The visceral experience of failure

I ran across this great NY Times article The Case for Working With Your Hands by Matthew B. Crawford which examines our cultural shift towards knowledge work and away from manual work. [NYTimes passwords]

You probably won't be surprised to find that the author proposes that this move away from physical vocations has not been wholly beneficial for society or the individuals involved. It certainly resonated with a general feeling I've had for a decade or so now.

Back at IBM in the 1990's, my colleagues and I would look wistfully at the men driving heavy machinery constructing a new office building as we trudged across the parking lo towards our cubicles. We wanted to arrange a job switch day ...just one day, please! From the article:

When we praise people who do work that is straightforwardly useful, the praise often betrays an assumption that they had no other options. We idealize them as the salt of the earth and emphasize the sacrifice for others their work may entail. Such sacrifice does indeed occur — the hazards faced by a lineman restoring power during a storm come to mind. But what if such work answers as well to a basic human need of the one who does it? I take this to be the suggestion of Marge Piercy’s poem “To Be of Use,” which concludes with the lines “the pitcher longs for water to carry/and a person for work that is real.” Beneath our gratitude for the lineman may rest envy.

We knew the gist of our envy. At the end of the day the constructors could take a last look at their day's work before turning home and see what they had accomplished in that day. This was something we certainly lacked as bit-pushers, at least at such a manifest level. It is not just the physicality of these discarded vocations that call us back however, it is the fact that they contain their own mental challenges and rewards that we seem to have forgotten. Crawford gives some examples of this from his life where he gave up a director of policy job at a Washington think tank to open an independent motorcycle repair shop.

Some diagnostic situations contain a lot of variables. Any given symptom may have several possible causes, and further, these causes may interact with one another and therefore be difficult to isolate. In deciding how to proceed, there often comes a point where you have to step back and get a larger gestalt. Have a cigarette and walk around the lift. The gap between theory and practice stretches out in front of you, and this is where it gets interesting. What you need now is the kind of judgment that arises only from experience; hunches rather than rules. For me, at least, there is more real thinking going on in the bike shop than there was in the think tank.

He talks about what it means to be an expert on something, which is one of my favorite subjects after reading Gary Kleain's Sources of Power. Klein is a cognitive scientist who studied people who have to make life and death decisions with little time for deep consideration, people like NICU nurses, firemen, war commanders. These are situations where the difference between experts and non-experts make an obvious difference. Like Klein, Crawford sees that the expert has develop rich internal models of the systems making up their area of expertise.

Put differently, mechanical work has required me to cultivate different intellectual habits. Further, habits of mind have an ethical dimension that we don’t often think about. Good diagnosis requires attentiveness to the machine, almost a conversation with it, rather than assertiveness, as in the position papers produced on K Street. Cognitive psychologists speak of “metacognition,” which is the activity of stepping back and thinking about your own thinking. It is what you do when you stop for a moment in your pursuit of a solution, and wonder whether your understanding of the problem is adequate. The slap of worn-out pistons hitting their cylinders can sound a lot like loose valve tappets, so to be a good mechanic you have to be constantly open to the possibility that you may be mistaken. This is a virtue that is at once cognitive and moral. It seems to develop because the mechanic, if he is the sort who goes on to become good at it, internalizes the healthy functioning of the motorcycle as an object of passionate concern. How else can you explain the elation he gets when he identifies the root cause of some problem?

Other aspects of these productive vocations are examined, from the social and ethical to the personal fulfillment. I was disheartened to realize that in my current job at a startup I've somehow become a middle manager after a career spent leading teams with really no one to override my decisions above me and no reason to be trapped in a decision. It also explains perhaps why I sometimes find myself lost at sea in this role as I don't possess the evolved survival behaviors of the middle manager.

Contrast the experience of being a middle manager. This is a stock figure of ridicule, but the sociologist Robert Jackall spent years inhabiting the world of corporate managers, conducting interviews, and he poignantly describes the “moral maze” they feel trapped in. [...] A manager has to make many decisions for which he is accountable. Unlike an entrepreneur with his own business, however, his decisions can be reversed at any time by someone higher up the food chain (and there is always someone higher up the food chain). It’s important for your career that these reversals not look like defeats, and more generally you have to spend a lot of time managing what others think of you. Survival depends on a crucial insight: you can’t back down from an argument that you initially made in straightforward language, with moral conviction, without seeming to lose your integrity. So managers learn the art of provisional thinking and feeling, expressed in corporate doublespeak, and cultivate a lack of commitment to their own actions. Nothing is set in concrete the way it is when you are, for example, pouring concrete.

A few years ago I took over a dozen classes at TechShop. I learned how to create things using milling machines, lathes, laser cutters, plasma cutters, carbon fiber folding, and three different types of welding equipment. It exposed me to a world I'd never known before. In high school, like most everyone else, I believed that shop class was someplace you went if you weren't academically inclined (not to mention where those of us who were academically inclined would get beat up by bullies) so I never got to explore this side of creativity, this side of societal necessity.

High-school shop-class programs were widely dismantled in the 1990s as educators prepared students to become “knowledge workers.” The imperative of the last 20 years to round up every warm body and send it to college, then to the cubicle, was tied to a vision of the future in which we somehow take leave of material reality and glide about in a pure information economy. This has not come to pass. To begin with, such work often feels more enervating than gliding. More fundamentally, now as ever, somebody has to actually do things: fix our cars, unclog our toilets, build our houses. [...] Some people are hustled off to college, then to the cubicle, against their own inclinations and natural bents, when they would rather be learning to build things or fix things. One shop teacher suggested to me that “in schools, we create artificial learning environments for our children that they know to be contrived and undeserving of their full attention and engagement. Without the opportunity to learn through the hands, the world remains abstract and distant, and the passions for learning will not be engaged.”

I suppose this all puts a positive spin on my belief that sometime soon our information culture will find itself receding into a more physical realm as we enter a low energy age which requires more local manufacturing and production (and thus more local manufacturers and producers). I just hope my abilities to function in such a world have not completely atrophied by then.

Comments

[ian]

Here in Finland Izumi and I observed that many of the people doing
manual labor (road construction, electricians, window washers) are very
young. It's almost like the requirement first year out of college is to
go and get your hands dirty. Makes sense when you think about it - put
your back into things when you're young and burly and can contribute
the most.- retire to intellectual pursuits in your autumn years.