Chapter 5: The Value of Skill

Chapter 5

The Value of Skill

When G.E. Moore compiled his list of primary goods—pleasure, knowledge, friendship, and artistic appreciation—he didn’t include skill. He could have; he should have. Skill is a good thing. If you consult a thesaurus, you will find many rough synonyms for “skill” that are manifestly positive. We don’t say derisively of someone that he is so skilled (like clumsy, inept, stupid, depraved, vile). To assign skill is to compliment. But why—what is so good about skill? The obvious first thought is that exercising a skill is pleasurable; it gives rise to feelings of pleasure. It activates the pleasure centers. No doubt this is often true (though is it always true?), and no doubt pleasure is a good; but is skill only good because of the pleasure it affords? What if you could get the same feeling without having the skill? Possessing a skill is not intrinsically pleasurable—you don’t have sensations of pleasure all day just by possessing skills. Pleasure is just one effect of skill. I’m not knocking it, just pointing out that hedonism is not the only justification for valuing skill. So, what else makes skill valuable?

Another answer is that it confers status on a person—admiration, esteem, envy. We think well of the skillful individual, and we all like to be thought well of. Skills allow you to show off—strut your stuff, command awed attention. I don’t want to denigrate this motive; I think it should be encouraged (we need some motive to sustain us through all those hours of practice and failure). Status is desirable. If mastering skills can improve your status, it is pro tanto a good thing. And it does—more than money and good looks in many cases. Skill is like intelligence—a surefire route to admiration. Fine, but is that all? I think not: I think it does something much more profound and meaningful—it expands the self. The self is a wispy thing, hard to discern and limn; what the Dickens is it? It seems suspiciously empty considered in its primal state (the newborn baby)—hardly a thing at all. It cries out for expansion, augmentation; it wants to grow. The bigger the self the better. The more self you have the more valuable you become—to yourself and others. The humble seed must blossom into the great oak. The body needs to grow and so does the self within it. Knowledge helps with that: erudition is extension; learning is expansion. But this point applies as much to knowledge-how as knowledge-that, i.e., to skill acquisition. Instead of being a dull, little, inert dot you grow into a splendid fully formed action hero, equipped with superpowers. You become multi-dimensional, many-sided, deep. You become more godlike. Look how skillfully God created the universe—you could approximate to that. So, we need to add the personal expansion aspect of skill acquisition. In sum, the skilled person derives pleasure from his skills, gains status from them, and becomes larger and lovelier the more skilled he becomes (or she, of course). That sounds like a nice package of goods, does it not?

I just touched on an aspect of skill hitherto ignored—its aesthetic aspect. Skilled action looks good, indeed beautiful. Clumsy action looks ugly, hard on the eyes. Skillful action (think Roger Federer) is pleasing to the eye (and Roger is not that handsome). I rate this aspect very highly, because deep down I am a skill-aesthete—I like the way it looks. That is why I am glued to gymnastics on the TV, and ballroom dancing, and tennis matches. I enjoy the aesthetic spectacle. Moore could have included skill under artistic appreciation. It is hard to say why we appreciate this aspect of skilled movement, but we do. Perhaps it has to do with creating organized wholes—like painting and sculpture. Skill also incorporates knowledge, so it inherits that value also. And doesn’t it encourage friendship, social bonds, even love? Some of my best friends I met on a tennis court and admired their game—not the winning as such, but the grace and style. So, skills press the right buttons by all four measures, as well as possessing their own sui generis value—the value of skill itself. For skill is surely a good in its own right; its value is not reducible to other primary values. You valued skill before you even thought about its relation to pleasure, knowledge, friendship, and artistic appreciation. You just thought “That is so cool” and wish you could do it too. Skill value is a thing unto itself not just other values in disguise.

I happen to have written a book on disgust, a highly disagreeable emotion.[1] It is notable that we are never disgusted by skill, as we are never disgusted by moral virtue. It is as if we put skill and virtue into the same anti-disgust bag. We might be disgusted by the bodies of skilled practitioners (they are only human after all), but skill lifts these bodies into a realm beyond disgust. In heaven nothing is disgusting, so skill approximates to heaven; you never want to throw up watching a skilled tennis player hit the ball. Perhaps skill enables us to transcend our natural feelings of disgust at human bodies, our own and others. We are angels pro tempore (Simone Biles is an angel). In skilled action we undergo metamorphosis—from wriggling larva to soaring butterfly. The human imagination is nothing if not creative, and it yearns for elevation, transformation. Skill is transformative; you are not the messy animal you once were but a new and superior being. Jesus had the skill to walk on water—and he was never more divine.

And then we have the curse of mind-body division: the two do not always get along; the marriage is rocky. It starts off rocky and it stays that way. Skill is what reconciles the inharmonious parties; it brings them into alignment. In fact, it gives the lie to the traditional duality of mind and body (soul and flesh), because skill is psychophysical. Even that word does not do justice to the phenomenon—it is too dualistic. In skill the body is the mind in action, and the mind is the body made sublime. When we speak of throwing a ball, we don’t presuppose a duality of inner and outer; we use a single verb “throw” to capture an indissoluble unity. There is no sense in describing throwing a ball as either mental or physical; it is both and neither. It is a skilled action—period. This is valuable because it repairs what can seem like a forced marriage of opposites; it enables us to live with our given dual nature. We are not an immaterial soul loosely and mysteriously attached to a grossly material body; we are agents with skills. In skilled action we feel at one with ourselves. Perhaps this is a kind of illusion—the felt unity can be rudely interrupted—but it provides a break from the mind-body divorce. The mind and the body become engaged, on the same page, ready to commit; the rocky marriage is harmonious for the nonce. The romance holds strong; opposites can combine.

