Author and one-time motorcycle mechanic MATTHEW B. CRAWFORD attempts to rescue manual competence from the condescension of contemporary culture in ‘Shop Class as Soulcraft’, an article published in the Summer 2006 issue of The New Atlantis. Shop class teaches U.S. high schoolers the rudiments of a trade, such as carpentry. It faces an uncertain future due to the widely held opinion that it is a pedagogical relic, out of tune with contemporary reality. Manual work ought to be farmed out to the developing world, and pupils should prepare for a career in the ‘knowledge’ sector, the thinking goes. The notion that our species has outgrown manual work is quite old; it gained significant traction after the Industrial Revolution, and has seduced intellectuals of nearly every stripe. In its current iteration, Crawford notes, its basis is ‘virtualism’: a variety of futurism in which digital technologies relieve humanity of the burden of material constraints.1 In order to alleviate the confusion about work and technology that such ideas reveal, Crawford attacks the conflation of assembly-line work and the trades. The assembly line is the management innovation that enabled manufacturers to break down what was previously integral craft knowledge into several minute tasks, each of which can be executed via simple instructions. Thousands of years’ worth of empirically acquired knowledge, thitherto distributed in the minds of countless craftspersons, was thus converted to data: represented as bundles of discrete operations, executable by unskilled labourers, and transferred to the minds of managers. As far as management was concerned, exponential gains in productivity were of secondary importance, Crawford suggests; it is the knowledge transfer that relieved management of the headache of demanding, uncooperative skilled labour. This divorce of cognition from execution is one reason that post-assembly-line generations find it difficult to discern any knowledge component in manual work.
The thing is, says Crawford, much of the work that we need done cannot be performed in a factory setting. In a number of trades — such as construction and auto repair — much depends on the on-the-spot judgements and decisions of the tradesperson. That is why experience, acuity and access to informal networks of shared, arcane knowledge are highly valuable. That is also why such work still affords its practitioners ‘an experience of agency and competence’, not to mention economic resilience in the face of twenty-first-century dislocations. Just as importantly, the work of a tradesperson engenders a respect for materiality and physical constraints. Such a frame of mind, Crawford asserts, makes one less prone to magical thinking, and so less susceptible to demagoguery. While the assembly-line revolution appears to have hit a wall in the world of atoms, it is proceeding apace in the world of bits. In many people’s minds, a suit-clad, keyboard-tapping employee is performing cognitively demanding work. In fact, a vast number of ‘knowledge workers’ do little more than executing algorithms. The ongoing development of artificial intelligence likely makes the position of cubicle dwellers no less precarious than that of their factory-floor counterparts. Individuals, then, should resist cultural fads and approach career choice with an eye to ‘engag[ing] the human capacities as fully as possible’, Crawford urges. His blend of philosophy, cognitive science, history and anecdote is elegant and cogent; but it is the correction of an asymmetry in the world of commentary that makes this a rare species of meditation. Tradespersons tend to lack not only the credentials that would grant them access to editorial platforms, but also the ‘tools’ and the inclination to pursue such access. This deprives serious, opinion-shaping publications of a valuable perspective. The literati, meanwhile, tend to lack manual competence, and consequently have little regard for its cognitive demands and inherent rewards, and little incentive to extol it in print. By rendering the case of the former in the vocabulary and codes of the latter, Crawford gives us an intervention of unimprovable public-mindedness.
BERTRAND RUSSELL, for example,. makes the anti-work case forcefully in his 1932 Harper’s essay ‘In Praise of Idleness’. However, his target is work of all sorts and his argument does not have a futurist flavour. Indeed, it could be argued that both Russell and Crawford arrive at the same place via different routes. ‘Idleness’ is given a terse Dilettante treatment in post no. 20, ‘Lush Life’.