Shop Class as Soulcraft_ An Inquiry Into the Value of Work - Matthew B. Crawford [51]
My job was structured on the supposition that in writing an abstract there is a method that merely needs to be applied, and that this does not require understanding (like a computer that manipulates syntax while remaining innocent of semantics). I was actually told this by the trainer, Monica, as she stood before a whiteboard diagramming an abstract. The writing of abstracts had been conceived in general terms, but I soon discovered that what the task in fact demanded was complete immersion in the particular text before me.6 Monica seemed a perfectly sensible person, and gave no outward signs of suffering delusions. She didn’t insist too much on what she was telling us, and it became clear she was in a position similar to that of a veteran Soviet bureaucrat who must work on two levels at once: reality and official ideology.
My starting quota, after finishing a week of training, was fifteen articles per day. By my eleventh month at the company, my quota was up to twenty-eight articles per day (this was the normal, scheduled acceleration). Whereas Charlie Chaplin’s efforts to conform himself to the accelerating pace of the machine in Modern Times took the form of a brilliantly comic ballet, mine were rather mopey and anxious. More than anything, I felt sleepy. This exhaustion was surely tied to the fact I felt trapped in a contradiction .7 The fast pace demanded absorption in the task, yet that pace also precluded absorption, and had the effect of estranging me from my own doings. Or rather, I tried to absent myself, the better to meet my quota, but the writing of an abstract, unlike the pulling of levers on an assembly line, cannot be done mindlessly. The material I was reading was too demanding, and what it demanded was to be given its due. To not do justice to an author who had poured his life into the subject at hand felt like violence against what was best in myself.
My efforts to read, comprehend, and write abstracts of twenty-eight academic journal articles per day required me to actively suppress my own ability to think, because the more you think, the more the inadequacies in your understanding of an author’s argument come into focus. This can only slow you down. The quota demanded that I suppress as well my sense of responsibility to others—not just the author of an article but also the hapless users of InfoTrac, who might naïvely suppose that my abstract reflects the contents of that article. So the job required both dumbing down and a bit of moral reeducation.
Now, it is probably true that every job entails some kind of mutilation. Working as an electrician, you breathe a lot of unknown dust in crawl spaces, your knees get bruised, your neck gets strained from looking up at the ceiling while installing lights or ceiling fans, and you get shocked regularly, sometimes while on a ladder. Your hands are sliced up from twisting wires together, handling junction boxes made out of stamped sheet metal, and cutting metal conduit with a hacksaw. But none of this damage touches the best part of yourself.
It will be objected: Wasn’t there any quality control? My manager would periodically read a few of my abstracts, and I was once or twice corrected and told not to begin an abstract with a dependent clause. But I was never confronted with an abstract I had written and told that it did not adequately reflect the article. The quality standards were the generic ones of grammar, internal to the abstract, which could be applied without my supervisor having to read the article. In this sense, I was not held to an external, objective standard.
It will further be objected