Shop Class as Soulcraft_ An Inquiry Into the Value of Work - Matthew B. Crawford [2]
The wad of cash in my pants feels different than the checks I cashed in my previous job. Following a doctorate in political philosophy at the University of Chicago, I took a job as executive director of a Washington “think tank.” I was always tired, and honestly could not see the rationale for my being paid at all—what tangible goods or useful services was I providing to anyone? This sense of uselessness was dispiriting. The pay was good, but it truly felt like compensation, and after five months I quit to open the bike shop. It may be that I am just not well suited to office work. But in this respect I doubt there is anything unusual about me. I offer my own story here not because I think it is extraordinary, but rather because I suspect it is fairly common. I want to do justice to intuitions that many people have, but which enjoy little public credit. This book grows out of an attempt to understand the greater sense of agency and competence I have always felt doing manual work, compared to other jobs that were officially recognized as “knowledge work.” Perhaps most surprisingly, I often find manual work more engaging intellectually. This book is an attempt to understand why this should be so.
My examples are drawn mostly from the mechanical repair and building trades because that is what I am familiar with (I used to work as an electrician), but I believe the arguments I offer can illuminate other kinds of work as well. It so happens that most of the characters who appear in this book are men, but I am sure that women, no less than men, will recognize the appeal of tangible work that is straightforwardly useful.
Allow me to say a word about what this book is not. I want to avoid the kind of mysticism that gets attached to “craftsmanship” while doing justice to the very real satisfactions it offers. I won’t be talking about Japanese sword makers or any such thing, and generally prefer to use the term “trade” over “craft” to emphasize the prosaic nature of my subject (though I won’t observe this distinction rigorously). Compared to any real craftsman, my own skills are execrable, so I have no basis for talking about the higher spirituality that is alleged to arise from a perfectly fit mortise or whatever. As a rough working formula, we might say that craftsmanship, as an ideal, provides the standards, but that in a mass-market economy such as ours, it is the tradesman who exemplifies an economically viable way of life, one that is broadly available and provides many of the same satisfactions we associate with craftsmanship. Also, we tend to think of the craftsman as working in his own snug workshop, while the tradesman has to go out and crawl under people’s houses, or up a pole, and make someone else’s stuff work. So I want to avoid the precious images of manual work that intel lectuals sometimes traffic in. I also have little interest in wistful notions of a “simpler” life that is somehow more authentic, or more democratically valorous for being “working class.” I do, in fact, want to rehabilitate the honor of the trades, as being choice-worthy work, but to do so from within my own experience, which I find is not illuminated by any of these fraught cultural ideals. Hardly any of the people I have worked with as an electrician or a mechanic have fit the stock image of “blue collar.” Quite a few have been eccentrics—refugees from some more confining life. Some drift in and out of the work, as I have, as their circumstances dictate.
This book advances a nestled set of arguments on behalf of work that is meaningful because it is genuinely useful. It also explores what we might call the