Shop Class as Soulcraft_ An Inquiry Into the Value of Work - Matthew B. Crawford [47]
I had a microfiche parts book for this bike, so I put the fiche into the old library reader that sits on my workbench, and killed the overhead fluorescent lights. I had to stop breathing as I peered into the reader, so that my breath wouldn’t fog up the screen. The exploded diagram didn’t answer my question. I was at an impasse, the kind where your limbs become heavy.
I lit a cigarette, and let the smoke form a screen between my eyes and the Magna. I became aware of the faint hum of the fluorescent fixtures, and the hour: it was late at night. I walked through the dark warehouse to the bathroom, where I discovered the water in the toilet had frozen solid. It occurred to me that the best business decision would be to forget I’d ever seen the ambiguously buggered oil seal. With a freshly rebuilt slave cylinder, the clutch worked fine. Even if my idle speculation about the weeping oil seal causing the failure of the slave cylinder seal was right, so what? It would take quite a while for the problem to reappear, and who knows if this guy would still own the bike by then. If it is not likely to be his problem, I shouldn’t make it my problem.
But as I walked back into the fluorescent brightness of the shop, I wasn’t thinking about the owner, only about the bike. I just couldn’t let that oil seal go. The compulsion was setting in, and I did little to resist it. I started digging at the seal, my peripheral vision narrowing. At first I told myself it was exploratory digging. But the seal was suffering from my screwdriver, and at some point I had to drop the forensic pretense. I was going to get that little fucker out.
There is something perverse at work here, and I would like to understand it. That oil seal was the opening to Pandora’s box: I felt compelled to get to the bottom of things, to gape them open and clean them out. But this lust for thoroughness is at odds with the world of human concerns in which the bike is situated, where all that matters is that the bike works. The bike is for riding, and riding motorcycles competes for resources with other purposes the owner surely has. This more holistic, pragmatic view of the motorcycle is the one where economics becomes salient. It grounds the fiduciary responsibility of the mechanic to the owner. In digging at that oil seal heedlessly, I was acting out of some need of my own. The curious man is always a fornicator, according to Saint Augustine. In this case, it was the owner of the bike who would get fornicated, when I handed him the bill.
One theologian writes that “curiosity’s desire is closed, limited by the object it wants to know considered in isolation: the knowledge curiosity seeks is wanted as though it were the only thing to be had.”2 The problem with such fixation is that the mechanic’s activity, properly understood, is practical in character, rather than curious or theoretical. As such it must be disciplined by a circumspect regard for others, a kind of fiduciary consciousness. Amy Gilbert writes that practical wisdom entails “the full appreciation of the salient moral features of the particular situations we confront. Our awareness of these features enables us to respond properly to them.”3 Acquiring practical wisdom, then, entails overcoming the self-absorption of the idiot, but also the tunnel vision of the curious man whose attention is indeed directed outside of himself, but who sees only his own goal. A lot of academic work has this quality of curiosity without circumspection; my own Ph.D. dissertation proceeded in a way similar to the Magna oil seal episode. But with the Magna I had to give an account to the customer.