The Existential Pleasures of Engineering, by Samuel C. Florman

It’s an ugly trend, I know, for book reviews to center too much around the reviewer—a sign, perhaps, that the reviewer is too much of a self-centered asshole to snap out of his natural narcissistic delusion to actually consider the work at hand—but in this case, I might have a small responsibility to start out with some caveats about myself. As a physics grad student, see, I come programmed with a swarm of biases about engineering. In physics classes, we are taught to scorn engineers, to think that they’re a necessary but secondary life form that exists to take our discoveries and put them out into the world. Our discoveries, though—let’s be clear about the boundaries of importance. These engineers are not to be thought of as pioneers or anything so grand; they’re worker bees doing the world’s work, while we, the great queens, give them the pictures of the world that they, neither intelligent enough nor imaginative enough to imagine otherwise, must blindly take as truth. This nasty little caricature may be necessary for the promulgation of physics (something to keep physicists from asking those practical questions like: why, if I’m so smart, do I get paid so little? and why doesn’t society think I’m cool, huh?), and engineers, so I’m told, are taught to harbor similar negative biases toward ‘pure’ scientists, those poor, impractical schmucks who couldn’t implement a real-world solution if life depended on it.

So it stands. So, too, it is probably not all that surprising that ‘The Existential Pleasures of Engineering’ didn’t overly rile my humors. The book itself is one of those tradesman’s classics that engineers (at least, the engineers at Dordt college, in my hometown) are assigned to read in their intro-to-engineering course as a pep talk that outlines what an engineer does, why this is good for society, and why, for those suited to it, engineering can be an enjoyable and profitable way to spend a life. These aren’t overly ambitious goals for a book, but they make it perfectly suited for that minor-classics niche that fills up introductory course syllabi. For non-engineers, the interesting parts of the book are likely to be those least involved in the craft of itself. For instance, what’s that ‘existential’ qualifier doing in the title of the book? And why this unusual emphasis on ‘pleasure’?

To explain those rhetorical questions, the first place to look is the preface, where Florman sets out the goals of his enterprise with an engineer’s directness:

At first glance, engineering and existentialism appear to have nothing to do with each other. The engineer uses the logic of science to achieve practical results. The existentialist is guided by the promptings of his heart, which, as Pascal said, has its reasons that reason cannot know. The existentialism most typically sees the engineer as an antagonist whose analytical methods and pragmatic approach to life are said to be desensitizing and soul deadening—in a word, antiexistential. To show that this adversary relationship is based on a misapprehension of the nature of the engineering experience is—as can be surmised from the title—a primary objective of the book.

Well, good enough. Next, though, we should probably check the copyright page, to position this puppy in history. 1976—the bicentennial year, true, but also right in the middle of the Future-Shock Decade, the Me Decade, and (most importantly) just after the Vietnam War’s end. History, at least to hear this book’s message, had conspired against the engineer. Back in the good old days of American Progress, an engineer was a friend to tomorrow, a reality enhancer, a vision facilitator. No more. In the wake of Vietnam, the engineer was just another blank-faced technocrat responsible for making bombs, tinkering toward Armageddon. The first of the book’s three sections is devoted to demonstrating this fall from grace; it is largely a pastiche of quotes from poems and novels from before and after the fall. For example. Before, we get Walt Whitman on the possibilities of new technologies:

Lo, soul, seest thou not God’s purpose from the first?
The earth to be spann’d, connected by network,
The races, neighbors, to marry and be given in marriage,
The oceans to be cross’d, the distant brought near,
The lands to be welded together.

Vs. Afterward, we’re given Cat Stevens as a representative of modern poetic protest (complete with unnecessary apostrophes, so as to compete with Whitman):

Well I think it’s fine building Jumbo planes, or taking a ride on a cosmic train, switch on summer from a slot machine, yes, get what you want to, if you want ‘cause you can get anything.
I know we’ve come a long way, we’re changing day to day, but tell me, where d’ th’ ch’ldr’n play?

