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Roger Scruton reviews Richard Sennett’s The Craftsman

He believes that craft is as vital to the healthy functioning of modern societies as it was to the medieval guilds lauded and romanticised by Morris and Ruskin. And he chooses modern examples to illustrate his thesis. He criticises computer-aided design as the enemy of the eye-guided craft of architectural composition, in terms that recall Ruskin’s assault on neoclassicism. He praises Nokia’s way of innovating through free cooperation in terms that might have been applied to the drafting of the Rule of St Benedict.

I haven’t read the book so I’ll have to go by Scruton’s review and agree in general with Sennett’s thesis that craftsmanship and pride in workmanship is alive and well. From dishwashers that take pride in their sparkling clean glassware to amateur flute makers to structural engineers I’ve meet people from every facet of society that take great pride in what they do. They have probably always been outnumbered by the people that could good enough to get by thus the impression that many people have at any one time that pride in work is dead or dying. I do have a couple problems with Scruton’s particulars. One is the assertion that digital art is not real because it doesn’t flow forth from hands caked with clay or paint. At the least the jury is still thinking things over or should be. What difference does it make if your brush uses pixels or pigment. They’re both still tools and if art is meant to convey some insight into the human experience it makes little difference if that insight has a digital presence versus a marble one. Though that might also be where digital art falls short. Marble is part of our real three dimensional world, we can walk around it and sometimes live in it where digital art exists solely as zeros and ones. Sennett may also place too much importance to the happenstance of religion and ritual in the development of well executed craft. While one can’t dismiss history, one can see several places where one belief or set of knowledge could have taken western culture down a different and possibly better path. For instance around 400 BC Greek philosophers Leucippus and his student Democritus proposed that all matter was made up of indivisible pieces (atomic particles) – pretty amazing stuff; nature was not composed of some mythical and unknowable substance, but something real and quantifiable. As logical as that concept sounds how it was rejected by Aristotle who claimed that no such particles existed. That assertion prevailed for the next two thousand years, until around the beginning of the Renaissance, but not fully evolving until John Dalton in 1808 . Imagine if instead of myth filling in the gaps of human knowledge the human race had pursued atomic theory for that two thousand years. Wouldn’t human civilization had still practiced and had a deep appreciation for craftsmanship and its benefits.

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