If you are going to tell people the truth, be funny or they will kill you.
Billy Wilder
People who believe they have the power to exercise some measure of control over their lives are healthier, more effective and more successful than those who lack faith in their ability to effect changes in their lives.
Bandura
There are too many ideas and things and people, too many directions to go. I was starting to believe the reason it matters to care passionately about something is that it whittle the world down to a more manageable size
Suzan Orlean, from ‘The Orchid Thief’, from ‘Adaptation’.
Shop Class as Soulcraft: be creative, just be present
This is my last post on Shop Class as Soulcraft by Matthew Crawford. This book has been a theme for this blog for a while now, a useful lens for me to talk about a number of different things, but lenses need to be exchanged to avoid a permanently tinted viewing of the world. Back one more time to his conjecture: mastery is a prerequisite to true creativity. For this post, I’ll need to take you back to my very special night with Iron Cobra
Iron Cobra is actually Becky Johnson, a great Canadian improviser who did a solo show at the 50:50 comedy night last October. Half-way through she made an appeal to the audience: she flew over without a musician, and for the next scene it would be great to have someone playing the piano which was conveniently up on stage… As the tumbleweed spun through the small audience, she lowered the bar so low – from competent piano player, to a person that had taken lessons, to someone who liked the look of the piano – that I couldn’t keep sitting on my hands.
So, up I came, and ended up accompanying Becky for the rest of her set. My piano skills are remedial, but I seemed to fulfil what was unarguably a creative role: to inspire performance and contribute tone. So what was it that allowed this to happen? The important thing was that I was actively engaged and responsive. I gave my all – a couple of chords, arpeggios, scales and high-note twinkles – in the right spirit, with abandon and a spirit of play. It sometimes had a bathetic quality which itself enhanced the creative contribution, but at other times I did a reasonable job of fuelling the tone.
What is true of this is true of improvisation also. Skills and experience do count for something. But for my taste, good improvisation is first and foremost about arriving to the stage in the right state: relaxed, alert, out of your head, open to possibility and interested in your partner. I am very happy to watch inexperienced performers when they play in this state. In fact, there’s a case that much of the training actually boils down to accessing this state more consistently, by working on personal change rather than solely the accretion of skills. Much of the rest is simply window dressing.
Let’s come back to Matthew Crawford for a last time. I’m with him that depicting a fake space for creativity is bullshit, and that we should call it when we see it. But finding new ways of approaching or thinking about a problem needn’t be restricted to technical experts. In fact, they may have over-determined responses to problems that prevent them from seeing different approaches. Fostering space for the proving, development and testing of ideas – before failure has high consequences – allows us to reap the benefits of an inclusive attitude to problem solving.
What’s more, some responses are necessarily improvisational, working with whatever you’ve got. Because of the hard limits around these responses, they tend to be simple; that simplicity is condusive to reuse, adaptation and repurposing, meaning improvisation breeds improvisation in a way that closed, complex systems are poor at. And for the ends that Shop Class as Soulcraft professes – human dignity and autonomy based on substantive contributions to navigating the world – we would do better to recognise the variety of ways in which we can contribute, from the expert to the intuitive, the precision to the experimental.
And for me? Browsing through my old blog recently, I’m reminded that its very purpose was “to proclaim my abiding dedication to the ideal of the polymath, or the diverse amateur”. A good purpose. I stand by it.
How about you?
Links
Iron Cobra site
Some posts from my old blog on specialism: one and two
Shop Class as Soulcraft: design space is creativity space
In a section of the book I found unexpectedly compelling, Crawford outlines a challenging repair to a bike, a Magna V45. Dealing with each part under suspicion demands intimate knowledge at both atomic and holistic levels: what the state of part A infers for B, C, Y or Z. The reason for this is that bikes are precision pieces of machinery, so his role is all about tuning, ever-more precise, beyond the limits that the bike begun with.
