Credo: Matthew Crawford

Do you consider yourself to be of a specific faith?

I feel no need to posit a supernatural agent who watches over me — that strikes me as one species of narcissism I’d rather resist.  Yet I have found some thinkers who draw on the Catholic tradition helpful. They have an account of the human person that has come to inform my own view, though ultimately I prefer a this-worldly approach to the problem of living well. A mundane ethics, you might say. Here the problem of self-absorption isn’t overcome by obedience to a commanding god. Rather, it requires keeping your eyes open and looking around, holding yourself responsible to the true nature of things — things you can see, if you make the effort.

Why do you think American society does not value careers in a trades?

When people think of the plumber, all they see is the butt-crack. I think this low prestige is tied to a false dichotomy of “knowledge work” versus manual work, as though they are two very different things. But the kind of thinking that goes on in the trades can be genuinely impressive, if we stop to notice it. As a cultural matter, the trades present an image of someone settled, learning to do one thing really well. I think that image bores us because we make a fetish of freedom and change; our imagination is sparked by limitless possibility in the future, and this diminishes our regard for modest yet solid accomplishments. But it is the latter that give coherence to a life.

If people take the advice and go into physical work rather than a desk job, what will they miss? What do you miss?

Air conditioning. Actually, the book doesn’t offer blanket advice. Rather, I want to suggest we can take a broader view of what a good job might consist of. We seem to have developed an educational monoculture, tied to a vision of what kind of work is valuable and important — everyone gets herded into a certain track where they end up working in an office, regardless of their natural bents. But some people, including some who are very smart, would rather be learning to build things or fix things. Why not honor that? I think one reason we don’t is that we’ve had this fantasy that we’re going to somehow glide around in a pure information economy.

You suggest in your writing that academically gifted students should learn a trade and work with their hands, even if only for the summers. What good will this do them as the future leaders of corporations and agencies?

Relatively few are going to become masters of the universe, and it’s nice to have something to fall back on. But also, for those who do end up making decisions for the rest of us, notice that there is a kind of formation of character that happens in the trades. When you’re dealing with physical stuff, it’s very hard to weasel your way out of responsibility when things go badly. You can’t go on mistaking theory for reality very long before it kicks you in the pants, and somebody gets hurt. So you have to pay attention to what you’re doing. Individual responsibility is the rule, and that seems like a good thing.

At your core, what is one of your defining beliefs?

I believe that taking one’s personal belief to be definitive of one’s self is a symptom of modern individualism and that a truer self-understanding would require recognizing that we are formed by our habits. Aristotle suggests that if you act as though you were brave, generous and so forth, you will come to love and hate the things a virtuous person loves and hates. Such a training of the affections through habit is an indispensable part of the lifelong project of developing a clear view of matters, or correct beliefs. Call it education.