The call to respect handwork, as opposed to brainwork, returns like the comet. Some of us listen, try it, drift away and the cycle begins again. This is not to denigrate the call – I have heard and tried to respond to it myself.
You would be rightly suspicious of praise for working with materials and mechanisms from someone who only lusted after these things mentally, and the most powerful advocates have been those who swap the overall and the thinking cap regularly. William Morris was one, and in The Case for Working With Your Hands Matthew Crawford traces the lineage back to the Arts and Crafts movement. Crawford is an academic philosopher who also runs a motorcycle repair shop in Richmond, Virginia; his book is a US bestseller under the title Shop Class as Soulcraft.
The virtues of an absorption in making and doing that Crawford enjoins are not only to be found in craftwork and repairing motorcycles: they lie in submission to any rule-governed task, and Crawford enlists Iris Murdoch in his cause. She wrote of learning a language (Russian, in her case): "I am confronted by an authorititative structure which commands my respect . . . My work is a progressive revelation of something which exists independently of me." Even better is her annexation of art within the realm of a selfless surrender to external reality: good art "resists the easy patterns of the fantasy, whereas there is nothing mysterious about the forms of bad art since they are the recognisable and familiar rat-runs of selfish daydream".
It is a difficult balancing act that Crawford has attempted: straddling motorbike culture while wearing a philosopher's crash helmet. A certain smugness in being the master of two trades is hard to avoid. He knows this and tries to escape with the disclaimer: "I want to avoid the precious images of manual work that intellectuals sometimes traffic in." Women might have a more fundamental criticism: that boys will seek any excuse just to get among their toys.
There must be something about motorbikes because the last time we heard such a powerful call to man the workshops was in Robert Pirsig's cult 1974 bestseller Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Pirsig doesn't appear in Crawford's book until page 96, but when he does their kinship is warmly acknowledged. Their messages are similar, except that Crawford does not have the father–son journey that ran through Zen.
Crawford is not only a diagnostician of motorbike faults; he knows exactly what's wrong with office work. He contrasts the master/apprentice relationship, in which the learner submits to the knowledge of the elder, with the awkward fandango of modern teamwork, in which it is politically incorrect to issue blunt orders and instead "authority becomes smarmy and passive- aggressive, trying to pass itself off as something cooperative and friendly; as volunteerism. It is always pretending to be in your best interest . . ."
But it was the motorbikes that got to me. All that talk about tappets and valve grinding reminded me of my father, who did all his own car and motorbike servicing. Why did I not learn from him? Too late now because, as Crawford bewails, the working parts of machines often come encased, making repairs difficult and whole-unit replacement necessary. Twenty years ago cars still had high-maintenance items in which the radiator, battery fluid, engine oil, tyres all needed to be checked regularly. Sometimes in winter you'd need to take the distributor cap off and squirt WD40 around to expel damp. Sparkplugs could be extracted to dry them and to check the gap. Now you only need to take the car in for service once or twice a year, and the plethora of electronic controls inhibits any kind of hands-on investigation. Such equipment is idiot-proof, but is it also turning us into idiots?
If motorbikes bring out the best in him, the philosopher Crawford sometimes resorts to language that sits uneasily with the down-to-earth talk about tappets and grease. He is fond of the term "agency" in its specialised philosophical meaning (defined by Crawford as "activity directed toward some end that is affirmed as good by the actor"): this is just the sort of abstract concept you'd think he'd want to dump beneath a ton of cylinder blocks and shock absorbers.
More than one writer has recently been advocating a new look at work: Richard Sennett's The Craftsman makes pretty much the same points as Crawford, and Alain de Botton's The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work enters similar territory. The wheel of fashion and the recession have created a climate reminiscent of the 1970s: make-do-and-mend; dig for a personal victory of the spirit. The Case for Working with Your Hands is a short and handy book, compelling and challenging: come in and get your hands dirty, get subsumed in the task. Why not? We have nothing to lose but our clean fingernails.
Peter Forbes's Dazzled and Deceived: Mimicry and Camouflage is published by Yale.
