How are we disposed towards what we do every day? Vocation, more in the sense of a calling than a mere trade, is the central concern of Matthew Crawford’s book Shop Class as Soulcraft, which originated as an essay in the New Atlantis. Part treatise, part polemic, and part testimony, it is a serious reflection on the way labor shapes our sense of self. Following in the tradition, if not exactly the spirit, of Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Shop Class challenges received wisdom about the necessity of a college degree for future success.
Crawford is skeptical of the rise of an “information economy” in which highly educated workers will deal dazzlingly in abstractions. He worries that “everyone an Einstein” rhetoric, derived from a woolly notion of creativity, obscures what is really going on: the depreciation of white-collar work, where “thinking” is increasingly separated from “doing.” Nowadays,
the cognitive elements of [a] job are appropriated from professionals, instantiated in a system or process, and then handed back to a new class of workers.
Crawford fears that “occasions for the exercise of judgment are diminished” in the workplace, that Pavlovs are being replaced by Pavlovian pups; he fears that we are fast becoming a nation of clerks.
In light of this undesirable state of affairs, Shop Classproposes manual labor as an alternative route to a rewarding career in postindustrial America. Here, Crawford draws