“The modern personality is being reorganized on a predicate of passive consumption, and it starts early in life,” says Matthew Crawford, author of Shop Class as Soulcraft.
The insidious creep of consumption over ground that could be occupied by creation is something that has bothered me for a long time. A simple example is the Lego company’s trend towards making specialized preassembled structures rather than the basic building blocks you could use and reuse to suit your imagination. My brothers and I, dissatisfied with this situation in our youth, wrote letters to the company and were informed that the specialized toys were what people wanted to buy. And things have gotten even worse with Legos in two decades. Why call them Legos at all anymore?
Consider also the world of Facebook, where it seems that one of the main ways you can choose to express yourself is by “liking” various consumer namebrands. Many of our status updates are merely commercials for whatever thing has briefly made our life better (or worse). What has become of us?
Matthew Crawford has an interesting background as a highly educated person who chose to leave the company of world-renowned scholars at a Washington, DC, think tank and open his own motorcycle repair shop. His book explores the value of craftsmanship (“the desire to do something well, for its own sake”) and critiques some of the assumptions of our society about work and education.
Early in his book, Crawford bewails our “loss of agency” as consumers, giving the example of the bathroom user confronted with a malfunctioning infrared faucet in the public restroom. There is no handle to mess with, no physical feature to manipulate. The bathroom user is left to fruitlessly perform inane dance moves for a blind audience. I have felt similarly frustrated at times with the paper towel machine. Perhaps you have seen the video skit of the two Scotsmen on the voice-activated elevator. Crawford’s treatment of dilemmas such as these is cathartic in its illumination of our frustration and dismaying in its portent.
I enjoyed reading his discussion of “the cognitive richness of manual work.” I have always valued fine craftsmanship, but I’m not sure I have read such a thorough exposition of how and why manual labor builds character. Speaking of the apprentice to a trade, Crawford writes, “His will is being educated—both chastened and focused—so it no longer resembles that of a raging baby who knows only that he wants.” Technical education thus contributes to moral education. Learning to play a musical instrument or speak a foreign language are similarly beneficial tasks. “The example of the musician sheds light on the basic character of human agency,” he says, “namely, that it arises only within concrete limits that are not of our making.”
Crawford’s summary of the history of industrialism was eye-opening. I was not aware of the intentional shift of the thinking and judgment required for manual labor from the laborers to the management in order to allow masses of unskilled laborers to be hired for significantly less money. Crawford reveals how this has hurt our society in many ways.
In his praise of individual craftsmanship, I sometimes felt that he went too far in devaluing the teamwork that has become so highly valued in today’s corporate workplace. It seems that it too has character-building properties. Some critics have pointed out that his values are masculine ones, and this is true, but I find that he also favors the values of an introvert, whether male or female. However, he addresses the fact that his book is written from a certain limited viewpoint, the experience of a particular craft and personality. We should not expect him to write a different book that he did not intend to, and could not, write. The book is valuable as an exploration of particular ideas in a particular context that encourages us to reexamine our society’s values and structure.
