The Engineering Mentality

The Ad agency for Shell Oil Company used to be fond of making television commercials depicting the passage of automobiles through paper barriers slung across a highway--which was supposed to prove something about Super Shell and a "mileage ingredient" called Platformate. A later campaign, however, turned to the hidden camera and an offensive young man named Tom O'Malley, who posed as an attendant and badgered customers about the product; if they defended it, they were put on the air, complete with residuals. In one of the commercials, O'Malley effectively destroyed the earlier campaign. Hectoring a customer with Spanish surname and accent, he belligerently demanded, "What's Platformate?" The annoyed gentleman responded, "How do I know what's Platformate? I like the gas." Years of commercials down the drain. Young Mr. O'Malley and his backers did not, unfortunately, succeed in killing off magic-ingredientism in advertising, a gimmick that to my own knowledge goes back a long way. I can remember learning to pronounce sodium acetylsalicylate along with the man doing the Alka-Seltzer commercials on radio, and I recall Johnny Mercer's Pepsodent commercial: "Poor Miriam, poor Miriam, neglected using irium...." On another front--while brash Mr. O'Malley was knocking off Platformate--Colgate announced something even better than stannous fluoride in its tooth paste. As we all know deep in our hearts, it's a con (despite the fact that Platformate--a form of platinum used in a compound--and stannous fluoride are both very real and very beneficial, which is why they're in most gasolines and tooth pastes, respectively). How do we know what's Platformate? We buy the gas. The con, however, is based on something very real: the fact that we Americans have a vague knowledge of something called science, which to most of us is the same as something called magic. And I suspect that whole areas of our lives are shaped by the same kind of con, the same kind of dependence, more or less unconscious, on science as on magic. Polls, we are told repeatedly, are pretty scientific things--and, indeed, taken correctly and reported correctly, and confined to things they can handle, they are both scientific and accurate. But you have to know how to use them and how to read them, and most Americans do not--as Arthur B. Krim, Jr., knows very well. Arthur B. Krim, Jr., is a big attorney (Louis Nizer's partner), a big motion-picture executive and a big Democrat; in 1967, he was the finance chairman of the Democratic Party. In those days, big Democrats wanted Lyndon Johnson to run again, but Messrs. Harris and Gallup were demonstrating that almost nobody else did. Of course (as Gallup, especially, showed), there were regional variations--but most of us just read and accepted the totals, or the headlines: "L.B.J. Popularity at new low." SO Mr. Krim hired the Crossley people and had them investigate the President's popularity--asking Mr. Krim's questions and asking them only where he wanted them asked. The poll was confined to the strongest Democratic areas (including one county only in New Hampshire) and it asked only for a choice between Johnson and some Republicans. To make it even better, the questionnaire used in New York left Nelson Rockefeller off the Republican list. Guess who won. The poll was accurate (continued on page 128)Engineering Mentality(continued from page 121) --for those questions, in those areas. What the press and the people got was something else. Headlines reported that the new figures were in sharp contrast to the Harris and Gallup polls, and columnists worried publicly about the fact that pollsters could arrive at such startlingly different results (oddly, a lot of us lost our faith in polls as scientific magic only when we were wrongly informed about them). The mighty New York Times even ventured a guess about the New Hampshire results--not bothering to find out, nor to figure out, that a one-county sample of 241 people meant that you had to allow eight percentage points for possible error in either direction, aside from its being a stacked county in the first place. Only much later did the Washington papers dig out the facts.

It was, in other words, an elaborate piece of political Platformate. The only difference was that it wasn't enough to put Johnson through the barrier. But it would have had no effect at all unless Americans, from The New York Times on down, had been willing, as they were, to accept scientific-sounding double talk as magic formulas.

This profound gullibility originates somewhere very deep inside us. All the fuss over heart transplants continued long after it became apparent that, like color television, they were introduced to an eager world some years before being anywhere near perfected. Somewhere in the back of our heads, the idea took hold that if we could somehow avoid getting in front of trucks and keep from slipping in bathtubs, we might yet prove to have found the magic potion of immortality, the Fountain of Youth.

Beyond even that: Almost daily, we can read solemn pronouncements that tomorrow will bring not only desalinization of sea water (which, if you're talking about large enough quantities to offset the rate at which we are fouling our fresh water, is pure nonsense) but marvelous underwater scenes in which trained dolphins cheerfully herd schools of protein-bearing fish as Scottish dogs herd sheep--all so that we won't worry about the fact that in 20 years or so, the world's population will have so far outrun its food supply that a world-wide famine is virtually inevitable.

