Shop Class as Soulcraft_ An Inquiry Into the Value of Work - Matthew B. Crawford [77]
Do the arguments I have made about meaningful work necessarily point to the trades? If we accept the testimony of the early-twentieth-century banker Thomas Lamont, related in chapter 8, his work was founded on direct perceptions, a “wide vision” over the community, issuing in judgments of better and worse character—the sort of evaluative attention that can join us to our work as full-blooded human beings. But as the subsequent history of banking illustrates, any job that can be scaled up, depersonalized, and made to answer to forces remote from the scene of work is vulnerable to degradation, even to the point of requiring that the person who does the job actively suppress his better judgment.
The special appeal of the trades lies in the fact that they resist this tendency toward remote control, because they are inherently situated in a particular context. In the best cases, the building and fixing that they do are embedded in a community of using. Face-to-face interactions are still the norm, you are responsible for your own work, and clear standards provide the basis for the solidarity of the crew, as opposed to the manipulative social relations of the office “team.” There are surely other kinds of work that I am unacquainted with where these goods can be realized; it remains for others to explore them.
Aristotle begins his Metaphysics with the observation that “all human beings by nature desire to know.” I have argued that real knowledge arises through confrontations with real things. Work, then, offers a broadly available premonition of philosophy. Its value, however, does not lie solely in pointing to some more rarefied experience. Rather, in the best cases, work may itself approach the good sought in philosophy, understood as a way of life: a community of those who desire to know.
Solidarity and the Aristocratic Ethos
When I was sixteen, I traveled to India by myself. Stepping off the plane into the swelter of Bombay, I smelled something foreign and foul: burning garbage, I learned later. Rather than stand in a queue at the bus stop, the Indians mobbed the place where they expected the bus to be. They pressed against me uncomfortably, and they, too, stank—I felt utterly apart from people who were literally touching me. Their eyes looked dull, as though they didn’t open into the same kind of chamber of consciousness as mine.
The next day, the rickshaw I was riding in stopped at a red light next to a construction site. There I saw some men wearing sandals and smoking tiny little cigarettes. They had spools of wire set up in a row, their hollow centers threaded onto a broomstick suspended between two crates. With a shock of recognition, I realized they were getting ready to pull wires through conduit. The dark thoughts of estrangement that absorbed me fled; I wanted to leap out of the rickshaw and say, “I do this, too!” Suddenly I felt connected to this small group of electricians. I wondered what they would use for lubricant (in America we use Ideal Yellow 77). I wondered if they used the same technique for constructing the “head” of the mass of wires to be pulled through (it needs to be as streamlined as possible). I wondered if they made the same, inevitable sexual jokes. I saw that they had the burliest guy, a Sikh to judge from his headgear, stationed at the other end of the conduit to do the actual pulling, just like in America. The oppressive sense that I was a foreigner among foreigners evaporated as I projected myself imaginatively into their day, into this very moment. They were currently encountering the world in a way that was familiar to me, orienting to it through a set of concerns I knew well, and the consciousness