Ken Jansen is one of those guys in the trades without whom the world would simply come to a stop. And in fact, as they retire and die off, the world kind of is coming to a stop. Have you ever found yourself wailing into the void, “why does nothing work anymore?!” It turns out that for stuff to work, you need people on hand who know things.
Not people who know how to Google it, or AI-prompt it, but who have a web of knowledge in their heads that is vast and detailed and synoptic, and who are able to synthesize it on the fly to arrive at some practical solution. This kind of knowledge accumulates over the course of a lifetime, slowly ripening and finding its way into their bones, to the point they probably couldn’t tell you how they know what they know.
[…]
Eddie’s father was a pilot in the Luftwaffe during WWII. My father was a radio operator and waist-gunner in a B17 bomber over German-controlled territory. It is possible, just barely, that they exchanged fire at some point. Today we exchanged stories of the war, stories of cars, and our own histories of learning under mentors. I have learned from Ken, who learned from Eddie, who learned from particular men in Wolfsburg wo are unknown to me. Ken’s own son Joe works at the shop, as does his wife Maria. Maybe civilization is made up of a million such lines of descent and transmission, invisible to all but those who live them.
There is a quality one can detect in the presence of genuine competence, an aroma of integrity. It is just this that seems in danger of dying off, if we are unable to cultivate the next generation of excellent tradesmen.
Also, the poster in this image from the essay is just perfect:
