Sennett—The Craftsman (i)

Richard Sennett
The Craftsman
(2008)

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Prologue: Man as His Own Maker

Pandora's Casket
Hannah Arendt and Robert Oppenheimer

Just after the Cuban Missile Crisis,... I ran into my teacher Hannah Arendt on the street. The missile crisis had shaken her, like everyone else, but it had also confirmed her deepest conviction. In The Human Condition, she had argued a few years previously that the engineer, or any maker of material things, is not master of his own house; politics, standing above the physical labor, has to provide the guidance. ... She wanted me to draw the right lesson: people who make things usually don't understand what they are doing.

Arendt's fear of self-destructive material invention traces back in Western culture to the Greek myth of Pandora.

Well,
if a given

fear

well and truly

traces back,

then it is not

her

fear.

And
if it is
"her" fear,
then it does not
"trace back."

i.e. We're already headed for the Genetic Fallacy. Not a great start.

A goddess of invention, Pandora was "sent to earth by Zeus as punishment for Prometheus's transgression." ...

[2]

... In the working out of Greek culture, its peoples came increasingly to believe that Pandora stood for an element of their own natures; culture founded on man-made things risks continual self-harm.

So, this notion that culture founded on man-made things risks continual self-harm ,
this also traces back recurs?

If "culture" simply denotes "all beyond necessity,"
then man-made things are no more or less fit to serve.
Perhaps it is when necessity itself is in thrall to earthly contrivances that things can get (have gotten) dicey.

Augustine's dictum "hands off yourself" takes the self as given.
Whereas culture,
definitionally and paradigmatically,
is contingent.

Perhaps?

Something nearly innocent in human beings can produce this risk: men and women are seduced by sheer wonder, excitement, curiosity, and so create the fiction that opening the casket is a neutral act. About the first weapon of mass destruction, Arendt could have cited a diary note made by Robert Oppenheimer, director of the Los Alamos project. Oppenheimer reassured himself by asserting, "When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb."

The poet John Milton told a similar story about Adam and Eve, as an allegory for the dangers of curiosity, with Eve taking the Oppenheimer role. In Milton's primal Christian scene, the thirst for knowledge, rather than for sex, leads human beings to harm themselves. Pandora's image remains potent in the writings of the modern theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, who observes that it is human nature to believe that anything that seems possible should therefore be tried.

You've heard the saying about "having the right enemies?"

Are these the right enemies to have?

Let's go looking for some better ones...

Arendt's generation could put numbers to the fear of self-destruction, numbers so large as to numb the mind. ... In Arendt's view, these numbers represent the compound of scientific blindness and bureaucratic power—...

Today, peacetime material civilization posts equally numbing figures of self-made self-harm: one million, for instance, represents the number of years Nature took to create the amount of fossil fuel now consumed in a single year. The ecological crisis is Pandoric, man-made; technology may be an unreliable ally in regaining control. ...

[3]

...

Fear of Pandora creates a rational climate of dread—but dread can be itself paralyzing, indeed malign. Technology itself can seem the enemy rather than simply a risk. Pandora's environmental casket was too easily closed, for instance, in a speech given by Arendt's own teacher, Martin Heidegger, near the end of his life, at Bremen in 1949. On this infamous occasion Heidegger "discounted the uniqueness of the Holocaust in terms of the 'history of man's misdeeds' by comparing 'the manufacture of corpses in the gas chambers and the death camp' to mechanized agriculture." In the historian Peter Kempt's words, "Heidegger thought that both should be regarded as embodiments of the 'same technological frenzy' which, if left unchecked, would lead to a worldwide ecological catastrophe."

If the comparison is obscene, Heidegger speaks to a desire in many of us, that of returning to a way of life or achieving an imaginary future in which we will dwell more simply in nature.

Now we've found the "right" enemy. But how many others have found more decorous ways of saying the same thing and thereby avoided being called obscene ?

