While manufacturing jobs have certainly left our shores to a disturbing degree, the manual trades have not. If you need a deck built, or your car fixed, the Chinese are of no help. Because they are in China.
The wad of cash in my pants feels different than the checks I cashed in my previous job. Following a doctorate in political philosophy at the University of Chicago, I took a job as executive director of a Washington “think tank.” 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 to anyone? This sense of uselessness was dispiriting. The pay was good, but it truly felt like compensation,
As a rough working formula, we might say that craftsmanship, as an ideal, provides the standards, but that in a mass-market economy such as ours, it is the tradesman who exemplifies an economically viable way of life, one that is broadly available and provides many of the same satisfactions we associate with craftsmanship.
We often hear of the need for an “upskilling” of the workforce, to keep up with technological change. I find the more pertinent issue to be: What sort of personality does one need to have, as a twenty-first-century mechanic, to tolerate the layers of electronic bullshit that get piled on top of machines?
Those who work in an office often feel that, despite the proliferation of contrived metrics they must meet, their job lacks objective standards of the sort provided by, for example, a carpenter’s level, and that as a result there is something arbitrary in the dispensing of credit and blame. The rise of “teamwork” has made it difficult to trace individual responsibility, and opened the way for new and uncanny modes of manipulation of workers by managers, who now appear in the guise of therapists or life coaches.
The college student interviews for a job as a knowledge worker, and finds that the corporate recruiter never asks him about his grades and doesn’t care what he majored in. He senses that what is demanded of him is not knowledge but rather that he project a certain kind of personality, an affable complaisance. Is all his hard work in school somehow just for show—his ticket to a Potemkin meritocracy? There seems to be a mismatch between form and content, and a growing sense that the official story we’ve been telling ourselves about work is somehow false.
This seems to capture the kind of iterated self-criticism, in light of some ideal that is never quite attained, whereby the craftsman advances in his art. You give it your best, learn from your mistakes, and the next time get a little closer to the image you started with in your head.
I was sometimes quieted at the sight of a gang of conduit entering a large panel in an industrial setting, bent into nestled, flowing curves, with varying offsets, that somehow all terminated in the same plane. This was a skill so far beyond my abilities that I felt I was in the presence of some genius, and the man who bent that conduit surely imagined this moment of recognition as he worked.
The satisfactions of manifesting oneself concretely in the world through manual competence have been known to make a man quiet and easy. They seem to relieve him of the felt need to offer chattering interpretations of himself to vindicate his worth. He can simply point: the building stands, the car now runs, the lights are on. Boasting is what a boy does, because he has no real effect in the world.
the tradesman must reckon with the infallible judgment of reality, where one’s failures or shortcomings cannot be interpreted away.
I once built a mahogany coffee table on which I spared no expense of effort. At that time I had no immediate prospect of becoming a father, yet I imagined a child who would form indelible impressions of this table and know that it was his father’s work. I imagined the table fading into the background of a future life, the defects in its execution as well as inevitable stains and scars becoming a surface textured enough that memory and sentiment might cling to it, in unnoticed accretions.
The repairman has to begin each job by getting outside his own head and noticing things; he has to look carefully and listen to the ailing machine.
Street-level work that disrupts the infrastructure (the sewer system below or the electrical grid above) brings our shared dependence into view. People may inhabit very different worlds even in the same city, according to their wealth or poverty. Yet we all live in the same physical reality, ultimately, and owe a common debt to the world.
The craftsman is proud of what he has made, and cherishes it, while the consumer discards things that are perfectly serviceable in his restless pursuit of the new.
Political theorists from Aristotle to Thomas Jefferson have questioned the republican virtue of the artisan, finding him too narrow in his concerns to be moved by the public good.
Such a strong ontology is somewhat at odds with the cutting-edge institutions of the new capitalism, and with the educational regime that aims to supply those institutions with suitable workers—pliable generalists unfettered by any single set of skills.
