I once received some excellent medical advice from a professor of psychology in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. When I contacted him again recently he informed me he was now living as a cabinet-maker in Maine. I was initially surprised, but then saw it as part of a wider pattern — the abandoning of mental and clerical work in favor of manual labor of some sort.
The author of The Case for Working with Your Hands has a doctorate in political philosophy but runs a bike repair shop. And motorbikes are deeply divisive objects in Western culture — maligned by the suburban middle-classes as vulgar symbols of unbridled male sexuality, but treasured by many of their owners as emblems of true independence and self-reliance.
Some time during the 1980s, writes Michael Crawford, US high schools stopped teaching “shop class” (automobile repair, woodworking, metal fabrication and the like) and started training students instead to be “knowledge workers,” i.e. skilled with computers. This was a pity, Crawford argues, not only because in the midst of mass unemployment there’s now a chronic labor shortage in the construction and repair industries, but also because manual work gives a deep pleasure that working with pen and paper, or computers, can never bestow.
After Crawford took his doctorate at the University of Chicago he worked in a Washington think-tank. “I was always tired,” he says, “and honestly could not see the rationale for my being paid at all — what tangible goods or services was I providing to anyone?” After five months he quit and opened the bike shop.
Crawford goes out of his way to explain that he’s not an aficionado of the “higher crafts.” He’s no Japanese sword-maker, claiming a higher spirituality from creating supremely fine hand-made products. Nor is he a wood-worker, like so many latter-day middle-class hippies who believe in the sanctity of working close to nature. By contrast, he’s an advocate of the democracy of everyday trades, fixing the things that many people need, but which require someone with know-how to be able to put right.
Moreover, Crawford feels that the time is right for such a
re-evaluation. The recent economic crisis has made people lose
trust in a career on Wall Street,
and hopefully made them
reconsider the fundamental truth that “productive labor is the foundation of all prosperity.” And anecdotal evidence suggests that American community colleges that take students who already have four-year degrees and train them
in a marketable trade skill
see 98 percent of their trainees getting jobs in the first year
after graduating.
Indeed, the recent banking-led economic crisis sets the context for much of this book, as well as providing examples of what happens when businesses lose contact with the reality of the solid objects in which they are dealing.
Crawford relates how he worked as an electrician’s helper when he was 15 and still remembers the pleasure he derived at the end of the day from flipping a switch “and there was light.” (It’s hard here not to recall the poet Pope’s two-line verse epitaph on Isaac Newton. “Nature, and Nature’s laws, lay hid in night. God said, ‘Let Newton be!’ and all was light” — all the more brilliant as Newton’s specialism was optics).
The Case for Working with Your Hands is inevitably going to be compared to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. It has to be said that there’s no real comparison. This new book is much shorter, and anyway doesn’t have the fictional allure and opportunities for a digressive inclusiveness Robert Persig provided for himself in his justly famous road narrative.
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