If you only read one thing this month...
Make it this (or listen if you want - the reader is pretty good)
Nothing new under the sun, as they say. And with nothing new to see, I’ve had nothing new to say.
But this man has been busy:
In my estimation, Matthew B Crawford is an exceptional man. Don’t be fooled by his academic title. This is a man who packed in the academic and institutional life to go and open a motorcycle repair shop. He only went back to academia when he could do so on his own terms, by his own rules. He is possibly the only man in the academic world who esteems the virtues of working with your hands and thinking empirically.
He wrote a splendid book called “Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work”. I loved this book and it is why I consumed the article while in my little workshop, as I hammered and sawed, planed and sanded. He’s written another book - on my stack to read - called “Why We Drive: Toward a Philosophy of the Open Road”. If the blurb lives up to its promise, the theme neatly dovetails with this article insofar as it explains the liberal elite’s war on our proclivity for driving.
Anyway, this is the most helpful think-piece I’ve come across on the Internet opinion pages in a very long time. It may contain no radically new thought, but it neatly explains a great deal of where we have found ourselves, in terms of the 20th century tension between Locke and Hobbes, which has very much resolved under liberal technocracy in favour of Hobbes and his Leviathan.
He touches on all of the key themes that have bedevilled western politics dating back to the rise of Clinton and Blair.
I can’t pretend it makes for the happiest of reading but if, like me, the question “what the actual fuck is going on?” barges into your head a hundred times a day, you may find satisfaction, and now spend some time thinking about the ramifications.
It’s brought me the relief of clarity and I hope it does the same for you.
AJ