The egalitarian worry that has always attended tracking students into “college prep” and “vocational ed” is overlaid with another: the fear that acquiring a specific skill set means that one’s life is determined.
In college, by contrast, many students don’t learn anything of particular application; college is the ticket to an open future.
Through pragmatic engagement, the carpenter learns the different species of wood, their fitness for such needs as load bearing and water holding, their dimensional stability with changes in the weather, and their varying resistance to rot and insects.
The surgeon’s judgment is simultaneously technical and deliberative, and that mix is the source of its power.”13 This could be said of any manual skill that is diagnostic, including motorcycle repair.
This imagining relies on a stock mental library, not of natural kinds or structures, like that of the surgeon, but rather the functional kinds of an internal combustion engine, their various interpretations by different manufacturers, and their proclivities for failure.
You also develop a library of sounds and smells and feels. For example, the backfire of a too-lean fuel mixture is subtly different from an ignition backfire. If the motorcycle is thirty years old, from an obscure maker that went out of business twenty years ago, its proclivities are known mostly through lore.
The fasteners holding the engine covers on 1970s-era Hondas are Phillips head, and they are always rounded out and corroded. Do you really want to check the condition of the starter clutch, if each of ten screws will need to be drilled out and extracted, risking damage to the engine case? Such impediments can cloud your thinking. Put more neutrally, the attractiveness of any hypothesis is determined in part by physical circumstances that have no logical connection to the diagnostic problem at hand, but a strong pragmatic bearing on it (kind of like origami).
Even on the relatively primitive vintage bikes that were our specialty, some diagnostic situations contain so many variables, and symptoms can be so under-determining of causes, that explicit analytical reasoning comes up short. What is required then is the kind of judgment that arises only from experience; hunches rather than rules. I quickly realized there was more thinking going on in the bike shop than in my previous job at the think tank.
“think tank” is an answer that, at best, buys you a few seconds when someone asks what you do and you try to figure out what it is that you in fact do,
The critical divide in the future may instead be between those types of work that are easily deliverable through a wire (or via wireless connections) with little or no diminution in quality and those that are not. And this unconventional divide does not correspond well to traditional distinctions between jobs that require high levels of education and jobs that do not.
Frank Levy makes a complementary argument. He puts the issue not in terms of whether a service can be delivered electronically or not, but rather whether the service is itself rules-based or not. Until recently, he writes, you could make a decent living doing a job that required you to carefully follow instructions, such as preparing tax returns. But such work is subject to attack on two fronts—some of it goes to offshore accountants and some of it is done by tax preparation software, such as TurboTax. The result is downward pressure on wages for jobs based on rules.
The central culprit in Braverman’s account is “scientific management,” which “enters the workplace not as the representative of science, but as the representative of management masquerading in the trappings of science.”
A man whose needs are limited will find the least noxious livelihood and work in a subsistence mode,
trafficking in abstractions is not the same as thinking.
Standardized tests remove a teacher’s discretion in the curriculum; strict sentencing guidelines prevent a judge from judging.
It seems to be our liberal political instincts that push us in this direction of centralizing authority; we distrust authority in the hands of individuals. With its reverence for neutral process, liberalism is, by design, a politics of irresponsibility.
Robert Jackall offers a more plausible account of the role these teenaged and immigrant Einsteins are playing at Best Buy. Based on hundreds of hours of interviews with corporate managers, he concludes that one of the principles of contemporary management is to “push details down and pull credit up.”17 That is, avoid making decisions, because they could damage your career, but then spin cover stories after the fact that interpret positive outcomes to your credit. To this end, upper management deals only with abstractions, not operational details. If things go well: “Finding cross-marketing synergies in the telecommunications and consumer electronics divisions has improved our strategic outlook heading into the fourth quarter.” If things go badly: “Change the Vonage display? That was the kid’s idea. What’s his name, Bapu or something. Jeezus, these immigrants.”
