A very interesting article in the New York Times about the joys of manual labor. (link via Leiter Reports) The author of the piece has a Ph.D in philosophy. He runs a motorcycle repair shop in Virginia.
The television show“Deadliest Catch” depicts commercial crab fishermen in the Bering Sea. Another, “Dirty Jobs,” shows all kinds of grueling work; one episode featured a guy who inseminates turkeys for a living. The weird fascination of these shows must lie partly in the fact that such confrontations with material reality have become exotically unfamiliar. Many of us do work that feels more surreal than real. Working in an office, you often find it difficult to see any tangible result from your efforts. What exactly have you accomplished at the end of any given day? Where the chain of cause and effect is opaque and responsibility diffuse, the experience of individual agency can be elusive. “Dilbert,” “The Office” and similar portrayals of cubicle life attest to the dark absurdism with which many Americans have come to view their white-collar jobs.
Is there a more “real” alternative (short of inseminating turkeys)?
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? I take this to be the suggestion of Marge Piercy’s poem “To Be of Use,” which concludes with the lines “the pitcher longs for water to carry/and a person for work that is real.” Beneath our gratitude for the lineman may rest envy.
This seems to be a moment when the useful arts have an especially compelling economic rationale. A car mechanics’ trade association reports that repair shops have seen their business jump significantly in the current recession: people aren’t buying new cars; they are fixing the ones they have. The current downturn is likely to pass eventually. But there are also systemic changes in the economy, arising from information technology, that have the surprising effect of making the manual trades — plumbing, electrical work, car repair — more attractive as careers. The Princeton economist Alan Blinder argues that the crucial distinction in the emerging labor market is not between those with more or less education, but between those whose services can be delivered over a wire and those who must do their work in person or on site. The latter will find their livelihoods more secure against outsourcing to distant countries. As Blinder puts it, “You can’t hammer a nail over the Internet.” Nor can the Indians fix your car. Because they are in India.
The article is six pages long. Do read the whole thing. Matthew Crawford, Ph.D in philosophy, fascinates with his perspective on work and satisfaction with life. The paradox here of course is that had Crawford not gone through the initial "safe" life trajectory of higher education and cubicle jobs of "ideas," he wouldn't probably have developed such a carefully weighed and regret-free appreciation for manual labor and nor perhaps the facility with words to make his case so succinctly for the cost-benefit of the informed choice he made.
Crawford begins his piece with a reference to a television show. That reminded me of another TV show, also to do with jobs. I am not much of a TV watcher. But during our brief stay in Germany in the early eighties, I used to watch a fair amount of TV with my two small children partly out of boredom and partly in order to get a grip on the German language. A game show called "Was bin Ich?" (a spin off of the American game show, What's My Line?) used to air on German TV in those days. I remember noting with interest that some of the hardest vocations for the hosts to guess were manual jobs, even though one would think that such work would offer up more concrete clues than amorphous intellectual pursuits. But then as Crawford notes, inseminating turkeys is working with your hands but who would ever guess that someone actually does it? Similarly, I remember that on "Was bin Ich?" one guy's job completely stumped the hosts and he ended up earning a sizable prize for keeping them in suspense for the entire episode. He turned out to be a "Totenkopf Maler." ( see translation) Evidently, there is a market for painted skulls - at least, there must have been one in Germany!
Crawford is full of it. He reminds me of those snotty yuppy couples in the '90s who worked a few years on Wall Street, decided they'd had enough of the crass world of finance, bought a ranch in Vermont or Montana, or a villa in Provence, pursued a "simple" life, then wrote a book to apprise us all of their path to enlightenment. I don't disagree with his diagnoses of corporate bureaucracy and the distortions of capitalism, but I do wonder whether he simply misses the point that perhaps all along he has been naive. It's fine to be excited about getting one's first job as a "knowledge worker," but the business about feeling one's place in the order of things...please. His expectations were way out of sync, and it's no wonder he quickly tired of working in such environments.
