Need.

Michael B. Crawford left D.C. think-tanks and the Committee on Social Thought to open a motorcycle shop.

In this memoir/manifesto, he suggests that knowledge work is ultimately unfulfilling, and recommends manual trades as a more engaging way to both think and do.

We are recalled to the basic antagonism of economic life: work is toilsome and necessarily serves someone else’s interests. That’s why you get paid. Thus chastened, we may ask the proper question: what is it that we really want for a young person when we give them vocational advice? The only creditable answer, it seems to me, is one that avoids utopianism while keeping an eye on the human good: work that engages the human capacities as fully as possible. What I have tried to show is that this humane and commonsensical answer goes against the central imperative of capitalism, which assiduously partitions thinking from doing. What is to be done? I offer no program, only an observation that might be of interest to anyone called upon to give guidance to the young.

Since manual work has been subject to routinization for over a century, the nonroutinized manual work that remains, outside the confines of the factory, would seem to be resistant to much further routinization. There still appear developments around the margins; for example, in the last twenty years pre-fabricated roof trusses have eliminated some of the more challenging elements from the jobs of framers who work for large tract developers, and pre-hung doors have done the same for finish carpenters generally. But still, the physical circumstances of the jobs performed by carpenters, plumbers, and auto mechanics vary too much for them to be executed by idiots; they require circumspection and adaptability. One feels like a man, not a cog in a machine. The trades are then a natural home for anyone who would live by his own powers, free not only of deadening abstraction, but also of the insidious hopes and rising insecurities that seem to be endemic in our current economic life. This is the stoic ideal.

Read the rest at The New Atlantis.

He adds ...

Taking a tool in hand and seeing a direct effect of your actions in the world, answers to a very basic human need.



Watch the rest at FORA.

Don't miss Crawford's book, Shop Class as Soulcraft. There are many answers found there.

Cliffy has some as well ... Thank you, Karen.