Matthew B. Crawford, author of Shop Class as Soulcraft, holds a PhD in political philosophy, is a fellow at the University of Virginia, and owns his own motorcycle repair shop. Although he was raised in a commune, this isn’t another Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, in which Robert Pirsig motorcycles half-way across the country with his young son in search of himself. Crawford is not on a road trip, but a philosophical journey through the value of manual labor. Not assembly line work, where an employee often has little feel or care for the objects created, but rather the trades such as carpentry, plumbing, electrical work, as well as car and motorcycle repair. These are the kind of jobs that will always be, not able to be outsourced across the world; jobs in which the good worker is intimately part of building or repairing an object.
After college, time spent in an office of cubicles writing summaries of technical articles, followed by a stint as the director of a think tank, convinced Crawford to try work he loved — motorcycle repair. He repaired and rebuilt motorcycles slowly and lovingly, learning that understanding the whole machine is a necessity. Soon he was accepted by a community of riders and old-timer mechanics who knew every cycle ever made. To earn a living, he knew he would have to work faster or charge exorbitant rates, neither of which he could do. He now divides his time between manual labor and the academic world.
Crawford leaves us with the view that our modern world has disconnected us from truly understanding the material world. To reconnect, he proposes that we become able to make and repair things, not to save money, but for the satisfaction of becoming the “master of one’s own stuff.”
If you are not mechanically inclined, parts of the motorcycle sections might not be for you, but his philosophy of work could intrigue you.
~Rosemary
Read it or Weep 