A couple of things come to mind while reading this...first, on icemen. It's not just the job that was lost; it was also the skill at making ice even in the summer without refrigeration. Have you ever seen the cold air dams in the mountains they used to build to funnel the sinking nighttime cold air into a valley, and ultimately to a pond from which the ice that formed was harvested each morning? How many people today would even think of doing that if they didn't have a refrigerator?
On your idea of collective interaction being important even in non-physical tasks, it reminds me of a story my father-in-law told me. He was a Boeing engineer, and in the days of punch-card computing they used to stand in line at the computer, feed in their cards, then go stand in another line to get their cards and print outs. Some manager decided it would be more efficient to have them drop their cars off in a box; an intern would then feed the cards for them, and put the cards and printouts in another box they could pick up later. After they implemented this system productivity went way, way down and they re-instituted the old system. Why? Turns out that while waiting in line all the engineers would discuss what they were working on and help solve each other's problems that they were stuck on! That casual interaction was vital to doing the work!
First I learned about is when I worked in the Gila Mountains and they had these remnant cold air dams near Mogollon, NM that channeled the cold air down the valley to a pond. The ice was cut and stored, but since the air was coming down from 8-10 thousand feet it was cold even in summer so they could make ice nearly year round.
Sure, in New England they cut ice in winter and stored and shipped it...but people are way more ingenious than even that! You also have ice caves...caves underground where the temps stay very cool and ice forms and never melts. Ice was also harvested from these where the water was potable. It's pretty cool (pun intended 😁).
Really interesting points you brought up, especially about the importance of collective interaction in non-physical tasks. It’s amazing how those little moments of discussion and collaboration can make such a big impact on productivity.
C. S. Lewis, in his space trilogy makes this very point. Weston and the other "bad guys" are intent on using technology to secure the survival of "our species" at the expense of all other species. Even if "our species" evolves through the technology into something monstrous. The hero Ransom is a philologist, not a tradesman, but he is concerned to preserve, not merely the species, but the human values of courage, love, communication, truth, beauty, respect, and right.
Wonderful article Nate. I am delighted that our daughter is training to be an Illustrator; it is one of the last few artisan degree courses available. She loves what she does and makes beautiful things in the way they need to be made for people who really want them. Whereas I used to work for a Law Firm
shuffling money and papers.
And great to hear from another Lewis fan:) His essays on audiobook got me through lockdown.
That and switching off the radio.
"modern industry is a radically hopeless system. You can improve wages, hours, conditions, etc., but all that doesn’t cure the deepest trouble: i.e., that numbers of people are kept all their lives doing dull repetition work which gives no full play to their faculties. How that is to be overcome, I do not know. If a single country abandoned the system it would merely fall a prey to the other countries which hadn’t abandoned it.
C.S Lewis
"Answers to Questions on Christianity," God in the Dock (Eerdmans: 1970) 48.
He develops this point elsewhere to say that people who realise the issue will be after jobs requiring skills and discernment like jack rabbits and hang on like limpits.
In the small town where I was born, we once had a little shop that made clothes. Those clothes were sold in the local J-Gees and other mom and pop stores.
The little shop employed about 100 workers, the clothing shops about another 50. When the little shop couldn't compete with Wal-Mart and chinese shit, it shut down. Within 10 years, the local mom and pops also shut down, because they couldn't keep up with Wal-Mart and could sell clothes so cheaply. So 150 people out of work.
Ubiquity is the mother of all vice: Cheap gin to rolled cigarettes, porn and gambling and opiates, and now the scourge of infotainment. How can we not become cognitively obese? How can culture and lifestyle not be destroyed. The only way is to resist the same as one stops drinking after the second beer or stops eating after a sliver of cake. Only virtue can overcome vice. Can we do that?
I keep reading this! It so beautifully lays out a concept that so important to me but I haven’t been able to articulate this clearly. A related piece from Jay Griffith’s book Kith talks about how “knowable”, especially to children, our trades are: middle ages woodcutter versus a financial consultant. The whole book is worth reading but I quoted this one passage at the end of this essay: https://open.substack.com/pub/kitkitdizze/p/aesthetics-touch-the-earth-directly?r=4absm&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email
I’m an architect; in school, 25 years ago I was probably the last computer-less class that drafted with a set of seven Rapidograph pens on vellum. The experience of sitting at the drafting table with music on selecting the right line weight of pen was worlds away from drafting in CAD and now modeling in BIM. If I was 18 again I’d choose a job based on lifestyle (so one that was not about sitting at a computer and glorifying long hours) rather than even interest.