As the man said, engineering needed an image rehab, and Part 2 of the book takes the fight to technology’s critics. In the chapter titled ‘Antitechnology’, he names his nemesi and gives each a key text: founding father of the antitechnologists, Jacques Ellul (“The Technological Society”); convert and intellectual heavyweight, Lewis Mumford (“The Myth of the Machine”—published in Pt. 1, “Technics and Human Development” and Pt. 2 “The Pentagon of Power”); scientific backer, the biologist Rene Dubos (“So Human an Animal”, which won the 1968 Pulitzer for nonfiction); popularizer via the New Yorker, Charles A. Reich (“The Greening of America”); and the man who put all this material into its final, summed-up form, Theodore Rozak (“Where the Wasteland Ends”). Here’s Florman talking smack: “They make an unlikely combination: a theological philosopher, a historian of technology, a biologist, and two academic apologists for the counterculture…With the exception of Dubos, who speaks in tones of sweet reason, they are all inclined to make extravagant statements, and, again with the exception of Dubos, they have been subjected to criticism and even ridicule. Yet certain of their basic ideas are receiving much serious attention. The thoughtful engineer has no choice but to give these ideas a hearing.” (pg. 48)

Given the already extant “criticism and ridicule” toward these poor luddites, the wringing that they’re put through in the next pages might seem a bit much. In terms of history, certainly, these guys posed little threat to engineering as a whole (especially since the ‘green’ movement in America today is so heavily intertwined with both engineering and capitalist economics). But the book is a pep talk, and any good pep talk includes a hefty offering of why the other team can be beat. This is kept mostly on the proper ideological level, and it’s possible that my boredom here is more that I’m already in the choir (no preaching necessary, thanks) than that the topics are so noncontroversial as I assume.

For instance. Under Florman’s characterization, the tone of all the antitechnological lit mentioned is uniform and unquestioning on some topics, one of these being the powerlessness of individuals to make their own decisions under the headlong march of techy progress. Florman prefigures Pinker on this subject and says that these critics have it exactly reversed. Technology is, as a capitalist enterprise, responding to the desires that people already have, not (as some suggest) insidiously creating needs in order to pump up profits. In fact, he goes farther with this critique and asserts that their referral to technology as an inevitable progression is just the type of dehumanization that they claim to detest, for behind each machine is an engineer, a human, and this person is simply doing his best to respond to societal needs with the tools he has. There’s even a subtext of snobbery in the antitechnologist’s furor. When Roszak complains of his irritation that during a trip to Yellowstone, “Never once were we out of earshot of chattering throngs and transistor radios or beyond the odor of automobile exhaust…Ah, wilderness,” Florman acidly responds, “How nice it would be for a select few of us if Delphi and Yellowstone could be set aside for our personal enjoyment, with the masses restricted to places to places such as Coney Island, more suited to their coarser sensibilities.” (pg. 80)

This is well said, and I find much to agree with in it. When today’s internet populists attack Al Gore’s plane flights and jumbo lodges, the same sort of anger gets (rightly) stoked. What I find harder to appreciate is why this little volume latches onto that most anti-intellectual of philosophies, existentialism, and claims it for the engineers. Aaaand…we’re back to the scientist/engineer divide. Florman praises the engineer as a ‘doer,’ as homo faber (‘man the maker’), and not as some scientist who would passively suck all meaning and pleasure from the world. No man plagued by doubt, he. Ah, screw it. Let him go to Sartre, and they can together condemn contemplation as an outcome of a bourgeoisie philosophy (really—Sartre does this, here). As for me, I can write little diatribes on my unread blog, dismissing the last third of the book as little more than a name-checking of every novel ever to involve an engineer. Hey, look, existentialists, I’m choosing! I’m sorry—I’m going to go indulge in some more of my sad passiveness, and try to actually understand what the hell’s going on…indeed, an unheroic thing, if ever. You can stuff it, engineers, O ye heroes.

Ravelstein, by Saul Bellow

I first heard of Ravelstein when it came out in the year 2000, back in my senior in high school. The term ‘roman a clef’ would have been unfamiliar to me then (I just learned it last month, actually, and feel pretty cool using it), but this book is a prototypical example: the title character is based on a real person, Allan Bloom, author of the controversial book The Closing of the American Mind. Although Saul Bellow is of course considered one of our Great American Writers, a prose genius, a wonderful confabulator of the high and the low, etc., etc., an interest in Allan Bloom was my reason for picking up this book. Reviews on Amazon.com show that I am not alone in this.

