Shop Class as Soulcraft_ An Inquiry Into the Value of Work - Matthew B. Crawford [23]
Early motorcycles were not very convenient. They may have been more convenient than a horse (I can’t say), but surely not by much. More than today’s machines, they made an issue of certain intellectual and moral qualities of the rider; forgetfulness and overcautiousness would show themselves when the rider applied oil “as he thought fit.” One was drawn out of oneself and into a struggle, by turns hateful and loving, with another thing that, like a mule, was emphatically not simply an extension of one’s will. Rather, one had to conform one’s will and judgment to certain external facts of physics that still presented themselves as such. Old bikes don’t flatter you, they educate you.
As every parent knows, infants think the world revolves around them, and everything ought to be instantly available to them. At an earlier stage of technological progress, I am sure that contending with a motorcycle, like contending with the farm animals that likely inhabited the same barn as the motorcycle, helped along the process of becoming an adult. When your shin gets kicked, whether by a mule or a kick-starter, you get schooled.
It would be strange to pine for the inconvenience of old motorcycles. They truly are a pain in the ass. My point rather is to consider the moral significance of material culture, and to suggest that there are forces on the consumption side that parallel those we have seen on the production side. On all sides, we see fewer occasions for the exercise of judgment, such as the old-timers needed in riding their bikes. The necessity of such judgment calls forth human excellence. In the first place, the intellectual virtue of judging things rightly must be cultivated, and this is typically not the product of detached contemplation. It seems to require that the user of a machine have something at stake, an interest of the sort that arises through bodily immersion in some hard reality, the kind that kicks back. Corollary to such immersion is the development of what we might call a sub-ethical virtue: the user holds himself responsible to external reality, and opens himself to being schooled by it. His will is educated—both chastened and focused—so it no longer resembles that of a raging baby who knows only that he wants. Both as workers and as consumers, technical education seems to contribute to moral education.
The moral pedagogy that is tacit in material culture can take various forms. Consider an advertisement for a top-of-the-line Mercedes that appeared in the June 17, 2007, issue of the New York Times Magazine. The ad claimed that the car is “completely intuitive.” This may or may not be true, but in any case the meaning of “intuitive” that is intended is fairly recent. It is the usage of those who design electronic equipment, and signifies something very different from what one would mean in uttering the same word while gazing at the stark engine compartment of, say, a 1963 VW Bug.
With electronic equipment, the facts of physics operate on such a scale that they do not present themselves to immediate experience for the user. The computer “interface” adds another layer of abstraction, as it screens the user also from the human-generated logic of the program running the software. Logic, like physics, is something hard and unyielding. The interface is meant to be “intuitive,” meaning that it introduces as little psychic friction as possible between the user’s intention and its realization. It is such resistance that makes one aware of reality as an independent thing. If all goes well, the user’s dependence (on programmers who have tried to anticipate