Follow Steven Schwartz Hard yakka: is it good for you?
Written by Steven Schwartz on June 30th, 2009
The narrator in Banjo Paterson's famous poem Clancy of the Overflow hates his clerical job. He yearns for a taste of Clancy's life, imagining the drover experiences "pleasures that the townsfolk never know". And while Clancy can behold "the vision splendid of the sunlit plains extended", the writer is imprisoned in his dingy little city office:
And I somehow rather fancy that I'd like to change with Clancy,
Like to take a turn at droving where the seasons come and go,
While he faced the round eternal of the cash-book and the journal --
But I doubt he'd suit the office, Clancy, of `The Overflow'.
It’s a familiar theme in poetry and art. Among many examples, the great Irish poet W.B. Yeats wistfully dreamed of growing beans; the Pre Raphaelite Brotherhood idealised medieval craftsmen; the Victorian author and artist John Ruskin believed labouring work was inherently moral; while in the US Presidential Medal of Freedom winner Eric Hoffer was a self-educated genius who found inspiration in his background as a wharfie.
The idea that physical work is ennobling and intrinsically good has been around for a long time.
Now a new book by Matthew B. Crawford, a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia, argues that skilled manual labour is largely unappreciated in modern society. A cluster of cultural prejudices
is ensuring more and more young people are going to university and then on to “stultifying office jobs”.
Crawford, a PhD, also runs a motorbike repair shop called Shockoe Moto. Fixing motorcycles, he says, fills him with competence and confidence:
“The satisfactions of manifesting oneself concretely in the world through manual competence have been known to make a man quiet and easy. They seem to relieve him of the felt need to offer chattering interpretations of himself to vindicate his worth. He can simply point: the building stands, the car now runs, the lights are on.”
While Crawford doesn’t argue against young people going on to higher education, he does urge them to learn a manual trade … “You’re likely to be less damaged, and quite possibly better paid, as an independent tradesman than as a cubicle-dwelling tender of information systems”.
The distinguished academic Richard Sennett – who grew up in a Chicago housing project – has also examined the value of craft labour which, he says, “suggests ways of using tools, organizing work, and thinking about materials that remain alternative, viable proposals about how to conduct life with skill”.
What we do for a living has recently been put under the microscope by Alain de Botton, who argues we find it hard to reflect properly on what we do because “most of us are still working at jobs chosen for us by our sixteen-year-old selves”.
As for office work, de Botton says we toil away wearing a mask of false cheerfulness - all the while secretly wondering “is this all there is?”
Is physical work ennobling? I think the answer is – it can be. It can also be hard and horrible.
While Banjo Paterson was eulogizing Clancy, fellow poet Henry Lawson was despairing for the needle-woman whose limbs “are all a-tremble for the want of rest and sleep”.
Similarly with office work: it can be stimulating and fulfilling; but it can also be futile and monotonous. Much depends on our skills and abilities, our levels of ambition, and what we want from life.
It’s likely that some of the absurdities inherent in the global financial crisis have prompted a renewed interest in the values of physical labour.
As a result, some people now question the value of a university education, the purpose of which historically has been to enable young people to enter white collar professions.
For example, 19-year-old Tom Mursell has established a successful website called notgoingtouni “dedicated to helping young people make informed decisions about their future by showing the opportunities that exist outside of university”.
I would be the last person to devalue university education. Its benefits are enormous but university is not all things to all people.
The challenge to us all, as Ken Robinson puts it, is to create a new paradigm for education – “to evolve a new appreciation of the importance of nurturing human talent along with an understanding of how talent expresses itself differently in every individual”.
That’s going to take a lot of hard work, of all kinds.
- Steven Schwartz
VC,
There is a brilliant discussion of these themes in Richard Sennett’s book THE CRAFTSMAN.( Sennett is Prof. of Sociology at NYU and LSE).What always strikes me is how hard our forebears worked, both at home and on the farm, in the factory or mill et.al. Some work may be enobling; but all work is far from enobling.
