Better Man

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Day 23 Learn a <strong>Man</strong>ual Skill I read an interesting article in the New York Times where the editors asked eight artists to draw a portrait of their fathers and name one thing that their dad can/could do, but they can’t. The answers were interesting and made me think of the things that my dad can do that I can’t. Like clean a gun. And skin a deer. While it’s not universally true, among people my age, it seems our dads are a lot handier than we are. Sometimes I imagine what would happen if there was a terrorist attack or natural disaster that wiped out our electricity and disrupted society. How many of us would be standing on our lawns, scratching our heads, absolutely clueless about what to do next? Learning hands-on skills is about more than survival, however. Men are made to be productive, to create things with our hands, to enjoy the manly satisfaction of taking things apart, seeing how they work, and putting them back together. <strong>Man</strong>ual skills have stopped being passed down from father to son. And in our digital age, much of what we do for both work and pleasure is often conducted in an intangible realm with intangible results. You might think that the need for craftsmanship has become irrelevant in our high-tech times. But while working with your hands may no longer be necessary for your livelihood, it doesn’t mean it’s not necessary for you soul. The need for craftsmanship springs eternal. To put into words why this is, I turn to Mathew B. Crawford, whose book, Shop Class as Soulcraft, makes the argument for craftsmanship far better than my humble writing skills ever could. This excerpt comes by way of The New Atlantis: Anyone in the market for a good used machine tool should talk to Noel Dempsey, a dealer in Richmond, Virginia. Noel’s bustling warehouse is full of metal lathes, milling machines, and table saws, and it turns out that most of it is from schools. eBay is awash in such equipment, also from schools.
30 Days to a better man It appears shop class is becoming a thing of the past, as educators prepare students to become “knowledge workers.” At the same time, an engineering culture has developed in recent years in which the object is to “hide the works,” rendering the artifacts we use unintelligible to direct inspection. Lift the hood on some cars now (especially German ones), and the engine appears a bit like the shimmering, featureless obelisk that so enthralled the cavemen in the opening scene of the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. Essentially, there is another hood under the hood. This creeping concealedness takes various forms. The fasteners holding small appliances together now often require esoteric screwdrivers not commonly available, apparently to prevent the curious or the angry from interrogating the innards. By way of contrast, older readers will recall that until recent decades, Sears catalogues included blown-up parts diagrams and conceptual schematics for all appliances and many other mechanical goods. It was simply taken for granted that such information would be demanded by the consumer. A decline in tool use would seem to betoken a shift in our mode of inhabiting the world: more passive and more dependent. And indeed, there are fewer occasions for the kind of spiritedness that is called forth when we take things in hand for ourselves, whether to fix them or to make them. 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 installing a pre-made replacement part. So perhaps the time is ripe for reconsideration of an ideal that has fallen out of favor: manual competence, and the stance it entails toward the built, material world. Neither as workers nor as consumers are we much called upon to exercise such competence, most of us anyway, and merely to recommend its cultivation is to risk the scorn of those who take themselves to be the most hard-headed: the hard-headed economist will point out the opportunity costs of making what can be bought, and the hard-headed educator will say that it is irresponsible to educate the young for the trades, which are somehow identified as the jobs of the past. But we might pause to consider just how hard-headed these presumptions are, and whether they don’t, on the contrary, issue from a peculiar sort of idealism, one that insistently steers young people toward the most ghostly kinds of work... 146
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Copyright 2014 © by Brett H. McKay
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Introduction 30 Days to a Better Ma
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30 Days to a better man before you
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30 Days to a better man don’t wor
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Day 2 Shine Your Shoes There’s a
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Day 3 Find A Mentor A few years ago
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Brett and Kate McKay school” and
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Day 4 Increase Your Testosterone Wh
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Brett and Kate McKay So what’s sa
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Brett and Kate McKay 3 Things I Wil
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30 Days to a better man him and the
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30 Days to a better man the extraor
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30 Days to a better man awards you
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Day 7 Reconnect with an Old Friend
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Brett and Kate McKay fast food, unl
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Day 8 Start a Journal My grandpa, B
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Brett and Kate McKay Why Keep a Jou
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Brett and Kate McKay Some days you
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Day 9 Take a Woman on a Date A man
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Brett and Kate McKay The “paid fo
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30 Days to a better man Almost the
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30 Days to a better man memorize. I
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Day 11 Give Yourself a Testicular E
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Brett and Kate McKay 1. Sudden acut
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30 Days to a better man Of course,
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30 Days to a better man Then pick o
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Day 13 Declutter Your Life “Simpl
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Brett and Kate McKay Also, through
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Day 14 Write a Letter to Your Fathe
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Brett and Kate McKay If You Don’t
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Brett and Kate McKay Today’s Task
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