Aspiring amateur agrarian, Ben speculates that his engineering friends who dream of becoming farmers may be engaging in “subconscious rebellion against the rampant specialization of modern life.”

I think he’s right, but for me, it’s not subconscious.

An old friend of mine, who worked as a farmer in Maine, once quoted Emerson to me to explain his motivation. He wrote, “When people ask me why I work on a farm, the best answer I can give is that once I read Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay entitled, “Man The Reformer” and I found it to be so compelling, so resonant, that I could not ignore it.”

He then quoted from the passage below:

“But the doctrine of the Farm is merely this, that every man ought to stand in primary relations with the work of the world, ought to do it himself, and not to suffer the accident of his having a purse in his pocket, or his having been bred to some dishonorable and injurious craft, to sever him from those duties; and for this reason, that labor is God’s education; that he only is a sincere learner, he only can become a master, who learns the secrets of labor, and who by real cunning extorts from nature its sceptre.”

While I don’t find Emerson’s claim compelling enough to move to the sticks and plant an apple orchard, I do feel compelled to resist the specialization of labor, to the extent that I know how. As my friend Alex once pointed out, none of us are pure– “What are you going to do, smelt your own metal?” All the same, I try to reduce the distance between me and the work done on my behalf in the world.

It’s a curious bind. As an engineer, I’m at the extreme end of specialization, but I’d much rather spend the afternoon repairing a friend’s bureau than working for higher wages that I might pay to a carpenter to repair the bureau.

I had a friend’s mill in my garage for a while a few years ago. I didn’t use it very much, but I spent a fair bit of time doing maintenance on it– rewiring the switchbox to make it a bit neater, replacing some of the crappier fasteners with stainless socket head cap screws, and so forth. I’ll be the first to admit that that sort of behavior is pathological.

Still, taking care of the mill gave me a satisfaction that I’ve found hard to duplicate, despite my work as an engineer. Typically, the manufacture of stuff I design, and hence the care of tools, is performed by machinists, who will work for a lower wage than I do.

I suspect that a good deal of my desire to inject myself into the workings of machines is genetic. My dad, for example, mentioned to me a while back that in the 70’s he wrote a FFT subroutine in machine code (not assembly– he was typing raw hex). It makes me polishing the old mill look rational.

When I was a kid, I remember my grandfather finding a toy van in the garbage on the way to the beach. He replaced the floor in the van and repainted it, and my brother and I got to play with it whenever we came to visit. At the time, I was delighted. Looking back now, doing automotive maintenance on a vehicle too small to drive seems odd.

Regarding specialization, Wendell Berry wrote in 1977 in The Unsettling of America:

The disease of the modern character is specialization. Looked at from the standpoint of the social system, the aim of specialization may seem desirable enough. The aim is to see that the responsibilities of government, law, medicine, engineering, agriculture, education, etc., are given into the hands of the most skilled, best prepared people. . . . The first, and best known, hazard of the specialist system is that it produces specialists - people who are elaborately and expensively trained to do one thing. We get into absurdity very quickly here. There are, for instance, educators who have nothing to teach, communicators who have nothing to say, medical doctors skilled at expensive cures for diseases that they have no skill, and no interest, in preventing. More common, and more damaging, are the inventors, manufacturers, and salesmen of devices who have no concern for the possible effects of those devices. Specialization is thus seen to be a way of institutionalizing, justifying, and paying highly for a calamitous disintegration and scattering-out of the various functions of character: workmanship, care, conscience, responsibility.

The disintegration of workmanship, care, conscience, and responsibility is what drives me to resist the deepening of specialization. I want to avoid the conclusion that stuff should be left to “the experts.” No need to fix your toilet, a plumber will do that. No need to drag your trash to the curb, the condo manager’s henchman will do that. No need roust your corpulent form from its slumber, your mechanized exoskeleton will do that.

This next paragraph is a bit of tangent, but it’s a good story and a metaphor as well. My experience has been that you can achieve more than you might expect through severe effort. Around 1998, Oliver, Alex, and I were trying to move a very heavy, slate-topped lab bench from a quonset hut across some dirt and weeds into a workshop. We tried moving the table, and only managed to move it a few inches on the first attempt. Oliver and I started talking about going to get a furniture cart, or a dolly, or maybe a sled of some sort. Alex broke in and said, something like, “We’re not getting a cart. Just push harder. Come on. Push.” This effort was successful and taught me a good lesson about the use of force.

I’ve found repeatedly that my overly-specialized contemporaries generally assume that anything more difficult than lifting a coffee pot should be left to professionals. A few weeks ago, I was helping my parents clean some junk out their basement when we came across the trestle built from 1×3’s from an old worktable that would make good fodder for our woodstove. My mom made a comment about needing some tools to disassemble the trestle. I was able to wrench it apart in less than 30 seconds.

Sometimes I feel like I’ve discovered a lost secret. “No, really, you can sharpen knives by hand with a stone.” “No, really, you can make your own Ethernet cable that’s as long as you want. You just crimp the wires like this.”

The feeling of doing good work yourself is surprisingly liberating, and a little sample breeds a taste for more. After a little while, you’re in danger of attempting to reject industrial society entirely. As Wendell Berry writes at the conclusion of his 1993 essay, The Joy of Sales Resistance, “When the inevitable saleswoman comes to tell me that I cannot be up-to-date, or intelligent, or creative, or handsome, or young, or eligible for the sexual favors of so fair a creature as herself unless I buy these products, dear reader, I am not going to do it.”

Oh, also: I paid $4.20 for a gallon of diesel this week.