Educated by a gearhead: Why we need to encounter reality
Review of Shop Class as Soulcraft: An inquiry into the value of work, by Matthew B. Crawford (The Penguin Press, 2009)
I’ve never seen a job advertisement that says, “the successful applicant will have suffered a major disappointment in life.” But apparently this was one of the requirements for working in the White House under President Lyndon Johnson because, “the responsibility of working there was too great … to be entrusted to people who weren’t painfully aware of how badly things can go wrong.” This story appears in Matthew Crawford’s book, Shop Class as Soulcraft, first published more than a decade ago but which I only picked up recently. The work of a philosopher-mechanic, the book isn’t just an ode to the trades and manual work. As virtual reality becomes ever more immersive, Crawford’s book is an increasingly important reminder of our human need to engage with real people, making real choices, in the real world.
Crawford isn’t your average philosopher, nor your average mechanic. He “lived in a large commune from age nine to fifteen,” which provided the context for learning his first trade as an electrician (“there was constant renovation work on whatever dilapidated hotel we currently occupied. The electrical crew needed someone small to fit into tight crawl spaces and drafted me”). In chapters with titles like, “The Education of a Gearhead,” he describes his life after leaving the commune; he got a job repairing Porsches, worked on his own cars, and eventually went to the University of Chicago to acquire a PhD in political thought. He then was hired on a “huge” salary as the head of a Washington DC think tank, where he discovered that “the trappings of scholarship were used to put a scientific cover on positions arrived at otherwise,” positions that just happened to coincide with donors’ interests. After five months, he’d saved enough to buy tools and quit to open his own motorcycle garage.
Shop Class as Soulcraft represents something like a dialogue between Crawford’s interests, which he sums up in the phrase, “thinking as doing”. The early chapters are a defence of “the useful arts”—the cognitive demands of the trades, the continuing need for manual work in the economy of the future, the way it matches certain dispositions. But beyond that, the book contains three big ideas that apply even to those of us that wouldn’t know a carburettor if we tripped over it.
The first big idea is that “a struggle for individual agency [is] at the very center of modern life”. Crawford illustrates with an advertisement for the Yamaha Warrior, with its accompanying range of Star Custom Accessories. There’s an image of a guy in his garage, apparently a craftsman working on his Warrior. Except that what he’s doing is just attaching an accessory. “This is a little like those model cars where the child’s role consists of putting the decals on,” says Crawford. What he’s pointing out, although he doesn’t use the word, is that we are becoming increasingly infantilised as fewer and fewer real decisions are required of us. In the process, we lose our agency—the freedom to choose a goal that is worth choosing, and the knowledge of what is worthy of being chosen.
The second big idea is that “real knowledge arises through confrontations with real things.” The Yamaha advertisement offers the illusion of mastery but it represents, in fact, an alienation from the kind of judgment and discernment that goes along with real knowledge applied to a real problem. Crawford also argues that encountering reality—the practical, physical world—is the basis for true creativity. Contrary to the stereotype of the “creative” conjuring something from thin air, he says that creativity is, in fact, “a by-product of mastery of the sort that is cultivated through long practice. It seems to be built up through submission (think a musician practicing scales, or Einstein learning tensor algebra).” However, mastery and creativity only become possible if we recognise that reality exists as something outside of us—that we can’t discover truth or the real features of the world merely by looking inside ourselves.
The third big idea is that we grow through community with others, in the course of common activity directed towards a shared goal. Crawford’s first car was a Volkswagen Beetle, and he became part of a community of learning in the shape of the VW “speed scene”—including, memorably, encountering a “sleeper” car and learning not to judge by appearances (“A guy in a bone stock-looking Bug” attracts Crawford’s condescension, until “he puts it into first gear and proceeds to light up the tires”). Crawford describes this kind of community as solidarity, a kind of “positive attraction, akin to love,” which binds us tightly in a relationship to particular people in a particular time and place. Unlike a “vaporous universal” concept like abstract human rights, solidarity has both the relational strength to force us to become better people (perhaps through “being schooled by one’s elders” as Crawford was by the owner of the “sleeper”) and the common interest that makes the exchange and development of real knowledge possible.
The book’s major implications all flow from its emphasis on the importance of encountering the physical, material world. But as is hopefully obvious by now, it’s not just a book for those who practise manual crafts. Anyone who works in a community of solidarity and exercises “the sort of evaluative attention that can join us to our work as full-blooded human beings” can apply Crawford’s insights. An aspiring writer, for example, engages in “thinking as doing” when he or she moves beyond thinking about writing and actually writes (without recourse to Grammarly) and submits the result to the public for their assessment.
Perhaps most profoundly, Crawford argues that encountering physical reality, “demands that you be attentive in the way of a conversation rather than assertive in the way of a demonstration.” We live in an age of social media posturing and ‘you do you’ individualism, one that prizes youth over experience even in significant positions of responsibility and leadership, and with a politics that is vulnerable to aspirational-yet-ineffectual sloganeering about complex social problems. Crawford’s argument for this sort of listening posture, and for real engagement with real people and real objects, is a much-needed counter to our increasing disengagement from the real world, and from each other.