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!
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