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.
At one point Crawford cites Toqueville’s prediction that Americans would become dependent on the “soft despotism” of what’s nowadays sometimes called the “nanny state,” while suggesting that today’s outsized corporations are more of a threat than government itself. But he also refers to Toqueville’s remedy for this situation: small enterprises that allow people to solve problems without recourse to corporate psychological manipulation.
One member of a small technical “crew” can say to another “It’s plumb and level — check it for yourself,” whereas a member of a modern corporate marketing “team” can only assert his semi-independence from management-imposed ethics by “pinning Dilbert cartoons to his cubicle wall and watching The Office every Thursday night.”
The point here is that office work often has no verifiable criterion available by which to judge if someone is working well or not. As a result, “speech codes, diversity workshops, and other forms of higher regulation” proliferate, leading to the spread of “a dull and confusing anxiety.”
Crawford extends his dislike of the office ethos to computers — machines that have no inkling of things that practical men and women in many spheres of life often know by instinct. He also argues against Marx’s idea of manual workers’ “alienation” — that the object over which they have labored is “torn away” by the rich man who eventually buys it, leaving the worker “alienated” as a result. Why so? the author asks. Doesn’t a furniture-maker want to see his furniture used, what use has he for 100 chairs, and so on.
This excellent book, published in the US as Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work, ends with a caution against all revolutionary nostrums. The vision of a future in which economic antagonism has been abolished may blind us to the problem of how to live well here and now, one best solved by insisting on what human beings do best in a local context — such as making motorbikes purr and hum in harmony with the pulsations of the stars.
Seven hundred job applications. One interview. Marco Mascaro arrived in Taiwan last year with a PhD in engineering physics and years of experience at a European research center. He thought his Gold Card would guarantee him a foothold in Taiwan’s job market. “It’s marketed as if Taiwan really needs you,” the 33-year-old Italian says. “The reality is that companies here don’t really need us.” The Employment Gold Card was designed to fix Taiwan’s labor shortage by offering foreign professionals a combined resident visa and open work permit valid for three years. But for many, like Mascaro, the welcome mat ends at the door. A
The Western media once again enthusiastically forwarded Beijing’s talking points on Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s comment two weeks ago that an attack by the People’s Republic of China (PRC) on Taiwan was an existential threat to Japan and would trigger Japanese military intervention in defense of Taiwan. The predictable reach for clickbait meant that a string of teachable moments was lost, “like tears in the rain.” Again. The Economist led the way, assigning the blame to the victim. “Takaichi Sanae was bound to rile China sooner rather than later,” the magazine asserted. It then explained: “Japan’s new prime minister is
NOV. 24 to NOV. 30 It wasn’t famine, disaster or war that drove the people of Soansai to flee their homeland, but a blanket-stealing demon. At least that’s how Poan Yu-pie (潘有秘), a resident of the Indigenous settlement of Kipatauw in what is today Taipei’s Beitou District (北投), told it to Japanese anthropologist Kanori Ino in 1897. Unable to sleep out of fear, the villagers built a raft large enough to fit everyone and set sail. They drifted for days before arriving at what is now Shenao Port (深奧) on Taiwan’s north coast,
Divadlo feels like your warm neighborhood slice of home — even if you’ve only ever spent a few days in Prague, like myself. A projector is screening retro animations by Czech director Karel Zeman, the shelves are lined with books and vinyl, and the owner will sit with you to share stories over a glass of pear brandy. The food is also fantastic, not just a new cultural experience but filled with nostalgia, recipes from home and laden with soul-warming carbs, perfect as the weather turns chilly. A Prague native, Kaio Picha has been in Taipei for 13 years and
RSS