When something’s broken

Earlier this year, our beloved Seattle Post-Intelligencer shut down, and since then we have been taking the Seattle Times, which I find much less interesting as a newspaper. Although I appreciate very much how hard they are working to make PI-orphan readers feel welcome; they even added many of the PI comics to their comics page, which is exactly the kind of thing that matters, you know? Any measure of control and input and respect that we can give one another during times of change makes a difference.

The Times, like every other newspaper in the US, has cut back on its arts coverage in general and its book reviews in particular, and so I have taken less pleasure of late in my Sunday paper reading. But I enjoyed last Sunday, not so much because of the specific content as because of the internal conversational trails it led me down. Perhaps I’m just in a mood to personally connect with ideas. Hmm, which one might simply read as a less obnoxious way of saying It’s all about me!, but perhaps you will make the kinder assumption. These days I tend to be both harder on myself, by which I mean more truthful in my self-analysis, and also more accepting of those truths. I’m guessing that acceptance is necessary to stay relatively coherent even as I become more and more aware of my own fractures.

And so I was struck by this review of a book called Shop Class as Soulcraft. The reviewer didn’t like the book, and it sounds as though I might not either; but I was struck by the truth (in my perception) of the pull quote:

What ordinary people once made, they buy: and what they once fixed for themselves, they replace entirely or hire an expert to repair, whose expert fix often involves replacing an entire system because some minute component has failed.
 
— from Shop Class as Soulcraft by Matthew B. Crawford

And it occurred to me this is one more way in which we have contrived as a culture to give ourselves less control of change, and to… how do I put this? To deify expertise to the point that in order to be “special” by the standards of our culture, we have to be experts at something. We achieve standing in our communities by having something specific to contribute; but within my lifetime the standard for being a fully active member of a community was that we all pitched in with whatever was needed, because to some extent we all could.

Recently, members of my high school class have been talking about taking on a community construction project (building a free dental clinic) as a way of giving back to the town where our school is based. I think it’s a great idea; and I am struck by the number of people who want to participate but “don’t know one end of a power tool from the other” or “can pull nails with the best of them!” Et cetera. No disrespect intended to those folks: what I’m pointing at is not Oh, they can’t build stuff, but rather the readiness with which they downplay the general knowledge they may have, and/or the lack of assumption that if they turn up and someone shows them how, they can probably do a lot of what is needed. These are smart people: so why the apparent lack of confidence in their ability to become successful students once again?

I myself do know one end of a table saw from another. I’m no master carpenter or electrician or plumber, but when something breaks in my house, I try to fix it; and often I’m happy to find that I can. I was going to say happily surprised, but that wouldn’t be true: I go into these situations with the expectation that I can learn enough to decide fairly quickly whether I can fix it or not; and if I think I can, then I try. I’ve made a complete mess of a few things (let’s not talk about the time I tried to replace the motherboard in Nicola’s computer, thank god she’s a forgiving person), and a complete success of others (I fixed a Horrible Grinding Sound in the dishwasher just last week).

The internet is an enormous blessing in this regard; you can find out how to do just about anything if you’re willing to spend a little time with Google. But I grew up with an engineer father and an artisan mother; they fixed things, assembled stuff, made things from scratch, and taught me enough theories to make me feel confident that I could do it too. And so when I was offered a job in a theatre shop one summer, I took it; when the furniture comes all in pieces in a box, I put it together; and when my WordPress upgrade completely breaks the back end of my website to the point that I cannot access a single administrative function (that was yesterday’s fun), I figure out how to get in the side door and fix the problem.

This is not because I’m so special; in fact, the point is that I’m not. Mine is the attitude of the generalist and the student. I don’t try to fix stuff because I think it’s nobler or more authentic, I do it because I want to manage my own changes if I can. I want to know that I can control my own environment if I choose to. Sometimes that’s a fool’s game, for sure; and some of it comes from insecurity on my part, my knee-jerk response in crisis that no one else is going to take care of me, so I’d better be able to do it myself.

But I can’t do everything myself. And I’m part of a community, finally, of family and friends and neighbors for whom pooling skills, pitching in, doing what we can, is just part of the deal. We don’t have to all do everything well; but it’s not enough to just do “what we’re best at.” If that were the case, I guess I’d be writing everyone’s term papers for them, or something. But I cook for people when they are sick; I collect their mail and put out their trash when they are on vacation. I drive them and their dying cat to the emergency hospital. I paint trim, I weed, I run errands. I give communication process advice. I do what I can to help people manage their changes. And they do that for me.

And I think that if I didn’t have the attitude that it’s worth a try to fix things myself, maybe I wouldn’t have the impetus to try to help other people when their things need fixing. Maybe I’d learn to be helpless, to depend always on expertise as opposed to intelligence, or kindness, or community. Maybe I’d stop trying to fix myself too; maybe I’d assume that I couldn’t, or that having parts of myself be broken was the opposite of being whole. I don’t know: I am who I am, and so the rest is just guessing. But it’s something I’m thinking about.