Artisans and industrialism

Artisans & industrialism Eric Gill argued that craft production methods suit craftsmen, who should not use industrial methods. Something similar goes for writing software without an industrial ‘methodology’.

However nearly complete the victory of mechanised industry may be, it can never obliterate the fact of human responsibility, & there will always be many who will choose to be masters of their own work & in their own workshops rather than masters of other men working under sub-human conditions, that is to say conditions which deny them intellectual responsibility.
¶ There are, then, two worlds & these twain can never be one flesh. They are not complementary to one another; they are, in the liveliest sense of the words, mortal enemies. On the one hand is the world of mechanised industry claiming to be able to give happiness to men and all the delights of human life — provided we are content to have them in our spare time and do not demand such things in the work by which we earn our livings; a world regulated by the factory whistle and the mechanical time-keeper; a world wherein no man makes the whole of anything, wherein the product is standardised and the man simply a tool, a tooth on a wheel. On the other is the languishing but indestructible world of the small shopkeeper, the small workshop, the studio and the consulting room — a world in which the notion of spare time hardly exists, for the thing is hardly known and very little desired; a world wherein the work is the life & love accompanies it.
Eric Gill, An Essay on Typography, 1931

From: Patrick Lees
Sent: 01 March 2005 09:51
Subject: RE: Journeyman Craftsmen v Hack Carvers

Continuing the analogy: Eric Gill in his autobiography writes as follows.

What kind of lettering was good lettering, the right kind to be done, and what technique and social conditions were suitable for its production? I have explained at some length the line of thought provoked by three years in an architect’s office, and the revolt against the common architectural method of providing measured drawings of everything — even full-size drawings of carving. Obviously I did not become a lettercutter and monumental mason in order to become one of the hack carvers who follow architect’s ‘details’. My chief claim to support was that I could relieve the architect of the necessity of supplying drawings in connection with one craft at least. But such a claim depended upon my ability to give them something better than they could get otherwise.
Eric Gill, Autobiography, London, Jonathan Cape 1940

The analogy has strong foundations: the pioneer American psychologist William James, brother of Henry (himself no stranger to the elaborate metaphor) wrote as follows.

The mind, in short, works on the data it receives very much as a sculptor works on his block of stone. In a sense the statue stood there from eternity. But there were a thousand different ones beside it, and the sculptor alone is to thank for having extricated this from the rest. Just so the world of each of us, howsoever different our several views of it may be, all lay embedded in the primordial chaos of sensations, which gave the mere matter to the thought of all of us indifferently. We may, if we like, by our reasonings unwind things back to that black and jointless continuity of space and moving clouds of swarming atoms which science calls the only real world. But all the while the world we feel and live in will be that which our ancestors and we, by slowly cumulative strokes of choice, have extricated out of this, like sculptors, by simply rejecting certain portions of the given stuff. Other sculptors, other statues from the same stone! Other minds, other worlds from the same monotonous and inexpressive chaos! My world is but one in a million alike embedded, alike real to those who may abstract them. How different must be the worlds in the consciousness of ant, cuttle-fish or crab!
William James, The Principles of Psychology, London, MacMillan, 1890

Patrick F. Lees
Chair of the Department of Information Systems
Cavendish School of Computer Science
The University of Westminster