There’s a conception of design space outlined in Richard Dawkins’ Climbing Mount Improbable that I find useful to call on. In that book, evolution’s job is to move us from the flats of undesign into the highland states of ever-more complexity. Thing is, any single random move (mutation) is likely to be unhelpful, and this becomes increasingly true as organisms become more complex – more elements to throw out of wack. Gear-head cycle tuning is right up there on the high peaks, and with a narrow criteria to meet – a more responsive beast with higher speeds – and a single customer needing you to deliver without any nasty surprises, it’s unsurprising that Crawford views with scorn the idea of the unexpert creative.
However, there are a couple of ways in which things can look different.First. ideas can arise on the flats as well as on the peaks. Not everything is as complicated as a Magna V45 engine or jazz improvisation. If I’m promoting a neighbourhood event, and looking for a method beyond clipping a sheet to the town hall notice board, then my lack of a marketing qualification does not prevent me from twigging a good idea and acting on it. There’s no real fear of my innocent activity upsetting a carefully constructed consciousness-penetrating brand campaign – there isn’t one. I’m building from a minimal position.
Second, moves that turn out to be bad don’t have to be a big deal. “Failure is not an option” was a byword of the Apollo 13 return. But in nature, failure is an option, and the one most frequently chosen. Pure natural selection is a “blind watchmaker” that gets it right mainly by virtue of getting it wrong so many times. Evolution operates in part by this process operating over and over, it’s iterations helping the organism and environment adjust and fit to one another.
Now, in our dealings with one another, we don’t have the disinterested view of evolution, that can simply shrug when mutations take an organism down no-hope alley. We are most definitely interested – that our astronauts come home ok, that our bike returns with its braking system fit for purpose. But whereas evolution’s testing ground is the world, we have more. We have our minds, our tools, and each other. The interconnectedness of the internet further facilitates this: ideas can originate in one head, be tested by another, run through models to check out concerns, before ever becoming a reality. But it’s always been so.
What this means is that we can afford to take risks in our thinking, in our idea generating, in our creativity. We should. We don’t need to wait for mastery in a domain to contribute to it, we just need to employ the networks of mastery – our spaces to try out iterations – to ensure that ideas get their proper hearing, and those with potential are developed further.
I think these twin examples do fit the picture of many creative acts at work. Crawford may contest this, as these things are not monumental, complex and enduring, but I think this just reflects the multitude of meanings that inhabit the term. Nevertheless, I don’t dispute his claim that expertise-bound creativity is immensely satisfying, and for this to be hollowed out of jobs is a great pity. He also warns that creativity and freedom can be a cover for management laziness/incompetence, where subordinates are expected to make decisions, credit for which is passed up to the manager, and failure is passed down to the subordinate. I have no quarrel with this, either.
Shop Class as Soulcraft: creativity at work
The beginning of the end: this post begins the final theme I want to take away from Shopwork as Soulcraft by Matthew Crawford. In some sense it’s more tangential, and it’s actually the first thing I wrote.
What jobs are creative nowadays? Are we seeing an upsurge in creativity at work, or is this propaganda to keep us in a false consciousness? There was a round of debate on this last year on Crooked Timber, but reading Shopwork as Soulcraft reinvigorated this issue, as Crawford makes an even more savage case against a rise in creativity.
Specifically, he asserts that “creativity is a by-product of mastery of the sort that is cultivated through long practise” which requires “submission” rather than freedom. If we believe otherwise, we will willingly swim the ephemeral streams of modern life, never gaining grounded competence in a single craft, competence of a sort that grants us genuine (economic) freedom and the capacity to create. Labelling jobs as creative is a great misdirect, and we shouldn’t stand for it. I think Crawford has it half right.* It’s true that some cultural products call for a minimal skill set. Many enduring works of art are the product of a tenacious history of practise and improvement: Malcolm Gladwell makes much of this anecdotally in Outliers, his book on people with exceptional achievements. That said, I’m certain there are counterexamples of talents who made a genuine mark without having ‘paid dues’ along the way, and would be fascinated in your examples in comments. One for me would be Mike Allred, who exploded onto the comics scene after working as a journalist for much of his adult life. Across the board however, I’d probably put the balance of enduring cultural products in the hands of those with the mastery.
