“The need to create, to construct, to invent, to order, this is what distinguishes man from the animal.” - Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses
Every civilization must decide whether it will be ruled by those who work with their hands or those who work with signs. The balance between symbol and thing, between clerisy and craftsman has ordered societies from antiquity to the present. When that balance breaks, republics falter, empires rot, and peoples lose their way.
This essay follows the architecture we have been building. Essay 1 mapped class as a three-tiered order, economic, social, cultural, with a fourth axis of orientation. Essay 2 traced the hollowing of the middle that once stabilized the republic. Essay 3 showed the collapse of cultural aspiration as the ladder of taste snapped. Essay 4 confronted the fracture of home and horizon, cosmopolitan and provincial. Here we turn to function: who works in symbols and who works in things; who governs by abstraction and who governs by contact with reality; which order is ascendant, which neglected, and how to reunite them.
Orientation of Work
Economic class explains wealth. Social class explains status. Cultural class explains taste. Orientation explains loyalty. But the republic also turns on a fifth axis: the orientation of work.
Humans live by matter and by meaning. We need food, shelter, tools; we also need law, memory, story. Out of that duality arise two functional orders:
The clerisy: those who manipulate signs. Words, numbers, codes, contracts, models, rituals. They arbitrate legitimacy. Their tools are language, calculation, and credential.
The craftsmen: those who shape matte. Farmers, builders, machinists, electricians, nurses, line cooks, mechanics, fabricators. They arbitrate reality. Their tools are hands, instruments, and embodied skill.
The clerisy is a class of interpretation; the craftsmen, a class of making. The first persuades; the second proves. In the clerisy’s world, success is often social. Does the argument win, the memo persuade, the model convince? In the craftsman’s world, success is physical. Does the bridge hold, the engine run, the patient heal?
Matthew Crawford captures the contrast: fixing a motorcycle is an encounter with truth that cannot be faked. Either it starts or it doesn’t. Hannah Arendt separates labor, work, and action; the modern clerisy leaps toward “action” without the discipline of “work,” while the craftsman carries the solid world on his back but is too rarely admitted to action. A republic that forgets this complementarity becomes a theater of slogans hovering above a crumbling workshop.
Historical Parallels
This division is older than any ideology. Athens refined the arts of speech, law, theater, geometry, the clerisy of the classical world. Sparta hardened the virtues of discipline, husbandry, and soldiering, the craftsman’s ethic turned to war. The Peloponnesian War is not just strategy; it is the collision of symbol and thing. Athens, brilliant but unmoored, overreached in Sicily. Sparta, narrow but durable, endured. The later loss of Spartan adaptability proved that craft without imagination stagnates.
The early Roman Republic balanced senators and soldiers, jurists and smallholders. The legionary owned a farm; the farmer served in the legion. Expansion loosened that bond. Lawyers and orators multiplied while latifundia displaced yeomen. Bread and circuses signaled the inversion: symbol over thing, spectacle over manufacture. Empire bought time; it could not buy renewal.
In Christendom, the medieval order fused altar and guild. Monks kept the symbols. Scripture, liturgy, law; guilds raised cathedrals stone by stone. When the clerisy grew corrupt or forgetful of craft, revolt followed; when craft severed itself from symbol, meaning thinned into trade alone.
The British Empire required both. Engineers built ships and rails; administrators wrote codes and treaties. The 19th century’s vigor rested on this fusion. The 20th century’s drift began as finance and mandarins floated free of foundry and dock.
Japan and the Meiji as an example had elite scholars deliberately apprenticed itself to industry. Textiles, steel, shipbuilding. Fusing symbol and thing in national policy. When later finance and bureaucracy outpaced shop floor innovation, stagnation followed.
The American founding generation married idea and instrument. Washington was planter and general; Hamilton, clerk of finance and soldier; Franklin, printer, scientist, diplomat. The young republic’s strength was not that it despised the clerisy, but that its clerisy had done hard things with their hands.
The Rise of the Clerisy
The 20th century scaled symbols. Telephones braided markets; typewriters mass-produced administration; computers abstracted work into code. Paul Fussell mapped the new status system: class signals became linguistic and cultural as much as material. Robert Reich named the ascendant group “symbol manipulators.”
