The New Criterion

How are we disposed towards what we do every day? Vocation, more in the sense of a calling than a mere trade, is the central concern of Matthew Crawford’s book Shop Class as Soulcraft, which originated as an essay in the New Atlantis. Part treatise, part polemic, and part testimony, it is a serious reflection on the way labor shapes our sense of self. Following in the tradition, if not exactly the spirit, of Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Shop Class challenges received wisdom about the necessity of a college degree for future success.

Crawford is skeptical of the rise of an “information economy” in which highly educated workers will deal dazzlingly in abstractions. He worries that “everyone an Einstein” rhetoric, derived from a woolly notion of creativity, obscures what is really going on: the depreciation of white-collar work, where “thinking” is increasingly separated from “doing.” Nowadays,

the cognitive elements of [a] job are appropriated from professionals, instantiated in a system or process, and then handed back to a new class of workers.

Crawford fears that “occasions for the exercise of judgment are diminished” in the workplace, that Pavlovs are being replaced by Pavlovian pups; he fears that we are fast becoming a nation of clerks.

In light of this undesirable state of affairs, Shop Class proposes manual labor as an alternative route to a rewarding career in postindustrial America. Here, Crawford draws heavily on his own experience in a variety of fields. Soon after completing a fellowship at the University of Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought, he landed a position as the director of a Washington-based think tank. Although the job was both lucrative and high-profile, he did not feel invested in his own work and decided to pursue what had been, up until then, a keen hobby: motorcycle maintenance (minus the zen).

The reader is spared rapturous invocations of the grease monkey’s art and, instead, given an account of craftsmanship that is rooted in a classical conception of practical knowledge—wisdom attained through “a systematic encounter with the material world … the kind of encounter that gives rise to natural science.” The study of handiwork, we learn, cultivates diagnostic intelligence, which functions like intuition at the level of daily life. Theoretical knowledge is “insufficiently involved in particulars” to allow for such flexibility. When Crawford’s father, a physicist, boasts of his ability to untie any shoelace no matter how badly it is entangled, even his newly apprenticed son can see the folly of his claim. A mathematical solution may be elegant, but what is needed if the string is wet or sticky? Who do you call if it simply refuses to come undone? It’s not so easy to sever the Gordian knot.

Trades like plumbing and automotive repair, which call on practitioners to interact with and often mend objects not of their own manufacture, are described, following Aristotle, as “stochastic.” Crawford believes they “have a special significance for our time because they demand that you be attentive in the way of a conversation rather than assertive in the way of a demonstration.” Stochastic trades produce “habits of mind” conducive to acquiring genuine knowledge about our connections to an external world we don’t absolutely control. They inspire an openness to experience that is “incompatible with self-absorption,” a trait notably lacking from the modern, scientific way of thinking, which is built on the “foundation of a radically self-contained subject.” Crawford even jokes at one point that “fixing things may be a cure for narcissism.”

By the end of Shop Class, we realize that, more than anything else, occupational fulfillment requires participation in real, personal, human relationships, no matter where the clock is punched. There are, indeed, workshops where the same problems of “institutionalized carelessness” found in the cubicle exist. Crawford is aware of this, of course—his purpose is never to make machinists of us all, however much he values the lessons of the “useful arts.” At the end of the day, his book is a reminder, intended for those who blindly conflate significance with status, of something rather more important. If we are to lead meaningful lives, we must seek, as the philosopher instructed, “an activity of soul in conformity with excellence or virtue.” I’m encouraged that Crawford has found one.

Although Shop Class raises important questions about work which are inadequately addressed in contemporary classrooms, it is occasionally hampered by an academic tone. Unsurprisingly, Crawford’s prose is most engaging (and convincing) when he sticks to stories about his own time in the garage. Eloquence, like mechanical mastery and like self-knowledge, rests on something solid.