During my flight to Iowa (or maybe Detroit?) when I wasn’t sleeping I was reading  a collection of short stories by the famous Sci-fi writer Philip K. Dick (aka.PKD). While sci-fi has never been my genre I have recently been drawn in by the profound philosophical and political themes of PDK’s stories. One story I read today (probably written in or before the 70s),“The Variable Man”, was set around the year 2132. In the story the inhabitants of planet Terra, the Terrans, are at war with the Centaurian Empire. The Terran governmental war machine is constantly working to create weapons to break through Centaura, so they can expand.They finally find the hope to do so with the new missile “Icarus.” The problem is that no one possesses the skill or knowledge to know how to fix this machinery at least until a man from the year 1914 is accidentally brought to the future in a “Time Bubble.” This man is a basic rural craftsman from the Midwest who lands in Terra with his horse and “Fixit” buggy and basic tools. Long story short the rural craftsman is shown to not  only be the sole  person capable of fixing Icarus, but also transforming it from a weapon into a shuttle to take the Terrans’ to new unexplored territories.
I’m pretty sure the main point of this story was to serve as a warning against over specialization in industry and to create a greater sense of respect for the mechanical arts. I was reminded of this story today when Denny was giving us his tour of the farm. Particularly in the way he talked about his tractors and his workshop. While Denny, and pretty much everyone else in society, have benefited greatly from various technological advancements, there is something to be said for retaining  a general holistic knowledge of how things work. Denny seemed to me to show a balance of adaptation to new technologies as well as the retention of basic mechanical skills that could still be said to qualify him as a craftsman of sorts. This gave me hope that maybe if more people could cultivate this balanced approach we could avoid the future that is so concerning to PKD. A warning echoing Tocqueville’s concern that  democratic society’s taste for material well-being and advancement of the practical arts (ie. “progress”) could lead us to become so enraptured in the enjoyment of these new arts that we entirely lose our ability to create them.  In the process, we lose a part of our humanity (Tocqueville outright says “brutes” so I’m being positive). This conflict between classic craftsmanship that looks at things holistically against the various shortcuts provided by technology which  lead to specialization is something I don’t entirely comprehend but find fascinating.