Working Hands

Well, hi, it's Tom Guarriello. Another beautiful day here in Connecticut. Steve, how are you? You know how every once in a while coincidences occur in your life and they sometimes are more meaningful than others? Well, in the last couple of days I had some coincidences that got me to thinking about something, and I thought I'd make a video and talk about it. The other day I caught up on a video— I caught up with a video that Perry Urban made about his father making a guitar for him. I'm going to show about maybe a minute and a half, 2 minutes of that video that I edited just to highlight the issues that were part of this coincidence for me. And the thing that was striking when I was watching Perry's father making this guitar for him in this lovely little workshop workshop in Scotland, beautifully used and clearly loved workshop, was the intelligence in Perry's father's hands. We don't think about hands as having— as being intelligent. We think about brains as being intelligent, right? But The fact of the matter is our hands are extraordinarily intelligent. In fact, our bodies are extraordinarily intelligent. The way we move our bodies through space and the way our bodies adapt to our surroundings is, I think, a great measure of intelligence, a great indicator of intelligence. And in fact, there's a psychologist from Harvard, Howard Gardner, who has written extensively about intelligence and has really taken psychology to task for, um, uh, only defining intelligence in terms of abstract reasoning skills. Uh, in fact, Gardner says there are 5 intelligences, um, and I'm not gonna remember them all now, but, uh, one of them is kinesthetic bodily intelligence, um, And so the idea that our bodies are intelligent is not anything new. But if you watch Perry's father, in particular his hands, because he's working with his hands, his hands are extraordinarily intelligent. So let me show you that, those, the clips that I edited from Perry's video, and then I'll come back and talk a little bit about the second piece of the coincidence.

This is a prototype. I made a template with a piece of wood and cut it out, and I've pushed it in there, and that's it. It's a very tight fit.

It's a very tight fit, isn't it?

It's a perfect fit.

So that's a template fitted on there. It shouldn't be too bad.

That's how it'll go.

So that's a template fitted on there. It shouldn't be too bad.

That's how it'll go.

So what is this you're going to be doing?

I'm going to cut the template if I can. I'm just not sure it'll work.

You've already got a template though.

I know, but I'm doing it again. Isn't that—

it's very good. It's not quite—

no, it's— I've got to take a little off the sides here. You and your damn blog.

It's not a blog anymore, it's YouTube.

I'm going to stick the template to the bit of wood, and this will be a test.

This is a test run, but sadly we're not going to see this pocket Route it today because we're gonna have to go and get the train.

Okay, so I think you'll agree after watching those clips that Perry's father's hands have been trained by experience and have become intelligent by experience. And the second part of the coincidence that occurred this week was reading an essay by a guy named Matthew B. Crawford. And this was an essay that was recommended by David Brooks of the New York Times in one of his op-ed columns in the past week. And the essay is entitled "Shop Class as Soulcraft." Now, for those of you who don't live in the United States, shop class is— refers to a course that those of us in the United States took in high school, or take in high school, in which we learn how to do things like work in woodshop, in a woodworking shop, in a metal shop, In my primary education, secondary, early secondary education, we had print shop. And this was a way of kind of gratuitously sort of taking the kids, many of us who were going to go on to college, and giving us exposure to, um, you know, manual craft. And shop class was always a bizarre place. It was bizarre because the shop teachers were always a little unusual. My woodshop teacher had— was missing like 2 fingers plus on his right hand. And, you know, these were always sort of laughable characters. Why were they laughable characters? Well, because even then in the '60s, and certainly now, as we are in this wonderful age of information, the idea of making a living with your hands has become— well, it's diminished. It's not something that most of us would recommend that our children do, for example. And that's exactly the point of Crawford's essay, in which he talks about his own experience experience in moving from being a college graduate associate at a think tank to becoming the proprietor of a motorcycle shop, and mostly a motorcycle repair shop. Peter, obviously I thought of you when I read this essay. And Crawford's an intellectual and writes with great power. I'll put the link— where am I gonna put the link? Over here in the notes. Writes with great power about this diminishment of all physical labor and that, you know, we have We have now come to a point in which historically, coming from the beginning of the 20th century forward, any manual craft has become a hobby. Or, you know, now we're beginning to get these, you know, a renaissance, if you will, of sort of artisanal work on a small scale so that craftsmen are beginning to, you know, pop up in actually in sort of high-end kinds of locations, you know, making fine wood carvings and tools and cutting boards and, you know, fine furniture, handmade. But, you know, things like in the essay Crawford talks about about electrical work and being an electrician, uh, and the wonderful combination of something that was taken apart in the early part of the 20th century, and that is that, that the mind and the hands were separated in labor. When the assembly line came into, uh, power with, uh, Henry Ford's Model T. The labor was separated into planning and doing. And the planners, who became the white-collar workers, were the ones who were, of course, the intelligent ones. And the doers, the ones who use their hands, were the less intelligent ones. They were the executors. They did the things that the white-collar planners designed for them to do. And so we've taken manual— all manual work, and whether we recognize it or not, I think, have taken it and put it at a lower status. Pay's often lower. But the point that Crawford's now making is that we are now in a period where there are great shortages of skilled craftsmen. Here in Connecticut, for example, if I want to try to get an electrician to come to our house to do what I can't, which is to fix any electrical wiring in our home, first of all, extraordinarily expensive, and second of all, very difficult to even get them to come to do the work here. So what Crawford points out is that skilled automobile repair people, certainly in building trades— carpenters, electricians, and so on, are people who are now in tremendous demand. But in our education system, we have no— let's call it— we have no respectful tracks in which we can train people, teach people to do the work that is very intelligent work But intelligent in ways that, you know, the knowledge worker of today doesn't think of as being intelligent, and yet is tremendously— is a tremendous integration of thinking and doing. So this coincidence of events, watching Perry's father's intelligent hands beautifully create a beautiful, um, what I'm sure is going to be a beautiful guitar for Perry. And watching how those hands have learned over decades how to do the things that the hands, his hands, know how to do. And then reading this essay really brought to me again this insight that, uh, We are certainly not encouraging our children to go into the kind of work that Crawford talks about in this essay and that we see Perry's father doing. And yet this kind of work may very well be both the most economically rewarding as well as the most— the title of the essay is "Shop Class as Soul Food." I'm sorry, "Shop Class as Soulcraft." indicating also the most spiritually rewarding, the most personally rewarding that we can recommend. Because many of us who work in the corporation and who work in what I call cubicle land are now doing jobs that are, if at sometimes at best vaguely dissatisfying and sometimes profoundly dissatisfying as we find ourselves becoming more and more abstract in what we do and less connected with the kinds of things that we produce in those settings. So, um, those were the things that came to me by virtue of these coincidences this week, and I'd certainly look forward to hearing any of your thoughts about any of those things. So thanks very much. Take care. Bye-bye.