Subsidiarity or, in other words, “Doing it for Yourself”
The thoughts in this essay have materialized over a long period. I was finally prompted to write this by questions raised about Subsidiarity in Lorne, Australia in August 2002, by head teachers at their conferences in Slough, Pembrokeshire, Ealing and Essex the following month, and by administrators from the Association of the Independent Schools of Africa at their Johannesburg conference in October.
Craftsmanship is something we instinctively treasure. Something that is not only well made, serves its purpose well, and is a pleasure to behold, is something that is highly attractive. Craftsmen are instantly recognisable by the quiet, unostentatious way in which they go about their work. Rather than being driven by the need to beat the clock, they are normally unhurried folk who take great pride in what they do. Ask them an apparently simple question and, if they think you are serious, they will give you an explanation that transports you into the unwritten secrets of their trade. Craftsmen own their work. It is with pride that a painter eventually puts his signature to a painting, or a sculptor to his masterpiece, or an author to his book.
As you get to know such people, you begin to realise that their sense of perfection permeates their entire lives. Being master of a particular skill, they strive patiently to be creative in other things. Searching to be the best they can characterises their whole lives. “I helped build the Titanic”, I once heard a shipyard worker in Belfast say wistfully to his grandchild, “and something of me died when she went down”.
We envy people who are so happily involved in their work. But most of us live in a fast moving world where more and more people see their career as being shaped by the size of their salaries. They don’t own the work they’re doing. More and more people want to move out of blue-collar jobs into the world of information processing, management, or the direction of other people’s services. Fewer and fewer young people are becoming apprentices, and the shortage of well-qualified carpenters, cabinet-makers, plumbers and electricians becomes is already acute. Technology has responded to this challenge by inventing a multitude of devices that makes the job of an old-fashioned craftsman easier: compression joints in brass have replaced the sweated joints in lead, chemical glues have replaced old-fashioned glues based on ground up bones, electric routers have replaced complex combination planes, and non-drip paint appears to make decorating possible for almost anyone.
Designed initially for the craftsman, these tools have in practice gone a long way to putting craftsmen out of work. It’s not just the cowboys of the building trade who, with a vehicle and an array of tools, botch up the simplest of tasks and give the skilled man a bad name. In reality it’s the growing multitudes who flock to DIY stores around the country every day of the week who have taken away so much of the bread and butter work of the traditional craftsman.
Why do we do it? I would argue that it is only partially to do with saving money. It’s every bit as much to do with that deep-down need we all feel from time to time to do something we can actually own as our work and no one else’s. Of course, many people have this sense of ownership: over the article they wrote for a newspaper, over the solution they engineered for some complex managerial issue, and many revel in learning how to play the international money-markets through the access given by their mobile phones.
Exciting as all this is, we are both a tactile species as well as an intellectual one. We like “hands-on” activity. Many people get as much satisfaction manipulating objects as they do ideas. Probably most like to do both. At simple, uncomplicated tasks we can each do this by doing little more than reading the instructions. The more complex the task, the more we have to think for ourselves. As the task gets more complicated we find ourselves in the uncertain world of the problem-solver; some decisions could backfire and cause damage. In days gone by, as the level of complexity increased, so the apprentice became ever more attentive to the skills of the craftsman whom he was shadowing. They talked together endlessly about why one technique was superior to another, why one tool performed well in one situation but not in another. Between craftsman and apprentice tensions had to be managed. The younger mind of the apprentice might well have seen the advantages of a new technology that invalidated an earlier, well-established process – one much beloved by the older craftsman.
Be it in a science laboratory, on a building site, or in a cabinet-maker’s shop, the worker is driven to find the best way of doing something.
Back to the check-out counter, as it were, of a Homebase, or a Do-It-All, or an Ikea. Of a Saturday morning the queues stretch way back into the store, with men and women of all ages staggering under the weight of clumsy loads of timber, plumbing fittings, nails, screws, door locks and door stops, together with expensive pieces of machinery – electric drills, routers, circular saws, or electric planes.
Stand back for a moment, and do the calculations. Allowing for the cost of the power tools (likely only to be used for a fraction of the time it was designed for), the cost of the work Jack is about to undertake is considerably greater than the cost of calling in a builder. Jack, if he thinks about such a comparison at all, quickly dismisses the thought. He simply prefers to do it himself. It makes him feel in some curious way more at ease with himself. He, and equally she, feel that by doing this they are able to express their own identity, and that they are not quite so dependent on outside factors as they often feel. Without this sounding too sexist, a man’s workshop can be as much an expression of a man’s personality as a woman’s kitchen, and his expensive, multi-purpose, three-speed electric drill, used for no more minutes in a working week than a woman’s multi-purpose, three-speed, dough mixer is simply an expression of this.
“Doing it for yourself”, it seems, is a deeply ingrained human instinct. Indeed, when linked to our sense of inquisitiveness and the need to survive, it is probably one of the three or four key instincts that we have inherited, through evolution, from our ancestors over millions of years. It’s part of what makes the human race exactly what it is, and it’s really pretty simple to understand. If you can do something for yourself you don’t feel as powerless as the person who has to get somebody else to do it for them. The more you can do for yourself, the more in control of your future you think you are.