As an old man Heidegger wrote in a different context that "the fundamental character of dwelling is this sparing and preserving," against the claims of the modern machine world. A famous image in these writings of his old age invokes "a hut in the Black Forest" to which the philosopher withdraws, limiting his place in the world to the satisfaction of simple needs. This is perhaps a desire that could be kindled in anyone facing the big numbers of modern destruction.

Maybe I'm actually starting to lose it, but all it takes for me to feel this way is to leave the house and take a look around. The envious living are more terrifying than the enviable dead.

In the ancient myth, the horrors in Pandora's casket were not humans' fault; the gods were angry. Pandora-fear in a more secular age is more disorienting: the inventors of atomic weapons coupled curiosity with culpability; the unintended consequences of curiosity are

[4]

hard to explain. Making the bomb filled Oppenheimer with guilt, as it did I. I. Rabi, Leo Szilard, and many others who worked at Los Alamos. In his diary, Oppenheimer recalled the Indian god Krishna's words, "I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." Experts in fear of their own expertise: what could be done about this terrible paradox?

Decentralization of power
and
the broadest possible education
are where I would start.

When Oppenheimer gave the Reith Lectures for the BBC, subsequently published as Science and the Common Understanding, in 1953—broadcasts intended to explain the place of science in modern society—he argued that treating technology as an enemy will only render humanity more helpless. Yet, consumed by worry over the nuclear bomb and its thermonuclear child, in this political forum he could offer his listeners no practical suggestions about how to cope with it. Though confused, Oppenheimer was a worldly man. ... But to these insiders, too, he could provide no satisfying picture of how their work should be used. Here are his parting words to them on November 2, 1945: "It is good to turn over to mankind at large the greatest possible power to control the world and to deal with it according to its lights and its values."

The creator's works become the public's problem. As David Cassidy, one of Oppenheimer's biographers, has observed, the Reith Lectures thus proved "a huge disappointment for both the speaker and his listeners." If the experts cannot make sense of their work, what of the public? Though I suspect Arendt knew little about physics, she took up Oppenheimer's challenge: let the public indeed deal with it. ...

[5]

The Human Condition, published in 1958, affirms the value of human beings openly, candidly speaking to each other. Arendt writes, "Speech and action ... are the modes in which human beings appear to each other, not indeed as physical objects, but qua men. This appearance, as distinguished from mere bodily existence, rests on initiative, but it is an initiative from which no human being can refrain and still be human." And she declares, "A life without speech and without action is literally dead to the world." In this public realm, through debate, people ought to decide which technologies should be encouraged and which should be repressed. Though this affirmation of talk may well seem idealistic, Arendt was in her own way an eminently realistic philosopher. She knew that public discussion of human limits can never be the politics of happiness.

Nor did she believe in religious or natural truths that could stabilize life. Rather, like John Locke and Thomas Jefferson, Arendt believed that a polity differs from a landmarked building or "world heritage site": laws should be unstable. This liberal tradition imagines that the rules issuing from deliberation are cast in doubt as conditions change and people ponder further; new, provisional rules then come into being. Arendt's contribution to this tradition turns in part on the insight that the political process exactly parallels the human condition of giving birth and then letting go of the children we have made and raised. Arendt speaks of natality in describing the process of birth, formation, and separation in politics. The fundamental fact of life is that nothing lasts—yet in politics we need something to orient us, to lift us above the confusions of the moment. The pages of The Human Condition explore how language might guide us, as it were, to swim against the turbulent waters of time.

Tons to reckon with there, starting with actually reading Arendt firsthand. For now, dare I say the part of this I have the most trouble with is not the "liberal" formalism or the grand analogy of "natality." Rather, it is the line,

as conditions change and people ponder further.

Similarly, Paul Goodman:

it is because moral problems are so publicly important...that they must be ongoingly decided by all groups, as well as individuals; and they are so subtle that only the manifold mind of all the institutions of society, skirmishing and experimenting, can figure them out and invent right solutions.

