The Craftsman, page 3
The hymn to Hephaestus may seem to celebrate no more than a cliché, that of civilization commencing when human beings began to use tools. But this hymn was written thousands of years after the fabrication of such tools as knives, the wheel, and the loom. More than a technician, the civilizing craftsman has used these tools for a collective good, that of ending humanity’s wandering existence as hunter-gatherers or rootless warriors. Reflecting on the Homeric hymn to Hephaestus, a modern historian writes that because craftwork “brought people out of the isolation, personified by the cave-dwelling Cyclopes, craft and community were, for the early Greeks, indissociable.”2
The word the hymn used for craftsman is demioergos. This is a compound made between public (demios) and productive (ergon). The archaic craftsman occupied a social slice roughly equivalent to a middle class. The demioergoi included, in addition to skilled manual workers like potters, also doctors and lower magistrates, and professional singers and heralds who served in ancient times as news broadcasters. This slice of ordinary citizens lived in between the relatively few, leisured aristocrats and the mass of slaves who did most of the work– many of whom had great technical skills but whose talents earned them no political recognition or rights.3 It was in the middle of this archaic society that the hymn honored as civilizers those who combined head and hand.
Archaic Greece, like many other societies that anthropologists until quite recently labeled “traditional,” took it for granted that skills would be handed down from generation to generation. This assumption is more remarkable than it might appear. Social norms counted for more than individual endowments in the traditional “skills society.” Developing one’s talents depended on following the rules established by earlier generations; that most modern of words–personal “genius”–had little meaning in this context. To become skilled required, personally, that one be obedient. Whoever composed the hymn to Hephaestus accepted the nature of this communal bond. As with deeply held values in any culture, it seemed self-evident that people will identify with other craftsmen as fellow citizens. Skill would bind them to their ancestors as to their fellows. In their gradual evolution, traditional skills thus seem exempt from Hannah Arendt’s principle of “natality.”
If the artisan was celebrated in the age of Homer as a public man or woman, by classical times the craftsman’s honor had dimmed. The reader of Aristophanes finds a small sign of this change in the contempt with which he treats the potters Kittos and Bacchios as stupid buffoons due to the work they do.4 A graver portent of the artisan’s darkening fortunes appears in the writings of Aristotle on the nature of craft. In the Metaphysics, he declares, “We consider that the architects in every profession are more estimable and know more and are wiser than the artisans, because they know the reasons of the things which are done.”5 Aristotle abandons the old word for the craftsman, demioergos, and uses instead cheirotechnon, which means simply hand-worker.6
This shift had a particular, ambiguous meaning for women workers. From earliest times, weaving was a craft reserved for women that gave them respect in the public realm; the hymn singles out crafts like weaving as practices that helped civilize the hunter-gatherer tribes. As archaic society became classical, still the public virtue of women weavers was celebrated. In Athens, women spun a cloth, the peplos, that they then paraded through the city streets in an annual ritual. But other domestic crafts like cooking had no such public standing, and no craftwork would earn Athenian women in the classical era the right to vote. The development of classical science contributed to the gendering of skill that produced the word craftsman as applying to men. This science contrasted the man’s hand dexterity to the inner-organ strength of women as childbearers; it contrasted the stronger arm and leg muscles of men to those of women; it supposed that men’s brains were more “muscular” than those of women.7
This gender distinction sowed the seed of a still-living plant: most domestic crafts and craftsmen seem different in character than labor now outside the home. We do not think of parenting, for instance, as a craft in the same sense that we think of plumbing or programming, even though becoming a good parent requires a high degree of learned skill.
The classical philosopher most sympathetic to the archaic ideal of Hephaestus was Plato, who also worried about its demise. He traced skill back to the root word for “making,” poiein. This is the parent word for poetry, and in the hymn, too, poets appear as just another kind of craftsman. All craftsmanship is quality-driven work; Plato formulated this aim as the arete, the standard of excellence, implicit in any act: the aspiration for quality will drive a craftsman to improve, to get better rather than get by. But in his own time Plato observed that although “craftsmen are all poets… they are not called poets, they have other names.”8 Plato worried that these different names and indeed different skills kept people in his day from understanding what they shared. In the five centuries between the hymn to Hephaestus and his own lifetime, something seemed to have slipped. The unity in archaic times between skill and community had weakened. Practical skills still sustained the ongoing life of the city but were not generally honored for doing so.
To understand the living presence of Hephaestus, I ask the reader to make a large mental jump. People who participate in “open source” computer software, particularly in the Linux operating system, are craftsmen who embody some of the elements first celebrated in the hymn to Hephaestus, but not others. The Linux technicians also represent as a group Plato’s worry, though in a modern form; rather than scorned, this body of craftsmen seem an unusual, indeed marginal, sort of community.