I see it in my own experience too. I’ve been improvising for three years and change, following a much longer background in the related roleplaying scene, and I know this: there are some things I see more experienced players do that I’m currently incapable of. And: there are some good things I do now that I didn’t before, and that other greener players can’t or won’t. The psychologist R. Keith Sawyer talks of certain fundamentals that need to be in place for jazz creativity to kick in – comfort with standard chord substitutions, familiarity with the dynamics of performance to sense when a solo is ending, and so on. In a nuts-and-bolts physical skill like juggling, I’ve noticed a step change from just being able to manage the basics to having command of the basics, and thus the freedom to creatively combine them.
But is it true that all creative acts relate to mastery? Here I disagree with Crawford, and suspect our differences may be disciplinary. Crawford’s grounding is in high-end motorcycles repair and improvement, where being exact is all. I’ll describe this further in the next post.
Links
Mike Allred’s site
R Keith Sawyer’s site
Soulcraft, stoves and giggling freaks
Something about this post has been bothering me: the impression that we can cleanly sort people into moral categories from a disinterested perspective. I completed Catch-22 yesterday, and find it has something to say on this.
The novel’s protagonist, bombardier and sometime refusenik Yossarian, shares a tent with a pilot named Orr. Orr has buck teeth and bulging eyes, spends his time grinning or “giggling like a crazy little freak”; he is an “unsuspecting simpleton” who delights in being seemingly unable to answer a simple question with anything approximating an answer. As Yossarian comments, “Orr hasn’t got brains enough to be unhappy.” Clearly, The Idiot fits nicely.
But there’s more to Orr. Thoughout the book he is obsessed with the maintenance of a gas-powered stove.
He worked without pause, taking the faucet apart, spreading all the tiny pieces out interminably, as though he had never seen anything remotely similar before, and then reassembling the whole apparatus, over and over and over again,with no loss of patience or interest, no sign of fatigue, no indication of ever concluding.“
This constant preoccupation grates on Yossarian, his tent-mate and possibly only friend. Late in the book Yossarian beseeches Orr for some peace:"Don’t start,” he begged in a threatening voice, both hands tightening around his beer bottle. “Don’t start working on your stove.”
Orr cackled quietly. “I’m almost finished.”
“No, you’re not., You’re about to begin.”
“Here’s the valve. See? It’s almost all together.”
“And you’re about to take it apart. I know what you’re doing, you bastard. I’ve seen you do it three hundred times.”
They go on, Orr asking for permission to continue:
“Once more?”
“When I’m not around. You’re a happy imbecile and you don’t know what it means to feel the way I do. Things happen to me when you work over small things that I can’t even begin to explain. I find out that I can’t stand you. I start to hate you, and I’m soon thinking seriously about busting this bottle down on your head or stabbing you in the neck with that hunting knife there. Do you understand?”
Orr nodded very intelligently. “I won’t take the valve apart now,” he said, and began taking it apart, working with slow, tireless, interminable precision, his rustic, ungainly face bent very close to the floor, picking painstakingly at the minute mechanism in his fingers with such limitless, plodding concentration that he seemed scarcely to be thinking of it at all.
We seem to have a textbook case of The Curious. Orr has all the attributes of the idiot and is happy to turn his narrow focus onto a manual activity. He has no appreciation of context, of the harm his obsession has on the people around him, even with it spelled out in plain terms.
The passage goes on to complicate this picture, however. Through Yossarian’s reflections, we get a wider picture of Orr: far from being a limited hobbyist, Orr possesses “a thousand valuable skills” – with soldering iron, drill, hammer and chisel, improvising constructions with excess bomb parts, mixing paint, meausring, building fires, bringing water. “He had an uncanny knowledge of wildlife and was not afraid of dogs or cats or beetles or moths, or of foods like scrod or tripe.”
Orr begins to feel like someone genuinely equipped to take on the world. But what about his insular focus? When Yossarian challenges Orr on the need to hurry on with the stove, he has an unexpected rationale.
