The reruns of “Car Talk” have run their
course—one of the two hosts died several years ago—and with the archiving of
the radio show, we will lose a valuable cultural resource: a depiction of the
rich thinking involved in common blue-collar work. This matters in a country so
fractured by class and cultural divides, one of which involve beliefs about
work and intelligence.
“Car
Talk” was a popular decades-old show on National Public Radio featuring two
Boston-area garage owners, Tom and Ray Magliozzi, who took calls about car
repair, and along with self-deprecating wisecracks and commentary on all things
automotive, thought their way through the problems callers described: Tom and
Ray asked questions, zeroed in on the detail of sound, touch, and smell,
isolated variables, eliminated less likely causes. Both brothers had science
backgrounds from MIT but were down-to-earth, smart without being showy. They
would occasionally draw on their coursework in physics or chemistry to answer a
problem, but most of what listeners got was the diagnostic reasoning displayed
by generations of skilled automechanics and taught in good training programs.
The
advice-giving show with call-ins is an old format in radio; there are shows on
home repair, health, personal finance, cooking, and relationships, and some of
these shows involve the host reasoning through a problem. But the popularity
and longevity of “Car Talk” is remarkable. The show was well-produced and
comical, but the center of it was the Magliozzi brothers’ diagnostic skills.
I’m not an expert on broadcast media, but except for “Ask This Old House”
and, to an extent, “Dirty
Jobs,” I don’t know of another show with this reach that brought the
intelligence involved in blue-collar work to an audience that included so many
non-blue-collar listeners.
Why
is this diversity of audience important?
For
all our social advances, we still live with formidable barriers that keep us
from knowing each other. Many areas of the country are resegregating by race.
Growing economic disparity also leads to segregation by social class. The
explosion of media outlets and new media platforms enables us to live in
informational and ideological silos. A divide I’ve been writing about for a
while involves work: the kind of work people do, the class-infused biases we
have about the intellectual demands of different kinds of work, and the
attributions about intelligence we make about each other based on the work we
do. In school, in business and industry, in our social networks and
organizations, in popular culture there are subtle and not-so-subtle messages
about brainpower and the way people make a living. I explore this web of issues
in The Mind at Work, but for now let’s consider, as one example, the
widely made claim by writers on business and the economy that work in the “new
economy” requires fundamentally different intellectual skills from work in
traditional industries and services. “Whereas organizations operating in the
Industrial Age required a contribution of employees’ hands alone,” write the
authors of Leveraging the New Human Capital, “in the Information Age
intellect and passion—mind and heart—are also essential.” Some writers on the
economy reduce this claim to an even simpler formulation, distinguishing
between the “neck-up” work of the new economy versus the “neck-down” work that
preceded it.
It’s legitimate
and accurate to claim that certain kinds of emerging jobs require specialized
skills or that alternative organizational structures bring with them different
ways to manage work. How revealing it is, though, that so many make these
claims by erasing any intellectual content in the work of just a generation or
two ago, work that still surrounds and sustains us. This erasure may well be
done for rhetorical effect, but it also displays class bias and ignorance about
the actual performance of traditional blue-collar work.
Enter
Tom and Ray Magliozzi thinking out loud about a commonplace century-old
technology. “Car Talk” was but one radio show, a very small thing in our
cultural landscape. But it represented a kind of cognitive border-crossing that
is rare today. Work is laden with assumptions about
virtue, intelligence, and motivation, so it's not a bad place to begin
consideration of all that separates us. "Car Talk" was
free-of-charge, a public good available to us once a week to appreciate the
occupational intelligence that sits on one side of our social class divides.
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