Shop Class as Soulcraft_ An Inquiry Into the Value of Work - Matthew B. Crawford [78]
“Obligation to others” is the claim made on us by various systems of universal ethics. It has a dreary quality to it, like a summons for jury duty. The Kantians claim to find the source of this obligation in a rigorous argument, but I am not able to follow it. By contrast, solidarity with others is a positive attraction, akin to love. It is not an abstract imperative, but an actual experience we have from time to time. Its scope is necessarily smaller, its grip on our affections tighter, than that of any vaporous universal.
There is, in fact, something called the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. It is not very international; the union has members in the United States and Canada. But the name captures pretty well my experience of brotherhood in the rickshaw. That experience suggests an alternative to various attempts that have been made, along universalist lines, to mitigate the self-enclosure of the modern individual.
Today’s liberal humanitarian posits human rights, based in a common humanity, as the ground of an obligation to distant others. This is a noble ideal, but perhaps too much so to engage our affections. When the humanity of others who were previously invisible becomes apparent to us for the first time, I think it is because we have noticed something particular in them. This may be some everyday experience we share with them, such as that of pulling wire, or it may be something unfamiliar that arrests our attention for being impressive—something excellent.
A regard for human excellence is the aristocratic ethos. To speak of aristocracy is perhaps a bit eccentric in our time, but consider the paradoxical truth that equality is an aristocratic ideal. It is the ideal of friendship—of those who stand apart from the collective and recognize one another as peers. As professionals, or fellow journeymen, perhaps. By contrast, the bourgeois principle is not equality but equivalence—a positing of interchangeability that elides human differences of rank.
This train of thought can help us to a clearer conscience about our aristocratic intuitions: such intuitions may humanize and deepen, rather than threaten, our democratic commitments. People of aristocratic sympathies are alive to rank and difference, and take pleasure in beholding them. I think most of us have this response when we see talent, but we have become inarticulate about it. It seems illegitimate to give rank its due in a society where “all children are above average,” as Garrison Keillor says of Lake Woebegon. Yet it is precisely our attraction to excellence—our being on the lookout for the choicer manifestations—that may lead us to attend to human practices searchingly, without prejudice, and find superiority in unfamiliar places. For example, in the intellectual accomplishments of people who do work that is dirty, such as the mechanic. With such discoveries we extend our moral imagination to people who are conventionally beneath serious regard, and find them admirable. Not because we heed a moral injunction such as the universalist egalitarian urges upon us, but because we actually see something admirable, and are impressed by it.
The lover of excellence is prone to being drawn out of himself, erotically almost, in a way that the universalist egalitarian is not. The latter’s empathy, projected from afar and without discrimination, is more principled than attentive. It is similar to bad art and mathematical shoelaces, in this regard; it is content to posit rather than to see the humanity of its beneficiaries. But the one who is on the receiving end of such empathy wants something more than to be recognized generically. He wants to be seen as an individual, and recognized as worthy on the same grounds on which he has striven to be worthy, indeed superior, by cultivating some particular excellence or skill.
The Importance of Failure
The practitioner of a stochastic art, such as motorcycle repair, experiences failure on a daily basis. Just today, for example, before sitting down to write,