Here are a couple areas that struck me:

But Crawford does not follow this path, at least not exactly. For one thing, Crawford has no affection for the “simpler” life (pg. 6); on the contrary, he is a self-confessed gearhead, a fan of metal and power tools and powerful machines and speed (which means, among other things, that despite hanging out with various anti-moderns, he’s probably not advocating for a withdrawal from the oil economy and the surplus technology it has made relatively cheap in the United States, as Conor Williams notes in his FPR review of the book). For another thing, he is dubious that our psychological or philosophical or moral association with the products of our own hands is truly disturbed by the technologically-enabled marketing of them to someone else (”If I am a furniture builder…what am I going to do with a hundred chairs?…I want to see them in use“–pg. 186). But he is concerned about technology–specifically, he’s concerned about those aforementioned “social” and “intellectual” technologies, those ways of thinking about and codifying the world which he sees as germinating in the schools of our credential-happy society…

I find this discussion of technologies to be one of the few minor weak spots in Crawford’s analysis. It is a bit implausible to me that a division between “intellectual” and “social” technologies on the one side and material technologies on the other can be defended well, such that Crawford’s criticisms may only apply to social and intellectual technologies but not to material ones. I suspect that this blessing of the use of material technologies stems from an instinct to defend material technologies as not all bad, an instinct that I think is accurate rather than merely a prejudice of modernity.

But I think the division of (okay) material technologies from (bad) social and intellectual technologies is the wrong way to defend material technologies. A better way is opened up by Crawford’s rhetorical question and answer defending large quantity production via material technology: “If I am a furniture builder…what am I going to do with a hundred chairs?…I want to see them in use.”

I think Crawford is not being consistently Crawford-ian here. If part of the value of work is the personal engagement not only with the artifacts of one’s craft, but with the community the craftsman is serving in pursuit of his vocation, then we have a limit that can determine to what extent a material technology promotes (or does not) the common good: whether it promotes the crafting of better artifacts to serve the local community of which he is a part. So, in Crawford’s question, if the furniture builder’s community which he is serving through his craft needs him to build 100 chairs, a technology that improves the speed/capacity of his efforts to build 100 chairs contributes to the common good. But, a technology that allows him to build 100,000 chairs for export to foreign countries creates the conditions for greed and consumerism, and alienates the furniture builder from a part of his labor which consists in meaningful engagement with the people for whom he builds chairs.

In this way, social and intellectual technologies are not vilified outright (are not local meetings and protocols in those meetings good kind of “social technologies”?), nor are material technologies removed from the realm of criticism. I think this is a better approach, though I could be wrong.

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I also caught the harsh criticism of “natural order” as “unthinkingly appealed to” when it’s “more often that not the result of mean-spirited social power and nothing more,” but I might suggest that while the wheel is not re-created in every discussion, the appeal to “natural order” or “natural law” is not exactly unthinking, though it is certainly fallible–as is an appeal to egalitarianism. And while such judgments may be a result of merely mean-spirited social power and nothing more, it probably depends on the specific judgment. I do understand how the existence of such an order might create tensions for proponents of some forms of egalitarianism, but again, if the maxim “I could be wrong” is sincerely held by all, I’m relatively confident that our pursuit of truth together will bear fruit. Thanks for this essay.