Let’s Get Physical: What's So Great About Working in a Cubicle?

By Margaret Wheeler Johnson, AlterNet
Posted on June 13, 2009, Printed on November 25, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/140437/

Children of the '60s and '70s may remember Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Over the course of a 17-day motorcycle trip across the northern United States, Pirsig's narrator uses the relationship between man and bike to reflect on technology and reason.

"The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain or in the petals of a flower," reads a typical passage. Academics dismissed his ideas as New Age bunk. The public bought 4 million copies.

Thirty-five years later, Penguin Press is hoping to repeat Pirsig's success with a new philosopher-mechanic of its own. This month, the publisher will release Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work, motorcycle repairman Matthew Crawford's jeremiad against white-collar culture and the educational system designed to populate it.

Crawford, who has a Ph.D. in political thought from the University of Chicago, takes America to task for devaluing skilled manual labor. Trade work, he argues, is more psychologically, financially and intellectually satisfying than the white-collar information-processing jobs for which schools and colleges typically educate their students.

Crawford's book grew out of a piece he wrote for the conservative online journal the New Atlantis in 2006. The essay drew the attention of many, including 100,000 unique visitors on the web and New York Times columnist David Brooks, who named it one of the best of the year. Brooks joined Crawford's condemnation of "the way managers take decision-making authority away from workers, the way parents take decision-making authority away from kids, the way educators close off options without any debate."

By the end of the day that Brooks' column appeared, Crawford's agent had sold his book to Vanessa Mobley, a young editor at Penguin Press known for her way with big ideas.

In person, Crawford manifests the quiet confidence of a guy who got over himself a long time ago. Sitting in the lobby of New York's Roosevelt Hotel this spring, he wears jeans, a pressed navy blue button-down shirt -- tucked in, sleeves rolled -- and clean black suede work boots. At 43, he is inconspicuously fit, clean-shaven with short, wavy brown hair and boyish features.

He has just returned from a meeting with his publishers, bound manuscript in hand. He places it on the coffee table in front of him, along with some cover-photo options. There's a line of dirt and motor oil under his fingernails.

"It would've been nice to have that feeling of finishing," he says of the writing process. "It was done in stages. I was learning up to the last minute." Still, he is pleased with the book. "It's nice to have written something on a topic that people care about rather than some ancient Greek crap," he says.

Skilled labor has been part of Crawford's life since he started doing electrical work at age 14 in the Northern California community where he grew up. As an undergraduate physics major at the University of California, Santa Barbara, he did electrical work to support himself through the summers.

Crawford was an indifferent student until his senior year, when he happened on his roommate's copy of The Closing of the American Mind. Written by University of Chicago classics professor Allan Bloom, the 1987 polemic was an angry, unapologetic defense of high culture. Bloom credited liberal relativism and rock music with the decline of American universities and the degradation of our intellectual life. The book sold close to a million copies and turned a little-known academic into a celebrity.

It's a book Crawford is now wary of associating himself with, given the extreme reactions it often provokes. "It blew me away," he admits, after some hesitation. "Bloom offered a convincing diagnosis of contemporary life by tracing our intellectual genealogy, showing the sources of our confused, taken-for-granted opinions in the works of serious thinkers. It was incredibly liberating and exciting."

Crawford applied to do his graduate work at the University of Chicago in the hopes of studying with Bloom. But when they met, Crawford says diplomatically, they "didn't hit it off," and Bloom died shortly after Crawford arrived.

Chicago's philosophy department is the stronghold of the ideas of influential conservative philosopher Leo Strauss and is arguably one of the past century's most influential schools of political philosophy. Crawford ended up writing a dissertation on Greek political thought with Nathan Tarcov, Bloom's literary executor and an influential Straussian in his own right.

After earning his doctorate in 2000, Crawford spent a year as a postgraduate fellow at the university's prestigious Committee on Social Thought, attempting half-heartedly to turn his dissertation into a book. When the Marshall Institute, a conservative environmental think tank in Washington offered Crawford a high-paying executive job, he accepted.

His primary role at Marshall, it turned out, was to develop arguments about climate change that happened to agree with those espoused by the oil interests subsidizing the institute.

"Coming up with the best arguments money could buy," says Crawford, "wasn't work befitting a free man." He also felt that his boss was trying to turn him into the kind of knowledge worker whose plight Crawford laments in his book: deprived of agency, carrying out instructions phrased in corporate "action" speak. He hated the job almost immediately.

Whereas Chicago had provided him with "an intensive apprenticeship in a shared set of authors, interpretive rubrics, 'fundamental problems,' a set of master keys that unlocked every door," at the think tank he felt as if "the locks had been changed."

The Marshall experience was a turning point for Crawford. While there, he began to yearn for work with real goals and perceivable results, rewards he had only ever really encountered working with his hands. His executive job, he says, sent him "rushing toward work that was genuinely rational (fixing motorcycles), rather than work that was guided by the need to perform some weird pretense of rationality."

