6
Doing to develop confidence
Matter exists for him. It is stone, slate, wood, copper … The true engraver starts on a work in a daydream of volition. He is a worker. He is an artisan. He has all the glory of the labourer.
– GASTON BACHELARD
Here is the story of a brilliant intellectual, Matthew B. Crawford, who holds a doctorate in philosophy and who worked as the executive director of a Washington think tank. In a fascinating book, Shop Class as Soulcraft, he describes how thoroughly depressing he found his office work, even starting to doubt his own value and usefulness, and how he recovered his confidence by quitting and opening a motorcycle-repair shop!
Crawford shows how easily we can lose confidence in ourselves when we spend our days in an office and have no precise grasp of what we are doing or what are the effects of our actions. Conversely, he shows us how manual work, the fact of working with our hands and modifying the real world with our actions, can have a liberating effect, both emotionally and intellectually. Using humour and sharply drawn observation, he compares the satisfactions provided by his two successive occupations, offering a striking case for manual labour generally and a mechanic’s job in particular. He convincingly shows that the manual labour he performs has its mental element, and that it is in fact more nourishing intellectually than many less-manual jobs. Based on his own experience, he revisits the experience of those who work to make or repair things – jobs that are disappearing in a world where we simply buy, throw out, and replace. He talks of the pleasure he feels at immersing his hands in crankshaft oil, at doing something tangible. He describes the direct responsibility he feels when a motorcycle’s owner puts the machine in his hands, and his satisfaction when he overcomes the difficulty of making the repair. He feels confidence in himself, and a shared joy when the owner comes to collect his motorcycle. This is the happiness of what he calls his ‘face-to-face’ with the client.
‘A man is relieved and gay,’ wrote Emerson, ‘when he has put his heart into his work and done his best; but what he has said and done otherwise shall give him no peace.’ Surprisingly, repairing motorcycles gave Crawford, an intellectual, the opportunity to ‘put his heart into his work’ and ‘do his best’. He hadn’t been able to do this before. At his important post in his influential think tank, he’d spent his time juggling political sensitivities and political footballs. His work consisted in reading and synthesising academic articles, interpreting them to align with the ideological tenor of the think tank which paid his salary. If his experience was particular, he nonetheless experienced a form of alienation that is familiar to many of us: executing tasks that make no sense. He also encountered another common problem: because he had to churn out his syntheses at a rapid rate, he couldn’t read the scholarly articles in depth, and he produced shoddy work, deriving no pleasure from it.
By contrast, when he is repairing motorcycles, he takes pleasure in spending time on a malfunction that resists his efforts, in doing so truly grappling with it, and deepening his ability. He feels again what he felt at the age of fourteen when he worked as an apprentice electrician: the pleasure of doing something concrete and seeing the results. He tells how he never got tired, when he’d finished a wiring job, of turning on the switch and saying: ‘And there was light!’ We’ve all had that experience. We have just finished fixing a shelf, or repairing a piece of furniture, or adding a coat of paint and we exclaim, filled with a joy that exceeds our small accomplishment: ‘That’s work well done!’
In our work lives, we too often lack the opportunity to rejoice in this way; we are cut off from this joy.
Crawford contrasts his own joyful rediscovery of manual labour with the dominant ideology of his times: ‘The flitting disposition is pressed upon workers from above by the current generation of management revolutionaries, for whom the ethic of craftsmanship is actually something to be rooted out from the workforce … The preferred role model is the management consultant, who swoops in and out and whose very pride lies in his lack of any particular expertise. Like the ideal consumer, the management consultant presents an example of soaring freedom, in light of which the manual trades appear cramped and paltry: the plumber with his butt crack, peering under the sink.’ What Crawford says rings all the truer given that the reality experienced by the new generation of managers rarely conforms to this picture of ‘soaring freedom’. A large number of management consultants and other corporate types who never peer under a sink suffer from not knowing what it is exactly that they do, what purpose it actually serves. Their lack of self-confidence therefore has a very simple explanation: in the face of criticism, they have no concrete and objective reality to point to. A baker can always argue to his boss that he does good work: the freshly baked and delicious loaf is there, and you need only taste it to agree. Artisans have an easier time being confident: their talent is expressed objectively, tangibly, in the objects they make – and they often earn a better living than office workers. We’ve all met those plumbers and electricians. They aren’t looking for compliments or for anyone to express a liking for them. The leak has been fixed, the light has come back on: that’s all they need.