This mystic faith in trained dolphins has nothing to do with science. Enchanted as I am by the austere elegance and the exciting adventure of real science, I must distinguish not only between science and technology but between science and "science." There is, hanging out there in space, a brilliant hydrogen-fusion phenomenon we call the sun; and there also exists a sun that has at times been worshiped as god at dawn and twilight. Our devotion to "science" is not to science, it's to magic--and what we see as evidence that the magic works is not scientific advance but is, from hydrogen bombs to heart transplants, technology.

The evidence on which we most often rely is the proliferation of goods. America, the most "scientific" nation on earth, produces for its citizens (or for the more affluent three quarters of them, anyway) an astonishing array of goods. The cassette recorder, the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, the plastic coffee-can cover, the hydroelectric dam, the billy club that dispenses Mace from its handle, the radial tire, the Grateful Dead with accompanying light show, the rechargeable triple-headed shaver--all are the products of what we erroneously call scientific advance; and all are enjoyed, by those who use them, with a silent prayer of thanks for such magical manna.

And--to steal a pun whose origin I have forgotten--we all look at the goods and pay no attention to the bads.

The 19th Century composer Robert Schumann was a great believer in technology. Unable as a concert pianist to play certain pieces, because his fingers were too weak, he invented an elaborate mechanical finger strengthener. It paralyzed one of his fingers and he never played again. In a small way, Schumann was the victim of the engineering mentality. French sociologist Jacques Ellul has written an overwhelming book (The Technological Society) about the total subjection of man to the idea of technique; and conservative British philosopher Michael Oakeshott has worried the idea from his tradition-oriented point of view. In America, however, where technique is most openly worshiped, we have hardly begun to think about its consequences--which are a lot worse than paralyzed fingers.

In 1960, the citizens of California authorized the largest bond issue ever floated by a single state: financing for something usually called the California Water Plan. Ten years later, it is still worth a close look, not only for its own faults but for what it says about how we think about our lives--and how we let others think about them. The whole point of the California Water Plan can be grasped from a quick look at two maps of the state--a relief map and a population map. Almost all of the water is in the north; the overwhelming majority of the people (and, hence, of the bond-issue voters) are in the south. Problem: Get the water to the people.

If you accept the problem, you have already been conned by the engineering mentality. In the first place, it could as easily be stated, "Get the people to the water"--a program that would be physically easier, financially cheaper and ecologically wiser. Setting that aside, however, why get the people and the water together at all? State it as a problem and your thinking starts in on solutions. But who says it's a problem to begin with?

The engineering mentality does not deal with things like ecology--the science (real science) of the interrelationships among all the living and nonliving things on earth, of the interdependence of man and rock, river and desert, microbe and moose. Ecology deals particularly with life and the land, and we know very little about it except that the interrelationships it studies are crucial.

Many of California's rivers are already studded with dams and irrigation diversions; the California Water Plan will alter virtually every remaining body of water in the state, leaving none in its natural condition. No one knows what this will do to the complex ecology of the California land and wildlife. What can possibly be so important that billions of dollars must be spent on so chancy an experiment?

As a Californian, I have long been a political opponent of the California Water Plan, because only a small part of the water will go to crowded population centers; most of it is quietly intended to enrich men who hold land, now arid, along the route. Some of it, however, will go to Los Angeles and to the people of surrounding communities--who already get their water from faraway places such as the Colorado River and the Owens Valley in the Sierras. The population in the Los Angeles area is, as we all know, increasing rapidly. So, of course, they'll need more water.

Of course?

Los Angeles does not, today, ration water. Palm Springs still uses millions of gallons of water to keep the greens green on its famous golf courses--in the middle of a desert. But figures show that the population will grow by such and such a percentage, and the water supply is so-and-so, and therefore....

We've been conned again, with the Platformate of the engineering mentality. Under the guise of meeting a need we can't do anything about, someone has actually made a decision. Going ahead with the California Water Plan means that, as citizens of California, we have decided we want Los Angeles to grow by that percentage.

Don't build the massive dams and aqueducts, don't supply the water, and the population of Los Angeles will not grow by such and such a percentage. People and industries, learning that the area faces a water shortage, will go elsewhere. Some land speculators, of course, will lose out; but there's enough water so that (continued on page 266)Engineering Mentality(continued from page 128) Los Angeles can sustain its present population for generations--and the future of California as a viable place to live may be assured by refraining from this massive ecological rape.