His most recent manual work involved rebuilding his own bike, a 1975 Honda, while he was still in Chicago. So he quit his think tank gig and set up a motorcycle repair shop in an industrial area of Richmond, Va. He and his future shop mate, visual artist and fellow gearhead Thomas Van Auken, met in the parking lot outside a bar. The next day, they rented space in a warehouse where several other independent craftsmen also plied their trades.

"Matt talked constantly about ideas while working on bikes," remembers Van Auken, who drew the illustrations of cylinder heads and gaskets that appear in Crawford's book. "Sometimes it became hard for us to get any work done."

While working on motorcycles day after day, Crawford began to reflect on the turn his life had taken. His repair work was so much more fulfilling than any he had done as an academic or an executive. He wrote in the New Atlantis, "There was more thinking going on in the bike shop than in the think tank."

Why wasn't the rest of America on to this? Why do we see the labor of carpenters and electricians as inferior to processing information in some austere corporate space, usually without any sense of an ultimate product or goal?

It had to start with education. While he was building up a clientele at the bike shop, Crawford supplemented his income teaching high school Latin. He found his students utterly uninterested, and not just because Latin can be less than thrilling to teenagers. Studying Latin was a requirement, not a choice.

Once, they had been required to learn vocational skills that might interest them, not to mention teach them useful, marketable skills. Now, they were forced to take courses that would make them competitive college applicants. And there was no question that they were going to college.

Where Bloom, a lifelong academic, blamed relativists for the decline of the university, Crawford, a lifelong mechanic, claims that the university is not the right destination for many students in the first place. (Bloom would have agreed.)

Crawford argues that students like those in his Latin classes would find greater fulfillment pursuing a trade than an undergraduate liberal arts degree. He also counters the usual arguments against vocational schooling: that it lowers students' earning potential, doesn't challenge them intellectually and inevitably targets underprivileged and minority students already held to lower expectations.

Crawford offers his own experience as proof of the cognitive and emotional satisfaction manual work yields. He also notes that plumbers and electricians often earn more than college graduates, partly because they have job security that in the age of outsourcing white-collar workers no longer enjoy.

"If you need a deck built, or your car fixed, the Chinese are of no help," he wrote in the New Atlantis. "Because they are in China."

But what about the students who only discover their intellectual interests after they get to college? Crawford wants students to realize that the college-preparatory route isn't their only chance at fulfillment.

Society gives students a sense that "there's one track, one train, it's leaving the station, and if you're not on it you are totally hosed," he says. "It wasn't until the very end of my time in college that I got interested in philosophy, and that was because of a book I found lying around; it wasn't something assigned."

Penguin is banking on Crawford's wry, unaffected voice, humility and clarity to make Shop Class a latter day Zen. Like Pirsig, Crawford doesn't talk about philosophy like someone standing at a podium in tweed. "People think of philosophy as airy, lacking legs, lacking real-world substantiation," says Mobley, his editor. "He's the real deal."

Crawford is a fan of Zen's "democratic poetry" and says his own book has "similar aspirations." He doesn't think it's fair to fault Pirsig for using "language that New Age-y people took up shortly thereafter." Unlike them, says Crawford, Pirsig was engaging with serious philosophers, from Copernicus to Hume.

Still, Shop Class is not Zen. Crawford does not invite the reader to take a sojourn from the everyday in order to have a conversation about truth. His chosen metaphor is not the journey but the journeyman, the tradesman who makes his own way using knowledge he has acquired from working with physical materials.

Shop Class is about facing reality, and this is the part that is likely to get under people's skin. "What will alienate some will thrill others," says Mobley. "This is a polemic. The goal is to change lives." Mobley also thinks the book will strike readers on a personal level, as it did her. "I felt this applied to me. Anyone who's ever felt, 'WTF am I doing in the workplace?' will."

Back at the Roosevelt Hotel, looking at his cover options, Crawford has come around to his publisher's final choice. They were going to go with a picture of him in his shop surrounded by bikes and tools.

"It was a little too specific," says Crawford, who feared readers would think it was a how-to book. Instead, they've chosen a shot of a lone bike, a red 1967 BMW R50, leaning up against the wall of a shed. "Initially I thought, 'Really?' It seemed too blank. I was worried that it would look like a travelogue. But now I think it works."

Crawford has mixed feelings about the buzz that has been building around the book. The New York Times Magazine is going to publish a 5000-word excerpt ("I'm told that's a pretty big deal," he says ingenuously). The book also received a starred review from Publisher's Weekly, and made the "highbrow/brilliant" zone of New York magazine's Approval Matrix.

"I feel like I've been sort of … anointed this voice in the culture by people who, if they'd seen me two years ago when I was just fixing motorcycles would have said, 'What are you doing with your life?' "

But it takes more than big ideas to make a book big, and Crawford is uncomfortable commodifying himself to sell copies. Penguin has planned a multicity tour that Crawford is approaching with trepidation. He doesn't like speaking extemporaneously; he likes to think carefully about how he presents his thoughts, to control the narrative. One way he has dealt with this is insisting that some interviews be conducted via e-mail. He will not answer questions like, "Are you this funny in real life?" or even, "How did you become a writer?"

