Shop Class as Soulcraft_ An Inquiry Into the Value of Work - Matthew B. Crawford [27]
If these thinkers are right, then the problem of technology is almost the opposite of how it is usually posed: the problem is not “instrumental rationality,” it is rather that we have come to live in a world that precisely does not elicit our instrumen tality, the embodied kind that is original to us. We have too few occasions to do anything, because of a certain predetermination of things from afar.
It is precisely this experience of remote control that makes the spirited man angry; it offends the pride he takes in self-reliance. But this kind of response is perhaps becoming less common. The modern personality is being reorganized on a predicate of passive consumption, and it starts early in life. One of the hottest things at the shopping mall right now is a store called Build-a-Bear, where children are said to make their own teddy bears. I went into one of these stores, and it turns out that what the kid actually does is select the features and clothes for the bear on a computer screen, then the bear is made for him. Some entity has leaped in ahead of us and taken care of things already, with a kind of solicitude. The effect is to preempt cultivation of embodied agency, the sort that is natural to us.11
Children so preempted will be more well adjusted to emerging patterns of work and consumption. They are less likely to suffer the kind of agitation experienced by my hypothetical angry bathroom user. It will not strike them that there is anything amiss in the absence of a dipstick in the Mercedes.
What is this entity that leaps in on our behalf? It is something amorphous and difficult to name, but has about it something of the public. The activity of giving form to things seems to be increasingly the business of a collectivized mind, and from the standpoint of any particular individual, it feels like this forming has already taken place, somewhere else. In picking out your bear’s features, or the options for your Warrior or Scion, you choose among the predetermined alternatives. Each of these alternatives offers itself as good. A judgment of its goodness has already been made by some dimly grasped others, otherwise it wouldn’t be offered as an option in the catalogue. The consumer is disburdened not only of the fabrication, but of a basic evaluative activity. (For example, in customizing a car or motorcycle from scratch, the builder must harmonize aesthetic concerns with functional ones, and make compromises so the result isn’t prone to, say, catching on fire.) The consumer is left with a mere decision. Since this decision takes place in a playground-safe field of options, the only concern it elicits is personal preference. The watchword here is easiness, as opposed to heedfulness. But because the field of options generated by market forces maps a collective consciousness, the consumer’s vaunted freedom within it might be understood as a tyranny of the majority that he has internalized.
The market ideal of Choice by an autonomous Self seems to act as a kind of narcotic that makes the displacing of embodied agency go smoothly, or precludes the development of such agency by providing easier satisfactions. The growing dependence of individuals in fact is accompanied by ever more shrill invocations of freedom in theory, that is, in the ideology of consumerism. Paradoxically, we are narcissistic but not proud enough.
Yet consider the advertisement for the Warrior once again. Does it not present a contradiction, and thus point us in the right direction with a whisper? The ad is effective because it speaks to a deep discontent,