There’s an old joke about a banker whose plumber charged him £250 for a two-minute job to fix a leaking tap.  “I don’t earn that kind of money in the City!” the banker told the plumber.  “Yeah!” replied the plumber, “I didn’t either.  That’s why I switched to plumbing.”

The joke spoke to a pervading anxiety that the financial rewards of white collar work may be meagre compensation for the costs it exacts.  Now, along comes Matthew Crawford to rub salt in the wound with his thesis that the manual trades may also be more intrinsically rewarding.

The Case for Working with Your Hands (published in the US as Shop Class as Soulcraft) owes more to Marx than I had appreciated from reading reviews of the book. Crawford provides a critique of the alienation of work in corporate capitalism. He extrapolates the trends that Marx identified in 19th Century manual labour to show how so-called ‘knowledge workers’ in contemporary capitalism are subject to the same phenomenon. The argument is not new. What differentiates this book is that, while Crawford writes from the perspective of an academic philosopher, he builds his argument from his own direct experience in the manual trades (electrician, motorcycle engineer) and desk work (a writer abstracts of academic papers, a research fellow for a Washington think tank).

Crawford finds that his experience of manual work is more intellectually challenging and more intrinsically satisfying than his experience of knowledge work. As an electrician and running his own motorcycle repair shop, he finds engagement in problem solving, in creating something and working to demonstrable and tangible standards. There is holistic pleasure in working with both hands and brains, and daily experience of failure from which one learns, accumulates tacit knowledge and acquires mastery.

He contrasts this with our normal experience of alienation from work both as workers and as consumers. At work, jobs have been overwhelmed by bureaucracy and the stripping away of much of their intellectual content as the focus of corporations becomes the creation of maximum value for shareholders rather than for end-users. As consumers, we have no interaction with the products that we purchase which are designed to ‘free’ us from the need to fix or maintain them ourselves. He cites a model of Mercedes car which does not include so much as a dipstick to check the oil. The car still needs its oil levels to be topped up regularly but the owner is expected to leave this to the service engineer.

Crawford laments that in most organisational settings, work is not so much about mastery of craft but mastery of the dynamics of the team. He argues that the focus of management is to foster a certain sensibility in employees rather than require high standards in the application of skills. He gives a powerful account of his disappointment with his first job after completing his master’s degree. Employed to write abstracts of papers, he found that this was far from being the journey into knowledge that he had imagined. It turned out to be a mutilated form of intellectual work where the quality of his output — the integrity of his summarising of authors’work — mattered less than the number of abstracts that he could produce in a day. His colleagues were damaged people — including one who used heroin on the job and took pleasure in sabotaging his work by including in his abstracts outrageous material which his employers, none the wiser, would subsequently publish.  Crawford asks:

“How was it that I, once a proudly self-employed electrician, had ended up among these walking wounded, a ‘knowledge worker’ at a salary of $23,000? I hadn’t gone to graduate school for the sake of a career (rather, I wanted guidance reading some difficult books), but once I had the master’s degree I felt like I belonged to a certain order of society, and was entitled to its forms. Despite the beautiful ties I wore, it turned out to be a more proletarian existence than I had known as a manual worker.”

Crawford finds it perverse that Western democracies are alert to the dangers of a concentration of political power but not to the risks of concentrated corporate power. He advocates that, as consumers, we should show apply to our purchasing sensitivity to the impact of the production of goods and services on human dignity — in the same way that many routinely consider environmental issues. At work, he favours occupations which offer face-to-face interactions rather than control by remote forces, responsibility for one’s work, and solidarity between colleagues.  Such solidarity, he argues, is derived from the respect for each other which comes from working to clear standards and seeing colleagues do the job well.

Crawford offers nothing constructive for the masses of people who work in large organisations. The consolations of the trades cannot be readily established in the office.  Crawford himself acknowledges that to address the problems he identifies would require a revolution in the regulation of large corporations. Rather than hope for this, he suggests, individuals would do better adopting a ‘Stoic’ attitude — seeking out “the cracks where individual agency and the love of knowledge can be realized today, in one’s own life.” For many people, those cracks are to be found mainly in their personal space away from work  — which is a measure of the very alienation that Crawford seeks to highlight.

The Case for Working with Your Hands provides a thought-provoking critique of how we work. It offers a glimpse of a more sustaining alternative.  But it strikes me as the beginning of a discussion rather than the last word.

The Case for Working with Your Hands, by Matthew Crawford.  Available from Amazon.

Image courtesy Seattle Municipal Archive.

