Reviews
The work of our hands Shop Class As Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work. By Matthew B. Crawford (Penguin, 2009, 246 pp. $25.95 U.S. $32.95 Cdn.)
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f you’ve ever held a bare crankshaft, know something about torque heat, and like what the Apostle Paul said about manual work (1 Thess. 4:11), this book might be for you. It’s the closest thing you’ll find to a scholarly ode to the craft of repairing. Matthew Crawford is a trained electrician who also has a PhD in political philosophy and used to be head of a Washington think tank, but he cast it all aside to pursue work that was more intellectually engaging. For him, that meant opening a motorcycle repair shop. “I quickly realized there was more thinking going on in the bike shop than in my previous job at the think tank,” he says in Shop Class as Soulcraft. He lays bare pretensions of the white collar workplace and elevates the “work of our hands” (though without the Apostle Paul’s exhortation). By his reckoning, something important has been lost in the rise of the “knowledge generation.” It has, he
“Things need fixing and tending no less than creating” contends, produced a class of people who may know a lot but can’t actually do anything. In society’s yearning to educate everyone so they won’t have to soil their hands, what has been lost is the “experience of making things and fixing things.” Vanished, he says, is the old high school shop class The Marketplace March April 2010
because educators wanted to prepare students to become “knowledge workers.” The new generation, however, disdains manual work and seems bereft of any aptitude for analytical reasoning. Manual trades are not the mindless drudgery of an assembly line, says this philosopher/mechanic. They hold the possibility of highly integrated work in a world that is increasingly segmented. Your standard-issue repair specialists, he notes, have to first of all use their brains to analyze a problem, and then use their hands to fix it. “I believe the mechanical arts have a special significance for our time because they cultivate
not creativity, but the less glamorous virtue of attentiveness,” he writes. “Things need fixing and tending no less than creating.” Not only that, but in these uncertain times there’s a kind of security in building and fixing, as those skills cannot as readily be outsourced or made obsolete. Plus, he adds, it’s the kind of work that can tie us back to our local communities and instill the pride of doing something genuinely useful. ◆
Turning off the tap of aid Critics of the aid “industry” say they can’t compete with an electric guitar
Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is A Better Way for Africa. By Dambisa Moyo (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009, 188 pp. $24 U.S.)
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ll along, the west thought it was doing good in Africa. Not so, says Dambisa Moyo, a Zambian-born economist with degrees from Harvard and Oxford and stints at the World Bank and Goldman Sachs. She insists that African countries are poor precisely because of all that help. She’s not the first to question the benefit of aid, but she pushes the critical envelope further by asserting that aid actually makes things worse. “Aid has helped make the poor poorer, and growth slower,” she writes. “Aid has
been, and continues to be, an unmitigated political, economic, and humanitarian disaster for most parts of the developing world.” Dishing out vast sums of money has actually been a kind of curse because it encourages corruption and conflict and discourages free enterprise, she declares. Lest individual donors worry, what she is attacking is the huge direct transfers of aid from one government to another, the kind of money that is most vulnerable to misuse. She is not talking about the much smaller amounts of aid 18
that are channeled through non-government agencies (like MEDA, for example). In fact, many of the things that NGOs do to help the poor, such as microcredit, get high marks from her. But the larger “systemic” aid gets quite a thrashing. She heaps scorn on well-meaning celebrities who delight western audiences by strumming the same aid chord. “One disastrous consequence of this has been that honest, critical and serious dialogue and debate on the merits and demerits of aid have atrophied,” Moyo writes. Critics of aid are not heard because their voices cannot compete with an electric guitar. Moyo examines numerous planks of the aid platform, like positive efforts to “teach” democracy, and finds them