The Linux system is a public craft. The underlying software kernel in Linux code is available to anyone, it can be employed and adapted by anyone; people donate time to improve it. Linux contrasts to the code used in Microsoft, its secrets until recently hoarded as the intellectual property of one company. In one current, popular Linux application, Wikipedia, the code kernel makes possible an encyclopedia to which any user can contribute.9 When established in the 1990s, Linux sought to recover some of the adventure of the early days of computing in the 1970s. During these two decades, the software industry has morphed within its brief life into a few dominant firms, buying up or squeezing out smaller competitors. In the process, the monopolies seemed to churn out ever more mediocre work.
Technically, open-source software follows the standards of the Open Source Initiative, but the brute label “free software” doesn’t quite capture how resources are used in Linux.10 Eric Raymond usefully distinguishes between two types of free software: the “cathedral” model, in which a closed group of programmers develop the code and then make it available to anyone, and the “bazaar” model, in which anyone can participate via the Internet to produce code. Linux draws on craftsmen in an electronic bazaar. The kernel was developed by Linus Torvalds, who in the early 1990s acted on Raymond’s belief that “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow” – engineer-speak for saying that if enough people participate in the code-writing bazaar, the problems of writing good code can be solved more easily than in the cathedral, certainly more easily than in proprietary commercial software.11
This, then, is a community of craftsmen to whom the ancient appellation demioergoi can be applied. It is focused on achieving quality, on doing good work, which is the craftsman’s primordial mark of identity. In the traditional world of the archaic potter or doctor, standards for good work were set by the community, as skills passed down from generation to generation. These heirs to Hephaestus have experienced, however, a communal conflict about the use of their skills.
The programming community is grappling with how to reconcile quality and open access. In the Wikipedia application, for instance, many of the entries are biased, scurrilous, or just plain wrong. A breakaway group now wants to apply editing standards, an impulse that runs smack up against the movement’s desire to be an open community. The editor “elitists” don’t dispute the technical proficiency of their adversaries; all the professional parties in this conflict feel passionately about maintaining quality. The conflict is equally strong in the generative realm of Linux programming. Its members are grappling with a structural problem: how can quality of knowledge coexist with free and equal exchange in a community?12
We’d err to imagine that because traditional craft communities pass on skills from generation to generation, the skills they pass down have been rigidly fixed; not at all. Ancient pottery making, for instance, changed radically when the rotating stone disk holding a lump of clay came into use; new ways of drawing up the clay ensued. But the radical change appeared slowly. In Linux the process of skill evolution is speeded up; change occurs daily. Again, we might think that a good craftsman, be she a cook or a programmer, cares only about solving problems, about solutions that end a task, about closure. In this, we would not credit the work actually involved. In the Linux network, when people squash one “bug,” they frequently see new possibilities open up for the use of the code. The code is constantly evolving, not a finished and fixed object. There is in Linux a nearly instant relation between problem solving and problem finding.
Still, the experimental rhythm of problem solving and problem finding makes the ancient potter and the modern programmer members of the same tribe. We would do better to contrast Linux programmers to a different modern tribe, those bureaucrats unwilling to make a move until all the goals, procedures, and desired results for a policy have been mapped in advance. This is a closed knowledge-system. In the history of handcrafts, closed knowledge-systems have tended toward short lifespans. The anthropologist André Leroi-Gourhan contrasts, for instance, the open, evolving, difficult, but long-lasting craft of metal knife-making in preclassical Greece to the craft of wooden knife-making–a more precise, economical, but static system of fabricating knives that was soon abandoned for the problems of metal.13
Linux is most deeply “Greek” in its impersonality. In Linux online workshops, it’s impossible to deduce, for instance, whether “aristotle@mit.edu” is a man or a woman; what matters is what “aristotle@mit.edu” contributes to the discussion. Archaic craftsmen experienced a kindred impersonality; the demioergoi were frequently addressed in public by the names of their profession. All craftsmanship, indeed, has something of this impersonal character. That the quality of work is impersonal can make the practice of craftsmanship seem unforgiving; that you might have a neurotic relation to your father won’t excuse the fact that your mortise-and-tenon joint is loose. In one of the British-based Linux chat rooms to which I belong, the normal polite feints and indirections of British culture have disappeared. Gone are such locutions as “I would have thought that…”; in are “This problem is fucked-up.” Looked at another way, this blunt impersonality turns people outward.
The Linux community might have served the mid-twentieth-century sociologist C. Wright Mills in his effort to define the character of the craftsman. Mills writes: “The laborer with a sense of craft becomes engaged in the work in and for itself; the satisfactions of working are their own reward; the details of daily labor are connected in the worker’s mind to the end product; the worker can control his or her own actions at work; skill develops within the work process; work is connected to the freedom to experiment; finally, family, community, and politics are measured by the standards of inner satisfaction, coherence, and experiment in craft labor.”14
If Mills’s description seems impossibly idealistic, rather than reject it we might ask instead why craftsmanship of the Linux sort is so unusual. The question is a modern version of Plato’s ancient worry; the Linux programmers are certainly grappling with fundamental issues like collaboration, the necessary relation of problem solving to problem finding, and the impersonal nature of standards, yet the community seems special if not marginal. Some cluster of social forces must be pushing these fundamental issues to the sidelines.
