爱鼓捣的人成就美国的伟大

    纵观人类历史，人们常常诉诸鬼神和幻想的故事来解释许多无法理解的事物。人生或许是肮脏、粗鲁和短暂的，但在某种意义上，这个容纳它的世界却魅影重重。

    随后爆发了启蒙运动。这场运动强调理性和科学高于迷信,从而引发了“世界的祛魅”（马克斯·韦伯语）。换言之，人们不再谴责魔鬼，而是开始揣摩事物的运行方式。好奇心重、擅长操作机械的人终于迎来了自己的好时光。

    但在上世纪中叶的某个时候面纱再次垂下。战后的技术革命带给我们激光、计算机以及其他一些神秘莫测的技术。许多人热情拥抱它们，但很少有人能够理解它们、摆弄它们。结果留给我们一大堆神奇的电子用品（比如iPad），但以自己动手为特征的DIY活动却就此式微。这一悠久的传统形成了一种有益健康的鼓捣文化，与自立和创新等内涵更广泛的美国传统密切相连。

    亚历克·福奇认为，这种鼓捣传统是美国的一项核心美德。福奇在他的新著《爱鼓捣的人成就美国伟业：业余爱好者、DIY爱好者和发明家赞歌》（The Tinkerers: The Amateurs, DIYers, and Inventors Who Made America Great）一书中，对这种传统进行了毫无保留的探索。他在书中写到：“摆弄我们周围的机械其实已经成为了一种成年礼。对于许多人来说，这是一种生活方式。”

    福奇认为鼓捣有三个基本特征。第一种特征是，“用我们周围已经存在的事物制造出某种全新的东西”；其二，它“最开始时往往没有什么目的”；其三，它是“一种破坏性行为，鼓捣者背对历史开始了一段全新的旅程”。

    福奇意识到，鼓捣这种行为既可能发生在实体世界，也可能发生在虚拟空间。比如它有可能涉及移动应用，就如同它曾经涉及化油器一样。这与他的主旨观点是一致的——无论受到怎样的威胁，鼓捣行为并没有在这个国家消亡。

    就这一点而言，他是正确的。从生产新手工艺品的小作坊中，从诚挚的年轻学子对务农生活（美国相当多的鼓捣行为都发轫自农耕时代）重燃的兴趣中，我们都可以看到这一点。请不要忽视《制造》杂志（Make）和制汇节（Makers Faires）的成功，也不要对从东海岸至西海岸星罗棋布的各类科技作坊和骇客空间视而不见。

    For much of human history, people explained away the many things they couldn't understand by resorting to gods, spirits, and fanciful tales. Life may have been nasty, brutish, and short, but the world that contained it was in some sense enchanted.

    Then came the Enlightenment, with its emphasis on reason and science over superstition, leading to what Max Weber called the "disenchantment of the world." People stopped blaming the devil, in other words, and started figuring out how things worked. It was a great time for the curious and the mechanically inclined.

    But sometime in the middle of the last century, the veil descended once again. The postwar technological revolution served to re-enchant everyday life, giving us lasers and computers and other mysterious technologies that many embraced but few understood or could work on. The result was a great many magical gizmos (iPad, anyone?) but the decline of a long tradition of hands-on, do-it-yourself activity that formed a salutary culture of tinkering -- one linked to such broader American traditions as self-reliance and innovation.

    This tinkering tradition is a core American virtue, in the view of Alec Foege, who explores it, warts and all, in his new book The Tinkerers: The Amateurs, DIYers, and Inventors Who Made America Great. "Puttering around with the mechanical devices that surrounded us was practically a rite of passage," he writes, "and for many, a way of life."

    Foege argues that tinkering has three essential characteristics. First, it involves "making something genuinely new out of the things that already surround us." Second, it "happens without an initial sense of purpose." And third, it's "a disruptive act in which the tinkerer pivots from history and begins a new journey."

    Foege recognizes that tinkering can be virtual as well as physical -- that it can involve, say, mobile apps just as it once involved carburetors. That's in keeping with his thesis that tinkering, however threatened, isn't dead in this country.

    He's right about this. We see it in the host of small production runs for new artisanal products, and in the renewed interest of earnest young college graduates in a life of farming, which harks back to the agrarian roots of so much American tinkering. And let's not overlook the success of Make magazine and the Makers Faires, or the spread of techshops and hackerspaces from coast to coast.