“I’d like to get this all finished for you while there’s still time. You’ll have the best stove in the squadron when I’m through. It will burn all night with this feed control I’m fixing, and these metal plates will radiate the heat all over the tent. If you leave a helmet full of water on this thing when you go to sleep, you’ll have warm water to wash with all ready for you when you wake up. Won’t that be nice? If you want to cook eggs or soup, all you’ll have to do is set the pot down here and turn the fire up.”
“What do you mean, me?” Yossarian wanted to know. “Where are you going to be?”
Orr’s stunted torso shook suddenly with a muffled spasm of amusement. “I don’t know,” he exclaimed, and a weird, wavering giggle gushed out suddenly through his chattering buck teeth like an exploding jet of emotion. He was still laughing when he continued, and his voice was clogged with saliva. “If they keep on shooting me down this way, I don’t know where I’m going to be.”
The stove does end up keeping Yossarian in comfort when Orr’s words prove prophetic and he is shot down, not to be recovered. His actions prove to be extremely useful, and in the end, Yossarian realises, even visionary.
Catch-22 is a book that demands we open our eyes to “how many honest men were liars, brave men cowards, loyal men traitors” – and “how many wise guys were stupid”. To fully understand Orr, and all the rest, would require reading the book (and need it be said, it is magnificent). But from considering just these few excerpts I believe that using Crawford’s moral categories usefully means shifting our focus from the individual to the relational. It’s not just where they put their attention, but where we put our own.
Yossarian is angry and closed off, understandably so, but this clouds his ability to see what is really going on and the gifts that Orr offers him. Orr isn’t an Idiot, or Idiotically Curious, except that Yossarian has made him so. The practical wisdom that Orr is offering becomes real only when its recipient recognises it as such.
In case this isn’t obvious, I’m also talking about improvisation.
Shop Class as Soulcraft: the third lesson is awareness
(This post continues my meander through Matthew Crawford’s Shop Class as Soulcraft. Two posts precede it, here and here.)
I found Soulcraft especially illuminating in its third lesson, that manual work connecting us to material reality. Crawford draws out the risks of absorption, not only with oneself, but also with a task in hand. Those who take the first route he labels The Idiot – utterly disinterested in the workings of the outside world; unsurprisingly, he’s not fan. The second, he sees as The Curious – one who must follow one thing through to its full conclusion, irregardless of wider concerns. This is a pitfall, or at best a stepping-stone, not a desired state of being. If I, as a recovering Idiot, learn to whittle, learn to love whittling, and whittle all day through, then in Crawford’s eyes I haven’t addressed my habit of indulgent absorption – I’ve merely shifted its subject. And this is what manual work – rather than a manual obsession that exists for its own sake – allows us to transcend. Work has an object, in the form of a customer, or a project. It introduces competing demands, a wider context: Mrs Roberts may want a carved ashtray, but she can’t afford much for it and needs it by Wednesday, so I’ll forego my indulgence in the wood for a wider appreciation that includes the wood, Mrs Roberts, and the value of my time.
This is an ongoing struggle, rather than an end-state: in Crawford’s words, “being a clear-sighted person who looks around and sees the whole situation…is something that needs to be achieved on a moment-to moment basis”. There’s a call to betterment there that fits snugly with a variety of spiritual practises, from eastern approaches anchored with meditation through to the Christianity of CS Lewis, and it also resonates with current trends towards mindfulness that recognise the importance of the everyday. To become this individual, who transcends themselves through curiosity, and transcends narrowness through context, allows you to transcend alienation and become fully enabled, ready to take on the world as is. And against the vein of individualism that I read into the text, Crawford agrees our choices in making and doing only gain meaning by how they are measured to the needs and demands of others.
Reading back, I wonder what Crawford and David K Reynolds would make of each other. Reynold’s Constructive Living framework, based partly on Morita therapy and further back into Zen, focuses on immediate connection with the world itself, as it offers itself to you right now. It charges us to undertake every activity with full attention and awareness, eschewing self absorption and neurotic concern. Inspired by its other source of Naikan practise (itself from Shin Buddhism), it focuses attention on gratitude towards and concern for the needs of others, appreciating at the greatest level possible the web of human context that makes any action possible (such as the manifold steps that get an item into our hands for use). And his Handbook for Constructive Living emits a certain unsentimentality and gloves-off attitude that Matthew Crawford might approve of.