According to this hippie theory, the personal grooming habits of Albert Einstein are highly significant—how else does one identify a “bizarre maverick operating at the bohemian fringe”?
creativity is a by-product of mastery of the sort that is cultivated through long practice. It seems to be built up through submission (think a musician practicing scales, or Einstein learning tensor algebra).
So what advice should one give to a young person? If you have a natural bent for scholarship; if you are attracted to the most difficult books out of an urgent need, and can spare four years to devote yourself to them, go to college.
Consider the case of a man who is told his car is not worth fixing. He is told this not by a mechanic but by a clipboard-wielding “service representative” at the dealership. Here is a layer of bureaucracy that makes impossible a conversation about the nitty-gritty of the situation. This man would gladly hover around the mechanic’s bay and be educated about his car, but this is not allowed. The service representative represents not so much mechanical expertise as a position taken by an institution, and our spirited man is not sure he trusts this institution
he goes home and starts taking the valve covers off his engine to investigate for himself. Maybe he has no idea what he is doing, but he trusts that whatever the problem is, he ought to be able to figure it out by his own efforts. Then again, maybe not—he may never get his valve train back together again. But he intends to go down swinging. Spiritedness, then, may be allied with a spirit of inquiry , through a desire to be master of one’s own stuff. It is the prideful basis of self-reliance.
It is characteristic of the spirited man that he takes an expansive view of the boundary of his own stuff—he tends to act as though any material things he uses are in some sense properly his, while he is using them—and when he finds himself in public spaces that seem contrived to break the connection between his will and his environment, as though he had no hands, this brings out a certain hostility in him.
Consider the angry feeling that bubbles up in this person when, in a public bathroom, he finds himself waving his hands under the faucet, trying to elicit a few seconds of water from it in a futile rain dance of guessed-at mudras. This man would like to know: Why should there not be a handle?
It’s true, some people fail to turn off a manual faucet. With its blanket presumption of irresponsibility, the infrared faucet doesn’t merely respond to this fact, it installs it, giving it the status of normalcy. There is a kind of infantilization at work, and it offends the spirited personality.
Logic, like physics, is something hard and unyielding. The interface is meant to be “intuitive,” meaning that it introduces as little psychic friction as possible between the user’s intention and its realization. It is such resistance that makes one aware of reality as an independent thing.
There are now layers of collectivized, absentee interest in your motor’s oil level, and no single person is responsible for it.
This becomes most clear in advertising, where Choice and Freedom and A World Without Limits and Master the Possibilities and all the other heady existentialist slogans of the consumerist Self are invoked with such repetitive urgency that they come to resemble a disciplinary system. Somehow, self-realization and freedom always entail buying something new, never conserving something old.
One can’t be a musician without learning to play a particular instrument, subjecting one’s fingers to the discipline of frets or keys. The musician’s power of expression is founded upon a prior obedience; her musical agency is built up from an ongoing submission. To what? To her teacher, perhaps, but this is incidental rather than primary—there is such a thing as the self-taught musician. Her obedience rather is to the mechanical realities of her instrument, which in turn answer to certain natural necessities of music that can be expressed mathematically.
In any hard discipline, whether it be gardening, structural engineering, or Russian, one submits to things that have their own intractable ways.
The point is to sell a line of accessories, which can be combined in so many ways that one such combination is sure to capture “your unique personality.” Notice the elision from agency (dude with welding helmet) to Personality, that is, the expressive Self, whose autonomy is realized in, indeed simply is, the array of Choice that lies open before him or her. But choosing is not creating, however much “creativity” is invoked in such marketing.
In picking out your bear’s features, or the options for your Warrior or Scion, you choose among the predetermined alternatives. Each of these alternatives offers itself as good. A judgment of its goodness has already been made by some dimly grasped others, otherwise it wouldn’t be offered as an option in the catalogue. The consumer is disburdened not only of the fabrication, but of a basic evaluative activity.
