Anxieties about the way we work are much older than the factories that worried Morris and Ruskin. For more than two millennia, philosophers have argued that skills are worth defending, and that we lose something of ourselves when we let them go.
In Plato’s Phaedrus dialogue, written around 370 BCE, Socrates relates an Egyptian story about the invention of writing by the God Thoth. In the tale, Thoth makes his case for this new technology to the Egyptian king Thamus. After the divine sales pitch, Thamus responds:
This discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves.
In Plato’s telling, Socrates sides with Thamus on the basis that writing produces only a simulation of intelligence. Written texts are fixed, whereas conversation requires speakers to exercise flexibility, responding to questions and adapting to listeners. Plato views this responsiveness as characteristic of wisdom. There is a suggestion here that genuine understanding is produced through flexible give-and-take, and that reliance on writing threatens this by fostering forgetfulness and the mere appearance of knowledge. In some ways, this story suggests that flexible conversation could be understood as a skill – one that might be threatened if the technology of writing were to become widespread.
The shift to industrial manufacturing destroys the tacit knowledge tied up in the creation of handmade goods
Roughly 21 centuries later, in Émile (1762), Jean-Jacques Rousseau argues that apprenticeship in a métier – a job or skill – ought to be a central part of a child’s education. His rhetoric explicitly connects crafts with heritage: ‘Cultivate the heritage of your fathers! But if you have lost that heritage, or if you never had it, what should you do? Learn a skill [métier]!’ For Rousseau, the point of this apprenticeship is to gain insight into social relations, and crucially to learn the distinction between jobs that are held in high esteem and those that are actually useful.
A century later, Karl Marx spends three chapters of his Capital (1867) detailing the shift from hand-crafted objects to industrially manufactured products. These chapters are presented as economic analysis but they have a nostalgic bent. For example:
Manufacture begets, in every handicraft that it seizes upon, a class of so-called unskilled labourers, a class which handicraft industry strictly excluded. If it develops a one-sided speciality into a perfection, at the expense of the whole of a man’s working capacity, it also begins to make a speciality of the absence of all development.
In these chapters, Marx presents something like a political economy of skill. His basic thought – following Adam Smith – is that the division of labour in production leads to substantial benefits of efficiency and profitability for the owner of capital, at the cost of a vicious specialisation among workers that narrows their practical and mental lives.
|
Know Your MBA Exams |
|
