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

By Margaret Wheeler Johnson, AlterNet. Posted June 13, 2009.

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."

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