It is not the labor that is divided; but the men,” complains the author. Society produces “morbid thinkers, and miserable workers” because we have separated thought from labor in pursuit of a destructive freedom. What we need instead is a countercultural submission to the patterns of creation, for “the power and glory of all creatures, and all matter, consist in their obedience, not in their freedom. The sun has no liberty—a dead leaf has much.”
The author is John Ruskin, the evangelical reformer of industrialized Britain, but it could just as well be Matthew Crawford, a writer who has made stops at the University of Chicago, a D.C. think tank, and a motorcycle repair shop in Richmond, Virginia. His realization that “there was more thinking going on in the bike shop than in the think tank” led to the 2006 article “Shop Class as Soulcraft” that became a celebrated book, and now to a second volume, The World Beyond Your Head.
Crawford, too, complains of our vaporous notion of “freedom.” He analyzes the evolution of gambling, including the machines with auto-play features for the “mature player.” Crawford even extols the very glassmakers that Ruskin admired, and laments with him the “death of reverence and obedience.” Does our new Ruskin succeed?
