On Apr 16, 3:12=A0pm, Bill <[email protected]> wrote:
> Anyone here have any comments about it? Someone mentioned it in another
> forum (an unlikely one) and made it sound interesting.
I read it and enjoyed it. I can only argue that the premise that
building something by hand, is more "noble" than if you don't,
is a bit false. Crawford is a bit too quick to denigrate those who
tend to
more "non-physical" work. We need both types and
shades in between. A good mathematician can be
extremely valuable if you're trying to compute the
trajectory of a missile, as is a very good car mechanic.
Who is more valuable to society?That's the point. No one
can make that determination, but Crawford leans
to the car mechanic-type or in his case motorcycle
mechanic.
I think it is a good read, but needs some balance.
MJ
This is from the NY Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/07/books/review/Fukuyama-t.html
Making Things Work
By FRANCIS FUKUYAMA
Published: June 5, 2009
=93Shop Class as Soulcraft=94 is a beautiful little book about human
excellence and the way it is undervalued in contemporary America.
Enlarge This Image
Illustration by Ellen Lupton
SHOP CLASS AS SOULCRAFT
An Inquiry Into the Value of Work
By Matthew B. Crawford
246 pp. The Penguin Press. $25.95
Related
An Essay in The Times Magazine Adapted From =91Shop Class as
Soulcraft=92 (May 24, 2009)
Matthew B. Crawford, who owns and operates a motorcycle repair shop in
Richmond, Va., and serves as a fellow at the University of Virginia=92s
Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, notes that all across the
United States, high school shop classes teaching mechanical arts like
welding, woodworking or carpentry are closing down, to free up funds
for computer labs. There is a legion of experts denigrating manual
trades like plumber, carpenter and electrician, warning that the
United States labor force needs to be =93upskilled=94 and retrained to
face the challenges of a high-tech, global economy. Under this new
ideology, everyone must attend college and prepare for life as a
=93symbolic analyst=94 or =93knowledge worker,=94 ready to add value throug=
h
mental rather than physical labor.
There are two things wrong with this notion, according to Crawford.
The first is that it radically undervalues blue-collar work that
involves the manipulation of things rather than ideas. Expertise with
things permits human beings to have agency over their lives =97 that is,
their ability to exert some control over the myriad faucets, outlets
and engines that they depend on from day to day. Instead of being able
to top up your engine oil when it is low, you wait until an =93idiot
light=94 goes on on the dashboard, and you turn your car over to a
bureaucratized dealership that hooks it up to a computer and returns
it to you without your having the faintest idea of what might have
been wrong.
The second problem with this vision is that the postindustrial world
is not in fact populated =97 as gurus like Richard Florida, who has
popularized the idea of the =93creative class,=94 would have it =97 by
=93bizarre mavericks operating at the bohemian fringe.=94 The truth about
most white-collar office work, Crawford argues, is captured better by
=93Dilbert=94 and =93The Office=94: dull routine more alienating than the
machine production denounced by Marx. Unlike the electrician who knows
his work is good when you flip a switch and the lights go on, the
average knowledge worker is caught in a morass of evaluations, budget
projections and planning meetings. None of this bears the worker=92s
personal stamp; none of it can be definitively evaluated; and the kind
of mastery or excellence available to the forklift driver or mechanic
are elusive. Rather than achieving self-mastery by confronting a =93hard
discipline=94 like gardening or structural engineering or learning
Russian, people are offered the fake autonomy of consumer choice,
expressing their inner selves by sitting in front of a Harley-
Davidson catalog and deciding how to trick out their bikes.
This glorification of manual labor would seem patronizing but for the
author=92s personal biography. Crawford grew up in a commune in the Bay
Area with a theoretical physicist for a father, and worked his way
through high school and college as an electrician. Along the way he
picked up the ability to rebuild the engines of old Volkswagens,
something that stayed with him even as he went on to get a Ph.D. in
political philosophy at the University of Chicago, where he was a
fellow at the Committee on Social Thought. He also worked on a white-
collar assembly line, writing abstracts of articles in scientific
journals that he could not understand. Straight out of graduate school
Crawford got a job as the executive director of an unnamed Washington
=93think tank,=94 which he soon realized was being financed by oil
companies to issue scientific studies questioning global warming. =93I
landed a job at the think tank because I had a prestigious education
in the liberal arts, yet the job itself felt illiberal: coming up with
the best arguments money could buy. This wasn=92t work befitting a free
man, and the tie I wore started to feel like the mark of a slave.=94
Rather than his fellow academics, he found himself drawn to people
like Fred Cousins, owner of a Chicago area parts shop, who =93gave me a
succinct dissertation on the peculiar metallurgy of Honda starter
motor bushings=94 when his motor wouldn=92t start.
