Shop Class as Soul Craft

"Since the standards of craftsmanship issue from the logic of things rather than the art of persuasion, practiced submission to them perhaps gives the craftsman some psychic ground to stand on against the fantastic hopes aroused by demagogues, whether commercial or political." p18

"'Lack of experience diminshes our power of taking a comprehensive view of the admitted facts. Hence those who dwell in intimate association with nature and its phenomena are more able to lay down principles such as to admit of a wide and coherent development; while those whom devotion to abstract discussions has rendered unobservant of facts are too ready to dogmatize on the basis of a few observations.' - Aristotle" p23

What makes for a sticky job? One that can't be (1) sent overseas, and (2) automated. Examples of what can't be sent overseas are personal services that require face-to-face contact, site-based services like construction, maintenance and repair of physical plants, and the maintenance and repair of durable machines. It can be automated when it can be done according to rules, broken down to ones and zeros. p33-5

Scientific management separated the brain work from the grunt work on the factory floor, not to increase efficiency in time, but to to decrease cost, replacing skilled laborers with unskilled laborers. p39-40

"A man whose needs are limited will find the least noxious livelihood and work in a subsistence mode, and indeed the experience of early (eighteenth-century) capitalism, when many producers worked at home on a piece-rate basis, was that only so much labor could be extracted from them. Contradictory to the assumptions of 'rational behavior,' it was found that when empoloyers would increase the piece rate in order to boost production, it actually had the opposite effect: workers would produce less, as now they could meet their fixed needs with less work. Eventually it was learned that the only way to get them to work harder was to play upon the imagignation, stimulating new needs and wants. Consumption." p43

"From an economistic mindset, spiritedness or pridefulness appears as a failure to be properly calculative, which requires that one first be properly abstract. Economics recognizes only certain virtues, and not the most impressive ones at that. Spiritedness is an assertion of one's own dignity, and to fix one's one car is not merely to use up time, it is to have a different experience of time, of one's car, and of oneself." p55

"The difference is that on such a crew [vs team], you have grounds for knowing your own worth independently of others, and is the same grounds on which others will make their judgments. Either you can bend conduit or you can't, and this is plain. So there is less reason to manage appearances. There is a real freedom of speech on a job site, which reverberates outward and sustains wider liberality. You can tell dirty jokes. Where there is real work being done, the order of things isn't quite so fragile.

"Not surprisingly, it is the office rather than the job site that has seen the advent of speech codes, diversity workshops, and other forms of higher regulation. Some might attribute this to the greater mixing of the sexes in the office, but I believe a more basic reason is that when there is no concrete task that rules the job -- an autonomous good that is visible to all -- then there is no secure basis for social relations. Maintaining consensus and preempting conflict become the focus of management, and as a result everyone feels they have to walk on eggshells. Where no appeal to a carpenter's level is possible, sensitivity training becomes necessary." p157

"A regard for human excellence is the aristocratic ethos... It is the ideal of friendship -- of those who stand apart from the collective and recognize one another as peers. As professionals, or fellow journeymen, perhaps... People of aristocratic sympathies are alive to rank and difference, and take pleasure in beholding them. I think most of us have this response when we see talent, but we have become inarticulate about it. It seems illegitimate to give rank its due in a society where 'all children are above average,' as Garrison Keillor says of Lake Wobegon. Yet it is precisely our attraction to excellence -- our being on the lookout for the choicer manifestations -- that may lead us to attend to human practices searchingly, without prejudice, and find superiority in unfamiliar places. For example, in the intellectual accomplishments of people who do work that is dirty, such as the mechanic. With such discoveries we extend our moral imagination to people who are conventionally beneath serious regard, and find them admirable. Not because we heed a moral injunction such as the universalist egalitarian urges upon us, but because we actually see something dmirable, and are impressed by it.

