Shop Class as Soulcraft
As a guy who is often out in the workshop building things before the sun comes up, I've been meaning to read Matthew Crawford's book Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work for a long time. This winter, I finally checked it off the never-ending to-read list. And I enjoyed it, predictably. As a one-star reviewer said on Amazon, "Matthew Crawford obviously wants to warrant his life choices, not much else is going on." I guess that review applies to me, too.
The book builds upon some of the themes of Robert Pirsig's best-seller Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values: man's search for meaning, the satisfaction of working with your hands, and the inner peace of living simply and mindfully.
Pirsig's book had a big impact on me when I read it as a teenager. It's both abstractly philosophical and also a hands-on exploration (celebration?) of the minutiae of motorcycle repair, carefully structured around the story of a man and his son riding a Honda motorcycle across North Dakota and Eastern Montana to their destination in Bozeman at Montana State University. When I read it, I had already driven across much of Montana and North Dakota with my mother and brothers on a road trip from Seattle to Mom's hometown in North Dakota, and in the years after reading the book I took solo motorcycle trips across that same terrain several times. I was born in Bozeman while my father was attending Montana State University, coincidentally, which just added to the sense that Pirsig had been writing for me.
If Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was written for me as a young man, I feel like Shop Class as Soulcraft was written for me as an old man. Crawford extolls the deep satisfaction of learning to work with your hands, and although some of his observations are targeted at a young person choosing a career, they ring just as true to a retired guy learning to hand-cut dovetail joints. Financial details and career paths no longer interest me, but the goal of maximizing my quality of life and sense of satisfaction feels more and more urgent with each passing year. The main reason I spend so much time in my shop is because every day spent there feels like a great day, and Shop Class as Soulcraft is a deep dive into why that's true.
The book starts with a look back at how public education in the US changed in the late 20th Century, becoming more focused on churning out so-called knowledge workers and less concerned with training tradespeople. At that time, sociologists were saying that developed nations were becoming "post-industrial" societies, which to a socioloigist simply meant that services were becoming a larger portion of the economy than manufacturing. But some people missed that nuance definition, and terms like post-industrial led them to believe that we would soon no longer have as much need for building, maintaining, and repairing physical items.
Soon US high schools started adding computer literacy classes and canceling shop classes. Shop class requires expensive equipment and dangerous equipment, and in the 1980s and 1990s school district budgets started allocating that money to personal computers instead of table saws, lathes, and other tools. I had no idea, as a teenager in the 1970s, that I was part of the last generation that would be taking wood shop, metal shop, and electronics classes in junior high and high school, but I'm grateful for that timing.
Crawford points out that many in our society have become downright contemptuous of physical labor, with a misguided belief that most people could do physical labor if they had to, but only the smartest and most ambitious among us are capable of developing the mental skills needed to land high-paying white-collar jobs. This attitude was promoted by Frederick Winslow Taylor in the early 20th century, a mechanical engineer obsessed with efficiency in workflows who is widely considered one of the first management consultants.
Taylor's influential book Principles of Scientific Management is covered in the section of Soulcraft entitled "The Degradation of the Blue-Collar Worker." Published in 1911, it marked the beginning of a new way of looking at manufacturing and other large enterprises, in which thinking (white-collar work) became more important and valuable than mere doing (blue-collar work). As Taylor wrote, "the managers assume ... the burden of gathering together all of the traditional knowledge which in the past has been possessed by the workmen and then of classifying, tabulating, and reducing this knowledge to rules, laws, and formulae." In Taylor's view, once the corporation had acquired and organized all of this "traditional knowledge," specific bits of it could be doled out to each worker as needed for their specialized work on a single step in a manufacturing process, leading to greater efficiency. This proved a brilliant strategy for increasing profits, at the expense of reduced satisfaction and quality of life for those doing the mere doing.
Another influential thinker covered in Soulcraft is Albert Borgmann, professor of philosophy at the University of Montana in Missoula. In his 1984 book Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life: A Philosophical Inquiry, he laments the rise of disposable reality, noting how the modern stereo, with its undemanding ability to make every sort of music instantly available, had contributed to a general decline in the number of people willing to put in the years of work needed to master a musical instrument. "The stereo as a device contrasts with the instrument as a thing. A thing, in the sense in which I want to use the term, has an intelligible and accessible character and calls forth skilled and active human engagement. A thing requires practice while a device invites consumption. Things constitute commanding reality, devices procure disposable reality."
The distinction between stereo equipment and musical instruments is an example of an underlying theme that runs throughout the final chapters of the book: choosing is not creating. The satisfaction derived from creating something is missing when we merely choose it from a list of options, and the difference between playing a Beethoven sonata on a stereo or on a piano is akin to the difference between applying an Instagram filter to a photo, or learning to edit a photo in a tool like Lightroom or Photoshop to give it the look and feel that you want. Choosing is better if you're focused on efficiency and cost ("does it scale?"), but creating is better if you're focused on nurturing your soul.
In the end, Shop Class as Soulcraft, like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance before it, it is essentially a book about finding the middle path between an excessive faith in technology and a fanatical aversion to technology.