The case for working with your hands: or Why office work is bad for us and fixing things feels good
Matthew Crawford
Penguin
One of my many failings is that I’m not very comfortable relying on other people. So I have spent much of my life striving for independence and self-reliance, mainly through observing people, particularly tradesmen: stealing with my eyes, to snatch an Afrikaans colloquialism. I scrutinise what they do and how they do it. I try to pick up on the nuances of their technique – their ability to consistently produce a perfectly smooth molten metal seam, the skill with which a tile is cut to fit snugly around the base of a washbasin pedestal.
In so doing I have managed to acquire a degree of proficiency in a number of handy fields – a bit of plumbing, a smattering of woodwork, the ability to lay a few bricks, and Grand Master of the Universe skills in picture hanging.
Besides indulging my hankering for self-reliance, what doing these things well really gives me is a broad and self-satisfied grin – I’m usually tickled pink with myself – pretty much the feeling Matthew Crawford promotes in this book.
After getting a doctorate in political philosophy, Crawford busied himself writing abstracts of impossibly complicated academic articles, few of which he really understood.
After that he formed part of a think tank required to reason backwards from conclusion to premise. It is little wonder then that the author hankered for the opportunity to do something he considered to be “really useful and with a degree of related integrity”.
Crawford uses this short book to motivate his opinion on the psychological and spiritual benefits of doing manual work, as opposed to the sense of uselessness he experienced doing office work.
“I was always tired and honestly could not see the rationale for my being paid at all – what tangible goods or useful services was I providing anyone?
“This sense of uselessness was dispiriting.”
Hoping to turn his hobby into a business, Crawford saved some money to set himself up in a motorcycle repair shop.
Besides realising that the work was more intellectually challenging than the think tank, he found the overall effect energising.
“Seeing a motorcyle about to leave my shop under its own power, several days after arriving in the back of a truck, I suddenly don’t feel tired, even though I’ve been standing on a concrete floor all day.”
Of concern is the author’s sense of the ever-dwindling level of manual skills but also the change in the way we relate to our possessions. Few of us make things nowadays – even the most basic items are now available for purchase.
We also don’t fix things, we just replace them. Even if you wanted to fix something, most modern products don’t allow this as they often require a set of highly specialised tools just to remove the casing.
The result of this departure from the material world is what Crawford calls “virtualism – a vision of the future in which we somehow take leave of material reality and glide around in a pure information economy”.
Crawford’s primary reasoning behind this book is not about economics, it’s about the fact that manual labour and skill makes us feel good.
Ultimately, it grants us a feeling of responsibility for our work and the things around us, our homes, vehicles, appliances and so on. If not necessarily compelling, The Case for Working With Your Hands at least poses a challenge: it’s time to get dirty.