A good diamond cutter has a different disposition than a good dog trainer. The one is careful, the other commanding. Different kinds of work attract different human types, and we are lucky if we find work that is fitting.
There is much talk of “diversity” in education, but not much accommodation of the kind we have in mind when we speak about the quality of a man, or woman: the diversity of dispositions.
We are preoccupied with demographic variables, on the one hand, and sorting into cognitive classes, on the other. Both collapse the human qualities into a narrow set of categories, the better to be represented on a checklist or a set of test scores. This simplification serves various institutional purposes. Fitting ourselves to them, we come to understand ourselves in light of the available metrics, and forget that institutional purposes are not our own.
If different human types are attracted to different kinds of work, the converse is also true: the work a man does forms him.
I find the idea of “disposition” useful in thinking about the effect the work has had on me, and on other mechanics I have known. Or is it that people of a certain disposition are drawn to the work?
I spent about a week on the project, and only charged him for the materials, which came to fifty-six dollars. I remember the amount because I was embarrassed at how much it had added up to. Should I not charge for the jar of stain, since there was quite a bit of it left? I decided I would charge him for the whole jar, and felt a rush of boldness in making this decision. This wasn’t the commune, this was business, and that leftover stain was my profit.
The shoelace might well break before it comes undone. He was speaking of a mathematical string, which is an idealized shoelace, but the idealization seemed to have replaced any actual shoelace in his mind as he got wrapped up in some theoretical problem. As a teenager, this substitution wasn’t yet clear to me as such.
This disposition is at once cognitive and moral. Getting it right demands that you be attentive in the way of a conversation rather than assertive in the way of a demonstration .7 I believe the mechanical arts have a special significance for our time because they cultivate not creativity, but the less glamorous virtue of attentiveness. Things need fixing and tending no less than creating.
You can quadruple the amount of horsepower a VW engine makes, or even more, if you need it to last only for a single race and are willing to spend absurd amounts of time and money building it.
Scrawled above the dingy parts counter at Donsco was a slogan: “Speed costs. How fast do you want to spend?”
The sheer perversity of making a VW go fast attracts a different human type than the type who is attracted to cars that are supposed to go fast. Chas clearly had a kink in his soul, and suddenly the world was a less lonely place for me.
Match-porting is one small part of what is called “blue printing” an engine: by careful measuring and hand fitting, the motor can be brought to a higher level of precision than is achieved when you take for granted the fit of aftermarket parts—for example, these intake manifolds—where there is no consistent engineering intention among the various manufacturers. Someone building a high-performance motor combines parts from different makers, so he has to be something of an engineer himself, often modifying parts; there is nobody else in charge of making it all work together properly. (And in fact it is common for “high performance” engines to perform wretchedly, worse than stock.)
Match-porting is one small part of what is called “blue printing” an engine: by careful measuring and hand fitting, the motor can be brought to a higher level of precision than is achieved when you take for granted the fit of aftermarket parts—for example, these intake manifolds—where there is no consistent engineering intention among the various manufacturers. Someone building a high-performance motor combines parts from different makers, so he has to be something of an engineer himself, often modifying parts; there is nobody else in charge of making it all work together properly.
To actually reproduce the pattern of light hitting your eye with a pencil seems like it should be a straightforward matter, but it is extraordinarily difficult. It seems to require that you short-circuit your normal mode of perception, which is less data-driven than concept-driven. We have an idea of the thing that, in a sense, pre-constitutes the thing for us, prior to sensual experience.
The forensic efforts of a skilled engine builder are thus a kind of human archaeology.
the biggest clue seemed to be their expressions. They were hard to explain. Good-natured, friendly, easygoing—and uninvolved. They were like spectators. You had the feeling they had just wandered in there themselves and somebody had handed them a wrench. There was no identification with the job. No saying, “I am a mechanic.”
Piston slap may indeed sound like loose tappets, so to be a good mechanic you have to be constantly attentive to the possibility that you may be mistaken. This is an ethical virtue.