He takes exactly the wrong approach to reminding his readers that there is a material world out there, because he doesn't realize that even a cubicle-bound clerk or generic middle manager deals in it. Piles of paper move from here to there. That's a tangible result. Any job can feel surreal, confining, irrational, burdensome, aimless. Yet he romanticizes trades to compensate for their low prestige. But who cares about low prestige in the first place? Only elitists of the worst sort. (I'm fond of elitists of the best sort.) It seems to have taken Crawford until well into adulthood to recognize the value of superior accomplishment performed even by those uneducated sorts who have been compelled to work with their hands. I chalk this up to the capitalist mirage of meritocracy.
Posted by: Dean C. Rowan | June 03, 2009 at 01:27 PM
Thank you, Dean for a reality check.
I really enjoyed Matthew Crawford's article. But I took his "working with one's hands" and therefore, "with one's soul," implication with a fairly hefty pinch of salt.
Our jobs are sometimes only a means to putting food on the table and most workers are grateful for that. There are millions of people in the world who can go through routine jobs which don't require them to cogitate deeply over the challenge at hand or on paper, and still sleep happy at night. To connect with the soul, they find other avenues. The cog in the wheel of human endeavor, whether in the workshop or in the chain of bureaucracy has been vilified undeservedly. Not all vocations can be or need be a "calling."
The irony that Crawford may have overlooked is that the Honda itself whose inner rhythm and murmur he so prides himself of being in tune with, is still being manufactured in an assembly line. The manual worker in a Honda factory is mostly as far removed from the joys of doing emotionally fulfilling work as some of his intellectual counterparts are in the office cubicle.
Unless we are willing to go back to the jungle, we may as well learn to live with the fact that the will of corporations and large institutions win every time over our pursuit of personal fulfillment!
Posted by: Ruchira | June 03, 2009 at 03:17 PM
On a more personal note:
I had forwarded the article link to my husband who owns, rides and occasionally repairs his own motorcycle (a Honda, of course). For once, he'd beaten me to the punch in web browsing - he had read the Crawford piece already. Being a scientist, my husband probably thinks of himself as a "manual laborer" and so, he was pretty smug about the whole "hands vs brain" thing. I had to remind him that perhaps it was true at one time when he still did bench work. But his current life as a senior professor is more akin to an armchair bound philosopher. He doesn't even mow the lawn any more!
Posted by: Ruchira | June 03, 2009 at 06:22 PM
An alchemist's sure-fire recipe : Melt down a base metal, then stir vigorously for an hour without ever thinking of a hippopotamus.
Can one read a sonnet without thinking of Shakespeare; discuss magical realism without thinking of Márquez; teach geometry with no reference to Euclid? Two blog posts, a source article, and two comments have been committed to type, a process that must have taken hours if not days, and, notwithstanding the juxtaposition of 'motorcycle' and 'maintenance' with 'philosophy' hanging about for good measure, nobody has mentioned "Zen and the Art of ...". There is the remote possibility that the authors haven't heard of Pirsig's iconic book, or the possibility that I am of a certain age to remember the waves it made, and the others not; or is it merely a matter of not thinking of the hippopotamus?
Posted by: narayan | June 19, 2009 at 11:39 PM
Narayan, the hippo was in the room all the time. I too am of the right age for Pirsig's book (my own copy from 1979/ 80 has mysteriously disappeared, I discovered). The title of my post evokes that earlier reading. But Matthew Crawford had so much to say about his own soulful communion with the inner murmurings of the Honda engine that I did not feel the need to bring up Pirsig to gild the lily. If you feel like making a suitable juxtapositon between the two, please do so for the benefit of our readers.
Posted by: Ruchira | June 20, 2009 at 12:53 AM
I've worked in both tech and and as a truck driver. It takes far more intelligence to be a good truck driver and you handle far more responsiblity. It's more mentally rewarding, but the financial reward is dismal.
I can see why office type technical workers long to leave their jobs. Many times you're just a tiny spoke in the wheel of things. No thanks, no job security (which can turn out to be good), and no satisfaction from yourself or those you work for. Nobody is ever happy and they need happy pills to get through the day.
"I've talked to anyone in a rest home who wished they'd spent more time on their careers." is a quote I've heard many times. It's funny and sad at the same time that a guy like Crawford is even looking for meanings of life in an occupation.
Posted by: Mark | June 27, 2009 at 06:59 PM