I was recently road-tripping the West Coast in a Saab approaching my own age. At one point it was making a grinding sound. Not the kind of grinding sound you hear when you speed up; more like a grinding sound that appears to also be saying, “I am debating whether you need to experience the Oregon countryside in all the natural glory which that patch of dirt on the side of the road offers.”

At least, that’s what the grinding sounded like to my untrained ears. My friends pulled the car over and popped the hood. I looked in at the metal, which read like a foreign script the Rosetta Stone for which I lacked. Yet, by fiddling with these pieces of metal, the guys were reassured that we were not going to be breaking down, at least probably not yet.

I drive a car just about every day. On any given day in my life, it is statistically sound to claim that I rode in or drove a car. However, when my car broke down last winter, I had to call someone to walk me through jumping it. While at least I had jumpers, I wasn’t entirely sure what to do with them.

Since that night, I have felt an extreme degree of confidence in the fact that, when my car dies, I can now jump it. Many of these challenges with cars, and other things of a practical nature, require merely being shown howrolling up your sleeves and digging into the very complex nature of material artifacts. As life has happened, many of us learn bits and pieces of practical knowledge, more by rote than by a deep grasp of mechanics, or even a shallow grasp of mechanics. It’s odd  that in a world far more dependent upon the engineering of our technology, founded on the power of mechanics in a way that Archimedes and Bacon could have only imagined, many of us are ignorant of how precisely that world works.

I am not the only one to notice this phenomenon. Matthew Crawford referenced this trend years ago in "Shop Class as Soulcraft," a piece for The New Atlantis that Crawford developed more fully in a book by the same name. Early on in his discussion, Crawford notes,

A decline in tool use would seem to betoken a shift in our mode of inhabiting the world: more passive and more dependent. And indeed, there are fewer occasions for the kind of spiritedness that is called forth when we take things in hand for ourselves, whether to fix them or to make them.

Making things is an incredibly human endeavor: When Socrates distinguishes between living and living well, he turns to the availability of artifacts. Our making and fixing arise from an incredibly human impulse. Making calls us to be spirited because through it, we encounter, shape, and come to understand the way things are and workartifacts and the things of nature.

Perhaps someone may object at this point that man’s highest act is contemplation, according to Aristotle; such is a decently argued and reasonable position to hold. In extreme sum, Aristotle holds that to know the ultimate cause and the effects that proceed from that cause is the highest act of our highest faculty, namely, the intellect.

However, even Aristotle notes that man must eat. If man must eat, it is right that he eat like a man and not like an animalin a manner that befits the rational/social/political modification to his animality. So begins a cultural movement that will eventually give us Julia Childs and Jiro Dreams of Sushi.

What I mean to say is this: to know causes fulfills an innate desire in man. The one who knows more causes and their effects discursively is the one who approaches being known as a “wise man.” But I would argue that we cannot begin to claim wisdom while we fail to engage the real world. The philosopher who knows one artbe it the art of music, the art of electricity, of motorcycle maintenance, carpentry, sewing, or any of the making and fixing arts which have shaped our worldwill be more capable than his fellow who never has, all other things equal. The philosopher who is also a mechanic provides his intellect with far more material for abstraction than the philosopher who remains isolated from the world in which causes, effects, and their manifold relationships continue to both astound us and reveal themselves to us.

But leaving aside the abstractions of the philosopher: In terms of real life, we exist in an economy that in a certain respect does estrange a man from his labor, to borrow a term from Marx, and estranges him in and through increasingly abstract and virtual work. I have entered many things into many internet forms. I’m not always entirely sure to what purpose: to track records upon records, “trafficking in abstraction,” as Crawford calls it? When I cook dinner for my family and friends, a clear effect always results: food on the table that (hopefully) is both lovely and delicious. Is this to say that I would stop writing in favor of cooking, or quit my day job to become a chef? No. Rather it is to say that there is a good in doing that activity.

One of the strangest things to me is when I see people looked down upon because they are “just electricians” or “just plumbers” or “just seamstresses” or “just mechanics.” Yet, if my house wiring goes down, my piping breaks, my clothes need alteration, or my car is broken, it is these individuals, not me, who know the intricacies of the world that I inhabit. Crawford blames the underlying disdain for trade work on Frederick Taylor’s Principles of Scientific Management:

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 lay-out department.”

As noted above, a certain level of drudgery and dehumanization exists within the white-collar world as well. It is not as if data-entry, requiring what abstract cognitive skills it may, is the freedom of contemplation that Aristotle aligned with happiness. Ford’s factory became rote in the extreme; equally rote are the many files and clerical work in the modern office. Crawford rightly identifies the tension that we have: between thinking and doing. To unite those twoto connect our intellect to our actions and our actions to a demonstrable effect in the external worldis to find sign of the union of man’s soul and body.

We live in a world of causes and effects. To remain willfully ignorant of the world in which we live, which is now a quite mechanical and technical one, is to allow things to master us. To the extent that I depend upon a car and am incapable of fixing it, I have given the car a certain mastery over me. My ignorance creates a certain slavery to the things, to an economy that encourages me to replace rather than repair, creating a material world that is increasingly transient. Nowhere is my enslavement to my things more apparent than when I have been on-hold with Comcast for two hours and wondering what exactly the voices in the phone meant by, “We will be there between the hours of 8 a.m. and noon.”

Should one person learn all the arts? Probably not. But to learn one or two is to begin to understand how things work. To learn them well, so that you understand why one effect, and not another, results, is to gain a bit more understanding of the natural world, and find yourself more a bit more free. The manual arts teach us to employ cause and effect in such a way that when the engine kicks on again, we can look at it and see it as good.

Or at least, good enough to do what I need.