Stepping outside the intellectually serious circle of my teachers and friends at Chicago into the broader academic world, it struck me as an industry hostile to thinking.
I had an unspoken understanding with the resident janitor, Dwayne, based on my inexact accounting for the beer I kept under the stairway and his failure to notice the open container of highly inflammable solvent, next to the beer.
gut-and-rehab,
So I lie and tell people a job took ten hours when it might have taken twenty. To compensate, I also tell them my shop rate is forty dollars per hour, but it usually works out to more like twenty. I feel like an amateur, no less now than when I started, but through such devices I hope to appear like somebody who knows what he is doing, and bills accordingly.
When you are fixing bikes that are not worth the money it takes
The more breathing room I can get from the owner—the more I raise his expectations for the bill—the more discretion I have in dealing with the bike itself. When you are fixing bikes that are not worth the money it takes to get them running right, the tension I mentioned between your fiduciary responsibility to the bike owner and your metaphysical responsibility to the bike itself is especially acute.
It just seems flatly impossible. You persist only because you know it must have been put on at some point in the past, and in theory every sequence of moves ought to be reversible. But if you’re me, at least, eventually your mind starts to doubt even such unassailable logic, and you begin to entertain the idea of cutting the frame away and welding it back later. I get so focused on the problem at hand that, outside my tunnel vision, a wholesale insanity begins to sprout in support of my immediate goal.
At this point I’d exhausted my entire lexicon of “motherfucker” -based idioms, and was running perilously low on slurs against the Japanese.
In some journals, including Nature Genetics, articles begin with an abstract written by the author, but even in such cases I was to write my own. Nor was I simply to reword the author’s abstract, as I learned in my initial week of training. Rather, I was to read the entire article and distill it afresh. The rationale offered was that unless I did so, there would be no “value added” by IAC’s product. It was hard to believe I was going to add anything other than error and confusion to such material.
I tried to absent myself, the better to meet my quota, but the writing of an abstract, unlike the pulling of levers on an assembly line, cannot be done mindlessly. The material I was reading was too demanding, and what it demanded was to be given its due. To not do justice to an author who had poured his life into the subject at hand felt like violence against what was best in myself.
My efforts to read, comprehend, and write abstracts of twenty-eight academic journal articles per day required me to actively suppress my own ability to think, because the more you think, the more the inadequacies in your understanding of an author’s argument come into focus. This can only slow you down.
The quota demanded that I suppress as well my sense of responsibility to others—not just the author of an article but also the hapless users of InfoTrac, who might naïvely suppose that my abstract reflects the contents of that article.
I was never confronted with an abstract I had written and told that it did not adequately reflect the article. The quality standards were the generic ones of grammar, internal to the abstract, which could be applied without my supervisor having to read the article. In this sense, I was not held to an external, objective standard.
A good part of the job, then, consists of “a constant interpretation and reinterpretation of events that constructs a reality in which it is difficult to pin blame on anyone, especially oneself,” according to Calhoun. This gives rise to the art of talking in circles. Mutually contradictory statements are made to cohere by sheer forcefulness of presentation, allowing a manager to “stake out a position on every side of an issue.
Such concerns can be rendered appropriate, and higher-level management support secured, only by demonstrating how they contribute to profits. Not because the higher-level managers are heartless, but because such a demonstration provides everyone needed cover. In fact, a lower-level manager may need only to put on a performance of hardheadedness before her superiors, and produce the stage props of a profit-maximizing calculation (graphs, charts, and so on). Unless she has these skills of the corporate dramatist, she is unlikely to get the official cover she needs to do the right thing by her workers.
the diversity of dispositions,
What the hell is going on? Is this our society as a whole, buying more education only to scale new heights of stupidity?
The irrelevance of what you actually learn (or don’t) in school for job performance is hard to square with a technocratic view of the economy, which is invariably coupled with a sunny presumption of meritocracy.
Workers must identify with the corporate culture, and exhibit a high level of “buy-in” to “the mission.”
