A previous post, Soul Butter quoted an interview with Matthew Crawford, author of Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work.

I just wanted to make one point: There's knowledge work and there's manual work, and the idea that these are two very different things seemed very bogus to me. I needed to make the case for how much thinking goes on in the trades. . .

But it also seems to have a retro spin, or is seen that way by some.

Crawford’s book arrives just as a vague sense of dissatisfaction with the demands and rewards of the modern economy is coalescing into something like a movement. In 1998, the sociologist Richard Sennett published “The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism,” in which he saw soul-destroying consequences in our new work habits—endless hours spent at flexible jobs, performing abstract tasks on computer screens. Last year, in “The Craftsman” (Yale; $18), Sennett suggested that skilled labor could be a way to resist corporate mediocrity. The environmentalist writer Bill McKibben proposed something similar in “Deep Economy,” which condemned the ruinous effects of endless economic expansion and urged readers to live smaller, simpler, more local lives. This artisanal revival has been particularly pronounced among foodies, thanks in part to the writer Michael Pollan, who helped popularize an American variant of the Italian culinary-agrarian movement known as Slow Food. In “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” and “In Defense of Food,” Pollan surveyed the excesses of the “industrial food chain” and paid thoughtful tribute to small farms and local produce. (You can see evidence of Pollan’s influence on the White House lawn, where Michelle Obama has planted an organic vegetable garden.) These ideas have crept farther toward the mainstream in the wake of the economic collapse, which inspired calls for a return to real work—a return, in other words, to activities more tangible (and, it was hoped, less perilous) than complex swaps of abstract financial products. 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. An excerpt appeared in the Times Magazine, where Pollan is a contributing writer, and it stayed near the top of the paper’s most e-mailed list for a week.

All of this is bunk, ignorant posing by writers who have no grasp of work. It's a denatured antiseptic parody of work rather than the real thing. Worse it is antithetical to the idea that Crawford claims is the one point. There's no thinking in the world of Sennett, McKibben or Pollan, and it may be that Crawford also fails to think.

It seems that every generation discovers anew what Crawford has discovered: that work is — that we are — stupid and getting stupider. In “The Wealth of Nations,” which appeared in 1776, Adam Smith argued that while professional specialization broadened the economic activity of a society, it narrowed the lives of workers themselves. “Among nations of hunters, the lowest and rudest state of society, such as we find it among the native tribes of North America, every man is a warrior, as well as a hunter,” he wrote. By contrast, a worker with a dull, repetitive job would inevitably degenerate: “The torpor of his mind renders him not only incapable of relishing or bearing a part in any rational conversation, but of conceiving any generous, noble, or tender sentiment, and consequently of forming any just judgment concerning many even of the ordinary duties of private life.” Crawford’s low-level data analysts are about as miserable as Smith’s “manufactory” drones, and for the same reason: they’re bored.

Sounds like the prejudices of antiquity doesn't it?

Laborers are "generally held in bad repute," Xenophon wrote about 700 years later, "and with justice." Manual jobs keep men too busy to be decent companions or good citizens, "so that men engaged in them must ever appear to be both bad friends and poor defenders of their country."

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In Ion, Plato wrote that techne (in the sense of an art or craft) represented a threat to peace, order and good government for which Reason and Law “by common consent have ever been deemed best.” Aristotle saw it as representative of the imperfection of human imitation of nature. For the ancient Greeks, it signified all the Mechanical Arts including medicine and music. The English aphorism, ‘gentlemen don’t work with their hands,’ is said to have originated in ancient Greece in relation to their cynical view on the arts. Due to this view, it was only fitted for the lower class while the upper class practiced the Liberal Arts of ‘free’ men (Dorter 1973).

There's no reason for minds to be empty while doing manual labor. Every life activity has a physical component that is repetitive. Turning the pages of a book, massaging a keyboard or mousing about fit the description. Most lab work is fussy and tedious repetition. So why do we assume that minds must be idle if the repetitive work is of one sort rather than another?

I think it varies by individual with no connection to work type. Many academics are leather bottomed time servers who haven't had a thought in decades. Their lives and work are mind numbingly empty, as much or more so as any drudge that Smith worried about. And in each case it is not necessarily so. People choose to be empty headed or not.

The "artisanal revival" movement is just another update on the old arts & crafts type movements with which we have been afflicted for a couple of centuries at least. They usually are accompanied by a delusional populist socialism which does some harm and then fizzles again since it's merely fashion. It's escapism, a petulant refusal to think rather than what Crawford claimed was his main point that there's a lot of thinking going on in the trades. Thinking and daydreaming are not quite the same thing. Fantasy is not enough.

The previous post about fertilizer myths and the unthinking analyses and prescriptions of "some researchers" can serve as an example. A grower may be seen to be doing repetitive physical labor but that provides no insight into his mental life. He may be a delusional day dreamer living a retro fantasy - Mother Nature's son growing heirloom tomatoes for wealthy fashion victims - or he may be doing rigorous analysis and prescription for improved agronomic methods. It looks the same to an observer and is not a function of the work itself, rather it depends on the character and intellect of the grower.