Dare I ask,
sincerely and more-than-rhetorically,
what has really changed?
what remains to be pondered?

In a time when "natality" itself is as bound up as anything else with signalling and self-styling, it doesn't take a knee-jerk skeptic or radical postmodernist to wonder if the need being met here is not the need for new rules but rather the need of all these new people to have new important stuff to do that they can later say they did. And what could be more important or more visible than the law itself?

[6]

⁕ ⁕ ⁕

As her student almost a half-century ago, I found her philosophy largely inspiring, yet even then it seemed to me not quite adequate to deal with the material things and concrete practices contained in Pandora's casket. The good teacher imparts a satisfying explanation; the great teacher—as Arendt was—unsettles, bequeaths disquiet, invites argument. Arendt's difficulty in dealing with Pandora seemed to me, dimly then and more clearly now, to lie in the distinction she draws between Animal laborans and Homo faber. ... These are two images of people at work; they are austere images of the human condition, since the philosopher excludes pleasure, play, and culture.

Um...okay.

Animal laborans is, as the name implies, the human being akin to a beast of burden, a drudge condemned to routine. Arendt enriched this image by imagining him or her absorbed in a task that shuts out the world, a state well exemplified by Oppenheimer's feeling that the atomic bomb was a "sweet" problem, or Eichmann's obsession with making the gas chambers efficient. In the act of making it work, nothing else matters; Animal laborans takes the work as an end in itself.

Hmm. It sounds like there is plenty of affect here, actually. I would not expect mere beasts of burden to have these particular obsessions or feelings about the routine to which they have been condemned . Perhaps the question is, to what are they actually attached? What exactly makes a problem "sweet," and in whose eyes?

By contrast, Homo faber is her image of men and women doing another kind of work, making a life in common. Again Arendt enriched an inherited idea. The Latin tag Homo faber means simply "man as maker." The phrase crops up in Renaissance writings on philosophy and in the arts; Henri Bergson had, two generations before Arendt, applied it to psychology; she applied it to politics, and in a special way. Homo faber is the judge of material labor and practice, not Animal laborans's colleague but his superior. Thus, in her view, we human beings live in two dimensions. In one we make things; in this condition we are amoral, absorbed in a task. We also harbor another, higher way

[7]

of life in which we stop producing and start discussing and judging together. Whereas Animal laborans is fixated in the question "How?" Homo faber asks "Why?"

This division seems to me false

Me too. But whose division is it, really?

because it slights the practical man or woman at work. The human animal who is Animal laborans is capable of thinking; the discussions the producer holds may be mentally with materials rather than with other people; people working together certainly talk to one another about what they are doing.

And if someone is very much
"at work"
but not
working together with other people
?
Then what?

For Arendt, the mind engages once labor is done.

Again, I still haven't read Arendt directly. Either because or in spite of this, it's hard to believe that the above sentence is a fair representation.

Another, more balanced view is that thinking and feeling are contained within the process of making.

Modernism: "[thing] is [thing]."

Postmodernism: "[thing] that [modernist we don't like anymore] thought was merely [thing] really is also [seventeen really good things]. this we can be sure of. but don't say we said [thing] is not still [thing], just as [modernist we don't like anymore] thought. rather, we're keeping our options open depending on [contingency]."

Balanced ? Not really.

Sure, if we're at least conscious and upright, then some thinking and feeling must be contained within the process of making; but only the most elementary of processes permit us to reflect in real time. More likely, we need distance from the previous project and we need not to be consumed with the next project. I was once told by a high school math teacher (who was also a parent of my euphonium student) that "forgetting time" is crucial to learning. This seems to be part of it too.

The mid-project engagement of mind is not a reflective engagement. I would say...it is definitionally not reflective. The above remark seems not "balanc[ing]" but rather defensive first and foremost; defensive, that is, against the notion that mere craftspeople are not particularly smart or reflective...which, if they rely entirely on what they're able to learn while working and not at all on later reflection on and about the work, they certainly are not! I assume this is where the epithet "craft idiot" comes from. Perhaps that is the (admittedly very unkind) assessment which the author here seeks to "balance." At this early juncture I confess I'm not yet convinced.