Universities turned from finishing schools into factories of credential. The humanities taught interpretation; the social sciences taught model-building; business schools taught decision under uncertainty. None of this is trivial; it is the nervous system of a complex economy. But scale invited drift. An elite could now live entire lives within symbols. Law, finance, marketing, code. Believing that spreadsheets cause steel, that contracts conjure crops.
Financialization crowned the shift. Derivatives, swaps, high-frequency strategies, that is, profits from differences between symbols. Began to dwarf profits from differences between things. Silicon Valley added speed: code ate processes; platforms intermediated reality. And yet every server farm sits on concrete; every smartphone is mined, smelted, cut, etched, assembled. The clerisy’s dependence on craft persisted even as its regard for craft diminished.
The clerisy scales knowledge, standardizes rules, coordinates at distance. It defends the canon and extends the frontier. It can design constitutions and eradicate diseases. Those are its strengths. It drifts into abstraction and then into contempt. It mistakes a model for a machine, a narrative for a nation, a trend line for a town. Christopher Lasch saw the danger: a mobile elite “tourists in their own country,” fluent in cosmopolitan symbols but strangers to their neighbors. Those are its weaknesses.
When the clerisy mistakes symbol for sovereignty, it tries to govern by memo. When policy meets plumbing, plumbing wins.
The Craftsmen
The craftsman’s world runs on resistance. Wood has grain. Steel has tolerance. Skin has limits. Gravity is not a vote. That friction produces virtues: patience, humility before materials, pride without vanity, loyalty to crew and craft.
Tocqueville admired the American artisan not because he was rustic but because he was republican: the habits of making fostered the habits of self-government. He could reason in public because he reasoned at the bench. He could be trusted with a vote because he was already trusted with a tool.
Skilled trades built the American middle. Unions, guild schools, apprenticeship, shop class. These were ladders into dignity. Deindustrialization kicked those ladders away. Towns anchored by mills or yards lost payroll and purpose; a crisis of meaning followed a crisis of wages. Into that vacuum poured fentanyl and despair. Symbols blamed “globalization.” Things said: the factory is gone.
Strengths. Embodied knowledge that survives fashion. Judgment under constraint. An ethic of repair in an age of disposal.
Weaknesses. Narrow horizon, vulnerability to rapid technological displacement, susceptibility to demagogues who flatter dignity while offering no machinery of renewal.
Matthew Crawford again: “The tradesman is forced to confront the real.” A polity that forgets this produces mandarins who design elegant policies that cannot be installed.
The American Fracture
America once fused clerisy and craftsmen under a common civic culture. The WASP establishment, whatever its faults, sustained libraries and laboratories, mills and museums. Local elites endowed schools and waterworks because they would see the children and drink the water. The clerisy was embedded.
Today the map is a topography of separation. Global cities concentrate the clerisy: New York’s finance, Washington’s law, San Francisco’s code, Boston’s academy. The interior holds the craftsmen: machine shops, farms, logistics yards, refineries, hospitals. Information moves one way, goods the other, regard in neither direction.
Elections only dramatize the distance: zip codes dense with degrees versus counties dense with shop floors. But beyond voting lies the daily insult: the credentialed speaking as if they are the country, the practical hearing as if they are the problem. One writes “learn to code”; the other replies “learn to weld.” Both are right; the sarcasm is the wound.
The pandemic exposed the dependency. “Essential workers” were not the panelists on television. They were nurses, truckers, line cooks, custodians, grocers. Craftsmen of care and supply. The clerisy retreated into screens and discovered that the world does not deliver itself.
Symbols Meeting Things
Silicon Valley vs. the Supply Chain. A unicorn can deploy an app in a day, but a semiconductor fab takes a decade. Code scales; capacity does not. The valley’s genius is leverage; its temptation is arrogance toward the limits of atoms. When ports clogged and chips ran short, symbols waited on things.
Wall Street vs. Main Street. Capital is a symbol; a storefront is a thing. Credit can accelerate enterprise; it can also abstract it into collateral and strip it for parts. Financial engineering that never visits the plant can harvest a balance sheet and salt a town.
Universities vs. Trades. A high school with AP Latin but no machine shop produces a fragile elite and a resentful base. A community college with welding, nursing, and coding produces a commonwealth. Prestige signals have outrun public usefulness.
