Or, personal convictions in search of a social narrative.

A few months ago there was a flurry of commentary about Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work by Matthew Crawford. I posted a couple of times about it since it faintly echoed some of my old notions about the mental life of laborers (see Soul Butter) and because it seemed to contradict its own main thesis that a lively mind is not a function of what one does for pay, it is an individual characteristic that could as well be true of an academic or one who does physical labor. There are dull and lively minds in each broad category.

Here's another take on the book.

Part of my problem, I guess, is that he oversells his case. There are people who approximate what he calls craftsmen even in knowledge work, for one, who have the agency and ethos that he sees as systematically absent from that world. He often takes material objects, machines and technologies as artifacts which simply exist for the practical, craftmanslike person to work with, showing little interest in the processes by which new technologies are imagined, designed or implemented until or unless they become something he disdains because they are no longer easily accessible to craftsmanlike tinkering. He’s got a fairly shop-worn (pun intended) critique of consumer culture, which is banal but tolerable until you stop to think a bit about the fact that the business that puts bread on his table is maintaining vintage motorcycles that his customers drive for fun down the Blue Ridge Parkway. Hello, 21st Century leisure and consumption! It’s not exactly reshoeing the plow horse for the Widow Stevens so she can plant enough wheat for the coming winter. . .

Maybe it’s just tone, and personal taste. There was all of what I liked in the book, which was quite a bit. Then I had some more dispassionate questioning of some of his evidence or interpretations. And then there was a growing amount of irritation with the way he chose to say it.

Crawford doesn’t like technologies which automate some aspect of their functioning, which take the manual agency of the user out of the picture. Fine, I guess, but it’s sort of an arbitrary line in a lot of technologies, not to mention a feature of technological history which waxes and wanes rather than moves in a steady line.

This is a mistake in my view too. As I mentioned in that old post Soul Butter I worked as a cabinet maker in my youth. I was trained by some old school immigrants - Germans and Swedes - who had themselves been trained as apprentices to masters. The way that they were educated was to be given a log and some hand tools and told to make a fine cabinet with those tools and materials. It was only when they had developed the skill to do this that they were allowed to use powered tools. The purpose of power tools is to do what a man can do, but faster. If a man can't do fine work by hand - so the theory went - he won't do fine work with power tools.

My training was a faint echo of the old, hard way but the story was frequently told as I struggled to develop my limited talent. It forced me to think since one must not only make the end product, the cabinet, one must often make the tool to produce it too. In some ways it was like the story of the sculptor who visualized the work of art hidden in the block of marble, and the tools and tasks required to reveal it. If the tools did not exist then they invented and created them too.

It's all about technology no matter whether you are a knuckle buster for a living or a scribe. When you are fully engaged with work, any work, the techniques you use and invent are technologies. Writing is a technology after all, just as much as the equipment used to create and illuminate your manuscript. This was much clearer when you had to make your own pens and ink, but the task is still the same with keyboards and document processing software. It can be done in a mindless and derivative way or it can be done in a more fully engaged manner.

It’s not just that I feel a cussed desire to argue with even the statements I’m sympathetic to, but that somehow this voice, this tone, is far away from the substantive argument of the book: not concrete, not practical, not rooted in experience, not visceral. It feels like he’s trying too hard to validate his choices in a sweepingly universal way, as diktat rather than proposition . . .

Well, Timothy does argue with everything, but that's not all that he does. IMV one should dispute everything, especially your own muddled notions, since that is in some ways the true essence of craftsmanship, no matter whether you are crafting ideas or objects.