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auto parts stores, which get them from high-volume remanufacturing operations down in Mexico. These factories simply ignore the finer points that engage a mechanic’s attention. (That’s why they typically have a warranty of only 12,000 miles, or 36,000 at most.) But a more public-spirited calculus would include a humane regard for the kind of labor involved in each alternative: on the one side disciplined attentiveness, enlivened by a mechanic’s own judgments and ethical entanglement with a motor, and on the other systematized carelessness. Further, the decision is inherently political, because the question who benefits is at stake: the internationalist order of absentee capital, or an individual possessed of personal knowledge. Given the ever-bolder raids of capital into the psychic territory of labor, our consumer choices contribute to a land war, on one side or the other, whether we are aware of the fact or not. This can be understood by analogy with our food choices: having a motor rebuilt would correspond roughly to the decision to buy food from a local farmer versus a distant agribusiness. This is a practice the bohemian consumer already has in the cultural tool kit he uses, not only to construct his dissident self image but to give expression to his genuine public-spiritedness. If the regard that many people now have for the wider ramifications of their food choices could be brought to our relationships to our own automobiles, it would help sustain pockets of mindful labor.

Obviously, not every mechanic carries a countercultural dagger in his boot like Chas. But by the mere fact that they stand ready to fix things, as a class they are an affront to the throwaway society. Just as important, the kind of thinking they do, if they are good, offers a counterweight to the culture of narcissism.

5

The Further Education of a Gearhead: From Amateur to Professional

The moral-cognitive failure exemplified by the idiotic mechanic is something I have experienced more times than I care to recall, and I continue to commit acts of idiocy upon motorcycles to this day. But less often, I think. I want to consider how working on other people’s bikes, for pay, can help along the process of “unselfing” described by Iris Murdoch. To respond to the world justly, you have to see it clearly, and for this you have to get outside your own head. Knowing you’re going to have to explain your labor bill to a customer accomplishes just this.

Allow me to briefly run through the sequence of events that led me to go into business fixing motorcycles. Chas ended up joining the army. I went to UC Santa Barbara for college, and got introduced to philosophy in my senior year. It was a jolt of clarity. Graduating with a degree in physics, I couldn’t find a job based on that credential, so I continued to work as an electrician (as I had throughout college), and continued to feel the tug of philosophy. This tug was strong enough that I started going to night school to learn Greek, the language of philosophy, and eventually found my way to the University of Chicago. My studies there were interrupted by a stint in a cubicle job that I will describe later, but ultimately I earned a Ph.D. in the history of political thought. I then managed to stay on with a one-year gig at the university’s Committee on Social Thought, on the third floor of Foster Hall.

The office next to mine on one side belonged to the South African novelist J. M. Coetzee; on the other side was the classicist David Grene, who seemed to be an immortal ancient himself (he was in his nineties). It was good company, if a bit intimidating, and I had been incredulously grateful to get the appointment. During this year I was supposed to be turning my dissertation into a book and applying for teaching jobs. But trying to make my dissertation fit into the standard forms of academic publishing was something I despaired of being able to pull off. Related to that, the academic job market was utterly depressing. I sent off some job applications in which I took pains to carefully frame my academic