The Closing of the American Mind, for those who haven’t had the chance to experience it, is a strange sort of political touchstone. Published in 1987, it’s one of those books that is more cranky/snotty than it is conservative, but, due to its place in history, it became a text that conservatives could claim as their own during the culture wars. In it, Bloom railed against the modern university’s denigration of Great Books, modern students’ passivity, and rock music. (In the book’s argument, all three are interrelated; an example of its datedness can be seen in how Sir Mick Jagger, now an aged member of the establishment, is quoted as the one figure most often named by collegians as a person who they would like to be.) I suppose that the only reason this is of interest to me is that a paperback copy of Closing, bought by my sister Angela at a Sioux Falls Goodwill, floated around one of our family station wagons in high school, introducing me to guys like Rousseau, Nietzsche, and Heidegger for the first time. Reading it as an adolescent, you’d think that college is (or, at least, can be) a place of discovery where earnest students can discover the wisdom of the ages by reading and passionately acting out the works of the great dead whites.

The book was loved by many and hated by many, and in the process Bloom became an international academic celebrity. That’s where Ravelstein starts out: Bloom’s placeholder, Abe Ravelstein, is on a trip to Paris with Bellow’s placeholder, Chick. As Chick leisurely points out, “Nobody in the days before he struck it rich had ever questioned Ravelstein’s need for Armani suits or Vuitton luggage, for Cuban cigars, unobtainable in the U.S., for the Dunhill accessories, for solid-gold Mont Blanc pens or Baccarat or Lalique crystal to serve wine in—or to have it served.” And now that he has “struck it rich” in book sales, Ravelstein has the resources to live in the style in that he prefers; the opening conversation takes place in the posh Hotel Crillon, where Michael Jackson (‘Miekell Jack-sown’ to the French, Chick jokes) has simultaneously rented out the entire floor below them.

In the 1st act, Chick and Ravelstein hobnob about, allowing readers to observe the regular, lush habits of the book’s hero. Chick heaps endless praise on Ravelstein. Though he co-teaches a class with him at ‘the university’ (always unnamed, but a stand-in for the University of Chicago), Chick is consistently in awe of Ravelstein’s intellect, at one point commenting that although he is Ravelstein’s elder, Ravelstein is his teacher. Being a novel and not a strict biography, this could be a case of the unreliable narrator, but there don’t seem to be any of the conventional signs. The admiration seems to be genuine, backed up by the laudatory preface he churned out for Bloom’s real-life bestseller.

But what reason do we readers have to love Ravelstein? Is it the way that he berates his cleaning lady for not appreciating the cost of his deluxe wine glasses? (“You can’t help thinking these women are just as rough with men’s penises,” he comments to Chick.) Is it the way he heralds himself as the last bastion of the civilized culture, putting himself as one apart who can separate wheat from chaff? (All popular music, as mentioned, dismissed as vulgar, while Mel Brooks—that paragon of refinement—gets a free pass, as a fellow Jew.) Is it the way he separates out his students, pairing them, judging over their good or bad matches? (Indeed, he judges over Eros for all people. Chick’s wife at the novel’s beginning, a “chaos physicist,” is treated as a constant nuisance; Ravelstein is glad when she is replaced by a younger, more suitable candidate: one of his (Ravelstein’s) fawning graduate students.) Or is it just that charming way he has of dismissing scientific accomplishments as obviously secondary to the self knowledge of great-souled men like himself?

Well, no matter; Chick still loves him. Which is good, since Ravelstein needs companions during his struggle with AIDS that makes up the book’s 2nd act. To the surprise of all his conservative champions—they only found out when this novel was published—Ravelstein/Bloom was an openly gay man, with some kinky tastes. His companion is a much younger man here named Nikki, with whom he shares a taste for finely tailored clothing and not too much else. (With his disease, we are told that the relationship has become more paternal than romantic, for the obvious reasons.) Sickness makes any character more pitiable, which meanwhile rescues the book. Ravelstein’s extravagance, at least to me, was suddenly tinged by the heroic—a stubborn unwillingness to cede the things that he valued in life, no matter how unworthy those things might be.

