stimulant

Colleen Kaman was kind enough to send me an awfully good essay from The New Atlantis, called “Shop Class as Soulcraft”.¹

Reading through the article, I ran across a contradiction in my thinking about hands-on work. Typically, consumerism is associated with materialism, which I had previously articulated, ad hoc, as the predication of happiness upon acquiring and possessing material goods beyond one’s needs. But I realize that unless I’m prepared to strip materialism of its negative aspects, I need to provide a more nuanced definition. Consider what Crawford says about the psychic appeal of manual work:

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, who has no real effect in the world. But craftsmanship must reckon with the infallible judgment of reality, where one’s failures or shortcomings cannot be interpreted away. Hobbyists will tell you that making one’s own furniture is hard to justify economically. And yet they persist. Shared memories attach to the material souvenirs of our lives, and producing them is a kind of communion, with others and with the future. Finding myself at loose ends one summer in Berkeley, I 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. More fundamentally, the durable objects of use produced by men “give rise to the familiarity of the world, its customs and habits of intercourse between men and things as well as between men and men,” as Hannah Arendt says. “The reality and reliability of the human world rest primarily on the fact that we are surrounded by things more permanent than the activity by which they were produced, and potentially even more permanent than the lives of their authors.”

And it’s true: the empowerment associated with building, making, and hacking — even the emotional premise of hands-on learning — is founded upon the assumption that people need real-world involvement and creativity. And of course, we don’t want to put this assumption under the umbrella of materialism.

This is a pretty insignificant realization: obviously, materialism does not deprive material things from their capacity to contain and transmit meaning. But, this minor semantic conflict prompted me to realize that I’ve been undervaluing the role of the material thing itself, thinking that it was the process that was the most important. This cannot be reconciled with my belief that there are two paths to doing engaging work: pursuits that intrinsically appeals to and interests you, or pursuits that are important to someone else, that will affect the real world.

1. I’m sure I’ll be posting more about it, but here’s something to start it off. [↩]