I’ll call a halt on this, as I could talk and talk and talk. Particularly on how this is the foundation for improvisational theatre, how improv itself is a training regime for connection with the moment, connection with the real (it may be perverse to say so for a form full of mime and invention, but it’s true), connection with one another. Another time. I’m aware also that picking Reynolds to contrast may seem chauvinist, given that explorations of interconnectivity and groundedness are a rich space of feminine discourse. But that’s partly my point: Soulcraft feels to me as a very masculine exploration of these topics, and it’s important to recognise this, for what it adds and how it may be limited. To balance this a touch and in fairness to Crawford, I’ll close with a few quotes he takes from Iris Murdoch in support of his argument. Murdoch states that “anything which alters consciousness in the direction of unselfishness, objectivity and realism is to be connected with virtue”; putting it another way, “virtue is the attempt to pierce the veil of selfish consciousness and join the world as it really is”. Which we can do by following our hands.
The three lessons – agency, endeavour and a wider awareness of our position in the world – map very well onto Martin Seligman’s three kinds of happiness. The pleasant life, accessing the things you want to be comfortable and experience pleasure, is massively supported by having economic freedom and unburdening yourself of helplessness and stresses. The engaged life, experiencing flow and identity with your activities, clearly arises from physical endeavour, which is often used as an exemplar of engaged activity. And the meaningful life, of being part of something bigger than you, is served by a wider awareness of the web of life within which we are engaged, both moment-to-moment and at a social level of obligation and giving.
Bibliography and Links
Matthew Crawford (2009). Shop Class as Soulcraft. Penguin Press. Link
David K Reynolds (1995). A Handbook for Constructive Living, Morrow, N.Y. Link
David K Reynolds’ site
Morita therapy and Naikan on Wikipedia
Martin Seligman’s site
Shop Class as Soulcraft: lessons for agency and endeavour
(This post continues my meander through Matthew Crawford’s Shop Class as Soulcraft.)
Soulcraft’s topic is manual competence, and what it means when we lack it. I come away from the book reaffirmed that this matters for three reasons. The first is that being able to achieve things that matter in the real world makes us free and more secure. The second is that challenges that are tangible in character – flesh, blood, wood, earth, steel – are those that most stretch our capacities, a major reward to us thinking beings. The third is that constantly putting our attentions on the real world is important for the human spirit (a topic for the next post).
The first issue is essentially one of agency. If my plumbing breaks on New Years Day – thanks to the table I’m seated at, I am touching wood as I write this – could I deal with it? Or would I be powerless? (The latter, I’m afraid.) How indispensable am I at work? If I’m threatened with my role being outsourced overseas, can I point out my knack for repairing engine damage caused by frequent local dust storms, or restoring waterlogged lily gardens, knowing the soil composition round these parts – or simpler yet, say ‘I hope they enjoy the commute!’ Or could the outputs of my cubicle be replaced by one in Mumbai, leaving me perennially at the mercy of my last good idea?
Crawford emphasises that manual jobs are situated and substantial – they have to be done here, and they have to be done. Conversely, knowledge work is ephemeral: it could be done elsewhere, and when priorities change it may not need doing at all, such as snipping R&D to focus on existing products. The progress of technology seems to support this: the low hanging fruit of massed physical labour were picked during the industrial revolution, largely through the factory line, but manual work that is mobile, personalised, or open-ended seems well beyond what robotics can offer, and is certainly cost ineffective for the foreseeable future. Innovations in technology serve the manual worker rather than supplant him, offering up strength and finesse through stronger tools, better lenses and so on. This is the ‘enlightened inequality’ that Richard Sennett describes in The Craftsman, where the machine does one thing well where the person is weaker, but is unable to perform other parts of the role. The handy-man, gardener, and mechanic can all rest easy.
The second issue turns to the ground well explored in The Craftsman: doing as thinking. Let’s look first at Crawfords negative case, against thought in knowledge work. This seems counterintuitive; surely, regardless of whether using your hands is a thoughtful exercise, knowledge work surely must be. We’re employed for our minds, for our ideas, for our prudent decisions and radical innovations. No?
