Book Review

Work: our individual liturgy

The Craftsman

Craftsmanship is an enduring, human impulse, the desire to do a job well for its own sake, declares Richard Sennett. He is a professor both in New York and at the London School of Economics, a humane and learned man, a philosopher and historian and amateur musician. These biographical details are not irrelevant: it is essential that behind this book is a human person.

What he examines is fundamental to the Christian religion, yet this is not a religious book. It teems with ideas, examples and arguments and it places the chief work of mankind in a rightfully high position. Craftsmanship, he argues, is not just the making of objects; it survived industrialisation and extends to the work of computer programmers, doctors, artists.

His starting point is the distinction that Hannah Arendt made between Animal laborens and Homo faber, the former busy for the sake of the work (perhaps making an efficient gas chamber), the latter looking to the ends of the work, and working with others, socially, politically, ethically. Sennett does not altogether agree with his former teacher. He looks at the activity of working, the craft, and finds a read-across to the social and even religious systems of the workers. His own philosophical predisposition is American pragmatism, of which he is a leading exponent; his politics is socialist, but not Marxist. These approaches bring him on to territory that Catholics have considered explicitly since the publication of Rerum Novarum in 1891.

Sennett acknowledges that Christians had to take craftsmanship seriously because Christ was a carpenter. Who - though he does not ask this - could be more Homo faber than the Son of Man, known as the son of the carpenter? Sennett does not tease out the theology, and ignores the parallel between craftsmanship and the work that the Logos performed in creation. Actually Sennett is shy of the words "creation" or "creativity" because of their subjective Romantic connotations. He certainly does not entertain any idea of work or craft being a kind of sub-creation, as Tolkien thought of the task of the maker, whether painter, myth-maker or poet. A poet is etymologically, in Greek, a maker. Sennett prefers to consider the craftsman-goldsmith, for he wants to discuss first of all physical making before extending the concept to writing, thinking, forming human relationships.

Sennett goes, pragmatically, from practice to theory. He looks, for example, at the hand-wrist-forearm action in discussing knives and cleavers. Ergonomics leads on to anthropology. "In setting a table, we place the knife with its sharp edge inward rather than facing outward and so threatening our neighbour," he writes. Perhaps, but is it not also so that the sharp edge, not the blunt back, is presented by the right hand towards the meat?

Next he considers the use of the cleaver among Chinese cooks, whereby extra force is added to the weight of the falling blade only when necessary. In this use of minimal force he sees Taoism's lesson for Homo faber in the kitchen: "An aggressive adversarial address to natural materials is counterproductive." There seems to be wishful thinking here, for Sennett regards the chopstick, unlike the "barbaric knife", as a peaceable instrument enabling "small pieces of food to be eaten in the hygienic disciplined way". That is not the impression given by the practical use of chopsticks to help along a bowl of noodles held up to the open mouth.

On every page there is something to disagree with, but only because Sennett presents ideas for debate. "The practising that occurs in repeating a musical phrase, chopping meat, or blowing a glass goblet has something of the character of a ritual," he declares. "As theologians have long pointed out, religious rituals need to be repeated to become persuasive, day after day, month after month, year upon year." The positive treatment of ritual is welcome, but surely it is not the work of ritual to persuade. It is to do. "Liturgy" derives from Greek words meaning "public work". Eating every day is a work that humankind performs naturally; liturgy is a ritual of daily occurrence. Man is a ritual animal.

Sennett is not a Catholic, nor is he writing for them. So he does not follow the subterranean stream of Christian thinking on work. Augustine of Hippo gets a mention (opposing the pagan earthly City of Rome) and so does Jerome (opposing female idleness). But Benedict's Laborare est orare is ignored. At the same time Sennett is discussing an activity that characterises human beings, and in Catholic eyes is the stuff of their participation in the life of the Holy Trinity. Work is what we do, our individual liturgy. It is not necessarily at odds with this approach for Sennett to start with the hand, movement and habit of the craftsman, for we are animals. The human person acts but it is the body that we see acting. I am suggesting that Sennett's pragmatic treatment of human action can be accommodated to incarnational sacramentalism: spiritualised material activity, God-filled bodily acts. Sennett would not, I'm sure, agree.

David Jones in Epoch and Artist (1958) puts Man (homo) in a special place that neither beast nor angel can occupy, in making something that is sacramental from the material. "Theology regards the body as a unique good," he writes. "Man: sacrament at every turn and all levels of the ‘profane' and ‘sacred'."

Jones was a poet and artist but no careful philosopher. Sennett posits the socialism of Ruskin and William Morris as conclusions from their notions of craftsmanship. Catholic arts and crafts practitioners sought various political expressions in the Thirties. One of Eric Gill's followers, the classicist Walter Shewring, in his essay "Art and Work and Distributism", rejects the distinction between ugly daily work and elitist art. Art is "essentially the making of things - human making, directed by human reason to the use of human body or mind". His political correlative was ill-fated distributism, not quite Sennett's socialism, but certainly not liberal capitalism.

It is a little strange that Sennett takes as exemplars of craftsmanship such members of medieval guilds as goldsmiths. Guilds were urban, exclusive, commercial. Craftsmanship in Sennett's sense applies as much or more to making a shoe, fixing a harness to oxen, bringing in the harvest. Although Sennett finds craftsmanship in post-industrial settings, one of its marks is taking time to do things well. His prizing of the human is very welcome and impels the book energetically through its 300 pages.

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