Rodin’s ‘The Thinker’

As part of my continuance professional development as a coach, I try to immerse myself in the psychological perspectives that inform the profession.  But recently I’ve turned as much to philosophical and social theory to make sense of the challenges that people face in their lives.  So it was with some interest that I found Julian Baggini writing in The Guardian this week on the contribution philosophy can make to helping us live well.

Baggini was reviewing a new series of books – called The Art of Living – which aims to give the general reader an overview of philosophical insights into our age.  He finds that the books’authors have interesting and thought-provoking things to say about such subjects as illness, hunger or even fashion.  But they tend to reach conclusions that others commonly reach without recourse to the likes of Aristotle or Heidegger.

So while philosophy may have a historic mission to help us live well, it is not uniquely placed to do so.  Rather, Baggini sees its value in the scepticism it can bring to more simplistic approaches to finding fulfilment or contentment.  He’s particularly thinking about self-help:

The most important respect in which philosophy differs from – and is in some sense superior to – self-help is that it encourages us to think about the value of ends and not just the means to achieve them. In theory, self-help could do this too, but in general, the genre is focused on helping you to get what you want, not questioning whether you’re right to want it. Many bestsellers promise you instant confidence, greater powers of persuasion, and stress-free productivity. That we should be more confident, persuasive or productive is taken for granted.

Philosophy, in contrast, is about stepping back and questioning these assumptions.

If this is philosophy’s contribution, it is a valuable one.  But it strikes me that philosophy has no unique claim here either.  While no philosopher, I’ve found in my coaching work and working as a strategist in corporate life that scrutiny of assumed objectives, rather than finessing of means, often unlocks development.

A small example from my time in the BBC.  Not many years ago, the BBC used to broadcast its main evening news at 9pm.  Was its purpose to transmit a news bulletin at this given time every evening, or to provide its audience with the best possible take on the day’s news at the optimal time in the schedule?  Once we began to question whether broadcasting the news at 9pm was the best way to serve the audience, it soon became obvious that 10pm was much better.  This was true for editorial reasons because at 10pm the day’s domestic stories were more likely to be resolved.  It was also true for reasons relating to audience availability because people seem to prefer to turn to the news to round off their night rather than have it disrupt the evening’s entertainment.  When the BBC eventually shifted the 9pm news to 10pm, this was interpreted at the time as purely an opportunistic response to ITV vacating the slot.  In fact, the rationale had been laid long before through rational and sceptical enquiry of long unquestioned assumptions – which is why, when the opportunity came, the BBC was able to move so decisively.

Similarly, in my coaching, I find clients seem to benefit most when they take the time to explore why they seek a particularly end rather than fixate too quickly on engineering the means.  I’ve had clients who have come to me feeling stuck in their current job and desperate to leave who end up finding renewed commitment to their role and progressing rapidly.  Equally, I’ve had people wanting to make an impact at their current organisation who, after consideration, form the view that they’d actually rather move on.

Any form of rigorous enquiry takes you out of habitual, day-to-day modes of thinking and gives you perspective.  The paradigm shift helps you understand your situation afresh and, hopefully, make more robust choices. Now it may be that the spirit of enquiry behind such scrutiny draws on philosophy’s logical tradition.  But the distinctive contribution of philosophy to personal development lies in what it can offer as one of many perspectives, not as a standalone methodology.

Baggini says:

Philosophy is at its most engaged when it is impure. What is being recovered from the Ancient Greek model is not some lost idea of philosophy’s pure essence, but the idea that philosophy is mixed up with everything else. The challenge for those who champion philosophy’s usefulness is to show how it can fit in with the rest of life, not stand as master over it.

He advocates drawing on philosophy as a rich resource among many that contribute to our understanding of the good life.

I like this idea of eclecticism of theory.  As a coach, I draw on leadership thinking, strategy analysis and, yes, self-help writing alongside psychology, sociology and philosophy.  Diversity of perspective generates greater and richer insights. If the different perspectives ultimately lead to broadly similar truths, that at least points to their robustness.

Image courtesy Innoxiuss.

Loch Lomond, Scotland

Book review: A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit

Rebecca Solnit writes non-fiction as if it were a work of poetry. A Field Guide to Getting Lost is part cultural history, part philosophy: a meditation on loss and being lost.

The meaning of these experiences – the familiar falling away and the unfamiliar appearing – is different today than it was in the past.  19th century travellers thought nothing of being off course for days at a time; for us, anxiety sets in within minutes of losing our way.  People had the skills to navigate the natural landscape and with this came a sense of optimism about their ability to find their way and survive.  Today,  even those who walk in the wilderness lack this familiarity with the landscape and rely on mobile phones to get them out of trouble.