The division between private life and work life is eroded, and accordingly the whole person is at issue in job performance evaluations.
The author says her “favorite” moment is when “the group becomes paralyzed. No one person wants to be the person to come off contact—so they don’t take risks.” Having induced this group paralysis, she then sets out to re-create the spirit of innovation and charismatic rule breaking, now as a function of the Team. The most innovative groups question the “standing” starting point of the exercise. They notice that it’s hard to make the switch from standing to the kneeling position that is required to make the last move to the floor and keep in contact with the dowel. So they ask if they can start from a kneeling position. I generally approve this as I feel that the group is learning and questioning some unspoken rules.28 So here is a group of people on their knees, finally. It was their own idea, erupting from the collective genius of the Team. Together, these mavericks develop the force of personality to “question some unspoken rules”—for example, that old canard that it’s better to stand on your own two feet.
Given our democratic sensibilities, authority cannot present itself straightforwardly, as authority, coming down from a superior, but must be understood as an impersonal thing that emanates vaguely from all of us.
authority becomes smarmy and passive-aggressive, trying to pass itself off as something cooperative and friendly; as volunteerism
For his part, the team member has no solid ground on which he can make a stand against this kind of moral training. He can’t say, as the carpenter can to the foreman, “it’s plumb and level—check it yourself.” His only defense is a kind of self-division—he armors himself with the self-referential irony supplied to him by pop culture, pinning Dilbert cartoons to his cubicle wall and watching The Office every Thursday night.
In most work that transpires in large organizations, one’s work is meaningless taken by itself. The individual feels that, alone, he is without any effect. His education prepares him for this; it is an education for working in a large organization, and he has difficulty imagining how he might earn a living otherwise. This predisposes him to be deferential to the authority exercised in the organization (however tinged with irony this deference may be), since the organization is that which gives meaning to his work.
The difference is that on such a crew, you have grounds for knowing your own worth independently of others, and it is the same grounds on which others will make their judgments. Either you can bend conduit or you can’t, and this is plain. So there is less reason to manage appearances. There is a real freedom of speech on a job site, which reverberates outward and sustains a wider liberality. You can tell dirty jokes. Where there is real work being done, the order of things isn’t quite so fragile.
Psychologists find a positive correlation between repeated praise and “shorter task persistence, more eye-checking with the teacher, and inflected speech such that answers have the intonation of questions.”
The credential loving of college students is a natural response to such an education, and prepares them well for the absence of objective standards in the job markets they will enter; the validity of your self-assessment is known to you by the fact it has been dispensed by gatekeeping institutions. Prestigious fellowships, internships, and degrees become the standard of self-esteem. This is hardly an education for independence, intellectual adventurousness, or strong character.
The master has no need for a psychology of persuasion that will make the apprentice compliant to whatever purposes the master might dream up; those purposes are given and determinate. He does the same work as the apprentice, only better. He is able to explain what he does to the apprentice, because there are rational principles that govern it.
On a crew, skill becomes the basis for a circle of mutual regard among those who recognize one another as peers, even across disciplines.
There is a sort of friendship or solidarity that becomes possible at work when people are open about differences of rank, and there are clear standards.
The current educational regime is based on a certain view about what kind of knowledge is important: “knowing that,” as opposed to “knowing how.”
We take a very partial view of knowledge when we regard it as the sort of thing that can be gotten while suspended aloft in a basket. This is to separate knowing from doing,
The things we know best are the ones we contend with in some realm of regular practice.
Ohm’s law is something explicit and rulelike, and is true in the way that propositions are true. Its utter simplicity makes it beautiful; a mind in possession of this equation is charmed with a sense of its own competence. We feel we have access to something universal, and this affords a pleasure that is quasi-religious, perhaps. But this charm of competence can get in the way of noticing things; it can displace, or perhaps hamper the development of, a different kind of knowledge that may be difficult to bring to explicit awareness, but is superior as a practical matter. Its superiority lies in the fact that it begins with the typical rather than the universal, so it goes more rapidly and directly to particular causes, the kind that actually tend to cause ignition problems.
