Matthew Crawford's Shop Class as Soulcraft is a book worth buying, marking up, and arguing with. As soon as I read the excerpt in the New York Times Sunday Magazine this spring, I knew I had to buy it—if only to see if the latent references to the work of Albert Borgmann were in fact made explicit and fleshed out in the full book. They are, and any book that brings Borgmann's critique of technology to a wider audience is a good thing. I'll be posting excerpts from Crawford this week, with some comments along the way, and a slightly more in-depth response of my own next week. Here he documents how modern managers sought to systematically remove the element of craft (and therefore expense) from what once could have been called the creation of cultural goods—but now is simply manufacturing.

craft, industry, matthew crawford, taylorism

Andy:

The tenets of scientific management were given their first and frankest articulation by Frederick Winslow Taylor, whose Principles of Scientific Management was hugely influential in the early decades of the twentieth century. . . . Taylor writes, “The managers assume . . . the burden of gathering together all of the traditional knowledge which in the past has been possessed by the workmen and then of classifying, tabulating, and reducing this knowledge to rules, laws, and formulae.” Scattered craft knowledge is concentrated in the hands of the employer, then doled out again to workers in the form of minute instructions needed to perform some part of what is now a work process. This process replaces what was previously an integral activity, rooted in craft tradition and experience, animated by the worker’s own mental image of, and intention toward, the finished product. Thus, according to Taylor, “All possible brain work should be removed from the shop and centered in the planning or laying-out department. . . .” Once the cognitive aspects of the job are located in a separate management class, or better yet in a process that, once designed, requires no ongoing judgment or deliberation, skilled workers can be replaced with unskilled workers at a lower rate of pay. Taylor writes that the “full possibilities” of his system “will not have been realized until almost all of the machines in the shop are run by men who are of smaller caliber and attainments, and who are therefore cheaper than those required under the old system.”

It is oh so easy to lambast the work of Thomas Kinkade, who (I am told) is the best-compensated artist who has ever lived. But in this fascinating commentary Joe Carter takes a more nuanced, and therefore interesting, approach.

kitsch, thomas kinkade, visual art

Andy:

No doubt many people who would praise a rich, popular, establishment-approved hack like Andy Warhol despise Kinkade for being a rich, popular, evangelical-approved hack. But I think a solid case against Kinkade can be made on purely aesthetic criteria, especially when you compare his work to a superior artist.

Consider two works of on similar themes. Both are images of the Water Tower in Chicago. Both have similar elements—a carriage, trees, people with umbrellas. Indeed, paintings are almost identical in theme and content, if not in style.

And yet the first is unquestionably technically superior. The use of texture and shadow puts the viewer within the picture. You can almost feel the cold Chicago air and hear the sounds of the serene yet bustling city.

The second painting, however, distances the viewer from the scene. Light is overused (notice the light coming from every window and the background lights that resemble a brushfire), presenting a faux golden glow that is unrealistic and dull. And the carriage, though more sharply drawn than in the first painting, is two-dimensional and distracting. While the first work is worthy of gracing a museum wall, the second is only worthy of garnishing a cheap greeting card.

As you could probably guess, the second painting is by Thomas Kinkade, circa 2004.

But what about the first painting, the more aesthetically superior rendition of the Water Tower? It too is by Thomas Kinkade; he painted it in 1998.

This is what is so distressing about Thomas Kinkade: He is both a creator of some of the most inspiring paintings of the past two decades and a producer of some of the worst schlock ever manufactured by a talented artist.

The world-changing potential of new technologies is often best realized not by people whose initial goal was to change the world, but by those who dove into smaller passion projects, put in their hours and honed their craft without an eye on earth-shattering outcomes.

africa, europe, georgia, horizons of the possible, internet, journalism, kenya, protests

Nate:

From his experience as a founder of Global Voices, an aggregator of citizen media from around the world, Mr. Zuckerman says he has learned to value the roots laid down by a community of bloggers.

In Kenya, he said, bloggers were important commentators and reporters in 2007-8 on a disputed election, and people would ask why there were so many bloggers in Kenya.

It turned out, he said, that “Kenya has the second-most bloggers in Africa and that mostly they are not writing about politics; many are writing about rugby.” There was, he said, “a fascinating latent capacity — people who knew how to use the tools, knew how to write well, to tell a story with words and pictures.”

The Russia-Georgia war, he said, offered a contrast.

“Suddenly a bunch of people flocked to blogging tools,” he said. “We had never heard about of lot of those people. A number of people were manufacturing blogs from whole cloth for propaganda purposes. It was hard to know who they were, if they were credible. In Kenya, we knew who they were; we knew their favorite rugby team.”

Well, how could I not link to this? (See chapter 12 of Culture Making.)

books, change the world

Andy:

Exorbitant claims are inherent in another title genre: things that have changed the world. That list includes books, ideas, beliefs, decisions, inventions, plants, bridges, gigs, battles, speeches, photographs and molecules. Some authors prefer a single item: the ocean (Atlantic), voyage (the Mayflower’s), car (Model T), corporation (East India Company), business strategy (franchising), telescope (Galileo’s), painting (Picasso’s “Guernica”) and Olympics (Rome, 1960). Others favor a set: the 5 equations, the 10 geographical ideas, the 12 books, the 50 battles, the 100 maps, the 1,001 inventions. . . .

