Shop Class as Soulcraft_ An Inquiry Into the Value of Work - Matthew B. Crawford [21]
So what advice should one give to a young person? If you have a natural bent for scholarship; if you are attracted to the most difficult books out of an urgent need, and can spare four years to devote yourself to them, go to college. In fact, approach college in the spirit of craftsmanship, going deep into liberal arts and sciences. But if this is not the case; if the thought of four more years sitting in a classroom makes your skin crawl, the good news is that you don’t have to go through the motions and jump through the hoops for the sake of making a decent living. Even if you do go to college, learn a trade in the summers. You’re likely to be less damaged, and quite possibly better paid, as an independent tradesman than as a cubicle-dwelling tender of information systems or low-level “creative.” To heed such advice would require a certain contrarian streak, as it entails rejecting a life course mapped out by others as obligatory and inevitable.
3
To Be Master of One’s Own Stuff
Consider the case of a man who is told his car is not worth fixing. He is told this not by a mechanic but by a clipboard-wielding “service representative” at the dealership. Here is a layer of bureaucracy that makes impossible a conversation about the nitty-gritty of the situation. This man would gladly hover around the mechanic’s bay and be educated about his car, but this is not allowed. The service representative represents not so much mechanical expertise as a position taken by an institution, and our spirited man is not sure he trusts this institution (maybe they want to sell him a new car). He hates the feeling of dependence, especially when it is a direct result of his not understanding something. So he goes home and starts taking the valve covers off his engine to investigate for himself. Maybe he has no idea what he is doing, but he trusts that whatever the problem is, he ought to be able to figure it out by his own efforts. Then again, maybe not—he may never get his valve train back together again. But he intends to go down swinging. Spiritedness, then, may be allied with a spirit of inquiry , through a desire to be master of one’s own stuff. It is the prideful basis of self-reliance.
Often this kind of pride is in tension with one’s own self-interest, considered narrowly—one is urged to consider the “opportunity costs” of fixing one’s own car. “Time is money.” This dictum is usually accompanied by a dim view of pride, as being at bottom a failure to appreciate one’s true situation. (Thomas Hobbes regarded pride as a kind of false consciousness.) 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. But, against the ever-expanding imperium of economics, we do well to insist on what we know firsthand, namely, the concrete heterogeneity of human experience—its apples-versus-oranges character. From an econ omistic mind-set, spiritedness or pridefulness appears as a failure to be properly calculative, which requires that one first be properly abstract. Economics recognizes only certain virtues, and not the most impressive ones at that. Spiritedness is an assertion of one’s own dignity, and to fix one’s own car is not merely to use up time, it is to have a different experience of time, of one’s car, and of oneself.
It is characteristic of the spirited man that he takes an expansive view of the boundary of his own stuff—he tends to act as though any material things he uses are in some sense properly his, while he is using them—and when he finds himself in public spaces that seem contrived to break the connection between his will and his environment, as though he had no hands, this brings out a certain hostility in him. Consider the angry feeling that bubbles up in this person when, in a public bathroom, he finds himself waving his hands under the faucet, trying to elicit a few seconds of water from it in a futile rain dance of guessed-at