Toddlers love to follow their parents and naturally mimic what they do. We call children’s playthings ‘toys’. That’s an interesting word – in fact it’s derived from the word ‘tool’. Toys are children’s tools. Through them children imagine their future roles in life. Old cardboard boxes, plastic containers, and old magazines are often more treasured than the most sophisticated of toys. In a world free from adult expectations, the child seeks to create the adult world on their own scale. Because, at that scale, the child can “do it for itself”, and that is just what a determined four-year old, ten-year old or fifteen-year old wants to do. Evidence from cultural anthropology suggests that this question of social scale is essential to understand if young people are to become fully effective as adults. Initially a child has to learn the social skills necessary to survive in a small group. Successful within a set of extended family relationships, a child can safely expect to move comfortably within a group of 50 or so people by the age of eight or nine. Progression beyond that depends on practice, but many adults need a couple of drinks to give them the courage to set off on their own at a party. Psychologists note that very few humans ever grieve deeply for more than a dozen people in their lifetime -- the springs of human empathy are not bottomless. We like the security of small groups. To be anonymous in a large group is to be afraid of expressing your own individuality for fear of being hurt by people who can’t really know you.
Progressively, however, the groups within which we live have been getting larger and larger. Our instinctive predisposition towards living within small groups (a predisposition that enabled us to survive for most of human history) was first challenged 5,000 or more years ago by the growth of urban clusters (such as Ur of the Chaldees), but for most of our ancestors up until the late 18th century, successful living meant knowing how to exist alongside a group of little more than 50 people – the farm, the small shop, the ship, the craft workshop or whatever. Within this everybody had to be able to turn their hands to most things – they had to successfully multi-task, as told most compellingly in the story of the Swiss Family Robinson.
It was Frederick Winslow Taylor, the American Time and Motion expert, who most effectively blew the whistle on “multi-tasking”. It was he who first observed that multi-tasking was “unscientific”. The scientific management of labour, he argued most persuasively, meant treating men as if they were machines. “Technical calculation”, argued Taylor, “is in all respects superior to human judgement, which can’t be trusted because it’s plagued by laxity, ambiguity and unnecessary complexity”. In came the stopwatch and rulebook, and out went imagination and innovation. This ever-increasing level of detailed instruction was designed solely to reduce the possible irritations of individuals doing things in their own idiosyncratic ways, and to maximize their productivity on purely economic grounds.
In a late 19th century world, where big was becoming ever more beautiful, Taylor’s argument was highly persuasive to large-scale businesses. Workers who were not required (indeed were prevented) from thinking for themselves, had to be paid more to put up with becoming bored, and were quickly alienated from their employment. “You leave your brains at the door when you work at Ford,” wrote a bitter employee in the 1920s. Even Henry Ford himself recognised that he was enforcing something unnatural when he exclaimed in deep frustration, “Trouble is, when I hire a pair of hands I get a thinking human being”.
Fritz Schumacher, the economist and man responsible for setting up the European iron and steel community in the 1950s and 60s -- the immediate forerunner to the European Union -- wrote in 1973: “Soul destroying, meaningless, mechanical, monotonous, moronic work is an insult to human nature, which must necessarily and inevitably produce either escapism or aggression, and that no amount of “bread and circuses” can compensate for the damage done”.
Despite the rhetoric, much employment in the first years of the 21st century is still like this. Individuals are constrained by the needs of big systems to conform in a bewildering array of ways into structures that don’t make much sense to the individual. But, generation after generation, we are still the descendents of those Stone Age “do it yourself” people who can, in a multiplicity of ways, still subvert systematisation.
There is a story that well illustrates this. In 1927 Mercedes Benz built 1,400 of those beautiful cars that so capture our imagination. The directors at the time decided to call for a consultant’s report that would show, given the expected technological developments that were likely to occur, how many cars the company could expect to build in 50 years time – by 1977. Eventually the report came back: by 1977, so great would be the technical innovations, that the Company could expect to build 40,000 cars a year.
The directors were furious. The consultants should be sacked for they had failed to take into account that there was no way that the schools could train 40,000 chauffeurs in a year!
It seems stupid, doesn’t it? We know (contrary to American High Schools and their driver education classes) that most 17 year olds, paying a professional instructor for the first 12 or 15 hours of driving lessons (and with plenty of practice in driving their often terrified parents around country lanes and inner-city roundabouts), can learn to drive a £10,000/£20,000 car through practice well enough to pass their test within a few months. Learning in real time, these descendents of Stone Age men realise that a driver’s licence is a ticket to an even larger hunting ground (be the “game” girlfriends or boyfriends, football matches or distant pubs). They just get on and learn to do it. Schools, those institutions largely created by the Prussian mind in the late 18th century, and much loved by British administrators, were simply bypassed by young people with the energy to do it for themselves. For one of the most practical skills needed today schools just don’t matter.The same thing is happening with IT where it is often the pupils who sort out the teachers’ problems. We think that strange but it’s not. It’s what many thousands of generations of our ancestors have done, living in small, self-contained groups where one person’s weakness was compensated for by another’s achievement. We often forget that the human propensity for learning also includes teaching. We take great delight in being able to put our knowledge to good use.
Confucius understood this well when he observed 2,500 years ago “Tell me and I forget/Show me and I remember/Let me do and I understand”.
“It’s simple”, said one 11 year old boy when he first saw that statement. “It’s only when I have a chance of doing something for myself that I really understand what it’s all about”.
“That may be true. It probably is true”, said a seasoned but now disillusioned teacher worn down by too many years of not being allowed the freedom to work things out in her own way. “But it’s simply cheaper to tell a child something than it is to allow the child to work it out for itself”.