Work With Your Hands

The New York Times Magazine never ceases to provide great articles every Sunday. This past Sunday's edition (featuring Conan O'Brien in the cover story) also has a great little essay by Matthew Crawford, who adapted his article from his new book, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work.

Among many of his tales of deconstructing motorcycles, fixing bikes, and writing summaries for academic papers, he provides some great advice that everyone should listen to:

A good job requires a field of action where you can put your best capacities to work and see an effect in the world. Academic credentials do not guarantee this.

Nor can big business or big government — those idols of the right and the left — reliably secure such work for us. Everyone is rightly concerned about economic growth on the one hand or unemployment and wages on the other, but the character of work doesn’t figure much in political debate. Labor unions address important concerns like workplace safety and family leave, and management looks for greater efficiency, but on the nature of the job itself, the dominant political and economic paradigms are mute. Yet work forms us, and deforms us, with broad public consequences.

The visceral experience of failure seems to have been edited out of the career trajectories of gifted students. It stands to reason, then, that those who end up making big decisions that affect all of us don’t seem to have much sense of their own fallibility, and of how badly things can go wrong even with the best of intentions (like when I dropped that feeler gauge down into the Ninja). In the boardrooms of Wall Street and the corridors of Pennsylvania Avenue, I don’t think you’ll see a yellow sign that says “Think Safety!” as you do on job sites and in many repair shops, no doubt because those who sit on the swivel chairs tend to live remote from the consequences of the decisions they make. Why not encourage gifted students to learn a trade, if only in the summers, so that their fingers will be crushed once or twice before they go on to run the country?

I agree with Mr. Crawford when he says that we should all learn a trade-- something that is "hand-intensive". One of the great joys of being an architecture student is the requirement to think critically, yet requires one to work hands-on.

Moments of elation are counterbalanced with failures, and these, too, are vivid, taking place right before your eyes. With stakes that are often high and immediate, the manual trades elicit heedful absorption in work. They are punctuated by moments of pleasure that take place against a darker backdrop: a keen awareness of catastrophe as an always-present possibility. The core experience is one of individual responsibility, supported by face-to-face interactions between tradesman and customer.

If you've been following along so far, you might realize that Crawford is not the first person to cite this hands-on mentality. From time to time, I turn to my copy of Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, a book that has been on South Mountain College's reading list in the past. (Oddly enough, both books mentioned in this post have subtitles that mention that the book is an"inquiry" into some "value") His 1974 novel also brings to light the increasing amount of technology in society and the subsequent dismissal of "becoming one with the activity".

Thanks to financial pressures, everyone is returning to a more savvy lifestyle- buzzwords like "slow food" and "sustainability" reflect our thriftiness in an economical and environmental sense. Here's to weekend projects!

LINK: The Case for Working With Your Hands (NYT Magazine)