Why Buy Plastic? A Preference for Craftsmanship and Natural Materials Explored

I don’t like plastic things. Be it a toothbrush, a toy truck, a pen, or eating cutlery, if I can find an alternative to the plastic version of a product that I can afford, I much prefer to buy, own, and use anything made of wood or natural fibers and clay to the molded petroleum object.

This may be simple snobbery, I rush to admit. Certainly I have always known that handmade items were more expensive (hence “more valuable”) and I learned in the cradle I think that I was supposed to prefer things owned and used by a better class of people. My preference for objects made by hand (the literal meaning of “manu-factured”) above machine-built things could be just my wanting to appear as a member of the discerning upper crust or just a man of good taste.

I doubt it, though. I grew up with plastic toys in a plastic world in a wealthy family that provided everything a boy could want. I have a hard time believing social climbing or fears of caste inferiority shaped my tastes in materials dramatically or irrevocably. If anything, growing up without want gave me the leisure and experience to appreciate the differences between metal, clay, and wooden items made by individuals and their plastic equivalents made by injection molding and other factory processes.

Is this preference rational? I think it is. Three reasons that come to mind immediately are human design, human tradition, and understandable angst with modernity and the postmodern world.

Human design fosters a preference for natural materials shaped by craftsmen on two levels. First, of course, we are made of natural materials ourselves. There is a resonance between the human physical person that, in its visible aspect at least, is an indefinitely if not infinitely intricate assembly of organic chemicals with other objects of oxygen, carbon, and nitrogen that grew from the ground. Plastic may have come from oil which comes from the ground - but there is no “like feeling” between plastic objects and the human hand that holds them.

The human person is designed, too, principally for relationship with the physical, social, and spiritual environments in which he or she lives. Our sense organs are miraculous means for us not only to comprehend our physical surroundings but to assimilate them and become them (as much as smelling and tasting are ancillary to breathing and eating).

More important to the functioning of the person, however, as science reveals to us everyday in its pursuit of the causes of health and disease of the body, is our need for positive relationship with other human beings. Beyond our procreative design and function, our capacities for speech, emotion, and dependence on others in infancy and childhood speak to our being more social than chemical creatures, as odd as they may seem. The isolated or mentally persecuted person is as likely or more likely to fail physically than the malnourished one.

This fosters a preference for handmade articles because we seem to be made for contact with other human beings. A chair made by an artist from wood (even one that only appears to have been artisan made) speaks to a relationship and exchange with another human being in a community (even, alas, if the purchase is made by plastic card over the internet). Ownership of such items communicates to others something beyond good taste, namely, an appreciation of our interconnectedness and a willingness to be part of the whole human community. No small thing.

Our design for spiritual relationship fosters a taste for items made from natural materials, too, a preference that is evident in human tradition, specifically, the revealed traditions of the world’s great religions. All of them, both from their antiquity and into modern times (at least in their orthodox forms), have always and continue to build and adorn their places of worship with stone, metal, and wood. I attended an Episcopal Church as a boy and I suspect the stone building with beautiful wooden pews and lead glass windows shaped my taste in physical things as much as it did my heart for God. This was the “high place” where human beings were grateful, humble, and loving - and there was nothing like my G. I. Joe, my mom’s refrigerator, and our plastic pool furniture in that place.

I know there are “plastic cathedrals” and “Bauhaus Temples” now, and that Rococo churches of centuries past were as exotic and artificial as their modern equivalents. Each represents in its departure from traditional building materials and geometry, though, as great a departure from doctrinal orthodoxy and human design for spiritual relationship. “Tradition” speaks not only to sentimental conservatism and nostalgia for things passed down from our ancestors but to a living contact with what is transcendent.

Innovation in glass and plastic represents less a break with the past than with the proven means to the eternal. Just as coke and chips are not advances from bread and wine as the elements of the Eucharist, so, too, concrete churches with modern art and plastic theater seating do not represent thoughtful, edifying changes in our places of worship.

Wood especially answers our longing for alignment with our design as organic, social beings and for communion both with our spiritual traditions and the Spirit that lives in them. A finely made wooden item - be it a child’s rocking horse, a chair we sit in on the deck or lawn, or a chess board - subtly, to be sure, but certainly, makes us feel connected and right as human beings. This is no small thing as the “estrangement from our species being” that Marx, Weber, and Freud noted in the 19th century has become the predominant reality of life in the postmodern 21st century, an age of skepticism, irony, and ennui.

I am not so naïve that I think forsaking plastic is the answer to the world’s problems. I am not offering “plastic rejection” as a magic wand from a yew tree. I know, however, that preferring a wooden object to a plastic one speaks to my awareness of the problems and my longing for an answer. It is not a feckless antiquarianism or looking for a idolatrous talisman that shapes this preference.

It is the experience of dueling with my young sons both with plastic and wooden swords, of playing chess on a plastic square and on a hand-made craftsman’s board, and of playing a wooden and plastic recorder. The plastic items become human tools because we lend them our humanity; they tap us to become more human. In contrast, the wooden pieces foster our humanity and our design for relationship with and for transcendence of our environments.

Not a difference I can measure; no, it isn’t quantifiable. It is a qualitative difference, which, however subtle, is meaningful and substantial. Churchill is said to have quipped once that “we build our buildings and then they build us.” Our care, then, in choosing the materials with which our toys, our games, and our furniture are made is an important matter - and wood is the choice for a more human, even a more divine life.

