The Nation Is Losing Its Toolbox

Hugh Pickens writes "Louis Uchitelle writes that in Aisle 34 of Home Depot is precut vinyl flooring, the glue already in place. In Aisle 26 are prefab windows, and if you don't want to be your own handyman, head to Aisle 23 or Aisle 35, where a help desk will arrange for an installer, as mastering tools and working with one's hands recede as American cultural values. 'At a time when the American factory seems to be a shrinking presence, and when good manufacturing jobs have vanished, perhaps never to return, there is something deeply troubling about this dilution of American craftsmanship,' writes Uchitelle. 'Craftsmanship is, if not a birthright, then a vital ingredient of the American self-image as a can-do, inventive, we-can-make-anything people.' Mass layoffs and plant closings have drawn plenty of headlines and public debate over the years, and they still occasionally do. But the damage to skill and craftsmanship — what's needed to build a complex airliner or a tractor, or for a worker to move up from assembler to machinist to supervisor — has gone largely unnoticed. 'In an earlier generation, we lost our connection to the land, and now we are losing our connection to the machinery we depend on,' says Michael Hout. 'People who work with their hands are doing things today that we call service jobs, in restaurants and laundries, or in medical technology and the like.' The damage to American craftsmanship seems to parallel the precipitous slide in manufacturing employment. And manufacturing's shrinking presence helps explain the decline in craftsmanship, if only because many of the nation's assembly line workers were skilled in craft work. 'Young people grow up without developing the skills to fix things around the house,' says Richard T. Curtin. 'They know about computers, of course, but they don't know how to build them.'"

Comments

I blame Feminism

[kick6]

Feminism's now time-honored shaming of all things masculine has caused this. Men used to take pride in their ability to do manual things, and part of the reason they did so was because women found those abilities desirable. Now that women can pay a laborer with their own wages to do all those things a husband used to do, they're not skills anyone bothers to develop.

Re:Read...

[zidium]

Death by disease largely afflicted the less intelligent, regardless of class. Rich stupid people died of disease far more often than smart poor people. This was the great leveler of society; after plagues, the elites would find themselves even more disproportionately outnumbered and the number of truly stupid in society would have died out to even greater extents.

The invention of antibiotics changed all that. It above most other things has seriously destroyed the main fitness test against human stupidity. Coupled with liberal checks against outright stupidity (the Nanny State), the stupid have been multiplying with abandon for over a century.

This is the root cause of most maladies we suffer societally.