Ultimately, the best locutions are those that credit quotidian, trivial objects with earthshaking influence, like “Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World,” by Mark Kurlansky. The more obvious the significance of the subject, the less successful the title. After all, where’s the element of surprise or wit in “A Man Without Equal: Jesus, the Man Who Changed the World”?

Some of the more unlikely candidates endowed with superhuman powers by authors include “Tea: The Drink That Changed the World,” “Mauve: How One Man Invented a Color That Changed the World,” “Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World” and “Sugar: The Grass That Changed the World.”

Sheena Matheiken's Uniform Project is the latest in a series of web-documented undertakings wherein a young woman wears the same dress every day for a month, a season, a year. Interestingly, though though all the project descriptions circle the same themes of beauty, image, creativity, consumption, discipline, feminism and femininity, each one winds up having its unique angle. Andrea Rosen's A–Z Uniforms (1991–2002) has a definite performance-art edge; Alex Martin's Brown Dress (2005–06) called itself "a one-woman show against fashion"; Tala Strauss wrote last year about her month-long Dress Project in terms of contemplation, fasting, and liturgy. The Uniform Project, in just its 48th day, consistently puts creativity and cuteness at the forefront, perhaps bending the sustainability goal to make way for an endless parade of accessories that are at times so comprehensive as to render the actual uniform superfluous. Interesting that the repeated-dresses in all these projects were dark colored and generally simple (perhaps at least partway explaining why the participants all report all being surprised at how few of their colleagues noticed the fashion-repeats; presumably a Lime Green Dress Project might play out a little differently. Or maybe not.)

clothing, consumption, creativity, discipline, fashion, fasting, women

Nate:

The Idea: Starting May 2009, I have pledged to wear one dress for one year as an exercise in sustainable fashion. Here’s how it works: There are 7 identical dresses, one for each day of the week. Every day I will reinvent the dress with layers, accessories and all kinds of accouterments, the majority of which will be vintage, hand-made, or hand-me-down goodies. Think of it as wearing a daily uniform with enough creative license to make it look like I just crawled out of the Marquis de Sade’s boudoir.

The Uniform Project is also a year-long fundraiser for the Akanksha Foundation, a grassroots movement that is revolutionizing education in India. At the end of the year, all contributions will go toward Akanksha’s School Project to fund uniforms and other educational expenses for slum children in India.

The Story of Uniforms: I was raised and schooled in India where uniforms were a mandate in most public schools. Despite the imposed conformity, kids always found a way to bend the rules and flaunt a little personality. Boys rolled up their sleeves, wore over-sized swatches, and hiked up their pants to show off their high-tops. Girls obsessed over bangles, bindis and bad hairdos. Peaking through the sea of uniforms were the idiosyncrasies of teen style and individual flare. I now want to put the same rules to test again, only this time I’m trading in the catholic school fervor for an eBay addiction and relocating the school walls to this wonderful place called the internet.

Great observation from David Taylor. Of course, the problem is that no one gets to change "culture" or "tradition" directly—all we can do is create artifacts that might slowly reshape the ecology of a culture. And that's why we so often gravitate to "programs."

art, changing the world

Andy:

As I sat in our all-day meeting at Duke Divinity, talking about the future of a theology and arts institute, it struck me that a lot of our comments revolved around programs and activities. . . . People were offering great suggestion—suggestions I want in on. But a light bulb went off in my head at one point. It’s gone off before.

It’s a light bulb that made it into the Introduction of my book. If we really want to experience the kind of environmental conditions in which the arts will flourish in a Protestant setting—in the same way that the fruit and flora of God’s creation flourish, both in kind and degree—then we don’t need programs. The best program money could buy would still not accomplish what we yearn to see. What we need is a different theological and practical ecology. We need a different tradition.

I’m talking about a massive overhaul of a culture. In such a culture every bit of labor, every bit of a program matters. But what a culture has that a program the size of Jupiter doesn’t have is positive inertia. That’s what we need. We need for the current to be constantly and positively running in the direction of artistic flourishment, not fighting against us half the time.

Tony Woodlief is an enviably lucid writer on fatherhood and family. His blog Sand in the Gears, though (or perhaps because) it is intermittently updated, is impeccably written and well worth your time.

community, family, friendship, place

Andy:

We assemble relationships because we need them, but many of us—particularly men—shrink from intimacy, generating the modern dilemma of dense social networks afflicted with loneliness. Allan Bloom indicates this in “Love and Friendship”: “Isolation, a sense of lack of profound contact with other human beings, seems to be the disease of our time.” He decried the word “relationship” as “pallid” and “pseudoscientific,” itself an obstacle to genuine intimacy.