Reading Crawford’s book, we understand better what our problem is today. We make fewer and fewer things, both in our professional lives and at home. When our car breaks down, we drop it off at the garage. Even the mechanic spends more time looking at a computer screen than tightening bolts. Soon we won’t even have to drive our car to the garage, since cars will drive themselves. When our telephone or our laptop computer stops working, repair programs launch automatically. And when the updates no longer solve the problem, we toss the thing away and buy a new one. When we are looking for warmth, we are now in the habit of regulating the thermostat. We no longer perform those activities that, not so long ago, were part of a man’s daily routine: cutting and splitting logs, stacking firewood, setting fireplaces, keeping a fire going. When we are trying to find our way, we no longer open a map and ask passers-by to help us: we follow orders from our GPS. We are losing our direct relationship with things. Super-connected thanks to our digital devices, we are more and more disconnected from the world of making. Our thumbs glide over the surface of our smartphones, and we glide over the surface of things. ‘The civilised man has built a coach,’ said Emerson, ‘but has lost the use of his feet. He is supported on crutches, but lacks so much support of muscle.’ Hard to have confidence in yourself when you can no longer walk. Think how panicked we get when our iPhone won’t work. Without our digital crutches, we can no longer get around. When we neglect the fact that we have a body, we lose the sensual relation to the world that is so central to confidence. James Baldwin, who as it happens was influenced by Emerson, has written well about sensuality and the risk we run of losing confidence in ourselves when we ignore our body and our senses: ‘The word “sensual” is not intended to bring to mind quivering dusky maidens or priapic black studs. I am referring to something much simpler and much less fanciful. To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the breaking of bread.’ To be ‘present’ in what we do, there is nothing ‘simpler’, nothing more ‘down to earth’, than to roll up one’s sleeves and get one’s hands dirty. Baldwin, who lived an expatriate life in France after World War II and returned to the United States in the 1950s, pursues this train of thought with seemingly ironic comments on the quality of bread in the States, but his irony is quickly replaced by an earnest reflection on confidence: ‘It will be a great day for America, incidentally, when we begin to eat bread again, instead of the blasphemous and tasteless foam rubber that we have substituted for it. And I am not being frivolous now, either. Something very sinister happens to the people of a country when they begin to distrust their own reactions as deeply as they do here, and become as joyless as they have become … The person who distrusts himself has no touchstone for reality – for this touchstone can be only oneself.’ For Baldwin, it’s impossible to have self-confidence when you are so cut off from your body and your senses that you’re not even aware of what you’re putting in your mouth. This diatribe, written in the middle of last century, resonates particularly today in the age of industrially-raised animals. How can we have confidence in ourselves when we seem to have lost touch with even our most basic senses? The indifference that Americans showed to the ‘tasteless foam rubber’ they called bread struck Baldwin as a symptom of the crisis of confidence that Americans were then experiencing. In making his case against a white America that is incapable of even the most basic sensuality, Baldwin shows that ‘whatever white people do not know about Negroes reveals, precisely and inexorably, what they do not know about themselves’.
When he was recently asked about the most important changes that have occurred in our time, the French philosopher Michel Serres unhesitatingly answered that it was the disappearance of traditional rural life. It has meant not only the disappearance of the men and women who worked the land, but of their world, which was a world where men made things and knew what they were making, where they had a sensual relation to their bodies and material things. A world where, once their work was done, they could see the fruit of their labour. Their pride, their identity, came from the tangible evidence of their work; and when life dealt them a harsh blow, that visible presence of their work gave them back a little of their lost confidence.
The cabinetmaker who builds a table out of wood knows what he is making. The baker who kneads his dough and bakes his bread does, too. Both take all the more pleasure in their task when they do it well, derive all the more joy when they improve. Each feels a sense of satisfaction in giving pleasure to his clients, who return to him because they recognise his talent.
This simplicity, this direct and immediate recognition of our work, is what we are most cut off from. At the office, we ‘work with our hands’ less and less and spend more time in meetings, or looking at our computers, or dealing with emails and filling out spreadsheets. We work to achieve goals that rarely have any direct bearing on the quality of the finished product. It is not uncommon for us never to see the finished product, and not to particularly care. In consequence, we don’t see ourselves reflected in our work. We are evaluated on whether we achieve intermediate goals set by managers. We have to respect protocols, check the work of our subordinates, and report to our superiors. Hard in this context to say just what our profession is. When at night an artisan tells his child about his work, the child understands what his mother or father has spent the day doing. By contrast, many children of corporate executives don’t understand what their parents do for a living. Once, when I was giving a philosophy workshop in a first-grade class, a seven-year-old girl told me: ‘My mum’s work is going to meetings.’
