work, in which feedback is absolute therefore the work stays meaningful, and office work, in which achievement is unnecessary and an accent on procedure over substance has ruined everything. What he’s missing (and this is where some of the condescension toward craftsmanship Mr. Crawford bristles at so is actually based on a grain of truth) is that all these possibilities exist in both worlds, they’re just more obvious in the hands-on. We have all gotten back a car that’s still broken because a mechanic only followed the procedures in a shop manual he was ordered to follow by corporate hq. Gertrude Stein’s famous term was actually borrowed from a Paris car mechanic who found the younger mechanics went through the motions but didn’t understand what they were working on and so missed the nuances. He called the up-and-coming mechanics a ‘lost generation’. The point is that hand workers make the mistakes and work in the ways the author treats as unique to offices. Likewise, good managers cause nebulous organizations to work better. In, say, a school, it is much more difficult to diagnose a case of students who don’t learn what they could than it is to notice a light that doesn’t light. And you can bet the fix will take perception, subtlety, strength of character tempered with patience, tolerance for bureaucracy, etc. etc. yet people do this. It’s just harder, that’s why they fail a lot.
