“He picked up a chunk of wood and, putting it to the lathe, worked a foot pedal and held a sharp, bent knife to the rapidly revolving wood. With surprising speed he cut the outer shape of the bowl; then, taking a different knife, he cut out the inside as you might cut the inside of a turnip. The bowl was roughly finished.
‘It wants titivating up of course,’ he explained, ‘and the inside will make another smaller bowl.’
The alder sapling sprang back, vibrating: a clumsy, primitive, marvellously efficient invention, and in it - and many more now lost to us - the secrets of those beautiful handcrafts of antiquity which remain to astonish us and to confound our modern machinists.
‘Boys won’t learn this now,’ he said ‘It’s not as easy as it looks, and unless you learn when you’re a lad you can never catch the knack of it.’
That was H.V. Morton, in last week’s book, describing the work someone he described as the last bowl turner in England. Using a lathe and methods dating back to Anglo Saxon times it seemed like the end of a line, but sometimes things die off only to be revived slightly differently. There is now a growing interest in recovering ancient crafts both out of curiosity, an attempt to reconnect with history, and as an antidote to the modern sedentary/virtual world. Rediscovering the feeling of making something by hand is an experience to be valued. Here is an example of a bowl making course you can go on to be part of the tradition.
This leads directly on to this week’s book in which Matthew Crawford examines why he has found more satisfaction and even mental stimulus in manual labour than knowledge work. As someone with a PhD who has earned a high salary at a think tank and given it up to open a motorcycle repair shop, he is placed to make this comparison like few others. It is not about the mysticism of high end craftsmanship but is instead about everyday trades like an electrician or a motor mechanic. However many of the satisfactions of a craftsman and tradesman are shared, such as: control over what you yourself are doing, an objective standard to know if you have done a good job, and the feeling of doing something useful.
His thesis is that modern knowledge work is as alienating as the labour described by Marx, whereas skilled manual worker (i.e. outside the factory) actually has more autonomy. They make their own judgements of the physical world, using the evidence of hand and eyes, guided by knowledge and experience. It is same sort of encounter with the natural world as gave rise to natural science. The carpenter for example learns the characteristics of types of wood and their fitness for different tasks, he also learns the general skills of angles, what is plumb, load baring and stability. This is aside from his ingrained physical skill in executing the task. In early Western tradition sophia (wisdom) meant skill and you can see the connection. But we have now lost the concrete sense of the original and put more of our eggs into the theoretical basket.
If we accept this how should we see work? Not only should we value the practical, we need to look again at offices and see what a person has to do to be connected to a task in a way that makes them feel useful. Directly useful, not as part of an amorphous team effort. It is about individual agency. But this is not happening, the social river is rushing in the opposite direction. Higher academic qualifications are increasingly being demanded just to get on the the ladder and checklist, plans and inspections constrain the practice of professionals. Personal qualities are emphasised rather than specific skills. This book raises its skinny fist at that trend.
But is this trend new or has it just grown bigger and more rigid? This quote from Aristotle (On Generation and Corruption) suggests our ways of thought don’t change much.
“Lack of experience diminishes our power of taking a comprehensive view of the admitted facts. Hence those who dwell in intimate association with nature and its phenomena are more able to lay down principles such as to admit of a wide and coherent development; while those whom devotion to abstract discussion has rendered unobservant of facts are too ready to dogmatise on the basis of a few observations”
I think that describes the problem with most of what I read on social media!
But this quote goes to the heart Crawford’s argument about skill and why it needs to be celebrated: skill = the ability to see. More than once the author says that a more experience mechanic has often pointed out something that was right in front of his face but which he lacked the knowledge to see. The raw sensual data is the same but without a framework of meaning features become invisible.
“The cognitive psychologist speak of “metacognition,” which is the activity of stepping back and thinking about your own thinking. It is what you do when you stop for a moment in your pursuit of a solution and wonder whether your understanding of the problem is adequate … in the real world problems do not present themselves unambiguously. Piston slap may indeed sound like loose tappets, so to be a good mechanic you have to be constantly attentive to the possibility that you might be mistaken. this is an ethical virtue.
Iris Murdoch writes that to respond to the world justly, you first have to perceive it clearly and this requires a kind of unslelfing. “Anything which alters consciousness in the direction of unselfishness, objectivity and realism is to be connected with virtue” … This attempt is never fully successful because we are preoccupied with our own concerns. But getting outside her head is the task the artist sets herself, and this is the mechanics task too. Both, if they are good, use their imagination “not to escape the world but to join it, and this exhilarates us because of the distance between our ordinary dulled consciousness and an apprehension of the real.” This is the exhilaration the mechanic gets when he finds the underlying cause of a problem…
Any discipline that deals with an authoritative, independent reality requires honesty and humility .. our vision is improved by acting, as this brings any defect in our perception to vivid awareness.”
I can nod along with this and lament the conditions of the modern workplace but the theoretical passages are not what is most vivid about this book. For me it comes to life when it describes his own practical experiences. I loved the way he described the problems he had fixing an old Honda and felt it fitting that a book that extols the virtues of the practical is actually at its best when directly describing it.
Date of publication
2009
Link to last book
The description of a disappearing craft leads naturally to a book that propounds the virtues of trade work.
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