The New York Review of Ideas » Profiles | June 2009
Let’s Get Physical
Matt Crawford talks shop.
By Margaret Wheeler Johnson
The Marshall experience was a turning point for Crawford. He began to yearn for work with real goals and perceivable results, rewards he had only ever really encountered in manual work. His executive job sent him, he says, “rushing toward work that was genuinely rational (fixing motorcycles), rather than work that was guided by the need to perform some weird pretense of rationality.” The manual work he had done most recently was a rebuild of his own bike, a 1975 Honda, while he was still in Chicago. So he quit his think tank gig and set up a motorcycle repair shop in an industrial area of Richmond, Virginia where several other independent craftsmen also plied their trades. “Matt talked constantly about ideas while working on bikes,” remembers Crawford’s first shop mate, visual artist and fellow gearhead Thomas Van Auken. “Sometimes it became hard for us to get any work done.”
While working on motorcycles day after day, Crawford began to reflect on the turn his life had taken. His repair work was so much more fulfilling than any he had done as an academic or an executive. Why wasn’t the rest of America on to this? Why do we see the labor of carpenters and electricians as inferior processing information in some austere corporate space, usually without any sense of an ultimate product or goal?
It had to start with education. While he was growing his clientele at the bike shop, Crawford supplemented his income teaching high school Latin. He found his students utterly uninterested, and not just because Latin can be less than thrilling to teenagers. Studying Latin was a requirement, not a choice. Whereas once they had been required to learn vocational skills that might interest them, not to mention teach them useful, marketable skills—they now were forced to take courses that would make them competitive college applicants, and there was no question that they were going to college.
Where Bloom, a lifelong academic, blamed relativists for the decline of the university, Crawford, the lifelong mechanic, claims that the university is not the right destination for many students in the first place. (Bloom would have agreed). Crawford argues that students like those in his Latin classes would find greater fulfillment pursuing a trade than an undergraduate liberal arts degree. He also counters the usual arguments against vocational schooling: that it leads to lower earning potential, doesn’t challenge students intellectually, and inevitably targets underprivileged and minority students already held to lower expectations. Crawford offers his own experience as proof of the cognitive and emotional satisfaction manual work yields. He also notes that plumbers and electricians often earn more than college graduates, partly because they have job security that in the age of outsourcing white-collar workers no longer enjoy. “If you need a deck built, or your car fixed, the Chinese are of no help,” he wrote in the New Atlantis. “Because they are in China.”
But what about the students who only discover their intellectual interests after they get to college? Crawford wants students to realize that the college preparatory route isn’t their only chance at fulfillment. Society gives students a sense that “there’s one track, one train, it’s leaving the station, and if you’re not on it you are totally hosed. It wasn’t until the very end of my time in college that I got interested in philosophy, and that was because of a book I found lying around; it wasn’t something assigned.
Penguin is banking on Crawford’s wry, unaffected voice, humility, and clarity to be a latter day Zen. Like Pirsig, Crawford doesn’t talk about philosophy like someone standing at a podium in tweed. “People think of philosophy as airy, lacking legs, lacking real world substantiation,” says Mobley. “He’s the real deal.”
Crawford is a fan of Zen’s “democratic poetry,” and says his own book has “similar aspirations.” He doesn’t think it’s fair to fault Pirsig for using “language that New Agey people took up shortly thereafter.” Unlike them, “he was engaged with serious thinkers.”
Crawford, unlike Pirsig, actually has a degree in classical philosophy, and unlike Zen, Shop Class does not invite the reader to take a sojourn away from everyday existence in order to have a conversation about truth. Crawford’s chosen metaphor is not the journey but the journeyman, the tradesman who makes his own way using knowledge he has acquired by working with machines. Sbop Class is about facing reality, and this is the part that is likely to get under people’s skin. “What will alienate some will thrill others,” says Mobley. “This is a polemic. The goal is to change lives.” Mobley also thinks the book will strike readers on a personal level, as it did her. “I felt this applied to me. Anyone who’s ever felt WTF am I doing in the workplace’ will.”
Back at the Roosevelt Hotel, looking at his cover options, Crawford has come around to his publisher’s final choice. They were going to go with a picture of him in his shop surrounded by bikes and tools. “It was a little too specific,” says Crawford, who feared readers would think it was a how-to book. Instead they’ve chosen a shot of a lone bike leaning up against the wall of a shed. “Initially I thought, ‘Really?’ It seemed too blank. I was worried that it would look like a travelogue. But now I think it works.” The bike is a BMW R50. Crawford says that riding it would feel a little bit like riding a tractor.