At this point we need something concrete to hang onto. I am going to describe a skill I invented, which I think could be a boon to humanity. It isn’t all theory and metaphysics in this text. I invented a new swim stroke I call the “frog-crawl”. You combine the leg motion of the breaststroke with the arm motion of the crawl. You thereby get the benefits of the more powerful leg thrust of the breaststroke and the extra oomph of the crawl’s arm action. I have tested this scientifically and indeed this stroke delivers more power than either the traditional breaststroke or the crawl. Mainly, it adds to the crawl’s arm motion the stronger action of the legs; the usual flapping of the feet in the crawl is feeble in comparison. Now it does take some time to master the new skill, especially if you are used to traditional strokes, but it is perfectly feasible (I mastered the basics in about ten minutes). After a few sessions in the pool, it became my go-to stroke, and I now only use this stroke. It greatly adds to my enjoyment of swimming (I am not a dedicated swimmer). It would be excellent for children, and it might lead to new swimming records (it took about two seconds off my time over a length of the pool—equivalent to about 10 feet). Likewise, the invention of tennis and table tennis (both invented for English aristocrats by English aristocrats) added tremendously to human happiness. I suggest you get in the pool and try to learn the frog-crawl; you will thank me.

I am also a believer in skill psychotherapy. I believe any skilled activity is good for the old psychic health and whatnot, but I specifically believe that song therapy works wonders in the well-being department. This is a valuable property of skill in general and singing skill in particular. I find tennis very therapeutic (especially where anger is concerned), but singing is positively soul cleansing. I advocate learning to sing a favorite song all the way through, focusing on technique and detail (good breathing, correct pitch, clear enunciation); a hundred times through should do it. You must work on it, practice daily (I recently learned the mighty and poignant “Mother” by John Lennon). Then, when you’ve got the technical details down, pile on the emotion as a separate task. It’s a good skill to have psychologically. It also impresses people (you can make them cry). As to knife throwing, this is also quite therapeutic, especially with regard to one’s more aggressive urges (enough said). It hearkens back to the first days of human skill evolution when skill was a survival necessity and violence common. You can pick your own skill and give it your all—I think you will see therapeutic benefits. It beats Freud.

How many skills should you possess? What is the optimal number? No idea, but don’t stint on the quantity and variety. Admittedly, I probably overdo it a bit; I am skill-restless and a touch skill-promiscuous (now table tennis, now bowling, now trampoline—all good value). You’re not trying to become world champion, so you don’t need exclusive focus on a single skill; you can afford to range widely. I reckon ten skills would be a reasonable number for an able-bodied person, though that would feel limiting to me (I’m thinking of taking up disc golf). Speaking of golf, I never had much interest in the game, especially the trudging around and the class of people you meet; but a few years ago, I decided to learn the golf stroke and bought some clubs to practice with (also a couple of golf books to study). I quite enjoyed it but wasn’t set on fire. I was interested to plumb the mysteries of the golf stroke and have the experience of whacking the golf ball, but I really don’t have the time to put in hours at the golf course. One must be realistic. I find tennis much more rewarding and I try to stay faithful to her (she has given me some excellent times).

I would like to end this chapter by praising skills to the sky, but that might seem shrill and silly, as well as boring. Instead, I will quote from the tennis chapter (chapter 20, Part Two) in Nabokov’s superbly skilled novel Lolita; he conveys the ecstasy better than I ever could. “Her tennis was the highest point to which I can imagine a young creature bringing the art of make-believe, although I daresay, for her it was the very geometry of basic reality. The exquisite clarity of all her movements had its auditory counterpart in the pure ringing sound of her every stroke. The ball when it entered her aura of control became somehow whiter, its resilience somehow richer, and the instrument of precision she used upon it seemed inordinately prehensile and deliberate at the moment of clinging contact…I remember at the very first game I watched being drenched with an almost painful convulsion of beauty assimilation. My Lolita had a way of raising her bent left knee at the ample and springy start of the service cycle when there would develop and hang in the sun for a second the vital web of balance between toed foot, pristine armpit, burnished arm and far-flung racket, as she smiled up with gleaming teeth at the small globe suspended so high in the zenith of the powerful and graceful cosmos she had created for the express purpose of falling upon it with a clean resounding crack of her golden whip.” What more could you ask for? Could anything be more valuable?[2]

[1] The Meaning of Disgust (2011).

[2] Nabokov was an excellent tennis player himself and gave lessons; I suspect he was trying to put into words the ecstasy he felt on the tennis court. It isn’t easy. It must be experienced directly. You don’t know what it’s like till you experience it first-hand. The value is ineffable, though we try to eff it.