All-butter pie crust as soulcraft

What a decadent joy is to taste truly authentic food. Noble Pies — a family-owned small business in Upstate New York — excels at genuine productions, chiefly because of the freshness of the ingredients, and secretly because of the all-butter crust of its pies. Farmers’ markets vendors like Noble Pies are awash with all kinds of locally sourced temptations that you cannot help but capitulate to and automatically delight in. And rightly so. A handmade peach pie is a reunion with an old-time flavor, and a new delicacy fresh out of the oven – a soulful meeting between newborn matter and some dear, missed bits of sensorial experience. 

A list of such meetings could fill essays much longer than this one, because hand-made authenticity, like intimate memories, is an enormous category, bursting with seemingly unrelated contents – from decorative ceramics to Italian motorcycles. Still, for all this variety, authenticity always takes one of two forms. The first is time: you can’t bake a pie twice as fast if you double the oven temperature. The second is margin profile: most authentically-made products don’t return enough money. Neither of these traits allows for efficient mass production, which is why Noble Pies’ aficionados, as much as Ducati owners, are left feeling fortunate and awestruck. 

Falling in love with a farmers’ market vendor might bring some satisfaction – a kind of triumphant relief that is really just the opposite end of irritation from consuming too much bland, industrialized food. Part of the pleasure is in the ever-present scarcity of the find. The rareness of crafty, hand-made products seems to betoken a shift in our mode of inhabiting the world: more passive and more dependent. What ordinarily people once made, we now buy. What they once fixed for themselves, we replace entirely or hire an expert to repair. Neither as workers nor as consumers are we much called upon to exercise such competence. 

The satisfaction of consuming hand-made products mirrors the one of manifesting yourself concretely in the world through manual expertise. That is the medicine for the soul that has been known to make humans quiet and easy. Soulful work relieves you of the urge of offering chattering interpretations of your own self to vindicate your worth. You can simply point out: dinner is ready, the building stands, the light is on. Like truth, awe and insight, to which soulfulness is closely related, this kind of satisfaction has the power to instantly mute your surroundings. The world is never quieter than when you are absorbed in labor. 

In high school I had a summer job as a mover. On my return home, my dad would sniff me as a measure of how hard that day was. Sometimes I smelled like solvents, so he would know I stayed longer to deep clean the unit after loading the truck. Leaving a sensible trace, my day was imaginable to him. But while the filth of odors was apparent, the amount of focus, genuine care, and head-scratching was not. This harsh corrective to a sense of being central, competent and powerful was what my dad – a hard-working middle-class man from a Northern Italian suburb – wanted me to confront.

It’s hardly news that the future we are building through technology belongs to a vision distant from material reality. I suspect some kind of idealism steers us towards the abstract, rather than the tangible, and favors efficiency in lieu of soulfulness. Our testaments to soulful work are so often focused on the moral values such work exhibits rather than on the thought it requires. That is a subtle but pervasive omission. It is as though in our cultural iconography we are given the muscled arm, sleeve rolled tight against biceps, but no bright thought behind the eye, no image that links hand and brain.

Soulful work entails a systematic, durable encounter with the material world. Craft knowledge instills life into elements, materials, or fluids. A few years ago I built a small mahogany coffee table on which I spared no expense of effort. Once done, I started imagining where I would place it, what to put on it, and how I could have made my next one. It stood solidly on its own legs. The reality and reliability of the human world rest primarily on the fact that we are surrounded by things more permanent than the activity by which they were produced, and potentially even more permanent than the lives of their authors. Over and over, soulful work calls on us to reckon this universal impermanence, with the baffling revelation that something that just wasn’t there, all of a sudden, now is. 

Yet, much of the “job of the future” narrative in the West implicitly assumes heading to a post-industrial Information age in which everyone deals with abstractions, several layers removed from “the metal”. But trafficking in abstractions is not the same as thinking. Tech jobs and professional services are subject to high routinization and degradation, proceeding by the same process as befell manual fabrication a hundred years ago. Especially in the cutting-edge realms of high finance, advanced technology, and professional services,  genuine knowledge work comes to be concentrated in an ever-smaller elite. Soulful work has always been, and it still is, a privilege. 

Baking peach pies is a quintessential soulful job. If the Noble Pies were to disappear, owners, employees and customers would have a hard time filling that void. Crucially, at least some of those close to the business are well aware of it. This is the defining feature of a soulful job – one so utterly full of meaning for the person who performs it every day that it would be a net negative for at least one person if that job were to disappear. A soulful job is a form of employment that is entirely full of meaning, perceived as necessary and whose existence is completely justified. 

There’s an important caveat here. The meaning is not found at the societal level but at the individual level. Soulfulness is a specifically subjective human experience. These are jobs that the workers themselves feel they would be worse off if they were to disappear, but the same can’t be said for the local or broader community they are a part of. I am also suggesting that the worker is correct. Since no one has ever figured out an adequate way to measure soulfulness, the worker’s perspective is about as close as one is likely to get to an accurate assessment.

The real sticky problem comes in when it’s a question of whether certain kinds of work (e.g., professional services, some tech jobs, some jobs in the public sector) are efficient but soulless. That is, whether they can produce any sort of positive value that nurtures the worker's soul. All I am arguing is that it’s best to defer to the judgment of those who do that kind of work. Soulfulness, like God, is largely just what people think it is. Given the preponderance of those engaged in a certain occupation privately believing their work is of no value for their soul, one should proceed along the assumption they are right. 

