The Craftsman’s Role in the Machine Age

It is customary to say that in our machine age there is less room than formerly for the craftsman’s joy and skilled work. I am not at all sure that this is true: the skilled workman nowadays works, it is true, at quite different things from those that occupied the attention of medieval guilds, but he is still very important and quite essential in the machine economy.

There are those who make scientific instruments and delicate machine; there are designers; there are airplane machines, chauffeurs, and hosts of others who have a trade in which skill can be development to almost any extent.

The agricultural labourer and the peasant in comparatively primitive communities is not, so far as I have been able to observe, nearly as happy as a chauffeur or an engine drivers. It is true that the work of the peasant who cultivates, his own land is varied: he ploughs, he sows, he reaps. But he is at mercy of the elements, and very conscious of his dependence, whereas a man who works a modern mechanism is forces. It is true, of course, that work is very uninteresting to the large body of machine-minders who repeat some mechanical operations over and over again with the minimum of variation but the more uninteresting the work becomes, the more possible it is to get it performed by a machine.

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