To realize our full potential at work, we combine our capacity for abstract thinking with our physical capabilities. How we balance these functions affects what we can accomplish personally and as a nation in productive manufacture.
As we come to depend on automation and computing to plan, design, and execute our work and our leisure, the gap between abstraction and physical contact with materials and tools is growing. We run the danger of becoming stretched and hollow. This problem has not gone unnoticed, nor has the connection between the skills we value and the state of manufacturing.
Probably the best exposition on this serious bifurcation of body and mind is offered by Matthew B. Crawford in his recent book, Shop Class as Soulcraft. Crawford says we are losing our ability to make things and, therefore, the ability to work with our hands. Crawford is a philosopher with a doctorate from the University of Chicago. He is also a member of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia. However, he has chosen to make his living working in his own motorcycle repair shop. When asked what he does, he replies, “I fix bikes.”
That’s bikes, not bytes. Fixing bikes requires hand skills well beyond the nimble thumbs used to operate BlackBerries and games. Crawford recognizes the satisfaction a person (the soul) feels when a physical job has been accomplished, a reward he sees as far in excess of the rewards, if any, of phone and computer work at a desk.