Blue-Collar/Intellectual Snobbery

Letter to The New York Times Book Review

To the Editor:

As a “knowledge worker” who is all thumbs, I do not feel superior to people who work with their hands. I do not feel inferior to them, either, despite Matthew Crawford’s claim (described in Francis Fukuyama’s review of “Shop Class as Soulcraft,” June 7) that “most forms of real knowledge,” as Fukuyama writes, “come from the effort to struggle with and master the brute reality of material objects.” Rather than replacing intellectual snobbery with blue-collar snobbery, why can’t we recognize that the types of knowledge gained from struggling with material objects and from struggling with abstract arguments are equally “real”?

FELICIA NIMUE ACKERMAN
Providence, R.I.

The writer is a professor of philosophy at Brown University.