Weakened Motivation
Workers Demoralized by Command and by Competition
The modern world has two recipes for arousing the desire to work hard and well. One is the moral imperative to do work for the sake of the community. The other recipe invokes competition: it supposes that competing against others stimulates the desire to perform well, and in place of communal cohesion, it promises individual rewards. Both recipes have proved troubled. Neither has–in naked form–served the craftsman’s aspiration for quality.
The problems with the moral imperative appeared to me personally and sharply on a visit my wife and I made to the communist empire in 1988, on the eve of its collapse. We’d received an invitation from the Russian Academy of Sciences to visit Moscow, a trip to be organized without the “support” of the foreign ministry and its resident spies; we were promised the freedom of the city. We toured Moscow churches previously locked, now overflowing, and the offices of an unauthorized newspaper where people smoked, talked, and at odd moments wrote. Almost as an afterthought, our hosts led us out to the Moscow suburbs, which I had never seen before.
These housing developments were built mostly in the decades after the Second World War. Laid out as enormous chessboards, the suburbs stretch to the horizon across flat land sparsely planted with birch and aspen. The architectural design of the suburban buildings was good, but the state had not been able to command good-quality work. The signs of poorly motivated workers appeared in the details of construction: in almost every building, concrete had been badly poured and sloppily reinforced, well-conceived, prefabricated windows had been set askew into the concrete shells, and little caulk had been applied to the seams joining window frames to concrete. In one new building we found the empty cartons of caulk for sealing the windows, but the contents had been sold, our guides said, on the black market. In a few apartment towers workers had stuffed pieces of newspaper between the window frames and walls, then painted over the seams to give the appearance– lasting only a season or two–that the buildings had been sealed.
Poor craftsmanship was a barometer of other forms of material indifference. The housing we saw was meant for relatively privileged citizens, the Soviet scientific class. These families were allotted individual apartments rather than forced to live in communal space. Yet the negligence of construction was mirrored in the inhabitants’ neglect of their surroundings: window boxes and balconies were bare of plants; walls had crusted over with crayon graffiti or spray-painted obscenities that nobody had bothered to clean up. When I asked about the dilapidated state of these buildings, our tour guides gave us a sweeping explanation. “People”–in general–don’t care; they are demoralized.
This broad condemnation could not apply generally in the empire, since Soviet construction workers had long proved capable of making high-quality scientific and military buildings. Still, the guides seemed bent on proving the emptiness of the collective, moral recipe for craftsmanship. They led my wife and me from block to block with grim satisfaction, pointing out fraudulence and deception, taking almost a connoisseur’s pleasure in contemplating the fake caulking that nature required mere winter to expose. When prodded, one of our guides coined “the ruins of Marxism” to explain the evidence both of demoralized workers and of inhabitants indifferent to their surroundings.
The young Karl Marx thought of himself as a secular Hephaestus whose writings would set the modern craftsman free. In the Grundrisse, he framed craftsmanship in the broadest possible terms as “form-giving activity.”15 He emphasized that self and social relations develop through making physical things, enabling the “all-round development of the individual.”16 Before Marx became an analyst of economic injustice, he was a Moses to workers, promising to realize the dignity of labor natural to people as part of a community. This utopian core of Marxism survived even as the older Marx hardened into a bitter, rigid ideologue. As late as his essay “The Gotha Program,” he returned to the view that communism would rekindle the spirit of craftsmanship.17
On the ground, Russia’s command economy seems to explain the ruin of Marxism. Economists note the abysmally low productivity of Russian civil society throughout the 1970s and 1980s. The construction industry suffered particular problems of centralized command: its central bureaucracy was bad at estimating the materials needed for a project; the movement of materials across Russia’s vast distances was slow and followed irrational paths; factories and construction crews seldom communicated directly. And authorities overreacted to initiative on building sites, fearing that local self-management might germinate general resistance to the state.
For these reasons, the moral imperative, “Do a good job for your country!” rang hollow. The problems on the ground are hardly unique to Russia’s construction industry. The sociologist Darren Thiel has found equally demoralized workers at many British building sites. The construction industry in free-market Britain suffers from low productivity; its craft workers are treated badly or indifferently; onsite initiative is discouraged.18
The moral imperative is not, though, inherently empty. In the same decades that Russia was rotting, Japan was prospering under a command economy suffused with its own cultural imperatives to work well for the common good. Japan has been called “a nation of craftsmen,” which is a little like calling England a nation of shopkeepers or observing that New Zealanders are good at raising sheep.19 Still, in the past half-century the Japanese manifested a practical creativity that brought the country back to life after the Second World War. In the 1950s the Japanese mass-produced cheap, simple goods; by the early 1970s they produced cheap, high-quality automobiles, radios, and stereos, as well as superb steel and aluminum for special applications.