How can one actually know for sure what the majority of people working in an industry secretly think? The answer is that obviously, you can’t. Even if it were possible to conduct a poll of lobbyists or financial consultants, it’s not clear how many would give honest answers. However, soulful jobs, like siblings, exhibit similar traits recognizable by the untrained eye. 

Soulful jobs often require an extensive amount of time to master a skill or build a product before being able to make a living off of it. In the early days, they don’t come with high status, and they are not sought-after. In the early 1920s, the House of Gucci was a small leather goods shop specializing in saddles. They may involve a component of manual labor and the creation of a tangible, concrete product, though not at the expense of cognitive demand, as anyone who has assembled IKEA furniture before can attest. Because they often require long periods of solo, concentrated efforts they allow to consistently reach that zen dimension of the mind where distractions are muzzled and cannot penetrate the prefrontal cortex. They generate creative energy instead of draining it. They favor loyalty over reach, and specificity over generality. 

On the other hand, the issue with efficient jobs is that they have to compensate for the lack of soulfulness in order to attract talent. Given the intrinsic poverty of efficient work, cognitively, socially and in its broader psychic appeal, the economic rationale is often offered to make up for it. But not everyone is motivated by money. To the upper classes of management, the possibility presented itself that the office laboring classes might remain satisfied with their found purpose in their labor. Any work, it was posited, could be “soulful” if done in the proper spirit. By shifting the attention from the conditions of labor to the laborer’s frame of mind, craft ideologues and Mission Statement publicists could acclaim the value of any work, however monotonous. 

As humans, we are victims of the persistent temptation to make life more explicable by making it more calculable. To put experience into some logical scheme that by its order and niceness will make what happens more understandable, analysis more bearable, and decision simpler. And today, the tendency to work with quantifiable elements and logical systems seems to be accelerating. There are more tests and measurements, more rational systems like those of Keynes and Freud to assist us in ordering the economy and the personality, more mathematical models, and more efforts, as in MBA schools, to reduce administrative experience to quantifiable elements.

This is quite obviously for the better.  The aim of pure reason, which proceeds upon measurable quantities, is, presumably, to introduce increasing order and system into the randomness of life. But I worry that as time goes by we may begin to lose somewhat our sense of the significance of the qualitative elements, such things as the loyalties, memories, affections, and feelings humans bring to any situation, things that make life messier but more real.

My worry is that the technology, which feeds on quantifiable data, may give too much aid and comfort to those who think you can learn all the important things in life by breaking experience down into its measurable parts. I hope it is clear that I am all for order and logic. But I do hope also that it remains as clear that in all the really interesting questions and problems of life the measurable and the immeasurable are — like ingredients of a peach pie — all mixed up.

For a long time, the design of our technology was determined by our necessity to deal with external needs as efficiently as possible. Dig more coal, go farther, get there faster, and turn out a wider variety of goods for a larger number of people. Things we required to increase our advantage over nature. Our mechanical triumph may have produced a mechanical atmosphere we can’t stand. So we may have reached a point where the design of our technology must take into greater account our interior needs.

Efficient workers tend to build a world for those inside it. With its special duties, its nice categories, its ordered set of rules, its rituals, its familiar faces, its known and definable limits, efficient work is a comfortable and sheltered ecosystem. And any self-enclosed world presents great trouble in changing itself. It tends to ossify into a firm structure within which rival passions and energies can contend with each other. It is highly dependent upon outside stimuli to force changes upon itself. 

Efficiency is an attempt to give useful expression to some part of the spirit. It is an expression to act as a rational being, to plan, program, and hypothesize before making decisions and taking wise action. It echoes the desire to work and cooperate with others within a general scheme and the desire to erect general rules to protect the community from the randomness of individual energy. It vocalizes an intense need to introduce order, consistency, and predictability. It reflects that part of human nature that seeks to reduce the danger that surrounds us. That part that wants to play it safe.

Efficient work tends to exclude a part of the human spirit. Though humans are rational, they are also biological and emotional. They proceed not only by their wits but by instincts, intuitions and feelings too. Though political and social animals, human beings are also single, idiosyncratic people, with peculiar personal needs and fears. With the urge for order and safety, inconsistency and disorderly (or even dangerous) conduct persist, out of which come so many of the truly imaginative and original works of humanity. Within efficient work is a spirit antagonistic to this part of us.

In this complicated, distracted world our need for order and safety may drive us into progressive efficiency. But then too we have ourselves. In spite of the immersion of the individual in large classes, large companies, and large communities, it is still possible to believe in our whole and separate selves. If we keep in sensible touch with our heritage built on individual freedoms. If finally, we have the nerve to think the single self is worth perpetuating, we have the means to ward off the fate of the organization and the efficient worker.

Whether we do or not depends in large part on how frightened we get, and more, on how much we allow our fears to govern us. And that is something, fortunately, I think we can determine for ourselves. To follow this path would require a certain contrarian attitude, and rejecting a life course mapped out by others as inevitable. The best argument I know for a soulful life is the existence of those who yearn for one.