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workers from above by the current generation of management revolutionaries, for whom the ethic of craftsmanship is actually something to be rooted out from the workforce. Craftsmanship means dwelling on a task for a long time and going deeply into it, because you want to get it right. In managementspeak, this is called being “ingrown.” The preferred role model is the management consultant, who swoops in and out and whose very pride lies in his lack of particular expertise. Like the ideal consumer, the management consultant presents an image of soaring freedom, in light of which the manual trades appear cramped and paltry: the plumber with his butt crack, peering under the sink.

With such images in their heads, parents don’t want their children to become plumbers. Yet that filthy plumber under the sink might be charging somebody eighty dollars an hour. This fact ought, at least, to induce an experience of cognitive dissonance in the parent who regards his child as smart and wants him to become a knowledge worker. If he accepts the basic premise of a knowledge economy that someone being paid a lot of money must know something, he may begin to wonder what is really going on under that sink, and entertain a suspicion against the widely accepted dichotomy of knowledge work versus manual work. In fact, that dichotomy rests on some fundamental misconceptions. I’d like to offer an alternative account, one that will give due credit to the cognitive richness of manual work. In pursuing these questions, we arrive at insights that help to explain why work that is straightforwardly useful can also be intellectually absorbing.

The Cognitive Demands of Manual Work

In The Mind at Work, Mike Rose provides “cognitive biographies” of several trades, and depicts the learning process in a wood shop class. He writes that “our testaments to physical work are so often focused on the values such work exhibits rather than on the thought it requires. It is a subtle but pervasive omission. . . . It is as though in our cultural iconography we are given the muscled arm, sleeve rolled tight against biceps, but no thought bright behind the eye, no image that links hand and brain.”10

Skilled manual labor entails a systematic encounter with the material world, precisely the kind of encounter that gives rise to natural science. From its earliest practice, craft knowledge has entailed knowledge of the “ways” of one’s materials—that is, knowledge of their nature, acquired through disciplined perception. At the beginning of the Western tradition, sophia (wisdom) meant “skill” for Homer: the technical skill of a carpenter, for example. Through pragmatic engagement, the carpenter learns the different species of wood, their fitness for such needs as load bearing and water holding, their dimensional stability with changes in the weather, and their varying resistance to rot and insects. The carpenter also gains a knowledge of universals, such as the right angle, the plumb, and the level, which are indispensable for sound construction. It is in the crafts that nature first becomes a thematic object of study, and that study is grounded by a regard for human utility.

In the tradition that developed in the West, “wisdom” lost the concrete sense it originally had in Homer. In religious texts, on the one hand, “wisdom” tended toward the mystical. In science, on the other hand, “wisdom” remained connected to knowledge of nature, but with the advent of idealizations such as the frictionless surface and the perfect vacuum, science, too, adopted a paradoxically otherworldly ideal of how we come to know nature: through mental constructions that are more intellectually tractable than material reality, hence amenable to mathematical representation. Descartes, generally credited with inaugurating the scientific revolution, begins from radical doubt about the very existence of an external world, and builds up the principles of scientific inquiry from the foundation of a radically self-contained subject.

Yet this solipsistic ideal doesn’t gibe perfectly with the history