The same engineering mentality is being used today in New York to urge construction of a fourth jetport: There will be 85,000,000 passengers by 1980, so we must have the facilities. But if there are no facilities, there will not be 85,000,000 passengers. In other cities, large and small, it's new industries or downtown parking lots or bigger buildings--always in the name of a magical statistical inevitability. It's one thing to want more passengers or more industry and consciously to plan for them; it's quite another thing to be conned into it and then to wonder why it seems that the surroundings of your life grow beyond your control.

Growth-rate planning, with its hidden assumption of inevitability, is as much a pseudoscientific razzle-dazzle as Platformate or sodium acetylsalicylate or Mr. Krim's political poll. It comes about because, somehow, Americans have become fascinated with technique as the answer to everything. Our dawn and twilight devotions are in homage to "know-how," and the straight-line solution is our way of dealing with the questions of life, from seduction to South Vietnam.

Point out to a technician that a river sometimes floods its lowlands (or that there's a market for hydroelectric power in a nearby town) and he builds a dam. Point out to him that the dam will eliminate the salmon run on the river and he builds a fish ladder and artificial gravel spawning pits. Point out to him that the lake behind the dam will drown a small village on an Indian reservation and, at best, he'll call another technician to build a model city for Indians. What he will never do is reconsider the idea that he ought to build the dam in the first place. He won't do that because he can't; the engineering mentality just doesn't work that way.

The engineer's job--the essence of what we mean by engineer--is to solve whatever problem you give him, as directly as possible. Asked to dam the river, he's not supposed to worry about the salmon run; side effects aren't his concern. As a man (discrimination doesn't allow for many female engineers), he's diminished if he forgets the salmon or the beauty of the river or the ecology of the site; but as an engineer, they're not his business.

The problem comes when the engineering mentality takes over the thinking of the rest of us--politicians, planners, public men and just plain citizens: when our fascination with technique outweighs our sense of the other, more human values in life and we see all questions as problems to be solved in the straight-line fashion of the engineer, and side effects, however crucial they may prove to be, can go to hell.

There is nothing wrong with planning; we can hardly do without it--from family planning to city planning to intelligent international planning to avoid wars. And there is nothing wrong with technique. It takes technique to write or to edit a magazine article (or, for that matter, to read one), to play a guitar, to manufacture a chair or a sports car, to photograph a beautiful woman or to print her picture in accurately reproduced and registered color. It takes technique to manage a national park or to maintain the yield per acre of a cornfield, to judge a case on the Supreme Court or to direct traffic at a school crossing.

But we Americans have become fascinated with technique at the shallowest level, and our lives suffer for it. We tend to most admire the superb technician. Faced with the incredible complexity of urban ghettos, we call them a problem and seek a narrow solution--which usually means either wholesale slum clearance with bureaucratic contempt for the displaced residents or more cops with better riot-control equipment.

Caught up in this attitude, whether or not we are in public positions, we find ourselves not using technique but trying to live by it; we seek to learn techniques for using our minds, techniques for appreciating art, techniques for getting along with others. We even come to regard sex as a matter of technique, forgetting that that is not at all the point of sex. In our personal lives, shallowness haunts us more and more; in our social lives, the results are pollution, dwindling resources, disappearing beauty, a stuttering ecology and a paler and more sickly world in which to spend our diminished days.

Porfirio Díaz--that fascinating dictator who ruled Mexico from 1876 until the revolution of 1910--was surrounded by a group of men who were called científicos and who saw themselves as expert technicians, applying "scientific" methods to the administration of government. They were generally what our political writers today would call liberal men and some of them were even remarkably honest, considering their opportunities for personal enrichment. They met the fantastic problems of the Mexico of 1876 like true engineers: one problem at a time, with straight-line solutions and little thought for side effects. And, of course, their positions determined what they saw as problems.

In 1876, the treasury was empty. Under the científicos, the budget was balanced, the gold standard was adopted, Mexican five percent bonds could be sold on the world market at a premium, foreign trade increased 1000 percent. A network of railroads was built (and the científicos outplayed American railroad wizard E. H. Harriman, so that the railroads wound up in the hands of the Mexican government). Business boomed, harbors were improved, the swampy Valley of Mexico was drained, a national banking system was created, public buildings were constructed. Foreign observers were amazed.

It was such an improvement that nobody noticed the side effects. The burgeoning industries depended on what was virtually slave labor; the new railroads carried an agricultural output grown on land that was owned in huge blocks by a very few (in one completely agricultural state, Morelos, 99.5 percent of the population owned no land at all). The astonishing prosperity was enjoyed by only about five percent of the people of Mexico. And in 1910, the científicos saw the culmination they hadn't allowed for: a violent revolution that lasted ten years.

