Shop Class as Soulcraft_ An Inquiry Into the Value of Work - Matthew B. Crawford [79]
Those who belong to a certain order of society—people who make big decisions that affect all of us—don’t seem to have much sense of their own fallibility. Being unacquainted with failure, the kind that can’t be interpreted away, may have something to do with the lack of caution that business and political leaders often display in the actions they undertake on behalf of other people. In his book Real Education, Charles Murray relates a maxim attributed to Lyndon Johnson’s press secretary: “No one should be allowed to work in the West Wing of the White House who has not suffered a major disappointment in life.” Murray adds that “the responsibility of working there was too great . . . to be entrusted to people who weren’t painfully aware of how badly things can go wrong.”1
Yet, as Murray argues, the experience of failure seems to have been edited out of the educational process, at least for gifted students. Those who struggle academically experience failure all the time, and probably write off attempts to sugar-coat it with “self-esteem” as another example of how deranged adults can be. But the praising of gifted students for being smart, by parents and teachers, has a far more pernicious effect, especially when such praise is combined with the grade inflation and soft curriculum that are notorious at elite schools. A student can avoid hard sciences and foreign languages and get a degree without ever having the unambiguous experience of being wrong.
Such an education dovetails with the pedagogical effects of the material culture inhabited by the well-to-do, which insulates them from failed confrontations with hard reality. Such failures often force you to ask a favor of someone else, like when your car breaks down somewhere and you have no cell phone, and you have to flag down a motorist or knock on a door. Such an experience of dependence makes you humble, and grateful.
There may be something to be said, then, for having gifted students learn a trade, if only in the summers, so that their egos will be repeatedly crushed before they go on to run the country. But now I seem to be caught in a contradiction. Haven’t I recommended the trades based on the pride they instill? Haven’t I argued for self-reliance, and against dependence?
Individual Agency in a Shared World
I have tried to make a case for self-reliance of a certain kind—being master of your own stuff. This requires a basic intelligibility to our possessions: in their provenance, in their principles of operation, in their logic of repair and maintenance, in short, in all those ways that a material object can make itself fully manifest to us, so we can be responsible for it.
But viewed from a wider angle, self-reliance is a sad doctrine, arguably a consolation for the collapse of institutions of mutual care.2 Pensions routinely fail, as do marriages. One bravely writes a living will so as not to be a burden on others. Family bonds give way to social security, which in turn gives way to the individual retirement account. To fill the void that comes with isolation, and give it a positive cast, we posit the ideal of the sovereign self, unencumbered by attachments to others and radically free. This is the consumer self that puts its stamp on the world by buying things, thereby giving an