This is all dealt with a light touch. Bellow manages to fill Act 2 with both the death of his title character and the dissolution of Chick and Vela’s marriage (Vela being the ‘chaos physicist’) but somehow renders it without becoming ponderous or pompous. This is something of a miracle. It is even more extraordinary when you consider that the other main themes of the section are just the decline of western culture and the exile of the Jews. No biggie.

Ravelstein’s death 2/3 of the way through might have paralyzed some novelists, but, to my mind, the last third is the best of the book. In it, the abstractions of the earlier sections are made concrete. Chick struggles for many years—which, in the novel’s plastic sense of time, are passed over in a few sentences—over the Ravelstein book that his late friend asked him to write. Rosamund, the ex-Ravelstinian graduate student and Chick’s current wife, is as sensitive and caring as Vela was bitchy and soulless (Bellow could be accused of stereotyping his women, an especially damning charge when you find out that, along with the rest, they’re based on his actual wives, too), so when she suggests a Caribbean holiday, he acquiesces. Once there, he is poisoned by undercooked fish and bumbles near death himself. Unlike Ravelstein, whose coming death is well-acknowledged and respected, Chick has a hard time admitting his sickness. To reflect this, the novel grows hallucinatory and figures of the past mingle with the present. Even at the edge of the abyss, he continues to observe the minutiae of life, continues to see comedy instead of drama. Recalling his late friend Ravelstein, he says, “Better Bizet and Carmen than Wagner and the Ring.”

Though I did not know it at the time of reading, this was Bellow’s last novel, written when he was 85 years old. If we consider literature as just another form of human communication, this fact lends extra poignancy to this already remarkable book. As a meditation on the experience of modern death, I’ve not seen a fiction so detailed and so authentic. As one of the underling, Midwestern schlubs, I sort of resent some of the book's characters—with the conditioning we get toward modesty and self-effacement around here, I have a hard time liking a group of guys who scoff at the entire world while they slap each other’s backs, proclaiming themselves alone to be brilliant and worthwhile—but through their books, both Saul Bellow’s and Allan Bloom’s attitudes continue to influence me.

Somewhere in Northwest Iowa, Angela’s old copy of The Closing of the American Mind probably still exists, though she might declaim it now. As Bellow puts it in the last line of his book, “You don’t easily give up a creature like Ravelstein to death.”

The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

Back in high school, before I found out that it was fashionable to categorize my reading style as Marxist, feminist, reader-response etc., I only had one way of reading—and it was a good one. Each book was treated as a potential vehicle that might illuminate the ecstatic secrets of the universe. This was an exciting way to approach texts. Potentially, the pages of each Goodwill paperback held the unknown clue that might finally help me to make sense of my moody adolescent reality. Of course, this meant that just about every book was a major letdown, and the ones that weren’t were filled with superstition and lies. But no matter. This unfounded faith in books was a helpful delusion, because it pushed me to explore beyond the dogmas of my formal Bible-belt education.

I should know better by now, but I sometimes still get sucked in by high hopes. My only excuse is the blurbs on the back covers of books. When I picked up the book The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable at the library, the back cover screamed its greatness. “A masterpiece,” said Chris Anderson, the editor in chief of Wired magazine. “There’s more about the ways of the real world between the covers of The Black Swan than in the contents of a dozen libraries,” said Tom Peters, an author I’ve never heard of. Immediately, my high school hope returned. Maybe this book is finally the one! Finally, I’ll be able to understand the world!

I had some further justification for checking out this book; it’s the latest stand-in for my recent interest in Wall Street dynamics. (Really, who isn’t interested in those evildoers these days?) The author, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, was an active trader for many years, and in a recent interview he mentioned that during our current recession he made seven-figure annual gains. Interesting guy, I thought. He might be able to help me understand how the economic hit-men actually think. Additionally, I hoped to learn something about the economic theories themselves by reading his criticisms of them.

Just like always, the book was a slight disappointment. But that’s only because I expected to learn about modern economics (along with the ecstatic secrets of the universe). If I would have walked in expecting a guidebook on How To Be a N. N. Taleb, then I probably would have left more than satisfied.

