Heidegger and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

By Michael Agger
Slate Magazine, May 19, 2009

Edited by Andy Ross

Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work
By Matthew B. Crawford
Penguin, 320 pages

When Matthew Crawford finished his doctorate in political philosophy at the University of Chicago, he took a job at a Washington think tank. He quit after five months and started doing motorcycle repair in a decaying factory in Richmond, Virginia.

Shop Class is the best self-help book that I've ever read. Almost all works in the genre skip the "self" part and jump straight to the "help." Crawford rightly asks whether today's cubicle dweller even has a respectable self.

The motorcycle mechanic faces the tactile problem of a bike that won't start. He tests various theories and deploys actual tools. The sign of success is a roaring engine. In Shop Class, Crawford talks about fixing bikes and the analytical lessons he draws from his gearhead days.

Crawford focuses on cubicle life: investment analyst, paralegal, junior marketing executive, sales associate. He doesn't have a lot to say directly about the caring professions, like teaching, or about self-styled Web artisans or slackers. It's the cubicle and its "contradictions" that get him riled up.

The cubicle life is amorphous. What are you actually making? How do you know if you are advancing at your job? It's an absurd situation. Crawford looks around at the sociologists who have studied office life and concludes that the office is best approached as a "place of moral education" with managers helping us become team players.

With his motorcycle-inspired "metaphysics of quality," Crawford pays obvious homage to Robert Pirsig. But what distinguishes Crawford from his predecessors is that he surveys an economic landscape where everyone must go to college or else be viewed as suspect, stupid, and/or unemployable.

Crawford offers some strategies for avoiding despondent alienation. Learn to complete a task from start to finish. Start a small business, or learn a trade. Achieve mastery, which in turn gives you a skill not subject to the whims of office politics. And think about how your work affects others.

Crawford: "We in the West have arranged our institutions to prevent the concentration of political power. ... But we have failed utterly to prevent the concentration of economic power, or take account of how such concentration damages the conditions under which full human flourishing becomes possible (it is never guaranteed)."
 

Making Things Work

By Francis Fukuyama
The New York Times, June 5, 2009

Edited by Andy Ross

Matthew Crawford notes that all across the United States, high school shop classes teaching mechanical arts like welding or woodworking are closing down, to free up funds for computer labs.

This change 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. Most white-collar office work is 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 and planning meetings.

Crawford argues that the ideologists of the knowledge economy have posited a false dichotomy between knowing and doing. In fact, most forms of real knowledge come from the effort to master the brute reality of material objects. These activities can't 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.

Highly educated people with high-status jobs 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.

Crawford asserts that he is not writing a book about public policy. But he argues that there is something wrong with a global economy in which a Chinese worker sews together an Amish quilt with no 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's mortgage broker is a depersonalized cog in a financial machine that actively discourages prudence and judgment.

Francis Fukuyama is professor of international political economy at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.
 

Bikes and Work

By Kelefa Sanneh
The New Yorker, June 22, 2009

Edited by Andy Ross

In 1974, Robert Pirsig published Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. The book eventually sold about five million copies.

Thirty-five years later, a very different biker-philosopher has delivered a new indictment of "primary America." Matthew B. Crawford has a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago (where Pirsig had been a grad student), a fellowship at the University of Virginia, and, most important, a scrappy motorcycle-repair shop in Richmond.

Crawford means his book to be a philosophical manifesto for a dawning age: an ode to old-fashioned hard work, and an argument that localism can help cure our spiritual and economic woes. He sees the failure to appreciate skilled manual labor as a symptom of a narcissistic refusal to grapple with the material world. But Crawford is no Marxist. For him, the solution to big business is small business.

But how do you serve craftsmanship without serving the market? How can an independent artisan insure that he doesn't become an entrepreneur? This question haunts Crawford's book.

Crawford's book is, in large part, a treatise on the joys and frustrations of manliness in a post-manly age. For him, offices are profoundly feminized places. Reading a study about the sneaky ways in which managers assert their authority, he compares office life to "being part of a clique of girls," with a brutal hierarchy hidden beneath "the forms and manners of sisterhood." Far better, he says, to work at a garage or a construction site, where "one feels like a man, not a cog in a machine."

Crawford sets its sights on the blue-collar worker, not on the fussy consumer. And so he writes dutifully about economic trends, changing labor markets, and the uncertain future of America's information economy. But he can't feign much enthusiasm for, say, jobs in the health-care sector, no matter how satisfying or useful or plentiful those jobs might be. Really, he likes engines and building things and fixing things.

Crawford's brief for skilled manual labor is rooted in firsthand experience: repairing motorcycles fills him with a "sense of agency and competence." He decries our "ignorance of the world of artifacts," and mourns "the disappearance of tools from our common education." But he never quite gets around to explaining what counts as a tool, and why.

With a minimum of tweaking, Crawford could turn his manifesto into a first-rate motivational speech for business groups nationwide.
 

AR  I don't imagine this will be as big a hit as ZAMM — which deeply impressed me back in 1974.