My 298 Facebook friends aren’t the ones who remember our dead daughter’s birthday or leave flowers at her grave. Nor among them is the pastor who baptized each of our children and waged a personal holy war to keep our marriage from crumbling years ago. We have these deeper friendships because we’ve tried to build a life in one place. They sprang up because the stuff of life happened to this cluster of us living near one another, and much of it was too joyous or heartbreaking not to share with someone. If friendship is the key to happiness, then maybe this is the key to friendship, to be enmeshed—not just tangentially or voyeuristically, but physically—in the lives of others.

There's a dark side to expanding the horizons of the possible (or, rather, of the probable).

discipline, horizons of the possible, persuasion, statistics, temptation

Nate:

Ads quoting negative behavior en masse reinforces negative behavior. Petrified Forest National Park A/B tested two versions of a sign imploring people not to steal pieces of petrified forest from the park. One mentioned large amounts of petrified forest taken away on an annual basis, the other one simply asked the visitors not to remove petrified wood. The first one actually tripled the theft ratio as it showed stealing petrified wood as something commonplace. Same effect was observed after airing an ad that implored women to vote, but mentioned that 22 million single women did not vote last year. That kind of information actually portrays not voting as more socially acceptable.

When I worked in downtown Boston one of my favorite lunchtime outings was a walk to the corner of the Public Garden where stands the lovely and oddly orientalist Ether Monument, commemorating the pioneering demonstration of the surgical anesthetic at the Massachusetts General Hospital in the mid-1840s. Ether had been around and in use for a long time, but had previously been condemned by the medical establishment. Its "discovery" represented a cultural rather than technological innovation—perhaps rendering the monument (and MGH's preserved Ether Dome museum) more crucial than it might at first seem. Indeed, its use of Biblical texts from Isaiah ("This also cometh forth from the Lord of Hosts which is wonderful and excellent in working") and Revelation (see title) presumably was intended to undermine the lingering view that dulling physical pain contradicted God's intentions.

drugs, medicine, monuments, parks, technology and change

Nate:

What the great moment in the Ether Dome really marked was something less tangible but far more significant: a huge cultural shift in the idea of pain. Operating under anesthetic would transform medicine, dramatically expanding the scope of what doctors were able to accomplish. What needed to change first wasn’t the technology - that was long since established - but medicine’s readiness to use it.

Before 1846, the vast majority of religious and medical opinion held that pain was inseparable from sensation in general, and thus from life itself. Though the idea of pain as necessary may seem primitive and brutal to us today, it lingers in certain corners of healthcare, such as obstetrics and childbirth, where epidurals and caesarean sections still carry the taint of moral opprobrium. In the early 19th century, doctors interested in the pain-relieving properties of ether and nitrous oxide were characterized as cranks and profiteers. The case against them was not merely practical, but moral: They were seen as seeking to exploit their patients’ base and cowardly instincts. Furthermore, by whipping up the fear of operations, they were frightening others away from surgery and damaging public health.

The “eureka moment” of anesthesia, like the seemingly sudden arrival of many new technologies, was not so much a moment of discovery as a moment of recognition: a tipping point when society decided that old attitudes needed to be overthrown. It was a social revolution as much as a medical one: a crucial breakthrough not only for modern medicine, but for modernity itself. It required not simply new science, but a radical change in how we saw ourselves.

This excerpt by the amazing Richard Posner is heavier sledding than most of what we post here. But it neatly ties together a theme that has woven through my reading in the past week, which included Atul Gawande's investigation of the highest health-care-cost city in the nation, Hugh Heclo's elegant book On Thinking Institutionally, and Matthew B. Crawford's aforelinked Shop Class as Soulcraft. What happens when "professionals"—people whose identity is invested in work conceived as both a calling and a community—become "service providers"? We need to recover a deeper sense of calling, not just for doctors but for "health-care consumers" as well, if we are to have any hope of slowing the rising cost of medicine.

government, medicine, professions, trends

Andy:

A deep problem is the replacement, in the medical profession as in the legal profession, of a professional model of service with a business model. In the professional model, the service provider is assured a good but not extravagant income by limitations on competition, and in exchange he is expected to avoid exploiting the ignorance of patients as he could do by performing unnecessary or low-value procedures. In the business model, the service provider endeavors to maximize his net revenues. In the case of medicine, the disparity of knowledge between provider and patient, coupled with the fear and desperation that serious illness (or just the possibility of it) engenders, enables the profit-maximizing provider often to convince the patient to undergo costly low-value treatments. Certainly the profit-maximizing health-care provider will be very relucant to refuse to provide a treatment that the patient insists upon, his insistence being made convincing by the fact that insurance will pay all or most of the cost. Insurers do try to limit their costs by refusing to approve low-value procedures—but in the face of combined pressure by provider and patient, the insurer is often forced to back down.

To return to the initial puzzle of why our peer nations are able to provide what seems, judging by outcomes, a level of health equal or superior to that of Americans at far lower cost, the only convincing answer is that the health-care providers in those nations limit treatment. I am not sure of the explanation, but the possibilities include: the professional model is more tenacious in societies less committed to free markets and a commercial culture than the United States; more of their hospitals are public and more of their doctors are public employees, who are therefore salaried rather than entrepreneurial; and Americans, being less fatalistic than most other peoples, have a more intense demand for life-extending procedures.