If Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was a philosophical-literary-psychological exploration of the Ideal vs. the Real, Plato vs. Aristotle, and the virtue of honest work, than Crawford's book explores those same issues from an economic and political angle.
There is no Phaedrus, no kid to take care of, and no one teeters on the brink of psychosis, at least no one we care about. Instead, Shop Class As Soulcraft is exactly as advertised in its subtitle: An inquiry into the value of work.
This book's thesis should be familiar to anyone growing up in America the same time I did, meaning all of us at or nearing retirement age. We don't work with our hands anymore. No one does. Even though I was completely inept as a young man, I could at least open the hood of a car and have some recognition of the parts of an internal combustion engine and their purposes. I see nothing remotely familiar under the hood of my Inifiniti. If my transistor radio broke back in 1964, I was expected to make a feeble attempt to figure out the problem and fix it. Sometimes I actually succeeded and those were great moments. I couldn't break into a new radio today if my life depended on it. If something goes wrong, the stupid contraption gets disposed of and replaced by a new one.
My sister's washing machine broke down the other day and her husband, a man who knows how to work with his hands if there ever was one, tried to fix the thing. After a few futile days and confronted with the reality of the bits and pieces of what was once a washer in front of him, Dick finally called for the repairman. After paying the guy to recollect the machine into some semblance of order and to cart it off, Dick bought a new machine. He would have saved time, money, and piles of dirty clothes if he would have just bought a new one in the first place.
In short, we are becoming increasingly cut off from our tools and therefore from the world of experience. Work of all kinds has become trivialized, computerized, organized, and assembly-lined. It has become symptomatic of the larger societal dichotomy, the separation of thinking from doing.
There was a time when work had a kind of dignity and the worker was vitally connected to the fruits of his labors. Then Henry Ford came along with his assembly line and put into practice the thinking of Frederick Winslow Taylor's Principles of Scientific Management. Scientific Management! In other words, the movements of labor were analyzed, stream lined, parcelled out, measured, controlled, and most importantly, timed. Workers became parts of a machine and there was no real connection between their work and the finished product.
It is interesting that in 1913 when the assembly line at the Ford plant was going full bore, there was such a flight of workers from the factory that for every hundred positions it was necessary to hire 963!
How do you end up controlling your workers when they find themselves in such degrading jobs? It worked in the good old USA because we invented advertising and were able to dangle the fruits of their labor in front of them so tantalizingly that they became consumers, consumers in need of even more money. And when they didn't have the cash, they borrowed. Before they knew it, working in assembly lines was the only way to feed the fever.
So, the idea of wages as compensation was born to justify the intolerable conditions for labor.
All of this takes its most interesting turn in a discussion of the difference between The Crew and The Team. He makes an important distinction between Real Work--the kind that produces a tangible product, like a plumbing installation or a rebuilt motorcycle engine, that can be seen and judged--and not-so-real work that results in ideas that can neither be seen nor judged, like the work of a college professor or a think tank. Real work is done by men and women in crews. These crews are characterized by a hierarchy based on experience, a division of labor, accountability to the customer and to one another because the result of the crew's work is visible and measurable. Social problems, historical analyses, recommendations from the social sciences, investment advice, all are done by teams. Teams are characterized by group dynamics, consensus, brainstorming. Where hierarchy is essential for a crew to function (you don't want an apprentice plumber telling a journeyman how to do a job), it is anathema for a team. This just further exemplifies our cultural disconnect between thinking and doing. The following quote sums this up best.
Not surprisingly, it is the office rather than the job site that has seen the advent of speech codes, diversity workshops, and other forms of higher regulation. Some might attribute this to the greater mixing of the sexes in the office, but I believe a more basic reason is that when there is no concrete task that rules the job--an autonomous good that is visible to all--then there is no secure basis for social relations. Maintaining consensus and preempting conflict become the focus of management, and as a result everyone feels they have to walk on eggshells. Where no appeal to a carpenter's level is possible, sensitivity training becomes necessary.