VC, thank you for this inspirational message…
I have waited a long time to attend university. As a mature age student I seize every learning challenge as a new way of seeing, thinking, doing and feeling – and – I have never “worked” as hard in my life. How fortunate are those people who are able to develop their talents, enrich their skills and be true to their own sense of worth – in the path that they choose. Personally, I think Education is the greatest gift. There is very little glamour in submitting that final essay – but when you know you’ve done your best “work” that is all that matters.
Well you’ve spotted the big difference between the Banjo’s romanticism and Lawson’s down-to-earth realism. Hard work is hard work, whether manual or intellectual. Hard physical labour will wear your body out, hard intellectual labour will exhaust your mind. What we need is a sensible balance between labour, recreation and rest – that, after all, is what the 8 hour day campaign was all about (equal parts of each for a balanced and healthy life).
What’s interesting is that for those of us who labour primarily with their minds, physical work/craft can constitute recreation – I know lots of academics who love things like gardening and handcrafts (eg knitting – I’m a knitting fanatic!), and of course sport is a fantastic physical workout to contrast with the work of teaching and research. As usual, what works best for people is balance – there is no “best” sort of work for everyone, although there certainly is for individuals, according to aptitude and inclination of course.
The nostalgia and satifaction of having a little piece of land where you can produce you own fruit and veg and a few livestock is priceless. Its therapeutic both to your mental person aswell as physical. Mortality is also alot longer compared with a person who is imprisoned in an urban dwelling. Banjo saw its majesty. This is a bit critical of the modern day man. But there’s an old saying. If you want something done properly, do it yourself. Specialisation is killing basic comonsense. More and more as the assemble lines grown, basic know how diminishes. So building your own home, as romantic as it sounds. It usually is alot cheaper aswell as economical. Most generation X’s I speak with tell me in the simplest of language; “no one wants to work these days.” I guess the assemble line takes the soul aswell as love out of labour. The individual feels that the wears are not of there identity. because their the creation of anothers entrepreneurship. Imagine trying to pay someone to write poetry for instance. You carn’t pay someone no matter the resources at your disposal to create something from the soul. So why should be building a home be any different. As much as Barry would like to stand infront of 2000 students and lecturer them for two hours about practical wisdom. If they don’t care, which his to ignorant to know that they do. There not going too. Also the psychology of practical wisdoms absence needs to be examined. Why don’t they care? Because it works both ways. And until people stop indoctrinating other peoples identities nothing is ever going to change. How mediocre has the modern day construction sight become. Specialisation has striped workers of their sanity. A craft once performed by one individual is today performed by ten. Know wonder its abysmal appeal. Attempts to impose central ideas is like a pathogen that flat lines an economic model. Each cell needs its own membrane, otherwise it wouldn’t survive with the dynamics of everyday life. And so does every ward in Australia. Every worker is an individual. Being a craftsman whether its blue collar, white collar or a social pioneer, labour needs to have its integrity.
A thought-provoking and balanced discussion – thank you.
It conjures memories of Robert Kiyosaki’s book “If You Want to be Rich and Happy, Don’t Go To School.” In spite of its deliberately provocative title, the book’s major thesis is more considered, along the lines of “don’t rely on education alone to make you rich and happy.”
Having recently left the paid workforce, I am struck by how many retirees go back to manual crafts which they could only indulge as a hobby previously. What a pity when the working years were spent behind a desk, dreaming of doing something more engaging . . .
We shouldn’t romanticise work too much. Hard, dirty physical labour is not attractive. Ask those who have to do it and who are paid poorly for the privilege.
I agree totally, George – there’s nothing romantic about unrelenting hard physical labour. It’s usually dangerous too, although there have of course been improvements in workplace safety in many industries in the developed world over the last century (largely thanks to unions). A visit to a good industrial museum will bring home the reality of it quickly enough (I’m thinking of my trip to the Black Country Museum and the Redditch Needle Factory, both near Birmingham, a couple of years ago).
But there is certainly something appealing about working with our hands. I wonder if it’s something quite primitive about creating a physical artefact, that impulse to “make”, that persists inside us and that we find soothing to connect to?