So what does the idea of ‘good work’ mean here? Can we still talk about ‘expertise’? Where can we find pride if we no longer know what we do? How can we have confidence in our talent if we don’t know what that talent is? Work-related stress and the increase in burnout and depression are largely due to the disappearance of traditional occupations. As process and striving for intermediate goals become all-important, the yardstick for success becomes money. But the compensation is largely illusory. The sense that you’re not making anything tangible can’t be erased by higher pay and the opportunity for greater consumption. If it did, there wouldn’t be such a high rate of burnout among well-paid white-collar workers.
Self-confidence is the child of pleasure: the pleasure we take in doing something well. If we no longer ‘do’ anything concrete, if our professions are not really professions at all, if they don’t allow us to develop a true expertise, then we find ourselves deprived of the elementary pleasure of doing and making, alienated from ourselves and without self-confidence.
The workplace is experiencing a twofold crisis: workers and employees are under the permanent threat of being replaced by machines; and managers are fixated on process, which deprives them of their freedom and alienates them from their trade. Burnout and loss of confidence flourish on this cultural substrate.
A good occupation, according to Aristotle, should provide pleasure to the man or woman who follows it, and the excellence of that person should be directly observable to others. In a society that values ‘the good life’, he said, we should all have an occupation, a trade, that meets these criteria.
In his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Karl Marx defines the ideal of work in this way: ‘In my production I would have objectified my individuality, its specific character, and therefore enjoyed not only an individual manifestation of my life during the activity, but also when looking at the object I would have the individual pleasure of knowing my personality to be objective, visible to the senses and hence a power beyond all doubt.’ Let us be attentive to the terms used by the author of Capital: ‘objectified my individuality’, ‘enjoyed an individual manifestation of my life’, ‘the individual pleasure of knowing my personality to be objective’. These are evocative terms: they are so many metaphors for self-confidence. How many of us are lucky enough to have occupations that give us that?
The fact that we lack a direct relationship with making, that we have a hard time recognising ourselves in the product of our labour, surely contributes to our anxiety. Making something, even if it is something extremely simple, more often than not is enough to rid us of this anxiety. Just the fact of rolling up our sleeves and working with our hands, never mind the result, is enough to boost our confidence. There is a surprise twist here. It is that our anxiety is always, to a more or less secret degree, anxiety about death. But in working with physical material, we are in contact with a reality that we can count on, something tangible and reassuring. The transformed material proves in and of itself that we are alive and, if it is nicely transformed, that we have talent. Furthermore, if our work gives us a confirmation of our value, we can more easily endure the prospect of death: our value, at least, will not die. When we do nothing, or when we get no direct recognition from our work, we are more immediately susceptible to our anxiety about death.
‘It is not because he has hands that man is the most intelligent of beings,’ writes Aristotle in his On the Parts of Animals, ‘but because he is the most intelligent of beings that he has hands. Truly, the most intelligent being is the one that is capable of making skilful use of the greatest number of tools; and the hand would seem to be not a single tool but several.’ Crawford has put into practice what Aristotle discovered twenty-four centuries earlier. To be intelligent is to use one’s hands! To use them intelligently. The hand is the extension of the rational mind. This simple statement is of vast significance: if our intelligence is extended by our hands, then it is logical that not using our hands will cause us to feel doubt about ourselves. We lose confidence in ourselves as a result of not making anything with our hands: we are cut off from our true selves, from our nature as Homo faber.
Our nature, as Henri Bergson has argued, is more nearly that of Homo faber than it is of Homo sapiens. Our Homo sapiens ancestor was more of a maker (faber) than a knower (sapiens). What distinguished man was not so much his wisdom as his ability to fashion tools and make things using those tools. Our intelligence is not primarily an abstract intelligence but a fabricating intelligence. Homo faber is the man who works with his intelligent hands, who makes and uses tools. When we make things, we make ourselves. The different ages of human existence are named with respect to the tools that shaped us and allowed us to make progress (Stone Age, Bronze Age …). We are made to construct, manipulate, work, experience our faculties in contact with the world, and alter matter to develop ourselves and our talent. It’s in relation to matter that our mind reveals its true nature. That is why we feel lost, strangers to ourselves, when we no longer make anything with our ten fingers. The renewal of interest in cooking, in do-it-yourself projects, and in other manual activities has deep roots.
In recent years, a sizable number of young business-school graduates and corporate executives have turned toward artisanal work. They complete a certificate program to become bakers, pastry chefs, or cabinetmakers and set off on a new adventure. Giving up one’s attaché case to open a restaurant or abandoning a career as an executive to make cheeses is no longer so unusual.
And though we needn’t go as far as transforming our lives, there is nothing to stop us from working with our hands a little more than we do. Painting and making pottery, working in the garden or around the house, these are all opportunities to rediscover the joy of making, of doing things well. To make things with your hands, your intelligence, and your heart: this is the road to a sturdy self-confidence.