[독자서평] Bottom of the T: Richard Sennett on Craft

자료: Bottom of the T: Richard Sennett on Craft

Richard Sennett’s new book on craft seems to challenge some of our assumptions about the virtues of generalism. I just started the book last night, and there’s a much bigger argument in the book: that by separating our minds from our hands, our homo faber life from our homo laborens life (he uses the Arendt construction, that’s not me being pretentious with the Latin), we are living diminished lives. Still, the passion for craft, for “doing one thing well”, seems an important voice to bring into the blogosphere’s current discussion of T’s, fuzzies, generalists, etc.

While I wait for the book to take shape in my mind (in addition to reading it of course), there’s a decent WAMU interview with Sennett. Some high points:

• they spend a little time on the 10,000 hours maxim, that it takes that many hours of studious attention to something before you do it really well. An interesting parallel to Nicholas Negroponte’s rule that important worthwhile projects occur across five year time-spans

• “learning to get skilled and committing to getting good at something . . . [is what] nurses, doctors, and scientists do … it’s not about manual labor”

• Capitalism does not necessarily create forces for “doing something well”, it has no inherent interest in building skills and might actually be a long-term force for the race to the bottom.

• Sennett has comments about how the educational system tends to make vocational training, shop, even engineering second class to more purely brain-focused work. (This is an interesting parallel to Omnivore’s Dilemma which points out that the US has done everything it can to turn agriculture into a machine or an activity for stupid people to do. Innovative farmers isn’t something we celebrate even though there are many.)

• “there’s a lot of work that we think of as simple work that is not simple, there’s real content to it . . . we’ve become very snobbish about what we think of as ordinary jobs, we think anyone can do it, but that’s not true. … the reasons that motivate people to become craftsmen is self respect.”

• labs are like “modern workshops” they have the values and approach to work that an artisan of the 19th century. At MIT, he asked scientists if they were craftsmen which they didn’t always like. But at good labs, they would say “I’m very hands-on”. They use different tools, but the attitude is similar and there’s a respect for the importance of the ‘mechanical’ processes.

• mentor/master relationships need to be restored, people need mentors who say “that isn’t good enough”. The best thing you can say to a kid is “you can do better, it’s not a put-down”

I used to liken programmers to furniture makers. Programmers choose materials, techniques, tools and environments with the subtle care and attention to detail of a craftsman. They think simultaneously about how to make it work, and how to make it better (this is an important distinction for Sennett). They think about their components with the texture and nuance that a furniture maker has for the properties of wood, finishes, joints, and the tools that will shape them.

That said, though, I’m pretty sure I’m bastardizing Sennett’s book by dragging it to this level. In the preface, he talks about bumping into his teacher Hannah Arendt in the weeks after the Cuban Missile Crisis and sharing reactions. In a moment of self-loathing I was tempted to send the book back to Amazon. I mean, surely, he has a much bigger project that I should respect (and this is the first of a thee book project). But hey, advertising and marketing is all about coopting important ideas, right?