"The lover of excellence is prone to being drawn out of himself, erotically almost, in a way that the universalist egalitarian is not. The latter's empathy, projected from afar and without discrimination, is more principled than attentive. It is similar to bad art and mathematical shoelaces, in this regard; it is content to posit rather than to see the humanity of its beneficiaries. But the one who is on the receiving end of such empathy wants something more than to be recognized generically. He wants to be seen as an individual, and recognized as worthy on the same grounds on which he has striven to be worthy, indeed superior, by cultivating some particular excellence or skill." p203

"The practitioner of a stochastic art, such as motorcycle repair, experiences failure on a daily basis...the experience of failure seems to have been edited out of the educational process, at least for gifted students. Those who struggle academically experience failure all the time, and probably write off attempts to sugarcoat it with "self-esteem" as another example of how deranged adults can be. But the praising of gifted students for being smart, by parents and teachers, has a far more pernicious effect, especially when such praise is combined with the grade inflation and soft curriculum that are notorious at elite schools. A student can avoid hard sciences and foreign languages and get a degree without ever having the unambiguous experience of being wrong." p204

Susan Witt on Winona LaDuke's land trust model for the White Earth reservation

"The White Earth reservation in northern Minnesota, in the turn of the century a group of well-meaning quakers said to the Ojibwe...you poor dears, you don't understand about private ownership. Let us help you survey this land and divide it into individual lots and give private ownership so you can have the experience of it. But the Ojibwe culture is to use multiple parts of the land -- so there're the lakes where the rice is harvested, there's the brush with the best raspberries, there's the timberland for the hunt -- so the community as a whole, as an integral community, moved through the whole of the land.

"Suddenly it was divided up into little lots, and with the consequential mortgaging of the land and losing the land to outsiders, their once intact reservation got divided up with holes in it, so people couldn't travel across it. LaDuke has used the community land trust model... the goal is to recreate the land intact, and then give long-term lease rights, so that people actually can own their buildings, own their homes."

~ 1h14m here.

A Conservative on Preparing for the Fall of the State

Surviving the Fall of the State

by William S. Lind

The Discarded Image is the title of C.S. Lewis's last book, and perhaps his best. On the surface, it is a discussion of medieval cosmology and the Ptolemaic universe. In reality it is about very much more, including the medieval refutation of the modern notion of "equality," which decrees that people are interchangeable. That vast error lies at the heart of many of the ideologies which made the 20th century such a horror and which still gnaw at the vitals of Western civilization. Lewis recognized that on many matters, our medieval ancestors were wiser than ourselves.

Lewis's book was brought to mind by a letter from a reader of this column, who asked a difficult question:

…having read all I could lay my hands on about 4th generation warfare (including your books), something is missing. You are still discussing 4th generation warfare at the state level…What can individuals do to prepare for 4th generation warfare? What can my family do?

My correspondent has grasped the most difficult point about Fourth Generation war. In its ultimate form, it is not something we face "over there," in places such as Afghanistan and Iraq. Nor is it an import, like 9/11. Fourth Generation theory says that the state here, in the good old USA, is also likely to break apart as Americans too transfer their primary loyalty away from the state to a wide variety of other things. The conflicts among these new loyalties will in many cases be sharp enough to generate fighting.

In the face of this possibility, or maybe probability, what indeed are individuals and families to do? I think the answer, if there is one, begins with my friend David Kline's farm.

David Kline is an Amishman. He farms about 200 acres in Holmes County, Ohio, good land that supports a herd of forty to fifty dairy cows. He has some modern equipment, such as milking machines, but his life does not depend on any of it. In today's world, his farm provides him a good living. In a Fourth Generation world, his farm would still provide well for him and his family.

I am not talking about "survivalism" here. The Kline farm represents much more than that. As I have said to David more than once, what he and other Amish are doing is preserving an understanding of how to live in reality for the time when all the virtual realities collapse.

