"Making Things Makes You Human"

A quote from Christopher Schwarz got me thinking about a lost medieval word

“Making Things Makes You Human”

I came across this quote recently in an article by Christopher Schwarz, and it was one of those lightning bolt ‘hallelujah’ moments for me.

I knew immediately what he meant. When I’m making something with my hands, I feel most like myself. Making things makes me feel human. It is the very act of making that brings the humanity out, not the humanity that brings the making. As Schwarz says later in his article, “We have to make things – anything – to preserve both the craft and our humanity”. Preach.

When are we making?

‘Making’ is such a wide term. Making is to create something that wasn’t there before. After the making is done your life is a little bit fuller, in one way or another.

You could argue that almost everything we do is making, including mundane daily tasks such as writing work emails and cooking a quick dinner. So, I would add the caveat that this human-making form of making requires a particular intentionality and spirit, which is perhaps best described as doing it with cræft.

It is not just the act of making something, but the spirit with which that thing is made that turns something from craft as we think of it now, to cræft.

For the uninitiated, cræft is a medieval term that fell out of use, but it has recently made a comeback with the publication of Alexander Langlands’ book, Cræft: How Traditional Crafts Are About More Than Just Making. It’s a hard to define word, but it is essentially to do something with a sense of knowledge, wisdom, and resourcefulness.

It is not just the act of making, but the knowledge and spirit with which that thing is made that turns something from craft as we think of it now, to cræft.

The word for it may have fallen from use, but we can see the spirit of cræft dotted throughout artists and craftspeople of history, it’s very much still with us.

What cræft means to me

Becoming a violin maker gave me cause to think about the choices I get to make and how they will reflect my personal values. That covers everything from choosing where I get my supplies from (as local as possible when I can), which musicians I’m trying to sell to/serve (everyone! No snobbery here) and how I set my pricing (enough for me to live on, but hopefully still accessible to most working musicians).

But away from the pressure of also trying to earn a living from what I’m making, the tiny house has been an excellent project to truly apply this sense of cræft .

We aren’t actually going to live in the ‘tiny house’, it’s going to primarily be a woodland management office/workshop/toolshed

We’ve minimised the materials involved that won’t just eventually rot down. The insulation is treated sheep wool, the building frame, and its internal and external cladding is timber, and most importantly there’s no big concrete base. The roof is sheet metal and the windows are double glazed, but those were reclaimed materials from skips/other buildings and there’s not much of it so it can easily be removed from the site.

I know some people want the buildings they make to last forever, but I think that people in 100+ years time should get a choice about whether they just renovate and repair what I’ve built, or replace it with something more suitable to their purpose.

I’d be quite happy if there’s no trace of the tiny house left in 100 years, if the people who own the land then want it that way.

So I would say we’ve built this with a sense of wisdom (thinking about future generations), resourcefulness (reclaimed materials, building it ourselves, and using local suppliers wherever possible), and knowledge (using our woodworking skills), just as cræft requires.

A world lacking in cræft

When we are taught our crafts, how often are there modules or lectures focused on the spirit behind the making? Perhaps if you’re in the restoration business, there will be discussions about ethics, but I think anything beyond that is rare.

Right now, our lives are full of things which are not making us feel more human at all. Not for the people who own them, and not for the people who make them.

There may be some necessity for mass manufactured goods in our lives, but for those of us lucky enough to be earning a living through making, I think we owe it to ourselves and the buyers of our products, to make sure we’re doing the kind of making that adds humanity, rather than takes from it.

And even if you’re not trying to earn a living from a craft, I’d encourage you to think about how you can apply cræft to whatever it is you do spend your time on.

What that looks like will vary from individual to individual, but when you hit on it, you’ll feel it.

Don’t make blindly. Allow the making to make you human.