The New York Review of Ideas » Profiles | June 2009
Let’s Get Physical
Matt Crawford talks shop.
By Margaret Wheeler Johnson
Children of the sixties and seventies may remember Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Over the course of a 17-day motorcycle trip across the northern United States, Pirsig’s narrator uses the relationship between man and bike to reflect on technology and reason. “The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain or in the petals of a flower,” reads a typical passage. Academics dismissed his ideas as New Age bunk. The public bought four million copies.
Thirty-five years later, Penguin Press is hoping to repeat Pirsig’s success with a new philosopher-mechanic of their own. In late May it will release Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work, Matthew Crawford’s jeremiad against white collar culture and the educational system designed to populate it.
Crawford, who has a Ph.D. in political thought from the University of Chicago, takes America to task for devaluing skilled manual language. Trade work, he argues, is more psychologically, financially, and intellectually satisfying than the white-collar information-processing jobs for which schools and colleges typically educate their students.
Crawford grew the book out of a piece he wrote for the conservative online journal The New Atlantis in 2006. The essay drew the attention of many, including 100,000 unique visitors on the web and New York Times columnist David Brooks, who named it one of the best of the year. Brooks joined Crawford’s condemnation of “the way managers take decision-making authority away from workers, the way parents take decision-making authority away from kids, the way educators close off options without any debate.” By the end of the day, Crawford’s agent had sold the book to Vanessa Mobley, a young editor at Penguin Press known for her way with big ideas.
In person, Crawford manifests the quiet confidence of a guy who got over himself a long time ago. Sitting in the lobby of New York’s Roosevelt Hotel this spring, he wears jeans, a pressed navy blue button-down shirt—tucked in, sleeves rolled—and clean black suede work boots. He is coming from a meeting with his publishers, manuscript in hand. He places it on the coffee table in front of him, along with some cover options. There’s a line of encrusted dirt and motor oil under all of his fingernails. The former academic is happy with the final product. “It’s nice to have written something on a topic that people care about rather than some ancient Greek crap,” he says.
Manual work has been part of Crawford’s life since he started doing electrical work at age fourteen in the Northern California community where he grew up. As an undergraduate physics major at UC Santa Barbara, he became a freelance electrician to support himself through the summers.
Crawford was an indifferent student until his senior year, when he happened on his roommate’s copy of Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind. Written by University of Chicago classics professor Allan Bloom, the 1987 polemic was an angry, unapologetic defense of high culture. In it Bloom credited liberal relativism and rock music with the decline of American universities and the degradation of our intellectual life. The book sold close to a million copies and turned a little-known academic into a celebrity.
It’s a book Crawford is now wary of associating himself with, given the extreme, reactions it often provokes. “It blew me away,” he admits, after some hesitation. “Bloom offered a convincing diagnosis of contemporary life by tracing our intellectual genealogy, showing the sources of our confused, taken-for-granted opinions in the works of serious thinkers. It was incredibly liberating and exciting.”
Crawford applied to do his graduate work at the University of Chicago in the hopes of studying with Bloom, but when they met, Crawford says diplomatically, they “didn’t hit it off,” and Bloom died shortly after Crawford arrived. The department is the stronghold of the ideas of influential conservative philosopher Leo Strauss and arguably one of the past century’s most influential schools of political philosophy. Crawford ended up writing a dissertation on Greek political thought with Nathan Tarcov, Bloom’s literary executor and an influential Straussian in his own right
After earning his Ph.D. in 2000, he received a post-graduate fellowship at the University’s prestigious Committee on Social Thought to turn his dissertation into a book. When the Marshall Institute, a conservative environmental think tank in Washington, D.C., offered Crawford a highly paid executive job, he accepted.
It turned out that his primary role was to develop arguments about climate change that happened to agree with those espoused by the oil interests subsidizing the Institute. “Coming up with the best arguments money could buy,” says Crawford, “wasn’t work befitting a free man.” He also felt that his boss was trying to turn him into the kind of knowledge worker whose plight he laments in his book, deprived of agency, carrying out instructions phrased in corporate “action” speak. He hated the job almost immediately.
Whereas Chicago had provided him with “an intensive apprenticeship in a shared set of authors, interpretive rubrics, ‘fundamental problems,’ a set of master keys that unlocked every door,” at the think tank he felt as if “the locks had been changed.”