Look at what happened to Green Mountain High School in particular and all schools in general. The job at school is not measurable in the sense that I can use a level to check a frame I just pounded together. Yeah, our country has spent my lifetime trying to figure out ways to measure the work of schools, but, contrary to all you CSAPers out there, has yet to come up with anything that really works. Therefore, at the end of my career we were all walking around on eggshells with each new contradictory directive and each rehash of last year's educational panacea. No one knew what was expected because what was expected kept changing with each knee-jerk reaction.
I think the main reason Crawford wrote this book was to point out the bad rap we give practical education, the Doing half of the dichotomy. As a society we place a higher value on the thinker, the white collar worker. We pay them more. We elect them to make decisions for us. We seem to think that they are some how better trained in analytical thinking. But Crawford strongly asserts, and my experience corroborates this, that there is AT LEAST as much analytical thinking going on in a carpenter's head late at night when he is wide awake in bed trying to figure how to compensate for a house with no right angles, or a plumber trying to figure out a tricky installation.
He just wants us to realize that there is plenty of nobility to go around, a nice thought.
My point, finally, isn't to recommend motorcycling in particular, not to idealize the life of a mechanic. It is rather to suggest that if we follow the traces of our own actions to their source, they intimate some understanding of the good life.
Crawford ends his book by making some political and economic points that are quite appropriate for today. To be mercifully brief, he contrasts the idea that we have an "obligation to others" to the notion that we should act in "solidarity with others." Acting in solidarity is what happens when we acknowledge the nobility of all types of work and, most important, that we live in a shared world. He ends his essay with a magnificent statement.
Such a sociable individuality contrasts with the self-enclosure that is implicit in the idea of "autonomy," which means giving a law to oneself. The idea of autonomy denies that we are born into a world that existed prior to us. It posits an essential aloneness; an autonomous being is free in the sense that a being severed from all others is free. To regard oneself this way is to betray the natural debts we owe to the world, and commit the moral error of ingratitude. For in fact we are basically dependent beings: one upon another, and each on a world that is not of our making.
In "E.O. Wilson's Theory of Everything" (The Atlantic, November 2011.),Howard W. French writes about a controversial evolutionary biologist's take on this very idea of autonomy.
Now, I never was fortunate enough to take Bio II with C. Fite, so I am not as conversant with Darwin and Stephen Jay Gould and the rest as I probably should be, so bear with me for a little while. First of all, Wilson and Gould are not particularly fond of each other. Wilson thinks Gould fudges on his research and Gould thinks Wilson's conclusions approach the delusional. Like I've always said, there is nothing more fun than a good evolutionary debate.
There is a hot national debate going on among biologists concerning the kin-selection theory and the idea, promoted by Wilson, of eusociality. We can best understand this by looking at ants. Wilson loves ants. Darwinism suggests that individuals within a species will make the necessary adaptations to preserve their genes. How does this account for the behavior of female ants in a colony who sacrifice their reproductivity to the queen? Wilson says that ants, like humans, are eusocial, meaning they unselfishly put the good of the group over the good of the individual. Having a queen control reproduction frees the rest of the ants, both male and female, to protect the community against those pesky termites. Protecting the community, while not necessarily the best thing for the individual, is the best way to insure the survival of the species.
I always have this argument with people, especially conservatives. This is a society built on cooperation, not competition. If we are to survive it will be through cooperation.
In the studies Wilson has done, he discovered that within the confines of a group, selfish individuals seemed to prosper more than the selfless, but he also discovered that groups characterized by selfless rather than selfish behavior, prospered more than their selfish counterparts. I wish republicans in Congress would heed that lesson. The article ends with the following wonderful passage.
Group selection brings about virtue, and individual selection, which is competing with it, creates sin. That, in a nutshell, is an explanation of the human condition.
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