It’s been a long time since I read an essay as gratifying as “The Case for Working with Your Hands,” published in the New York Times Magazine two weeks ago and vaguely on my mind ever since. Matthew Crawford is a political philosopher (Ph.D. Chicago) turned motorcycle mechanic, and the piece is adapted from his new book, Shop Class As Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work.
Crawford’s central argument is twofold. The trades have intrinsic value and pleasure for many of those who practice them; and Americans have made a mistake in gradually disdaining the trades in favor of office work, which is often more stultifying than liberating. Describing his own lung-clearing transition from desk jockey to entrepreneur, he carefully catalogs the ways in which fixing motorcycles can be intellectually stimulating, a canvas for the diagnostic arts and for tangible solutions. Likewise, he lays out the ways in which desk-bound work in an organization can be pointless and soul-killing, voicing some truths that many professionals prefer not to face.
His personal experiences are remarkable, beautifully chronicled, and altogether interesting, but I’m even more engaged by the philosophy behind them. As a white-collar professional in a modestly paid field, it’s long been clear to me that the average plumber, electrician, or handyman — particularly my own handyman, a person of prodigious gifts — makes more money than I do. Why, Crawford implicitly asks, do we feel compelled to steer every young person of functional intelligence to a lifetime of sitting at a desk?
High-school shop-class programs were widely dismantled in the 1990s as educators prepared students to become “knowledge workers.” The imperative of the last 20 years to round up every warm body and send it to college, then to the cubicle, was tied to a vision of the future in which we somehow take leave of material reality and glide about in a pure information economy. This has not come to pass. To begin with, such work often feels more enervating than gliding. More fundamentally, now as ever, somebody has to actually do things: fix our cars, unclog our toilets, build our houses.
I frankly had no idea that shop class had been pulled from high-school course menus. I took both wood and metal shop in junior high — against the objections of my mother, who argued, not without justification, that learning how to cook and sew in “home ec” class would be far more practical. It’s true that in the ensuing years I have not once found occasion to wield an oxy-acetylene torch; I learned to cook in a rather delayed manner; and I still can’t sew more than a button. But shop class was thrilling, an exposure to processes I knew I would never otherwise mess around with. And I made a cool chisel that my dad claimed to use once or twice.
Crawford tackles the critical issues of prestige and patronizing attitudes. It’s easy for suits to say that they respect the work of tradesmen, but I think the true test is how each of us, as individuals, would feel if one of our children expressed a desire to pursue a trade. “When we praise people who do work that is straightforwardly useful, the praise often betrays an assumption that they had no other options,” Crawford writes. “We idealize them as the salt of the earth… But what if such work answers as well to a basic human need of the one who does it?”
The political scientist Francis Fukuyama reviews Shop Class As Soulcraft in tomorrow’s Times book review, calling it “a beautiful little book about human excellence and the way it is undervalued in contemporary America.” Fukuyama closes on an interesting personal note.
In the end I must confess that it would have been hard for me not to like this book. While I make my living as a “symbolic knowledge worker,” I have both ridden motorcycles and made furniture — my family’s kitchen table, the beds my children slept on while growing up, as well as reproductions of Federal-style antiques whose originals I could never afford to buy. Few things I’ve created have given me nearly as much pleasure as those tangible objects that were hard to fabricate and useful to other people. I put my power tools away a few years ago, and find now that I can’t even give them away, because people are too preoccupied with updating their iPhones. Shop class, it appears, is already a distant historical memory.
Crawford’s article, and the spirit that animates it, helped me to realize why I take growing pleasure in seemingly superficial pursuits like cooking and home improvement: not only are they intrinsically creative, but they produce palpable, visible, elemental results.
