> [!NOTE]+ Meta > Author:: [[Richard King]] > Reference:: > Date:: 2025 > Tags:: #warp/talk > WeftLinks:: [[Spiritual value of craft]] > Claim:: [[Claim - Craft gives meaning to life]] > [!SUMMARY] Summary > Craft is conducive to human flourishing through the exercise of creative freedoim ### Text Note: The following thoughts on craft are inspired by the body of social theory associated with the Arena group, established in Melbourne in 1963. You can find Arena’s website [here](https://arena.org.au/) and buy my book on technology [here](https://publishing.monash.edu/product/here-be-monsters/). The dominant social contradiction is no longer between labour and capital, but between, on the one hand, deep-seated human cultural needs grounded in the less abstract levels of life – face-to-face relations, a sense of settlement and collective identity, stable communities and so on – and, on the other hand, the abstracted, instrumentalised, technologically mediated, ungrounded existence that characterises so-called advanced economies/societies. It follows from this that an authentic emancipatory politics would be one aimed, not only at economic justice, but at a society in which one could give free rein (freer rein) to the full range of one’s human capacities, including one’s creative capacities. As the phenomenon in which manual competence and creativity meet social and ‘spiritual’ significance, craft finds an important place in this analysis. If we think of automation, for example, as the process whereby agency becomes a property of the system, embodying in inorganic machines first human actions, then human decisions, then creativity itself (through the factory system, cybernetics and Artificial Intelligence, respectively), we can begin to see how an emphasis on craft, and on manual competence more generally, affords a glimpse of an alternative dispensation (one more conducive to human flourishing), while also providing a deeper critique of the idea of ‘the economy’ as something separate from social and emotional life – a realm one enters at the beginning of the day and from which one extricates oneself at the end of the day, to partake (if we’re lucky) of ‘quality time’. Thus, while a conventional left analysis might be content to say that capitalism concentrates money-power in a few hands, and is to be deplored for that reason, this deep-cultural view would stress as well the way in which economic modernisation more broadly has ‘ungrounded’ once-grounded communities and the forms of creativity that have traditionally held them together. The significance of a political phenomenon such as Luddism can thus be seen, not merely as a reaction against a shift in economic power, but as an attempt to resist the destruction of a culture with a particular way of working at its centre. From this perspective, the ethos of craft permits us to identify and critique the nihilistic nature of capitalism, one effect of which is to reduce all artefacts to the status of commodities. Commodification can be usefully defined as the process by which the value of something becomes relative to the value of everything else: nothing has implicit value, only exchange value. A commodity is thus an item for sale from which all sacred meaning has been expunged, with ‘sacred’ here referring not only to notions of the otherworldly but to the artefact’s embeddedness in a whole way of life. Of course, craft objects can also be commodities, but there is something in the nature of craft that seems to resist such incorporation.  It is not merely paid work but culture in general that would benefit from the ethos of craft. Increasingly, we live in a ‘black box society’ in which the opportunities for manual competence, agency and creativity have been – are being – substantially reduced, and in which we are, so far from being disburdened by technology, actively disengaged by it (and so burdened in a different way). Knowing that things work, but not how they work, we are in thrall to what the philosopher of technology Albert Borgmann calls ‘tools of externalisation’ – tools that are not extensions of the person but autonomous systems into which we sink our own creativity and agency.  In these ways, craft and the ethos of craft can be seen as essential to human freedom, where freedom is understood to mean the capacity to exercise our human powers.