If we examine the case closely, we know this just ain’t so. Just as Time and Motion studies chiseled autonomy away from the factory worker, determining fixed steps of maximum efficiency and hard-coding these into each job, a similar fate is befalling the knowledge worker through ‘time and thought analysis’. The heads of experts are mined to fill the quarries of knowledge management systems, centralising the needed information and making those experts redundant, or at least in a markedly weaker state to negotiate their worth.
It seems to me that the only sanctioned move we’re able to make, pathetically, is to become an expert in the knowledge systems themselves. No longer valuable for knowing stuff, now (somewhat) valuable for being able to navigate the system that does the knowing for us. If the system changes, or doesn’t need us any more, bad luck. This resonates with me: before I began working for myself, I spent countless days spent coaxing byzantine systems to deliver information like costings of projects, where once I would have been permitted to use my own judgment to do it. I would hazard that a reasonable amount of the average person’s wage is paid for them to patiently wait as screens slowly refresh to reveal a preordained decision that is Ctrl-C Ctrl-V’d into place. Crawford calls it “a rising sea of clerkdom” and I think that’s dead right.
Meanwhile, manual work presents us with problems that are material and unavoidable. Each may have a single solution, or multiple ones of differing elegance. We must carefully try options, using rules of thumb to choose from the common, the laborious, the unusual, and outright inadvisable to get things done. We must use our full expertise at the service of our judgment which is exercised over countless decision points, each one a source of future learning. When it is done, we can see the outcome as correct – though we may need to check our working before signing off on it. This suggests not dull work but something akin to mathematics, whose problems are readily regarded as some of the highest intellectual pursuits within our culture.
Compare that to say product branding for phones. You commission market research, which suggests calling your phone a Meetbox may go down well with a desired demographic. You argue your case in presentations with peers. The company goes ahead with a fair-sized marketing budget. Sales are… ok. What have you learned? Nothing definite, because the whole field of operation is so ambiguous and intangible. Could sales have been better? Maybe. By different branding? Possibly. Should you re-use the market research company? Maybe not (but maybe). Would a bigger marketing budget have made a difference? You could make a case for it (but maybe running the numbers the other way would say the opposite). We don’t have a firm feedback, we can’t say this was a success or failure – except of course, in the eyes of others.
The learning you are most likely to take away from a modern work situation is the most direct component: manipulating your colleagues to a desired outcome. For instance, you mentally note that courting Sally before the meeting would have garnered more enthusiasm for the project overall, and plan to do so again. Crawford argues that as the tangible aspects of work wilt away, we are left focusing on managing our personal brand and becoming more involved in maintaining the best face, from all angles, in the hall of mirrors that is the workplace. In Dancing in the Streets, Barbara Ehrenreich recounts how the noble class within Europe moved from a culture of individual endeavour – warrior-lords leading their men directly through prowess – to one of social surfaces, of courtiers concerned with intrigue and alliance. The engine for this was the centralisation of military power, requiring nobles to define themselves around something other than martial skill. This process continues now with the knowledge class.
I’ve deliberately avoided discussing one component of endeavour, that of creativity. Here, Crawford is equally damning about the condition of the non-manual worker, but I am more optimistic. I’ll come to this in a future post. The next post, meanwhile, is on awareness.
Bibliography and Links
Matthew Crawford (2009). Shop Class as Soulcraft. Penguin Press. Link
Richard Sennett (2008). The Craftsman. Allen Lane. Link
Barbara Ehrenreich (2007). Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy. Metropolitan Books. Link
Shop Class as Soulcraft: Impressions
In the run up to the new year, I will be dedicating this blog to some thoughts inspired by Matthew Crawford’s book on craft. Doing this now is spurred by a post Tim Boucher wrote on the subject, together with realising that a suitcase sitting innocuously in a corner of my house was stacked full of my books, including Crawford’s. It’s much nicer to write about something when you have the physical object to handle; as we shall see, that’s a sentiment that accords well with Crawford’s position. I’m not interested in writing a review, per se*, but in using it as a jumping-off point for various ideas. I was in a note-taking mood when I read the book, and this will be the belated product.