Healthcare. The clinician is a craftsman; the payer is a clerisy. When billing codes and compliance checklists metastasize, nurses spend more time serving symbols than patients. The pandemic’s hero was not the dashboard but the ICU tech with a wrench and a will.
The military as fusion. An effective officer corps is bilingual: it reads doctrine and handles equipment; it writes orders and clears jams. Militaries that drift into staff-paper clerisy without field craft lose wars on contact. Those that disdain planning bleed needlessly. Victory is the marriage of map and mud.
These are not arguments to abolish symbols. They are pleas to submit symbols to things.
Culture, Education, and Dignity
Culture teaches a child what counts. For fifty years we told the talented that worth equals admission, admission equals credential, credential equals escape. From town, from trade, from the people who raised you. The message to the rest was clearer: you are what we leave.
Repair begins with esteem. A culture that honors engineers and scorns electricians will get fragile bridges and flickering lights. A school system that funds calculus and cancels shop class will produce coders who cannot hang a door and homeowners who cannot change a breaker. In a crisis they will not know whom to call, and when they find him he will have retired.
Education must recover tracks of excellence, not a single prestige funnel. Apprenticeship is not second-best; it is another apex. A master machinist is not a failed MBA. A nurse with judgment is the difference between protocol and life. Civic curricula should pair Plutarch with pipefitting, Aristotle with arboriculture, Euclid with electrical code. The mind forms best when the hands are engaged.
Dignity follows difficulty. If we want to restore civic dignity, we must restore difficult work to public honor.
Failure Modes and Feedback
When symbols rule things, three failures appear:
Paper sovereignty. Policies that look elegant in models but cannot be executed by crews with finite time, parts, and weather.
Prestige inflation. Credentials multiply while competence thins; titles rise as outputs fall.
Responsibility arbitrage. Decision rights climb the chart; accountability sinks to the shop floor.
When things rule symbols, three equal and opposite failures appear:
Local blindness. Craft turns inward, ignoring consequences upstream and down environmental, fiscal, moral.
Anti-intellectualism. Hard-won practical wisdom is misused to dismiss theory, science, and law.
Capture by appetite. Short-term comfort crowds out long-term investment; maintenance loses to consumption.
Healthy orders build feedback between symbol and thing. Pilots brief and debrief. Architects walk sites. Judges tour prisons. Legislators ride with linemen. The feedback institutions we neglect. Inspections, after-action reviews, shop talks, design charrettes are not bureaucracy; they are civilization’s brakes and eyes.
Civilizational Stakes
Oswald Spengler drew a hard picture: cultures become civilizations when their inner form drains, leaving machinery without soul. One symptom is the world-city, cosmopolitan clerisy detached from provincial craft. Another is spectacle, symbol without thing, bread and circuses without bread.
Rome’s lesson is not that elites should be dumb, but that they should be doing. Britain’s lesson is not that finance is evil, but that a city of paper must remain yoked to a nation of iron. America’s lesson is that you cannot stream or securitize your way out of the material substrate: energy, food, housing, health, transit, manufacturing. If the grid flickers, the servers stop; if the ports seize, inventories vanish; if the nurses burn out, mortality rises. Symbols feel sovereign until the lights go out.
A polity that despises its craftsmen will lose the capacity to make; a polity that despises its clerisy will lose the capacity to learn. Either error ends the republic, one in decadence, the other in fury.
Toward Reconciliation
Reconciliation means institutional repair, not vibes. It has four planks.
1) Revalue and retool education. Fund modern shop classes, union apprenticeships, and technical institutes at parity with college prep. Build “dual mastery” programs. coding + machining, biology + bioprocess operations, electrical theory + NEC practice. Measure schools by graduate competence in both symbol and thing.
2) Rechain abstraction to production. Tie finance to domestic capacity: tax advantages for capital that builds plants, labs, and grid; penalties for purely extractive churn. Incentivize software that controls real machinery. Industrial automation, medical devices, power systems, so code meets constraint. Require public-facing models to publish their physical assumptions: power, minerals, labor, land.
