Shop Class as Soulcraft_ An Inquiry Into the Value of Work - Matthew B. Crawford [70]
These remarks highlight an important feature of those practices that entail skilled and active engagement: one’s attention is focused on standards intrinsic to the practice, rather than external goods that may be won through the practice, typically money or recognition. Can this distinction between internal and external goods inform our understanding of work?
It may be telling that it is leisure activities that come first to mind when we think about intrinsic satisfactions—athletics, for example, or hobbies that we enjoy. Such activities are ends in themselves, and we pursue them without anyone having to pay us to do so. Conversely, with work, getting paid is really the main point, and there would be something utopian in trying to understand work without reference to its external rewards. It may be that a partition of work and leisure, harsh necessity and sweet pursuits, is just a fact of life. But I want to consider what a more integral sort of life might look like, even if doing so requires venturing into the discreditable territory of “idealism.”
It is common today to locate one’s “true self ” in one’s leisure choices. Accordingly, good work is taken to be work that maximizes one’s means for pursuing these other activities, where life becomes meaningful. The mortgage broker works hard all year, then he goes and climbs Mount Everest. The exaggerated psychic content of his summer vacation sustains him through the fall, winter, and spring. The Sherpas seem to understand their role in this drama as they discreetly facilitate his need for an unencumbered, solo confrontation with unyielding Reality. There is a disconnect between his work life and his leisure life; in the one he accumulates money and in the other he accumulates psychic nourishment. Each part depends on and enables the other, but does so in the manner of a transaction between sub-selves, rather than as the intelligibly linked parts of a coherent life.
On the other hand, there are vocations that seem to offer a tighter connection between life and livelihood. Can such coherence be traced to the nature of the work itself? A doctor deals with bodies, a fireman with fires, a teacher with children. Like Everest, these things are real enough, and the practices that serve them demand the kind of focused attention around which a life might take shape (as mountaineering does for the Sherpas). In these learned professions, the practitioner develops a highly discriminating appreciation of his objects, not unlike an aesthetic sense. His judgments of bodies, fires, children, or mountains become truer with experience, and therefore his ability to respond appropriately to them progresses.
The teacher who is really a teacher loves children, and wants to figure out how to make them smarter. Most people who get into working on cars do so because they love cars. Usually they want to figure out how to make them go faster. The work of a mechanic, then, may have the character of a vocation.
The Groove of the Speed Shop
The speed shop, such as Donsco, has been a fixture of American life for many decades. For those who work in such shops, like Chas, it seems hard to draw a line between job and leisure; it is a way of life. A speed shop usually consists of a storefront selling high-performance parts (domestic or import, never both) with a machine shop and a service bay in the back. There is a constant parade of blown-up or otherwise broken hoopties limping in, their drivers hoping to get things sorted by talking to the staff and other customers, buying parts and machining services, and (with utmost delicacy, if one wants not to be banished) borrowing tools. Many speed shops take on the character of a clubhouse, and will campaign a race car or two in whatever motor sport they are into.
Often someone working at a speed shop spent his younger days lingering around the counter, then, as he penetrated the social hierarchy, in the back, allowed now to pull his car