I loved the anecdote about your daughter seeing your work vehicles around town! I point out buildings I’ve worked on around town to my kids all the time. My five year old finally got exasperated with this one day and said, “mom, you didn’t actually work on that building, you just drew the picture!”. He’s not wrong.
Such a wonderful piece, Erin, and that passage from Griffith's book is enough to make me want to buy it! Thank you so much for sharing your story and link with me.
Seems like our daughters are cut from similar cloth! :)
Great post. It seems that as technology changes us and changes our way of life it also changes our orientation to tradition. We don’t just lose a sense of a particular way of life but also a sense of ourselves. We become sort of like hyper-individuals without any sense of being connected to our fathers or their land.
My great grandfather was a building contractor in Indianapolis (b. 1872, d. 1956). I still have his hand drill and a set of drill bits in their wooden box plus a few hand planers and a draw knife. (I love touching the wooden handles which are worn with use by his hands, like reaching back to a relative I never met who had a huge influence on my life nevertheless). I worked in the same field (mostly roofing and remodeling) for years and actually used his drill to make the hole for the electric service connection bc I had no power, lol. I suppose my point is these tools are no longer in use except by specialist artisans, but the way of life is still mostly intact, although much faster, I’d wager. I don’t expect my descendants will still have my battery powered drill 70 years after I’m dead, though. Hell, I’m 56 and I’ll likely outlive it!
It's so cool that you have your great-grandfather's tools and even get to use them occasionally! It's like getting a chance to shake his hand through his tools.
You've definitely touched on something with the speed brought about my newer power tools. I'm reminded of a passage in Matthew B. Crawford's "Shop Class as Soulcraft" where he is discussing George Sturt's "The Wheelwright's Shop" who describes the impact not just of industrialization generally, but of tools specifically.
"In Sturt's shop, working exclusively with hand tools, the skills required to build a wheel regress all the way to the selection of trees to fell for timber, the proper time for felling them, how to season them, and so forth."
Crawford then quotes Sturt's account of fabbing a wheel's rim, called a "felloe," and he describes how two felloes are alike when finished, but it was the wheelwright who had to make it so not only by having an intimate knowledge of wood, but familiarity with how to deal with all of the variations within a particular wood. "Knots here, shakes there, rind galls, waney edges...thicknesses, thinnesses, were for ever affording new chances or forbidding previous solutions, whereby a fresh problem confronted the workman's ingenuity every few minutes. He had no band-saw to drive, with ruthless unintelligence, through every resistance. The timber was far from being prey, a helpless victim, to a machine. Rather it would lend its own special virtues to the man who knew how to humour it."
So, we have a form of it, you're right. Go to the lumber supplier, select the material, check for inconsistencies or defects, do your work. But it definitely requires less of a person today than it did then, and I suppose the question is: what effect does this lowered requirement have on the person, the workshop, the community? And is it an effect we're okay with? No answers, only questions.
“The amount of genuine leisure available in a society is generally in inverse proportion to the amount of labour-saving machinery it employs.” E.F. Schumacher
“Man… attempts to create the world in his image, to build a totally man-made environment, and then discovers that he can do so only on the condition of constantly remaking himself to fit it. We must now face the fact that man himself is at stake.” Ivan Illich
Wool waulkings were also an important focus of "women's culture" in Gaelic Scotland, and there's a corpus of hundreds (thousands?) of great songs associated with them. (A sampling might be to look at recordings from Kate MacDonald (Uist) on the Tobar a Dualchais website.)
A couple of things come to mind while reading this...first, on icemen. It's not just the job that was lost; it was also the skill at making ice even in the summer without refrigeration. Have you ever seen the cold air dams in the mountains they used to build to funnel the sinking nighttime cold air into a valley, and ultimately to a pond from which the ice that formed was harvested each morning? How many people today would even think of doing that if they didn't have a refrigerator?