3) Embed elites in place. Require public service rotations in counties that lack prestige. Teaching, clinical work, infrastructure crews. Philanthropy should endow machine shops, nursing cohorts, water works, and fire academies, not only centers for discourse. Professional guilds should include practicum with the people who turn wrenches. Design fellowships that swap analysts and operators for a season.
4) Elevate a steward class. Stewards are bilingual: fluent in symbol, competent in thing. They design budgets and pour concrete; they quote Burke and read blueprints. Their formation must be deliberate: service academies for domestic production; civic institutes that pair classics with trades; fellowships that place analysts on factory floors and foremen in policy rooms.
Reconciliation is not sentiment. It is the engineering of a mixed regime of work.
Metrics of Renewal
We will know reconciliation is real when numbers move in the world that resists talk:
Median age of skilled trades falls, because young talent returns.
Time to permit and stand up a factory, clinic, or substation shrinks by half without relaxing core safety codes.
Share of public capital spent on maintenance rises above new ribbon-cuttings, and downtime drops accordingly.
Ratio of apprenticeship slots to four-year seats doubles, with completion rates that match or beat bachelor’s programs.
Industrial, clinical, and infrastructure apprentices earn middle-income wages by year two, not year ten.
Federal and state RFPs require site walks by decision makers and publish post-mortems on execution gaps.
Hospitals report charting hours down, patient hours up, because software serves practice, not the reverse.
Metrics like these are not decorative. They are how a republic disciplines itself to deliver.
A Call to Action
The steps are plain.
Households: Teach children to use tools and to read books. A weekend wiring a light and an evening with Plutarch build the same virtue: judgment.
Schools: Add fabrication labs, kitchens, greenhouses, clinics. Let students make, grow, cook, repair, and document. Tie reading and rhetoric to doing and building.
Cities and towns: Zone for workshops, not only co-working spaces. Make it possible to start small shops again: less friction, more three-phase power, cheaper permits, shared equipment.
States: Shift subsidies from credentials to competencies. Pay for outcomes: parts shipped, patients healed, megawatts delivered, houses framed, code deployed to hardware.
Firms: Promote people who can visit the site and still ship the memo. Reward the manager who can step on the floor and the engineer who can brief the council. Pair architects with superintendents from day one.
Unions and guilds: Recruit aggressively. Offer modern apprenticeships in EV systems, HVAC controls, robotics maintenance, sterile processing. Market dignity as a career, not a consolation prize.
Media: Replace the sneer with the documentary. Tell stories of makers, maintainers, medics. Bring back shows where a child sees a bridge built screw by screw.
Philanthropy: Endow chairs in welding, machining, emergency nursing, lineman training, water treatment. Build cathedral-level spaces for trades. Their beauty instructs.
Law and code: Prune rules that throttle small shops while keeping the safety spine: fire, electric, structural. Simpler compliance for honest work; hard penalties for fraud that harms bodies, buildings, or rivers.
If we do these things, the republic will feel different because it will be different: less brittle, more credible, more governable.
Class is not only about wealth, taste, or loyalty; it is also about function. Whether one lives by symbols or by things. The clerisy and the craftsmen are the oldest division in politics. One without the other breeds distortion; together they form order.
Essay 1 mapped the architecture of class. Essay 2 charted the vanishing middle that once mediated orders. Essay 3 tracked the collapse of cultural aspiration. Essay 4 weighed home against horizon. Essay 5 has pressed on the split of labor itself, symbol versus thing and the necessity of their reunion.
History is blunt. Athens dazzled and fell; Rome argued while its fields lay fallow; Britain administered but forgot how to build. America faces the same test. If symbols alone rule, the republic will drift into technocratic despotism. If things alone rage, it will collapse into populist fury. Both paths end in fracture.
Renewal requires a steward class that unites these orders. America must be led by men and women who can reason in law and labor with tools, who can draft policy and repair machines, who can move between symbol and thing without contempt for either. Without them, the republic will fracture into placeless elites and resentful provinces. With them, it may yet find renewal, not by erasing class but by ordering it rightly.
The next essay turns to the digital frontier: the “attention aristocracy” that governs not by law or craft but by capture. If the clerisy speaks and the craftsmen make, this new order mesmerizes. Whether America can keep its mind, or surrender it entirely, will be the next civilizational test.