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By Root 310 0

and gives due credit to our nature as tool users, more than we give ourselves. Advertisers have constant recourse to a stock image: somebody engaged in some focal practice, lost in his work.12 Often it is precisely that focal practice that the product promises to disburden us of, such as the building of a custom car or motorcycle. Such images present a picture of cultivated skill, the sort that makes possible some wholehearted activity. The marketers seem to grasp that it is not the product but the practice that is really attractive.

4

The Education of a Gearhead

A good diamond cutter has a different disposition than a good dog trainer. The one is careful, the other commanding. Different kinds of work attract different human types, and we are lucky if we find work that is fitting. There is much talk of “diversity” in education, but not much accommodation of the kind we have in mind when we speak about the quality of a man, or woman: the diversity of dispositions. We are preoccupied with demographic variables, on the one hand, and sorting into cognitive classes, on the other. Both collapse the human qualities into a narrow set of categories, the better to be represented on a checklist or a set of test scores. This simplification serves various institutional purposes. Fitting ourselves to them, we come to understand ourselves in light of the available metrics, and forget that institutional purposes are not our own. If the gatekeeper at some prestigious institution has opened a gate in front of us, we can’t not walk through it. But as a young person surveys the various ways he could make a living, and how they might be part of a life well lived, the pertinent question for him may be not what IQ he has, but whether he is, for example, careful or commanding. If he is to find work that is fitting, he would do well to pause amid the general rush to the gates.

He might also take note of the funnel that surrounds him, by which I mean the use of psychiatric drugs to medicate boys, especially, against their natural bent toward action, the better to “keep things on track,” as the school nurse says. This, too, serves institutional interests—I know because I taught high school briefly, and would have loved to set up a Ritalin fogger in my classroom, for the sake of order. It is a rare person who is naturally inclined to sit still for sixteen years in school, and then indefinitely at work, yet with the dismantling of high school shop programs this has become the one-size-fits-all norm, even as we go on about “diversity.”

If different human types are attracted to different kinds of work, the converse is also true: the work a man does forms him. I have previously touched on the cognitive aspects of mechanical work; now I want to give a fuller portrait of the mechanic, connecting his manner of thinking to his manner of feeling. What, then, are the peculiar virtues and vices of the mechanic? I find the idea of “disposition” useful in thinking about the effect the work has had on me, and on other mechanics I have known. Or is it that people of a certain disposition are drawn to the work? In any case, the term captures something important I want to explore, namely, the mutual entanglement of intellectual qualities with moral qualities. This entanglement shows itself in the work we do.

The Would-be Apprentice

One of the first jobs I took outside the commune, at age fifteen, was at a Porsche repair shop in Emeryville, California.1 At this time Emeryville was a mix of light industrial and black residential neighborhoods; my mother had recently bought a house there, and I was living with her. I used to walk by the shop and admire the 911s behind barbed wire in the adjoining yard. One day I walked in and asked for a job. The proprietor, whom I shall call Lance (not his real name), asked me what kind of skills I had. I told him about the electrical work I’d done, and a little carpentry as well. A woman in the commune who was a mechanic had taught me to do a basic tune-up. I didn’t have much to offer, in other words.

Lance asked