In praise of material culture

A friend sent me a notice of an auction. The State University sold off the shop that served the agriculture and vocational department. I can’t imagine them auctioning off a shop full of functional tools unless they were discontinuing that area of study. I suppose the reasoning is that nobody actually makes anything around here anymore, so why bother? We can get stuff from China.

Something that disturbs me about the way our society is headed is the loss of individual control over the material world. With the increase in global outsourcing and the increase in both service industries and job specialization, it seems to me that the number of Americans who can actually do things with material objects is decreasing. We are utterly dependent upon an array of machinery and electronics, but only a handful of specialists has the know-how to build or repair them. I’m not expecting the average driver to be a factory trained auto mechanic. I do think that your average driver should have a functional idea of what goes on under the hood. Alas, the set of useful gauges on the dashboard has been replaced by the dreaded “Check Engine” light. Most people turn the ignition key and pray to the car gods that the mysteries under the hood are in harmony.

Sure, there is a do-it-yourself movement out there, spawning woodworking magazines, craft stores, and high tech geek guides such as Make Magazine. However, the implication of identifying someone as a “do-it-yourselfer” is that normal people just buy things.

For most of human history, most people were generalists. With the advent of agricultural society and social hierarchy came specialization, but people still worked directly with their hands on material objects. People associated themselves with a piece of land. Parents passed down broad craft knowledge to their children. This is the way much of the planet still operates, but there is an empty place in the industrialized world.

The way people interact with music is indicative of the general trend. Less than a hundred years ago, most people heard music only when it was performed by musicians in their presence, or when people played or sang themselves. Towns had their own bands. The phonograph and the radio changed this, but listening to music remained a definite activity. 78 RPM records lasted three minutes, so the listener had to be right there, ready to pick up the tone arm and preserve the expendable steel needle. Both the recording medium and the player were fragile, bulky, and expensive. For many decades radio stations were forbidden to play records on the air – music had to be live performance. Music was labor intensive, expensive, and valued. The acquisition and storage of music has reached the point where it essentially costs nothing, takes up no space, and can be continuous and portable. High quality recording equipment has become cheap and ubiquitous, so anybody can produce an album. And anybody has. In one sense, the democratization of music production and distribution is good – it begins to free us from the tyranny of major record labels. In another way, it has devalued music. Why require real quality when it is effortless and disposable? Why understand it when you don't have to make it? Why pay attention to it if there is a seemingly infinite and constant supply?

And so it is with our material goods. Sweat laborers elsewhere in the world churn out cheap plastic crap, particle board furniture, and mayfly electronics that populate our lives. We casually purchase and discard the flimsy drek presented to us by our corporate suppliers, because, well, what else is there? Meanwhile, legions of kids (whose parents can afford it) are spending their time in the virtual world of video games and MySpace.

The Lake Champlain Maritime Museum has a program called Champlain Discovery that teaches kids to build their own kayaks, then teaches them how to handle them, and then takes them out for a week of adventure and education on the lake. For many kids it is a transformative experience, in that for the first time in their lives they have built something with their own hands. Then they take it out in the natural world and rely on it. Every kid should have an experience like this. (Note to adults: There are courses for you, too.) Children would be so much happier if they could get their hands on real things and use their bodies and their imaginations to change their world.

Here's the saying I thought up while building my own house (having never built anything bigger than a shed before that): An ounce of overconfidence is worth a pound of experience. By the time you realize that you can't do it you'll be so far into it that you will have to finish it anyway.

So get out there and make something. Build something, paint something, cook something. It doesn't have to be perfect. It doesn't have to be expensive. It might not even work, in which case you'll have to try again. Read the manual. Open the hood. Get something at a flea market and take it apart. So shut the computer off already.

Comments

[robby]

Actually, my favorite H. quip, remarked, as i remember, while you were helping me with a minor plumbing disaster years ago, is "Desperation is the mother of craftiness."