Recently ran into a higher educational program for theatrical designers, but discovered they don’t actually build any of their own designs. Coming from a strictly hands-on school of technical theatre and scenic carpentry, this completely mystifies me. How is the designer supposed to understand how forms, shapes, materials, construction techniques, etc actually work in real life if they are not dealing with them on the ground level?
…One of the best experiences I’ve had working in technical theatre was working this past season at a summer stock theatre where the roles of scenic designer, lighting designer, technical director and crew chief were collapsed into one person: me. Anything I designed, I was immediately thereafter made aware of how shitty or impractical my concept was.
…But as a result of that experience, I’ve managed to acquire a really close connection to what it means to actually build something, cut wood, put screws in, communicate with other people building, etc. Imagine what a good designer could do with that wealth of practical experience!
This is a concern that Crawford takes up with gusto in his book, titled Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work in the US and The Case for Working with Your Hands or Why Office Work is Bad for Us and Fixing Things Feels Good here in the UK. I’ll refer to it as Soulcraft for convenience hereon (quite different from Soul Craft). A trained philosopher, he uses the book to pursue the argument that the work that empowers, that ennobles, that tests the mind and enlightens, is not disembodied ‘knowledge work’ but manual work.
If you think this is ground that has been ploughed elsewhere, you may be thinking of Richard Sennett’s The Craftsman, by the accounts of many a masterwork**. It’s sitting next to me right now, and just leafing through the acknowledgements I note Sennett giving his credo for the book as “making is thinking”, which you can compare with Soulcraft Chapter 7: Thinking as Doing; the resemblances certainly go further (Crawford references Sennett’s work, though not The Craftsman, and Sennett is quoted in the book blurb). What sets the two apart (here I should admit that I haven’t finished The Craftsman, rewarding as it is) is that Sennett’s book is founded on a series of philosophical insights backed by a historical and sociological story he assembles, whereas Soulcraft is driven far more by Crawford’s own direct experiences, in the knowledge world of think tanks and publishing, contrasted with his time as an electrician and now as a motorcyle tuner.
The personal nature goes further: Crawford is positively punchy in making his case: derogation of the blue collar in favour of the white is a big mistake, and making it is going to cost you. That applies when he’s levelling his guns at government, with their reduced investment into shop class (we called it CDT – craft, design and technology) and equally when he levels them at his readership, recognising that it’s probable their fingers are trained merely to unthinkingly type. Watch out, he warns, you’ve put your eggs in the wrong basket. I found the book uncomfortable reading at times; this need not be a bad thing but I felt there was a certain degree of individualist machismo that underpinned it. Yours may be one of the “30 to 40 million U.S. jobs to be potentially offshorable”, but the author is safe – he’s put in the copious time needed to master a desired skill that can only be delivered in-person. I can only imagine what he makes of someone choosing to be an artist: are you crazy? TV, MP3, Youtube – you’re sooo replaceable by 4 billion people with a fraction of the cost of living – give it up. Perhaps I’m being uncharitable. That’s what I felt.
I raise this because it points to a broader issue: a celebration of craft and handwork seems to be on the rise: together with Soulcraft and The Craftsman (and the books footnoted below), we have Crafting Gentleness, Etsie, the make-not-mend movement, Makerhood and much more. The motivations for many of these movements seem to be different. Some are extremely community-centric (Makerhood comes to mind), whereas Crawford’s thesis is pretty individualist, about personal excellence and individual attainment. Some are rooted in environmental concerns – Transition Towns are all about reskilling for a low-oil future. Lauding high-end motorcycle tuning is orthogonal or even opposed to these concerns (thanks to @steel_weaver for crystalising that!). Dissensus is no bad thing, but I wonder if some of these positions aren’t genuinely at loggerheads. As always, I’m interested to hear your thoughts.
In the next post I’ll explore some aspects of Soulcraft that particularly resonate with me.
*There’s a good review here!
** Actually, a quick review shows how many books there are in this particular family: Thinking through Craft, Culture of Craft, The Craft Reader etc