A Poorly-Made Case

So.  I've just been reading The Case for Working With Your Hands: Or Why Office Work is Bad For Us and Fixing Things Feels Good by Matthew Crawford.  

He argues in favour of craft activities, of building and repairing material items, and compares this favourably with mind-numbing office work.  He mourns the diappearance of US 'shop' classes (where light engineering and automotive mechanics were taught, as far as I can work out - the classes that the Fonz and Danny Zucko took). 

Part of his argument is that, far from being a dumb, repetitive, uncreative activity. much of such work is highly intellectual and requires imaginative engagement with the immediate problem.  He argues for the promulgation of tacit knowledge - handed down and shared by experts - rather than book-learned understanding.

Most of his examples come from his own experiences of repairing specialist, classic and high-performance motorbikes.  Previously, he was a philosophy PhD, and he has the theoretical underpinnings to support his arguments.   

Now, I expected to like this book when I bought it - it contains a strong criticism of the office world, and of large corporates (and help desks, of vanilla standard solutions to standard problems which result in no capacity to deal with the unusual or the difficult, and so on and so forth).  He speaks eloquently of the challenges inherent in repairing old machines - recycling, if you will.

And yet, ironically, his argument is broken in a many places, and needs substantial repair itself. 

He argues from far, far too small a set of examples - all related to the highly-specialist repair jobs he is involved with - but which aren't necessarily typical of how much of engineering works.  And he links this work to the thrills of those who ride the machines 'at their limits',  in a petrolhead frenzy of speed and risk.  These challenges seem at one point to be just as necessary to his argument as the pleasues of the repair work itself - because only the high-performance riders can understand what he does and how knowledgeable he is at it.  

While mounting a fairly standard attack on Taylorism, he misunderstands much about the world of office work - eg in consigning all of IT to the rubbish pile as mind-numbing slavery, he misunderstands the pleasures of coding, software fixing (repairing again), information analysis (for some) and so forth.  He's never done it himself, hasn't checked it with others, and gets it horribly wrong.  Not all of IT is wordprocessing or email.  Basically, he confuses consumers and creators of digital technology - and it harms his argument greatly.   

If his overall arguments are weakened like this, he is also limited in the details of his piece.  He misunderstand's Godel's Incompleteness Theorem - in a manner typical of a philosopher or cultural studies specialist, who argues from analogy but fails to even attempt to grasp the nuts-and-bolts of the maths.  He seems to want the language of the machine shop to filter into his narrative, luching into unnecessary crude sexism on occassions.

These are just a few examples.  Overall, his argument starts, but doesn't really get going and is severely underpowered.  It needs to be stripped down and rebuilt from the beginning - with some of the older, shoddier lazy parts replaced altogether.  Which is a great pity - I believe there is a really good to be written on this subject, which makes a case somewhat like Matthew Crawford's.

But this isn't it.