Art

Shop Class as Soulcraft

Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work
by Matthew B. Crawford

-Reviewed by Monica Barra

As the computer technology class quickly replaces standard high school shop, manual work is often undervalued as a nostalgic craft. Michael Crawford, one of those rare people who has both a doctorate in political philosophy and a motorcycle repair shop, aims to rehabilitate popular conceptions of manual work. Shop Class as Soulcraft is a unique combination of memoir and philosophical inquiry that examines how we understand and give value to work.

Crawford studies the evolution of blue-collar jobs, beginning with the Smith-Hughes Act of 1917, a federal program that funded vocational training programs for adults and teens. The following years saw the emergence of the assembly line and the mass production of goods – among the most profitable developments in the American working world. As consumer goods began to drive the economy, labor became more streamlined, demanding less mastery and more efficiency, and aiming for ever greater and quicker profits. Work, stripped of craft, began to be valued in purely economic terms.

Nowadays, Crawford notes, most white-collar office work similarly derives value from economic efficiency alone. “White-collar professions, too, are subject to routinization,” of dealing in abstractions instead of knowledge and skill. Just as the assembly line separated craftsmanship from production, “the new frontier of capitalism lies in doing to office work what was previously done to factory work: draining it of its cognitive elements.” It is the office drones who are now subject to working in the assembly-line environment which “separates thinking from doing.”

After introducing this paradox, Crawford relates the saga of his “gearhead education” alongside his university education. He uses his journey – from electrical work in a commune, to post-doctoral time spent in a dank motorcycle repair shop in Chicago rather than in his office next to Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee – to articulate the value of dealing with material things instead of abstract concepts. He incorporates the observations of ancient Greek philosophers, artists, and prominent sociologists, who give merit to the “spirit of inquiry,” the sense of curiosity that, when applied to work, creates a desire for mastery rather than mere completion of a task. Because it creates a sense of pride, or “spiritedness” as Crawford calls it, such work is divorced from purely economic value, giving the worker a personal sense of accomplishment and room for intellectual growth.

Of course, Crawford notes, repairing things can be driven by profit. But his concept of spiritedness requires that a worker mature with the work, successful or not. As workers at the mercy of the entities they repair, mechanics, like doctors, are burdened with the complexities of manipulating what they did not create and can never fully master. Such workers do not seek to manipulate machines or people to make them more economically efficient. Instead, they seek to bring what they repair back to life and, if possible, to healthier life. Approaching this kind of work demands humility and selflessness from the worker who, Crawford argues, needs to engage thoroughly with the work, to think and to do, and to learn from what is broken.

For Crawford, human and cognitive engagement are the primary factors that give value to work; these factors, however, are often at odds with a consumer economy that demands efficiency. Crawford is ultimately searching for not just a valuation of work, however, but an “understanding of the good life,” based so much on the professions we choose. He levels the playing field, in a sense, by turning the stratification of the working world upside-down and provoking readers to reflect upon the value of the lives they live eight hours a day, five days a week.

Excerpt: “What is it that we really want for a young person when we give him or her vocational advice? The only creditable answer, it seems to me, is one that avoids utopianism while keeping an eye on the human good: work that engages the human capacities as fully as possible. This humane and commonsensical answer goes against the central imperative of capitalism, which assiduously partitions thinking from doing.”

Further reading:
The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work by Alain De Botton, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values by Robert M. Pirsig


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