At the center of Crawford's argument is the need to turn away from the self. One of the aspects of manual work that he values most is the way it forces the individual to cope with external reality.

"A carpenter faces the accusation of his level, an electrician the question whether the lights are in fact on," he writes in Shop Class. "Such standards have a universal validity." In his own trade, Crawford has to deal with the fact that elderly motorcycles "truly are a pain in the ass." They have their own needs and limits, and they won't run until specific conditions are met. Furthermore, what ails them is not always obvious. Frustration abounds. "Old bikes don't flatter you," Crawford remarks, "they educate you." In the shop, in other words, narcissism doesn't stand a chance.

Fortunately, Crawford's humility doesn't diminish the force of his argument -- or his confidence in his ideas. He uses humor but doesn't revel in the "dark absurdism" of Office Space or The Office. "Absurdity is good as comedy but bad as a way of life," he writes.

Yet, despite the cogency of his arguments and his down-and-dirty sensibility, Crawford comes across as a sort of innocent, especially when it comes to sensing how others will perceive him.

For instance, it doesn't appear to have occurred to him that female readers could take issue with the way he talks about women in Shop Class. He compares the overly emotional, nonconfrontational dynamic of the modern office to that of a clique of girls in which it is hard to know where you stand, "because of the forms and manners of sisterhood." Elsewhere, he writes that Volkswagens, which he used to work on as a teenager, "tend to get passed around like cheap whores, and it is rare to find one that hasn't been pawed at."

Mobley admits that some have criticized her for not excising these passages, but she stood her ground. "That's the way he sees the world," she says. His attitude does seem to stem from a genuine, traditional, almost chivalric view of male honor. In a rare burst of romanticism from this self-described stoic, he writes, "People who ride motorcycles have gotten something right, and I want to put myself in the service of it, this thing that we do, this kingly sport."

This innocence comes through, too, in how he thinks he will be viewed in relationship to his philosophical pedigree. Based just on his stance on education, most readers of Shop Class As Soul Craft are likely to think his ideas basically conservative. Yet Crawford's fear is that he will be cast as an apostate who has turned his back on his roots in the right.

Even Nathan Tarcov, Crawford's dissertation adviser at Chicago, sees followers of the Chicago school agreeing with Crawford. After all, Tarcov notes, Adam Smith, founder of the free-market capitalism that forms the basis of economic thought at Chicago, decried the kind of mind-numbing repetitive work Crawford prosecutes in his book -- once done on assembly lines, now in cubicles.

But Crawford does break with the right when, in promoting the course of the individual craftsman, he rejects the big-business model that has dominated American capitalism since Henry Ford. He points out that we have mechanisms in place to check political power, but "have failed utterly to prevent the concentration of economic power, or take account of how such concentration damages the conditions under which full human flourishing becomes possible."

And he makes his case in terms intended to cut deep amid our current economic woes, arguing, for example, that failing to regulate megacorporations has resulted in the satisfaction of the good life being "foreclosed" for many of us. He accuses bankers specifically of "the meta-work of trafficking in the surplus skimmed from other people's work."

Crawford is hopeful that in the aftermath of the financial sector's follies we will finally re-evaluate what kind of work is really valuable.

Now, he writes, "it becomes possible once again to think the thought, 'Let me make myself useful.' " Which is what Crawford is looking forward to doing after Shop Class goes to press. He has another book in the works, The Organ Maker's Shop, inspired by a month he spent at the factory of Staunton, Va., pipe-organ manufacturer Taylor and Boody while he was writing Shop Class. He had no particular interest in organs -- he has never been a member of any organized faith, so they do not conjure for him any personal religious experience. It's the work that moves him.

"It's the grooviest scene you could imagine. They're inheriting this tradition of making pipe organs, the best in the world, but they're also constantly innovating. I got completely pulled into their world." Crawford intended to devote a chapter of Shop Class to the organ shop, then realized it didn't quite fit.

Shop Class As Soulcraft, he says, leaning forward in one of the Roosevelt Hotel's plush sofas to flip through the manuscript, "is really not about making things -- it's about fixing things. Tradition doesn't appear in this book at all." At Taylor and Boody, which builds its organs to last 400 years, craft is "part of a larger narrative," says Crawford. It's also an example of cognitively rich manual work that also yields financial rewards.

"These people know what they're doing," he says. "They start with trees, they fell the trees, and they make everything from scratch. Their most-elaborate organs cost $2 million (Yale bought that one -- "an endowment helps," says Crawford), and business is good."

But before he gets down to another year of writing, Crawford wants to spend some time in his own shop. He picks up a printout of the Shop Class cover photo, the one of the red '67 BMW leaning against the shed. It just occurred to him that the bike pictured is actually a customer's, and the repair on it long overdue. "I've got to give that guy a call."

Click here to buy a copy of Shop Class As Soulcraft

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