The book I discussed two weeks ago – Matthew B. Crawford’s Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work – has been getting a lot of attention in the US.  The author himself wrote a long piece in the New York Times about his super-short journey from Director of a Washington think-tank to motorcycle mechanic.  There were a couple of quotes I liked in particular:

But what if such work [eg, a telephone linesman] answers … 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.”

A manager [in the corporate world] 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 [...] 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.

Francis Fukuyama, no less, also wrote a piece in the New York Times about the book.  He notes that Crawford identifies in the knowledge economy a “false dichotomy between knowing and doing.”  Whereas,

most forms of real knowledge, including self-knowledge, come from the effort to struggle with and master the brute reality of material objects – loosening a bolt without stripping its threads, or backing a semi rig into a loading dock.  All these activities, if done well, require knowledge both about the world as it is and about yourself, and your own limitations.  They can’t be learned simply by following rules, as a computer does; they require intuitive knowledge that comes from long experience and repeated encounters with difficulty and failure.

And it prompted a survey by Stanley Fish in his excellent blog in the New York Times of the tradition involving motorcycles and philosophy.  He cites Pirsig of the famed Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance:

The division of the world into parts,” says Pirsig, “is something everyone does,” but in doing it, “something is always killed” — and what is killed is an awareness of and contact with the world before analytic thought has done its (necessarily) reductive work.

To read Matthew B. Crawford’s article, click here.  To read Francis Fukuyama’s, click here.  To read Stanley Fish’s blog, click here.