The sharp edge of this perhaps self-evident observation lies in its address to Pandora's box. Leaving the public to "sort out the problem" after the work is done means confronting people with usually irreversible facts on the ground. Engagement must start earlier, requires a fuller, better understanding of the process by which people go about producing things, a more materialistic engagement than that found among thinkers of Arendt's stripe. To cope with Pandora requires a more vigorous cultural materialism.

The word materialism should raise a warning flag; it has become debased, stained in recent political history by Marxism and in everyday life by consumer fantasy and greed. "Materialistic" thinking is also obscure because most of us use things like computers or automobiles that we do not make for ourselves and that we do not understand. About "culture" the literary critic Raymond Williams once counted several hundred modern usages. This wild verbal garden divides roughly into two big beds. In one, culture stands for the arts alone, in the other it stands for the religious, political, and social beliefs that bind a people. "Material culture" too often, at least in the social sciences, slights cloth, circuit boards, or baked fish as objects worthy of regard in themselves, instead treating the shaping of such physical things as mirrors of social norms, economic interests, religious convictions—the thing in itself is discounted.

...

[9] "Craftsmanship" may suggest a way of life that waned with the advent of industrial society—but this is misleading. Craftsmanship names an enduring, basic human impulse, the desire to do a job well for its own sake. Craftsmanship cuts a far wider swath than skilled manual labor; it serves the computer programmer, the doctor, and the artist; parenting improves when it is practiced as a skilled craft, as does citizenship. In all these domains, craftsmanship focuses on objective standards, on the thing in itself. Social and economic conditions, however, often stand in the way of the craftsman's discipline and commitment: schools may fail to provide the tools to do good work, and workplaces may not truly value the aspiration for quality.

I suppose you could call these Social and economic conditions . But it would be more concrete and more to the point to say that it is other people who often stand in the way , i.e. via "the unintended consequences of well-intentioned actions." Making other people into part of the environment by abstracting them into "conditions" has the disadvantage of confounding any efforts (should such efforts still be believed in and/or become necessary to believe in) to hold individuals accountable for their actions.

If we're on the hunt for ghosts in the machine of society, then I would favor the good ol' "structural" line over equivocal talk of "conditions." The failure to value the aspiration for quality is an observable output both of certain "structures" and of certain "people." "Conditions" meanwhile seems to encompass everything and hence to obscure this distinction, a distinction which must be heeded, I think, if we are to try to do anything about it. (What unintended consequences might this beget?)

And though craftsmanship can reward an individual with a sense of pride in work, this reward is not simple. The craftsman often faces conflicting objective standards of excellence; the desire to do something well for its own sake can be impaired by competitive pressure, by frustration, or by obsession.

The Craftsman explores these dimensions of skill, commitment, and judgment in a particular way. It focuses on the intimate connection between hand and head. Every good craftsman conducts a dialogue between concrete practices and thinking; this dialogue evolves into sustaining habits, and these habits establish a rhythm between problem solving and problem finding. The relation between hand and head appears in domains seemingly as different as bricklaying, cooking, designing a playground, or playing the cello—but all these practices can misfire or fail to ripen. There is nothing inevitable about becoming skilled, just as there is nothing mindlessly mechanical about technique itself.

My note says:
"parenting improves when it is practiced as a skilled craft, as does citizenship.
In all these domains, craftsmanship focuses on objective standards."
Lays bare a tension in Lasch: the inevitable outcome of "objective standards" and of "citizenship" "improving when it is practiced" is...a certain amount, at least, of Progress.

also p. 33—"Within the framework of competition...clear standards of achievement and closure are needed to measure performance and dole out rewards.
(Contrasts competition with the community imperative.)
So, an affinity (if not quite an inevitable one) between "objective standards" and economic "competition."