‘You have no idea how much this article means to me. I suspect – hope – it represents the beginning of a shift in thinking.’
In May last year the New York Times published an extract from a book online. The response they received was, in their words, ‘overwhelming’. It registered 1 million page views and 400,000 visits within 48 hours, making it ‘one of the three or four most read stories we’ve ever put on line. And the comments we solicited were extraordinarily positive.’
Reading these responses, what strikes me is how emotional they are. The article inspired hope in one reader and gratitude in many. One read it with a mixture of ‘elation, admiration, envy, empathy, inadequacy’. That’s five emotions – a veritable medley. What is it here that provoked such outpourings and introspection?
The book in question was The Case for Working with Your Hands (or Why Office Work is Bad For Us and Fixing Things Feels Good) by a philosopher and motorcycle mechanic, Matthew Crawford. In it, he presents 210 pages of immaculately constructed, brilliantly persuasive argument that will convince you, if you need convincing, of the urgent need to re-evaluate our collective attitude to work, to reassess our idea of what a good working life might be and to cast aside the misguided and pernicious notion that all manual work is dirty and dumb.
Work is a hot topic these days. As Alain de Botton points out in The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, it claims ‘to be able to provide us, alongside love, with the principal source of life’s meaning’. Chaplin’s Modern Times and Arnold Wesker’s The Kitchen both present the worker as downtrodden machine, but recent books such as Josh Ferris’ Then We Came to The End have turned to the office as the microcosm of a more modern and all-encompassing sort of angst. Lucy Kellaway’s In Office Hours depicts with exquisite humour how someone we wouldn’t look at twice in the ‘real world’ can become an idol of lustful worship when they’re our boss. On the one hand, it’s the office that now defines us, yet the office also tends to warp us. Where did we go wrong?
Crawford describes how, over the course of the twentieth century, we replaced the skilled manual work of the workshop with, on the one hand, the abstract ‘knowledge work’ of the office and, on the other, the mindless, unskilled labour of the factory line. Thinking and doing have been separated, so neither can offer fulfilment. In this sense, Crawford’s book invites comparison with Richard Sennett’s brilliant work The Craftsman (and incidentally even Sennett describes The Case for Working with Your Hands as ‘moving’), but Crawford’s concern has a more urgent, contemporary edge to it. He notices how ‘shop class’ (design technology) has all but disappeared from the school curriculum in the US and how many school-leavers are being ushered straight into office jobs (via increasingly worthless, debt-laden university degrees) while being deprived of the opportunity to take a different route into a different working life. He notices how few of us now understand how the machines upon which we rely day-to-day actually work, and how few of us could fix them if they broke. He notices how the office has indeed become The Office. We may laugh, but it starts to become clear why we might also have a more emotional response.
Crawford left his jobs in a think-tank and library cataloguing company to start a motorcycle repair shop. This is a personal book for him, and this is partly why it’s so persuasive. When I read it, it felt personal to me, too. My grandfather was a mechanic, my father was a teacher, I work at Penguin. That’s the trajectory Crawford describes, from workshop to office, right there. I remember my dad teaching me how the internal combustion engine works, like in Danny the Champion of the World but with more swearing. It’s one of the very few practical, useful things I know. Come the apocalypse, I could change your spark plugs. But for now, I sit at a desk in front of (or should that be behind?) a computer. Judging by the New York Times readers’ responses, I’m not alone.
Will Hammond, Commissioning Editor
The Penguin Blog 