For Rebecca Solnit, to live this way is to miss something of the very essence of life: “Never to get lost is not to live.”  Indeed, her theme is less the hazards of getting lost and more a hymn to losing oneself – the life of discovery that comes with living with uncertainty.

One chapter explores the mythology of captives who come to embrace the culture that enslaves them.  Such as Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, who went to America as a Spanish conquistador, one of only four survivors of a ship that landed in Florida in 1528.  He tried to travel west but he and his men gradually fell to illness and exposure, eventually being held for several years by Native Americans, escaping finally to reach not just his destination but also a respect and sympathy for the people he had initially come to conquer:

He had gone about naked, shed his skin like a snake, had lost his greed, his fear, been stripped of almost everything a human being could lose and live, but he had learned several languages, he had become a healer, he had come to admire and identify with the Native nations among whom he lived; he was not who he had been…  The terms in which to describe the extraordinary metamorphosis of the soul did not exist, at least for him.  He was among the first, and the first to come back and tell the tale, of Europeans lost in the Americas, and like many of them he ceased to be lost not by returning but by turning into something else.

The story pre-figures the American narrative of settler children who were captured by the Natives and became “adopted” by them.  Many of these – despite witnessing the murder of their families – became attached to their new culture and resisted attempts to “rescue” them, so far did they travel from their previous life, identity and values.

All this may seem distant, too, from contemporary life, but Solnit suggests that each of us routinely faces similar existential challenge – if, mostly, in less extreme form:

Reading these stories, it’s tempting to think that the arts to be learned are those of tracking, hunting, navigating, skills of survival and escape.  Even in the everyday world of the present, an anxiety to survive manifests itself in cars and clothes for far more rugged occasions than those at hand, as though to express some sense of the toughness of things and of readiness to face them.  But the real difficulties, the real arts of survival, seem to lie in more subtle realms.   There, what’s called for is a kind of resilience of the psyche, a readiness to deal with what comes next.  These captives lay out in a stark and dramatic way what goes on in everyday life: the transitions whereby you cease to be who you were.  Seldom is it as dramatic, but nevertheless, something of this journey between the near and the far goes on in everyday life.  Sometimes an old photograph, an old friend, an old letter will remind you that you are not who you once were, for the person who dwelt among them, valued this, chose that, wrote thus, no longer exists.  Without noticing it you have traversed a great distance; the strange has become familiar and the familiar if not strange at least awkward or uncomfortable, an outgrown garment.  And some people travel far more than others.  There are those who receive as birthright an adequate or at least unquestioned sense of self and those who set out to reinvent themselves, for survival or for satisfaction, and travel far.  Some people inherit values and practices as a house they inhabit; some of us have to burn down that house, find our own ground, build from scratch, even as a psychological metamorphosis.

Towards the end of the book she relates, through the voice of a follower of Buddhism, the story of Turtle Man, who was blind and hustled a living selling chocolates around the streets of San Francisco.  When he would reach street corners, Turtle Man would shout out for help to cross the road – not knowing who was around and simply waiting for someone to show up.  The narrator imagines what it would be like to live with the only certainty that each day would bring barriers which you would need help to negotiate.  And he reflects that it might hold lessons for the rest of us:

It’s okay to become like Turtle Man, it’s okay sometimes to experience not knowing what to do next, to run into a barrier.  It’s okay to realize that life has a mysterious quality to it, it has an element of uncertainty, it’s okay to realize that we do need help, that calling out for help is a very generous act because it allows others to help us and it allows us to be helped.  Sometimes we’re offering help, and then this hostile world becomes a very different place.  It is a world where there is help being received and help being given, and in such a world this compelling urgent world according to me loses some of its urgency and desperation.  It’s not so necessary in a generous world, in a world where help is available, to be so adamant about the world according to me.

Rebecca Solnit describes herself as an activist.  In other words, she’s someone who is dissatisfied with the world as it is.  There’s an aura of loneliness, as well as solitude, which pervades this book.  Reflecting on the death of her friend, Marine, when they were both young women, she recognises that even in death Marine had made choices which opened her to experience in life and which could have ended differently, at a time when Solnit herself closed off options.

A Field Guide to Getting Lost disrupts the continuities which inform our sense of self.  To find our way in the world, we must not simply tolerate uncertainty, we should embrace it.  There’s discomfort and pain on this path, to be sure.  But there’s also magnaminity and ease with life.  For Solnit, to be open to loss is the only way to know what it is to be human.  Equally, it is impossible to experience loss and stay the same.

A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit.

Available from Amazon.