POSTED BY

Steven Leckart

AT 2:21 PM
Sunday May 24, 2009

HOWTO and DIY

The Case for Working With Your Hands

Matthew B. Crawford, motorcycle mechanic and author, has a great piece in the NY Times Magazine that adapts his book Shop Class as Soulcraft:

High-school shop-class programs were widely dismantled in the 1990s as educators prepared students to become "knowledge workers." The imperative of the last 20 years to round up every warm body and send it to college, then to the cubicle, was tied to a vision of the future in which we somehow take leave of material reality and glide about in a pure information economy. This has not come to pass. To begin with, such work often feels more enervating than gliding. More fundamentally, now as ever, somebody has to actually do things: fix our cars, unclog our toilets, build our houses.

When we praise people who do work that is straightforwardly useful, the praise often betrays an assumption that they had no other options. We idealize them as the salt of the earth and emphasize the sacrifice for others their work may entail. Such sacrifice does indeed occur -- the hazards faced by a lineman restoring power during a storm come to mind. But what if such work answers as well to a basic human need of the one who does it?

...Seeing a motorcycle about to leave my shop under its own power, several days after arriving in the back of a pickup truck, I don't feel tired even though I've been standing on a concrete floor all day. Peering into the portal of his helmet, I think I can make out the edges of a grin on the face of a guy who hasn't ridden his bike in a while. I give him a wave. With one of his hands on the throttle and the other on the clutch, I know he can't wave back. But I can hear his salute in the exuberant "bwaaAAAAP!" of a crisp throttle, gratuitously revved. That sound pleases me, as I know it does him. It's a ventriloquist conversation in one mechanical voice, and the gist of it is "Yeah!"

Previously:

9 Comments

Scuba SM

#1 – 3:24 PM May 24, 2009

My family has always been huge on doing things with your hands. If something breaks, it goes to the workshop, even if the ultimate destination is the trash because if you can't fix it, you can still learn something by taking it apart. My mom has the know-how and the equipment to take a raw fleece at one end and produce a tailored, intricately woven jacket at the other. As I'm writing this comment, I'm sitting in a room where 90% of the furniture was handcrafted by my dad and myself. There are a variety of skills that can be learned and honed in the shop that are applicable to everyday life, including patience, attention to detail, forethought, planning, communication (written plans and oral instructions), and how to deal with setbacks. Even when I've been crammed into dorm rooms and apartments, I've kept at least one or two projects going with limited tools, space and time.

pt

#2 – 3:47 PM May 24, 2009

But... can we get a link to the article?

zuzu

#3 – 3:53 PM May 24, 2009

Just as wood shop and metal shop were being phased out for CAD and non-linear video editing, the last thing I did in the last metal shop class ever to occur in my junior high school was CNC lathing with an Apple //e.

I'm all for people being able to repair their own cars, computers, and washing machines. But I see that as being far more likely to be backported into the "knowledge worker" paradigm where I'm going to program a computer to rapid-prototype the part that I need to fix my car (and share online the code for that part).

This is perhaps more obvious with laboratory automation and automated analysers throughout the biotechnology field.

More fundamentally, now as ever, somebody has to actually do things: fix our cars, unclog our toilets, build our houses.

Manufacturing / "hands-on labor" will continue to be done by the very poor, or by robots. (Sadly, the very poor are cheaper than robots, so far.) Or, you'd Do It Yourself (DIY), in the case of home plumbing, home electricity, home networking, and car repair.

...someday that'll also popularly include writing software, printing circuit boards, and operating a bioreactor and HPLC to yield the drugs you need. (Or emailing them out the way people have documents printed at Kinkos as a virtual printer.)

Automation and cognitive augmentation are together causing a kind of reversal (or diminishing returns) in the value of strict division of labor. We're returning to a more Renaissance age.

But this faulty premise that the cure to the current econocalypse is to return to a Manufacturing Economy of "actually making things" is hogwash. "Making things" is still something that's done for increasingly less cost, and now BRIC are competing for that diminishing sector (mostly because their populations are so impoverished that, to them, this is still an improvement).

kerry

#4 – 10:34 PM May 24, 2009

Back when I was in college I realized that my happy place was wherever I could work with my hands, and I feel more than a little stupid for taking so long to figure it out. I've always been mechanically-inclined, and my curiosity as a little'un led me to disassemble more than a few toys and other thingamabobs down in my dad's workshop. The curiosity ultimately led me to molecular biology, and to the lab bench, where I've spent the last 10 years. I think in some ways my parents are disappointed I never wanted more, never went to grad school like my sister did (she's a theoretical physicist), but I'm just glad I found something I love.

kaiza

#5 – 11:00 PM May 24, 2009

The actual article is here: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/24/magazine/24labor-t.html?_r=1&ref=magazine

larsrc

#6 – 1:23 AM May 25, 2009

Zuzu, I have to disagree with the statement that "Manufacturing / "hands-on labor" will continue to be done by the very poor". At least here in Denmark, "håndværkere" (hand-workers, literally, people like carpenters, plumbers etc) earn very good wages, better even than I as a programmer, as they do very high quality work.

dculberson

#7 – 7:18 AM May 25, 2009

Yeah, licensed electricians and plumbers and competent carpenters and builders are all paid very well in the US, too. Well above average. And rightly so, of course!

DIY is not recommended for the average person when it comes to electric and other services that can readily kill you or the other occupants of the house.

DSMVWL THS

#8 – 5:16 PM May 25, 2009

I do "knowledge work" for a living, and the creative work that's my passion is mostly done on a computer. But I've long enjoyed doing little carpentry projects in my spare time. I'm no master woodworker, but after much observation, research, and trial and error, my skills have evolved to the point that my wife was willing to countenance me building significant amounts of furniture for our new apartment. It's incredibly satisfying to have physical objects -- especially ones that you live with and use every day -- that you've crafted yourself.

missbaby0725

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