The prologue and the first chapter should have showed me that this wasn’t the book I had signed on for. The prologue succinctly explains the book’s central metaphor. “Before the discovery of Australia,” writes Taleb in the book’s first words, “people in the Old World were convinced that all swans were white, an unassailable belief as it seemed completely confirmed by empirical evidence. The sighting of the first black swan might have been an interesting surprise for a few ornithologists […] but that is not where the significance of our story lies. It illustrates a severe limitation to our learning from observations or experience and the fragility of our knowledge. One single observation can invalidate a general statement derived from millennia of confirmatory sightings of millions of white swans.” (p. xvii)

Which gives you the book in a nutshell. Taleb’s main argument is that the really important events, the game-changers both for economics and for history in general, are those that are necessarily outside of current predictions—otherwise, they wouldn’t come as a shock. The central philosophical notion here is that the outlier is the central fact of human history, a thing to be pondered and not ignored. The book beats this idea into the reader’s head over and over and over and over and over. ‘Black Swans’ are the unpredictable (“epistemically unknowable”) events that constantly pop up in contradiction to ‘Platonic’ theories of the world, and by the end of the book so many things have been categorized as Black Swans that I began to wonder if this term is meaningful enough to be used by anyone other than Taleb himself.

But the whole book isn’t spent in pondering Black Swans. Just as much space is spent enumerating reasons why people can’t seem to understand that uncertainty is something that must be lived with. The main reason, it seems, is that most economists, sad to say, are nerds. That’s right: nerds. So in the first chapter, “The Apprenticeship of an Empirical Skeptic,” Taleb presents the intellectual biography—autobiography, in fact—of an exemplary non-nerd: N. N. Taleb. He discusses the unexpected downfall of Lebanon, where he grew up, labels it as a Black Swan (go figure), and uses it to illuminate his theory of history—which, as far as I can make it out, is that no one really understands root causes; justifications are only added afterwards, when people use narratives to reduce the amount of information they need to remember. In this chapter, we get our first glimpse of Taleb the rebel, who eventually will be the self-styled hero of the book.

The first of these ideas—that a single ‘Black Swan’ can knock out any number of White Swan theories—is a good one, but I had a hard time getting very excited about it. It’s not Taleb’s idea, after all. Not that he claims it as his own; Karl Popper is given credit where credit is due. (Then again, as a physics student, I might come upon this way of thinking more often than most people. It would probably be interesting to the business-minded target audience that hasn’t read much academic philosophy.) The book also nicely catalogues a lot the standard issues that rigorous data interpreters need to face: silent evidence, infinite possible curves that fit a finite number of data points, even some basic chaos theory. But when Taleb moves on to his rhetorical tack of attacking all others who do not act as he does, I found it less convincing.

Here, I need to be careful; philosophers are quick to spot an ad hominem attack. However, Taleb so thoroughly makes himself a part of the book that it is difficult to separate him from the ideas themselves. A basic template: 1. Taleb, our hero, goes to a group of philosophers and tries to tell them how fucked their predictions are, due to Black Swans (see, “Lunch at Lake Como,” p. 125); 2. The traders and military folk—those who deal in the ‘real world’—listen receptively to his message, while the academics wistfully continue to scratch themselves (see, “How Many Wittgensteins Can Dance on the Head of a Pin?”, p. 289); 3. Taleb makes fools out of all those silly mathematicians, who suffer from too much nerdiness (see, “To Be Wrong with Infinite Precision”, p. 74).

I suppose that most of this is true; certainly, most professors cannot play the market like a Taleb. And, undoubtedly, he’s a very smart dude—e.g., before reading this, I’d never thought of Pascal’s Wager as a good paradigm for stock risk management, but, then, look at Taleb’s seven-figure returns. But the thing that keeps nagging me as I think about this book is my excited, high school self, hoping that the next page will bring some ecstatic wisdom. This book doesn’t do that. It just gave me more evidence that no one knows what’s really going on, anywhere. With my utter lack of economic knowledge going in, my default belief was that it was all bull, making the book less revealing for me than it might be for others. As a follow-up, I’m reading a book on investing entitled Taking Stock. It gives advice on how the markets work in brief, pithy quotations. The introduction is called, “Why You Need This Book.” Even while I know that it’s probably filled with superstition and lies, it’ll probably be a little more comforting than continuing to stare at that grand old abyss of human ignorance.