Shop Class as Soulcraft_ An Inquiry Into the Value of Work - Matthew B. Crawford [37]
“I hope we’ve got some more of those in stock,” he said.
I nodded.
He brought out a hammer and cold chisel and started to pound them loose. The chisel punched through the aluminum cover and I could see he was pounding the chisel right into the engine head. On the next blow he missed the chisel completely and struck the head with the hammer, breaking off a portion of two of the cooling fins.10
Finally he gets on the road, only to discover that the shop had neglected to bolt the engine back into the frame; it was hanging on by a single bolt.
I found the cause of the seizures a few weeks later, waiting to happen again. It was a little twenty-five-cent pin in the internal oil-delivery system that had been sheared and was preventing oil from reaching the head at high speeds.
. . . Why did they butcher it so? . . . They sat down to do a job and they performed it like chimpanzees. Nothing personal in it.
. . . But the biggest clue seemed to be their expressions. They were hard to explain. Good-natured, friendly, easygoing—and uninvolved. They were like spectators. You had the feeling they had just wandered in there themselves and somebody had handed them a wrench. There was no identification with the job. No saying, “I am a mechanic.” 11
”Nothing personal in it.” Here is a paradox. On the one hand, to be a good mechanic seems to require personal commitment: I am a mechanic. On the other hand, what it means to be a good mechanic is that you have a keen sense that you answer to something that is the opposite of personal or idiosyncratic; something universal. In Pirsig’s story, there is an underlying fact: a sheared-off pin has blocked an oil gallery, resulting in oil starvation to the head and excessive heat, causing the seizures. This is the Truth, and it is the same for everyone. But finding this truth requires a certain disposition in the individual: attentiveness, enlivened by a sense of responsibility to the motorcycle. He has to internalize the well working of the motorcycle as an object of passionate concern. The truth does not reveal itself to idle spectators.
Pirsig’s mechanic is, in the original sense of the term, an idiot. Indeed, he exemplifies the truth about idiocy, which is that it is at once an ethical and a cognitive failure. The Greek idios means “private,” and an idiōtēs means a private person, as opposed to a person in their public role—for example, that of motorcycle mechanic. Pirsig’s mechanic is idiotic because he fails to grasp his public role, which entails, or should, a relation of active concern to others, and to the machine. He is not involved. It is not his problem. Because he is an idiot.
This still comes across in the related English words “idiomatic” and “idiosyncratic,” which similarly suggest self-enclosure. For example, when a foreigner asks him for directions, the idiot will reply idiomatically, rather than refer to a shared coordinate system. He also lacks the attentive openness that seeks things out in the shared world, as when Pirsig’s mechanic “barely listened to the piston slap before saying, ‘Oh yeah. Tappets.’” At bottom, the idiot is a solipsist. 12
The forensic perceptual expertise of the engine builder is active in the sense that he knows what he is looking for. But with the idiot we see the result of a premature conceit of knowledge. If the expert and the idiot both know what they are looking for, what is the difference between them? How does the disposition of the one give rise to expertise, while the other rushes in and habitually finds himself in such straits that he ends up applying cold chisels to cylinder heads?
Seeing Clearly, or Unselfishly
The cognitive psychologists speak of “metacognition,” which is the activity of stepping back and thinking about your own thinking. It is what you do when you stop for a moment in your pursuit of a solution, and wonder whether your understanding of the problem is adequate. Contrary to the cognitive