John Granger
Port Hadlock, WA

Last Night

Last night I watched an artisan in the moment of the first showing of his creation to others. It reminded me of a young man taking his first risk of rejection with a young woman. He tentatively exposes himself to the risk of rejection while offering himself up in hopes of acceptance. We all go through this every day in our interactions with others. We take measured risks in seeking acceptance from others. Some of us, having faced repeated or particularly difficult rejections, give up and withdraw into ourselves refusing further risk. Others work to find ways to manipulate people into accepting them all the while knowing that recognition received in this way never has any real value. Most of us have become careful in how and when (and with whom) we take these risks.

Artisans, I have noticed, are forced to take these risks every time they create something. Even the celebrated craftsman offers his newest creation with a measure of fear and trembling. But they take the risk nonetheless. There must be something within that drives them to bring their creations to life and to share those creations with us. This, of course, is true of all artists: they must share; they must take the risk of rejection. This truth became experience for me last night as I watched the artisan bring in his new creation.

We all turned from what we were doing as he hand carried the chair into the house. A sort of expectant silence filled the room until we could all sense the palpable effect of his emotions in exposing this bit of his essence for our review. There was now no turning back: his self worth was on the line. He set the chair down and turned to us, unable to escape the vulnerable place in which he now found himself.

It’s interesting how most of us, when faced with a person who has just offered a part of their personhood to us for us to accept or reject, miss entirely the significance of the moment. We offer our opinions with little thought for the impact they may have. But last night we got it. We joined him in the moment and shared in rejoicing over one more tiny place where crass commercialism could not intrude.

Last night we witnessed something important; something you will never see at Wal-mart. We shared in the introduction of something that will likely be here in one hundred years or more. Long after we’re gone that chair will live on doing what it was made to do. Last night some pieces of wood became something that will provide enjoyment for generations of people.

Hand Made Christmas

In a time when we seem to rely on technology for everything there remains great value in giving something crafted individually by the hand of an artisan. Everything around us presses us to conform to unreachable ideals held tantalizingly beyond our reach. If we buy that car we will have the perfect mate, the perfect job, the perfect life. Like Wimpy in the old Popeye cartoons, we float helplessly towards the scent of success and ultimate happiness.

So why would we want something made individually and out the great mainstream of consumer goods?

• It says something about us. Our heart is truly where our treasures are, which is to say that we spend our hard earned cash on that which is important to us. When we invest in handcrafted goods, we are saying things of beauty and permanence matter.

• It says that we cared enough to find something real. Gift giving has become so buried in pragmatism that many people now give cash or open gift certificates instead of something meaningful to both the recipient and the gift giver. It is precisely the time and effort spent on finding something of substance to give that makes the gift an expression of our love.

• It makes you one who will not be drawn by the siren song to seek affirmation by conformity. We all imagine ourselves as the maverick, the one who lives just outside the rules. The truth is that life in that position is not always comfortable. It is, however, real and real beats virtual every time.

• The gift will come directly from the hands of an artisan. Believe it or not, most artisans’ I have known care more about sharing the beauty of their creations than amassing wealth from them. I have witnessed craftsmen worry about how the customer might care for their product after they take it home. Buying for a true artisan is nearly an adoption process! They care – and that care is carried into their creation. There is an ethereal element in the connection between the artisan and his work. Those who buy their products connect to this in a real way.

• It is unique and meant for the recipient alone. The value of this is lost in our mass marketed world. But in our souls, we all want to be seen as unique – we want to matter. What better way to say that someone matters than to give them something unique as they are.

Things of beauty have an intrinsic value all their own. Products made with love and care live and breathe. They create beauty, and in so doing, enhance our life in ways we never completely understand. Buy what you must from the great consumer machine and live within the bounds of puffery as we all must. Once in a while, however, we can all slip outside those boundaries and find something of substance and beauty to give to those we love. We can create heirlooms instead of filling trash dumps. We can explain to our grandchildren where that beautiful toy came from or how long that chair has been in the family. It’s worth the effort.

www.whybuyplastic.com

Hand Made in a Sound Bite World

Like ravening wolves, we devour information until we weary from the effort. We have somehow found the evolutionary express lane as we morph into computer generated graphics going about executing the programming given us by our virtual masters. Most of us feel a certain “something” missing but we just can’t seem to find it. It’s just beyond our reach like the appropriate word or name is behind a frustrating fog for the Alzheimer’s victim. We are certain that somebody out there knows – we just don’t know who.

I am no Luddite. I use technology every day in my work and leisure. There is no evil world domination plot occupying my thoughts. All the same, we have changed – and not necessarily for the better. In joining the online world many of us disconnected from that which we can feel and touch. Our perception of reality is changing rapidly. This “new real” is quite different than what we grew up with. You need not touch, smell, or understand a thing in any normal way for it to be real. The virtual tells us what is real and we adjust our perception to agree.

Connected to this, I believe, is a general trend towards aggressiveness and acrimony. It is as though this pervasive sense of wrongness agitates and stirs human passions better left unmolested. We work to win every contest at any cost irrespective of ethical or moral considerations. Our hero’s are those who prove that success obtained by any means brings fulfillment. We look into each other’s eyes and know it is so but we continue on like electronic marionettes dancing the dance given us.

There is something within that wants to touch and feel a thing to know if it is real. A link to our simpler selves that doesn’t quite get that things have changed. The nineteenth century Russian philosopher Dostoyevsky said that beauty will save the world. If that is true, then we should all be about creating enduring things of beauty. Our ability to create beauty must begin with learning to appreciate or desire beauty. True beauty costs, it requires something of us, it is never quick or easy. It is the antithesis of virtual, it is real reality. It’s never cheap but always fulfilling. It’s worth the effort.

www.whybuyplastic.com

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