Matthew Crawford’s accessible book is principally an argument for recognizing the value of work in the trades, and for establishing a social and personal context incorporating that recognition.
The Culture of Repair Project is principally about recognizing the value of repair, and for establishing a social and personal context incorporating that recognition. From the vantage point of this narrower purpose, an observation: Crawford presents the salutary effects of manual work as most readily experienced through repair. At the end of the day, repairing broken objects — a rational activity requiring exquisite attentiveness, carried out together with others — is square on the path to being fully human, to living “wakefully”, to living well.
Shop Class as Soulcraft explores the content, character and effect of “work”. Crawford presents work in bipolar opposition: on the one hand, situated, embodied, manual, attentive to reality; and on the other hand, remotely-controlled, abstract, disengaged from and blind to reality. Through weaving philosophical arguments with personal reflections on his life’s path and experiences along the way, Crawford examines ancient and more modern threads central to life: ethics, responsibility, perception, agency, and rationality; as well as the modern education system, capitalism, and workplace management, among others.
Central to Crawford’s argument is seeing reality by way of developing acute attentiveness to what is immediately, physically present. Repair takes a privileged position in this, superior to making / creating, as the vision and content of the broken object is not known in advance of working on it, but must be explored and discerned in order to be understood. The broken object presents as a mystery:
In diagnosing and fixing things made by others (this other may be Volkswagon, God, or Natural Selection), one is confronted with obscurities, and must remain constantly open to the signs by which they reveal themselves. This openness is incompatible with self-absorption; to maintain it we have to fight our tendency to get anchored in snap judgments. This is easier said than done.
Because the stochastic arts diagnose and fix things that are variable, complex, and not of our own making, and therefore not fully knowable, they require a certain disposition toward the thing you are trying to fix. This disposition is at once cognitive and moral. Getting it right demands that you be attentive in the way of a conversation rather than assertive in the way of a demonstration [author’s emphases]. I believe the mechanical arts have a special significance for our time because they cultivate not creativity, but the less glamorous virtue of attentiveness. (p. 82)
That attentiveness extends to seeing the inherently social character of the work — always “connected to others”. His exploration of the trades in service to others makes this most apparent, but the likewise present facts of skills learned from others and shared knowledge (whether in apprenticeship, through the owner’s manual or on YouTube), reveal the same: always connected with others.
The idea of autonomy [the modern ‘cult of the sovereign self’] 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 in 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.
To live wakefully is to live in full awareness of this, our human situation. To live well is to reconcile ourselves to it, and try to realize whatever excellence we can…For thinking is inherently bound up with doing, and it is in rational activity together with others that we find our peculiar satisfaction. (p. 208)
(An aside: Though not mentioned in Shop Class as Soulcraft, repair, that brilliantly rational activity carried out together with others, is consummately experienced in community repair events. Hence all the Hootin’ and Hollerin.)
There is a welcome frankness in the book. While rarely acknowledged, philosophical arguments are never objective, but are always shaped by the personal experience and biases of the author. Perhaps unintentionally, Crawford’s biases are evident as the text weaves between plumbing Aristotle, Murdoch, and de Tocqueville, and recounting the master showing his apprentice that he has “to vent a drain pipe a certain way so that sewage gasses don’t seep up through a toilet.” Seeing Crawford’s subjective predispositions clearly is a welcome alternative to their being buried in universal intellectual obfuscations.
Finally, a qualification: This distaff commenter, having been prohibited from taking high school shop class, not to mention from working in a garage as she dreamed, finds Crawford’s language lamentable as it perpetuates a discourse disempowering half of society. I would have hoped for otherwise from this Berkeley-bred child of a ‘70s commune, University of Chicago political philosophy PhD, father of girls, publishing in 2009.
That is to say: I sure wish he’d used more neutral language, for the benefit of all the girls coming up, including his own. My heart aches for the loss of what was disallowed me. (My own bias.)