Shop Class as Soulcraft
Looks like somebody wants me to write something. Okay lah, I oblige.There is this The New Atlantis article titled "Shop Class as Soulcraft" by Matthew B. Crawford I found myself nodding to while reading yesterday. Apparently, it has been much-discussed in the blogosphere. The article covers a lot of ground, but its basic premise can be summed up by its concluding paragraph.
"So what advice should one give to a young person? By all means, go to college. In fact, approach college in the spirit of craftsmanship, going deep into liberal arts and sciences. In the summers, learn a manual trade. You’re likely to be less damaged, and quite possibly better paid, as an independent tradesman than as a cubicle-dwelling tender of information systems. To heed such advice would require a certain contrarian streak, as it entails rejecting a life course mapped out by others as obligatory and inevitable."
As far as my limited comprehension skills would allow, the author seems to make the following points (by no means comprehensive):
- Manual competence has fallen out of favour. Vocationalism is the decidedly poor cousin to virtualism. In a post-industrial society, skilled labour is somehow not viable as a livelihood.
- Manifesting oneself through craftsmanship is a form of active creation, rather than passive consumption. There is an intrinsic satisfaction in a job well done, embodied in a physical entity whose merits and shortcomings are plain for all to see, and also of greater permanence.
- Currently, general skills that allow one to continually re-define one's job are preferred to a specific ones brought about by the accumulation of experience.
- Crafts are not reducible to an algorithmic problem (that means robots and computers cannot do lah). A good blend of experience and expertise is often required, which no two person have the same admixture.
- Manual work is cognitively rich (i.e. not brainless) and psychosocially satisfying (i.e. not drab or disgraceful). White-collar work is often as mindless as those on assembly lines, because the thinking has been shifted upstairs. Recall the Marxist premise of alienation, applied to modern bureaucracies.
- The bifurcation of white and blue-collar work is not due to technological progress, but new economic relations and scientific management. Historically, skilled piece-rate workers were coaxed (some say duped) into manning assembly lines. We are bound to routinized jobs owing to indebtedness caused by consumerism.
- The implicit assumption is that trafficking in abstractions is same as thinking, but genuine knowledge work has always been restricted to a select few. The modern equivalent to the assembly line is clerkdom in cubicles.
- Lastly, there is room for the independent craftsman outside mass production.
Jia lat lah, I never was too clever with my hands, or complex abstract systems for that matter. Which means I'm doomed to a career of paper-shuffling in cubicles. I remember on an occasion when I was struggling like mad to fix a obdurate contraption (know what it looks like, but forgot the name). I was getting really frustrated and resorting to brute force, but the thing that was supposed to move in a certain way simply refused. The technician came along, observed me for a while and remarked, "The thing is dead. You are alive. Why are you getting angry over it?"
posted by KynTheMan @ 9:44 AM
