The case for working with your hands

I’ve just finished reading Matthew Crawford’s ‘The Case for Working with Your Hands or Why Office Work is Bad for Us and Fixing Things Feels Good.’ It’s a wonderfully quirky, idiosyncratic read, as Crawford weaves together what he has learned from his passion and profession as a motorbike mechanic and his doctoral studies in philosophy. He writes:

“A decline in tool use would seem to betoken a shift in our relationship to our own stuff: more passive and more dependent….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 make them. What ordinary people once made, they  buy; and what they once fixed for themselves, they replace entirely or hire an expert to repair, whose expert fix often involved replacing an entire system because some minute component has failed.”

In the first few chapters, Crawford sets up some valuable questions and offers plenty of robust thinking (although I was left wanting a little by the end…) around our increasing detachment from, and ignorance towards, the stuff we use and rely on day to day. In short he builds a case for manual competence, for a return to the experience of fixing and making things with our hands, which he suggests provides both intrinsic satisfactions and abundant cognitive challenges.

“to fix one’s own car is not merely to use up time, it is to have a different experience of time, of one’s car, and of oneself.”

However, Crawford doesn’t go too deeply into human identity and its overwhelmingly consumptive orientation, yet for me this would add a powerful contribution to his entire thesis. Drawing on earlier Conservation Economy posts, if we accept that consumerism has become the dominant mode by which we experience and interact with the world, then fixing and making the things we consume feels like a powerful move towards a more productive, participatory identity. Our role as a social beings then moves beyond a mono-mode of endless, distracted consumerism to something more relational, more attentive, more contextual, more connected, more actively engaged, more responsible.

I also like to think that growing and making my own lunch or fixing a puncture on my bicycle provides intangible benefits, along side the obvious tangible ones (money saving, health etc). I have spent time, tended, invested emotionally, deepened my relationship with those things that I consume. They hold a different kind of value for me. I understand and use them differently and they genuinely fulfil my basic needs in multiple ways.

In engaging differently, in making and fixing, they become not ‘pseudo satisfiers’, which offer temporal, fleeting fulfillment of a single basic need, but are transformed into what Chilean economist Manfred Max-Neef calls synergistic satisfiers. Max-Neef suggests that there are a finite number of universal fundamental human needs, but what changes across cultures and over time are the many ways humans find to satisfy those needs. Synergistic satisfiers can fulfil material needs (food or mobility) and non-material needs (affection or freedom) simultaneously. Crawford points out however, that “somehow self–realisation and freedom always entail buying something new, never conserving something old.” Advertising exists largely to promise the satisfaction of these fundamental needs through the consumption of ‘new’, but at best can only ever ‘pseudo-satisfy’.

Having read Crawford’s book, I’m quite drawn towards making and fixing, to engaging our hands as well as our heads as a way to move beyond a consumptive mindset. But to go the whole hog also feels rather idealistic Tom-and-Babara-ish, a little too nostalgic 1970’s handicrafts-y to me. To come back to more 21^st Century thinking, I’ve long been fascinated by internet optimists like Clay Shirky who believe in the revolutionary potential of the internet as a platform for collective action and participative production; a space in which we can move beyond a purely passive, consumptive identity to more active involvement.

It is in this space and beyond, that I get excited about the prevailing move towards more participatory, open business models. And I don’t mean mere personalisation and customisation of products and services that feebly offer us the delusion of producing and taking part. But real participation and active engagement that creates and captures value on- and off-line for everyone. I’m thinking of businesses like Lulu, Zopa, and Bookmooch (for more examples see this show I co-curated). And there are a new wave on the horizon too, with the likes of giffgaff and Whipcar.

These open models, that also manage to successfully cross the real/virtual world divide, are based on relationship, participation, mutual trust, reciprocity and call for different, more co-operative, generous, responsible engagement. They don’t quite live up to Crawford’s ideal of manual competence and the intrinsic value of making and fixing physical things, but DO they have the potential to change the prevailing materialistic, individualistic, passive, consumerist mindset and synergistically fulfil our fundamental needs?

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