Crawford argues that the ideologists of the knowledge economy have
posited a false dichotomy between knowing and doing. The fact of the
matter is that most forms of real knowledge, including self-knowledge,
come from the effort to struggle with and master the brute reality of
material objects =97 loosening a bolt without stripping its threads, or
backing a semi rig into a loading dock. All these activities, if done
well, require knowledge both about the world as it is and about
yourself, and your own limitations. They can=92t be learned simply by
following rules, as a computer does; they require intuitive knowledge
that comes from long experience and repeated encounters with
difficulty and failure. In this world, self- esteem cannot be faked:
if you can=92t get the valve cover off the engine, the customer won=92t
pay you.
Highly educated people with high- status jobs =97 investment bankers,
professors, lawyers =97 often believe that they could do anything their
less-educated brethren can, if only they put their minds to it,
because cognitive ability is the only ability that counts. The truth
is that some would not have the physical and cognitive ability to do
skilled blue-collar work, and that others could do it only if they
invested 20 years of their life in learning a trade. =93Shop Class as
Soulcraft=94 makes this quite vivid by explaining in detail what is
actually involved in rebuilding a Volkswagen engine: grinding down the
gasket joining the intake ports to the cylinder heads, with a file,
tracing the custom-fit gasket with an X-Acto knife, removing metal on
the manifolds with a pneumatic die grinder so the passageways will
mate perfectly. Small signs of galling and discoloration mean
excessive heat buildup, caused by a previous owner=92s failure to
lubricate; the slight bulging of a valve stem points to a root cause
of wear that a novice mechanic would completely fail to perceive.
SHOP CLASS AS SOULCRAFT
An Inquiry Into the Value of Work
By Matthew B. Crawford
246 pp. The Penguin Press. $25.95
Related
An Essay in The Times Magazine Adapted From =91Shop Class as
Soulcraft=92 (May 24, 2009)
Crawford asserts that he is not writing a book about public policy.
But he has a clear preference for a =93progressive republican=94 order in
which the moral ties binding workers to their work or entrepreneurs to
their customers are not so readily sacrificed at the altar of
efficiency and growth. He argues that there is something wrong with a
global economy in which a Chinese worker sews together an Amish quilt
with no direct connection with its final user, or understanding of its
cultural meaning. Economic ties, like those between a borrower and a
lender, were once underpinned by face-to-face contact and moral
community; today=92s mortgage broker, by contrast, is a depersonalized
cog in a financial machine that actively discourages prudence and
judgment.
In the end I must confess that it would have been hard for me not to
like this book. While I make my living as a =93symbolic knowledge
worker,=94 I have both ridden motorcycles and made furniture =97 my
family=92s kitchen table, the beds my children slept on while growing
up, as well as reproductions of Federal-style antiques whose originals
I could never afford to buy. Few things I=92ve created have given me
nearly as much pleasure as those tangible objects that were hard to
fabricate and useful to other people. I put my power tools away a few
years ago, and find now that I can=92t even give them away, because
people are too preoccupied with updating their iPhones. Shop class, it
appears, is already a distant historical memory.
Francis Fukuyama is professor of international political economy at
the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.
On Apr 16, 8:36=A0pm, "[email protected]" <[email protected]>
wrote:
> On Apr 16, 3:12=A0pm, Bill <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> > Anyone here have any comments about it? Someone mentioned it in another
> > forum (an unlikely one) and made it sound interesting.
>
> I read it and enjoyed it. I can only argue that the premise that
> building something by hand, is more "noble" than if you don't,
> is a bit false. Crawford is a bit too quick to denigrate those who
> tend to
> more "non-physical" work. We need both types and
> shades in between. A good mathematician can be
> extremely valuable if you're trying to compute the
> trajectory of a missile, as is a very good car mechanic.
> Who is more valuable to society?That's the point. No one
> can make that determination, but Crawford leans
> to the car mechanic-type or in his case motorcycle
> mechanic.
>
> I think it is a good read, but needs some balance.
>
> MJ
I add the following quote by John Gardiner, President of The Carnegie
Foundation, which I think is germain to this topic.
"The society that scorns excellence in plumbing because plumbing is a
humble activity and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because
philosophy is an exaulted activity, wll have neither good plumbing nor
good philosophy. Neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water.
Joe G