Bad argument
Such a cognitive theory, if sound, would justify the alienation of judgment from skilled professionals when things get too complex. But, in fact, it is often the case that when things get really hairy, you want an experienced human being in control.
sometimes the system gives the wrong trouble code. Being off by one digit might give a diagnosis of “System fuel too lean on bank one” (P0171), that is, an air-fuel mixture that is too much air and not enough fuel on the first bank of cylinders, when in fact the problem is “System fuel too rich on bank two” (P0172). An experienced mechanic can tell too lean from too rich by looking at the spark plugs; they will look blanched white in the first case and sooty in the second. Representing states of the world in a merely formal way, as “information” of the sort that can be coded, allows them to be entered into a logical syllogism of the sort that computerized diagnostics can solve. But this is to treat states of the world in isolation from the context in which their meaning arises, so such representations are especially liable to nonsense.
Computerized diagnostics don’t so much replace the mechanic’s judgment as add another layer to the work, one that requires a different sort of cognitive disposition.
The net effect on me is often the same as it was on Bob: “This is bullshit.” The digital multimeter, together with the procedure in the book, present an image of precision and determinacy that is often false. What the procedure in fact demands of you is a real effort of interpretation, one that is nowhere acknowledged in the service manual.
The intimacy of such a collaboration is part of the surplus that gets gathered as labor is fragmented. The writers of modern manuals are neither mechanics nor engineers but rather technical writers. This is a profession that is institutionalized on the assumption that it has its own principles that can be mastered without the writer being immersed in any particular problem; it is universal rather than situated.
It is common today to locate one’s “true self ” in one’s leisure choices. Accordingly, good work is taken to be work that maximizes one’s means for pursuing these other activities, where life becomes meaningful.
Everyone is progressing in knowledge, through a shared dialectic. The dialectic is between people, but also between iterations—you break things, and learn something
Everyone is progressing in knowledge, through a shared dialectic. The dialectic is between people, but also between iterations—you break things, and learn something new by taking them apart and talking it through.
I like to fix motorcycles more than I like to wire houses (even though I could make about twice as much money wiring houses).9 Both practices have internal goods that engage my attention, but fixing bikes is more meaningful because not only the fixing but also the riding of motorcycles answers to certain intuitions I have about human excellence. 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 that is like war made beautiful.
I try to be a good motorcycle mechanic. This effort connects me to others, in particular to those who exemplify good motorcycling, because it is they who can best judge how well I have realized the functional goods I am aiming at.10 I wouldn’t even know what those goods are if I didn’t spend time with people who ride at a much higher level than I, and are therefore more discerning of what is good in a motorcycle.
Those who belong to a certain order of society—people who make big decisions that affect all of us—don’t seem to have much sense of their own fallibility. Being unacquainted with failure, the kind that can’t be interpreted away, may have something to do with the lack of caution that business and political leaders often display in the actions they undertake on behalf of other people.
A student can avoid hard sciences and foreign languages and get a degree without ever having the unambiguous experience of being wrong.
Such an education dovetails with the pedagogical effects of the material culture inhabited by the well-to-do, which insulates them from failed confrontations with hard reality. Such failures often force you to ask a favor of someone else, like when your car breaks down somewhere and you have no cell phone, and you have to flag down a motorist or knock on a door. Such an experience of dependence makes you humble, and grateful.
Such standards have a universal validity that is apparent to all, yet the discriminations made by practitioners of an art respond also to aesthetic subtleties that may not be visible to the bystander. Only a fellow journeyman is entitled to say “nicely done.”
It is in doing the job nicely that the tradesman puts his own stamp on it.
It is in doing the job nicely that the tradesman puts his own stamp on it. His individuality is not only compatible with, it is realized through his efforts to reach a goal that is common.