On your idea of collective interaction being important even in non-physical tasks, it reminds me of a story my father-in-law told me. He was a Boeing engineer, and in the days of punch-card computing they used to stand in line at the computer, feed in their cards, then go stand in another line to get their cards and print outs. Some manager decided it would be more efficient to have them drop their cars off in a box; an intern would then feed the cards for them, and put the cards and printouts in another box they could pick up later. After they implemented this system productivity went way, way down and they re-instituted the old system. Why? Turns out that while waiting in line all the engineers would discuss what they were working on and help solve each other's problems that they were stuck on! That casual interaction was vital to doing the work!
Efficiency isn't everything.
I had NO CLUE about the icemen. That’s absolutely fascinating. I’ll have to do more research on them now!
And the story you share about your father-in-law doesn’t surprise me at all. There’s far more to the benign, daily interactions than we realize.
First I learned about is when I worked in the Gila Mountains and they had these remnant cold air dams near Mogollon, NM that channeled the cold air down the valley to a pond. The ice was cut and stored, but since the air was coming down from 8-10 thousand feet it was cold even in summer so they could make ice nearly year round.
Sure, in New England they cut ice in winter and stored and shipped it...but people are way more ingenious than even that! You also have ice caves...caves underground where the temps stay very cool and ice forms and never melts. Ice was also harvested from these where the water was potable. It's pretty cool (pun intended 😁).
Really interesting points you brought up, especially about the importance of collective interaction in non-physical tasks. It’s amazing how those little moments of discussion and collaboration can make such a big impact on productivity.
That's why teleworking is bad for business.
C. S. Lewis, in his space trilogy makes this very point. Weston and the other "bad guys" are intent on using technology to secure the survival of "our species" at the expense of all other species. Even if "our species" evolves through the technology into something monstrous. The hero Ransom is a philologist, not a tradesman, but he is concerned to preserve, not merely the species, but the human values of courage, love, communication, truth, beauty, respect, and right.
Excellent insight from a great trilogy
Yes!
Wonderful article Nate. I am delighted that our daughter is training to be an Illustrator; it is one of the last few artisan degree courses available. She loves what she does and makes beautiful things in the way they need to be made for people who really want them. Whereas I used to work for a Law Firm
shuffling money and papers.
And great to hear from another Lewis fan:) His essays on audiobook got me through lockdown.
That and switching off the radio.
"modern industry is a radically hopeless system. You can improve wages, hours, conditions, etc., but all that doesn’t cure the deepest trouble: i.e., that numbers of people are kept all their lives doing dull repetition work which gives no full play to their faculties. How that is to be overcome, I do not know. If a single country abandoned the system it would merely fall a prey to the other countries which hadn’t abandoned it.
C.S Lewis
"Answers to Questions on Christianity," God in the Dock (Eerdmans: 1970) 48.
https://merecslewis.blogspot.com/2010/04/
He develops this point elsewhere to say that people who realise the issue will be after jobs requiring skills and discernment like jack rabbits and hang on like limpits.
warmest regards,
Karen in Cambridge UK
************
In the small town where I was born, we once had a little shop that made clothes. Those clothes were sold in the local J-Gees and other mom and pop stores.
The little shop employed about 100 workers, the clothing shops about another 50. When the little shop couldn't compete with Wal-Mart and chinese shit, it shut down. Within 10 years, the local mom and pops also shut down, because they couldn't keep up with Wal-Mart and could sell clothes so cheaply. So 150 people out of work.
I miss those shops.
Ubiquity is the mother of all vice: Cheap gin to rolled cigarettes, porn and gambling and opiates, and now the scourge of infotainment. How can we not become cognitively obese? How can culture and lifestyle not be destroyed. The only way is to resist the same as one stops drinking after the second beer or stops eating after a sliver of cake. Only virtue can overcome vice. Can we do that?
I think, quite possibly, this is the best piece you have written Nate.
That means a lot, Hadden. Thank you for reading, commenting, and sharing.