Virtual realities lie at the heart of Brave New World, aka the New World Order, "globalism," "democratic capitalism" (as the neo-cons define it), etc. The bargain Brave New World offers is this: if you will only do as Marcuse advises and trade the Reality Principle for the Pleasure Principle, we will enmesh you in virtual realities that will make you happy. True, you will lose your free will, because our virtual realities will condition you to think as we want you to. But they will also give you anything and everything you want. So what if none of it is real? All that matters is that you feel happy, right now.

As our medieval forefathers would quickly recognize, this is Hell speaking. Hell has always loathed reality, because in reality, Christ is king. Wiser than we, the medievals were interested not in felicitas but in beautitudine — not in being happy but in being saved. Had they been given a television or a video game, they would have smelled brimstone.

Not only do virtual realities lead to Hell, they have another drawback, one that a Fourth Generation world will soon bring to the fore: all of them, without exception, eventually collapse. The complex structures and vast resources required to sustain them are evanescent. The realities of the Fourth Generation are hard and sharp, and they will slice and dice virtual realities like, well — dare I say the Scimitar of Islam? Many Islamics, unlike most Christians, seem to recognize Brave New World for what it is.

Which brings me back to David Kline's farm. Is the answer to my reader's question that we should all become Amish? No, because in the end some of us will have to fight or the world will have no place for the Amish. Should we all live like Amish farmers? Here the answer is closer to "yes." At the least, even if we do not farm, we need to separate our lives and the lives of our families from the virtual realities and live in reality itself. The small family farm may not be the only way to do that, but it is a good way.

David Kline's farm is itself a discarded image. But it is an image America discarded not very long ago. As David says, "I just farm the way everybody did fifty years ago." David edits Farming Magazine, a thoughtful and literate quarterly dedicated to teaching others, Amish and non-Amish, how they too can make a good living from a small farm, farmed the old way. His discarded image is one we can find, still living, perhaps not too far down the road.

My correspondent concluded, "How do you apply non-state warfare to family protection? Give me only those practical items that can be implemented on the individual and family level." Well, I don't know many things more practical than an Amish farm, nor better at protecting families. And I do know that answers to the Fourth Generation and to Brave New World, false images both, can only be found at the individual and family level, because that is where the decision to live by the Reality Principle must be made.

January 28, 2004

Open Source Education

Resources:

www.curriki.org
www.oercommons.org
www.openstudy.com
MIT OCW Scholar
http://www.lowescreativeideas.com/Home.aspx
http://www.lowescreativeideas.com/woodworkers/ShopClass/shop_class_projects_1009.aspx
http://oreilly.com/pub/topic/science - O'Reilly DIY Science
http://proquest.safaribooksonline.com/9781449389543 - Cooking For Geeks online
http://expeyes.in/ - A Tool for learning science by exploration and experimenting
SlugTube (UCSC Videos)
The Do It Yourself Scholar

Columbia Virtual Academy - WA State K-12 Online!

Libyan DIY Weapon Workshops

Amazing photos here.

Photos courtesy of The Atlantic.

"Sustainable Community Development"

Is this my field?

Heard it described as Gwendolyn Hallsmith's shtick here.

Wiki has entries for community development and for sustainable development.

Where can liberals and conservatives agree? Local currencies, organic ag, sustainable (resilient) communities, etc. AND, how to make sure the "poor and disenfranchised" don't become serf communities adjacent to or within better-off communities?

And more on local currencies, since that's what the podcast's about:

"The things that complementary currencies do best is connecting underutilized resources with unmnet needs [e.g. people who want to work but don't have work, theatres that have seats to offer but aren't selling all their tickets, etc.]"

"Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty" (Duflo and Banerjee)

"A big constraint is what we call lazy thinking. I think we have a tendency as social scientists to look for the gulity party when we see something bad is happening... If we actually took on the burden of thinking about the problem, about thinking about why the problem arises rather than making up a story about it, looking at the data rather than starting from our premise or our ideology, sort of trying new things rather than just saying that this is how things are always done so this must be the right way to do it... we can actually make a lot of progress."

The 3 I's: ideology, ignorance, and inertia

LSE lecture podcast here. Book here.