I keep reading this! It so beautifully lays out a concept that so important to me but I haven’t been able to articulate this clearly. A related piece from Jay Griffith’s book Kith talks about how “knowable”, especially to children, our trades are: middle ages woodcutter versus a financial consultant. The whole book is worth reading but I quoted this one passage at the end of this essay: https://open.substack.com/pub/kitkitdizze/p/aesthetics-touch-the-earth-directly?r=4absm&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email
I’m an architect; in school, 25 years ago I was probably the last computer-less class that drafted with a set of seven Rapidograph pens on vellum. The experience of sitting at the drafting table with music on selecting the right line weight of pen was worlds away from drafting in CAD and now modeling in BIM. If I was 18 again I’d choose a job based on lifestyle (so one that was not about sitting at a computer and glorifying long hours) rather than even interest.
I loved the anecdote about your daughter seeing your work vehicles around town! I point out buildings I’ve worked on around town to my kids all the time. My five year old finally got exasperated with this one day and said, “mom, you didn’t actually work on that building, you just drew the picture!”. He’s not wrong.
Such a wonderful piece, Erin, and that passage from Griffith's book is enough to make me want to buy it! Thank you so much for sharing your story and link with me.
Seems like our daughters are cut from similar cloth! :)
Great post. It seems that as technology changes us and changes our way of life it also changes our orientation to tradition. We don’t just lose a sense of a particular way of life but also a sense of ourselves. We become sort of like hyper-individuals without any sense of being connected to our fathers or their land.
My great grandfather was a building contractor in Indianapolis (b. 1872, d. 1956). I still have his hand drill and a set of drill bits in their wooden box plus a few hand planers and a draw knife. (I love touching the wooden handles which are worn with use by his hands, like reaching back to a relative I never met who had a huge influence on my life nevertheless). I worked in the same field (mostly roofing and remodeling) for years and actually used his drill to make the hole for the electric service connection bc I had no power, lol. I suppose my point is these tools are no longer in use except by specialist artisans, but the way of life is still mostly intact, although much faster, I’d wager. I don’t expect my descendants will still have my battery powered drill 70 years after I’m dead, though. Hell, I’m 56 and I’ll likely outlive it!
It's so cool that you have your great-grandfather's tools and even get to use them occasionally! It's like getting a chance to shake his hand through his tools.
You've definitely touched on something with the speed brought about my newer power tools. I'm reminded of a passage in Matthew B. Crawford's "Shop Class as Soulcraft" where he is discussing George Sturt's "The Wheelwright's Shop" who describes the impact not just of industrialization generally, but of tools specifically.
"In Sturt's shop, working exclusively with hand tools, the skills required to build a wheel regress all the way to the selection of trees to fell for timber, the proper time for felling them, how to season them, and so forth."
Crawford then quotes Sturt's account of fabbing a wheel's rim, called a "felloe," and he describes how two felloes are alike when finished, but it was the wheelwright who had to make it so not only by having an intimate knowledge of wood, but familiarity with how to deal with all of the variations within a particular wood. "Knots here, shakes there, rind galls, waney edges...thicknesses, thinnesses, were for ever affording new chances or forbidding previous solutions, whereby a fresh problem confronted the workman's ingenuity every few minutes. He had no band-saw to drive, with ruthless unintelligence, through every resistance. The timber was far from being prey, a helpless victim, to a machine. Rather it would lend its own special virtues to the man who knew how to humour it."
So, we have a form of it, you're right. Go to the lumber supplier, select the material, check for inconsistencies or defects, do your work. But it definitely requires less of a person today than it did then, and I suppose the question is: what effect does this lowered requirement have on the person, the workshop, the community? And is it an effect we're okay with? No answers, only questions.
“The amount of genuine leisure available in a society is generally in inverse proportion to the amount of labour-saving machinery it employs.” E.F. Schumacher
“Man… attempts to create the world in his image, to build a totally man-made environment, and then discovers that he can do so only on the condition of constantly remaking himself to fit it. We must now face the fact that man himself is at stake.” Ivan Illich
Wool waulkings were also an important focus of "women's culture" in Gaelic Scotland, and there's a corpus of hundreds (thousands?) of great songs associated with them. (A sampling might be to look at recordings from Kate MacDonald (Uist) on the Tobar a Dualchais website.)