The científicos who served Díaz were hardly different from those who today serve the planners of our major cities. To them, as to our own politicians, the picture of tomorrow that grows from today's statistics was an infallible fact. The population is growing by X percent a year; therefore, by 1980, it will be Y million. But it doesn't have to happen like that--and we don't have to live like that, pretending that the formula is scientific truth and ignoring the fact that under the Xs and Ys are people, some hungry and some in need. When we accept this sun-worship approach, we become Xs ourselves and debase our lives.

The citizen of San Francisco today watches and feels helpless as new downtown buildings rise, far too large to maintain the scale of that delightful city, ruining the beauty of that loveliest of settings. We don't have a technical, scientific way to measure what happens to a child who grows up in an ugly city instead of one that's beautiful; but we know, somewhere inside ourselves, that there's a difference. We know, if we think about it, that there's a part of us that responds when someone succeeds in rising above the X level of mere professional skill. Watching the Jets play the Colts in that now-famous Superbowl game, for example, I discovered that while, as usual, I admired the finely honed technical skill of the players, I somehow actually liked Joe Namath. Also, I found that, for the first time after years of admiring him as a superb technician, I liked Johnny Unitas. I liked them, I think, because--in a game in which technique is virtually everything--both men displayed in the Superbowl something that was more than technical.

It's not just that, beyond technique, both men showed imagination; in professional football, what we call imagination is merely a name for a more sophisticated technique. No: It was that both men--Namath in his flippy self-assertion and Unitas in his weary, dramatic last-minute effort--became, for the moment at least, individual human beings, people for whom it was possible to feel a personal emotion beyond the almost impersonal admiration we tend to give any pro. It's the same thing that makes me, despite his frequent failures, admire Norman Mailer far more than I admire the much more professional John O'Hara; it's not just that he's a better writer, which is often a question of technique. And I like Joe Namath and Norman Mailer, in fact, for the same reason I like the San Franciscans (columnist Herb Caen, for example) who opposed that city's new International Market Center--a conglomerate of buildings in the waterfront area alongside Telegraph Hill--without attempting to give any technical reasons why.

In every case, their reactions are human reactions, not the machine reactions of a technological approach. Perhaps we're hungry for that human reaction, even if it doesn't make technological sense; that may be why so many admirers of Robert Kennedy voted, after the Senator's assassination, for George Wallace.

I had lunch one day with a couple of the people pushing that San Francisco project. When I said I didn't like it, they argued, with charts and figures, about the needs it would fill, the improvement it would make to the site and the tax base. I was almost overwhelmed--until I realized that to try to refute their arguments would be to play their game, that their terms are only one set of terms. For me, as for Caen and others, it was enough that it feels wrong, that somehow I know it's wrong--and that in this case, at least, I was not yet so overwhelmed by our technological society that I buried the feeling or allowed myself to think of it as irrelevant. It's that feeling, I suspect, that will save us, if anything will, from the final degradation of our lives by the triumph of technique, from that final state of helplessness that Ellul calls "technical anesthesia." That rebellious upsurge of human feeling is our hope for regaining control over techniques before technology impersonally and inexorably controls us all.

Those of us who live on the crest of the technological wave--those of us, in other words, who enjoy the goods and are not immediately touched in a superficial way by the bads--can give in too easily, relax with our gimlets and our Norman Mailer books (substitute participation) and our girlfriends and our Herbie Hancock records and what the hell? How--aside from a certain sterility in our personalities, a certain sameness in our lives, a certain mechanical quality about our personal relationships--does it bother us?

It depends, I guess, on what sort of thing bothers you. Privately, if the girlfriend you're relaxing with is also devoted to technique as a way of life, you're less likely to enjoy her companionship and more likely to feel as though you ought to give her $20 afterward. Publicly, when the científicos of our society have the upper hand, you find yourself outside the public decisions that are made--but confronted with the fact that those decisions affect the entire fabric of your life.

You get, for instance, things such as Columbia University's computerized and insensitive decision to build, on the edge of Harlem, what amounted to segregated gymnasiums. When students, somewhat more sensitive, demonstrate against such decisions, you get--as we got at Columbia--cops solving that problem with their solution, which at Columbia, as in Chicago and elsewhere, was a vicious, unreined police riot. You get, for instance, decisions about racial questions made by whites who see each facet of the question as a problem, and who try, with all sincerity, to find solutions that won't be called racist--not understanding that the approach is itself racist. How can I look at you as a problem, and propose measures to solve that problem, unless somehow I regard myself as the better or wiser of us?

You get cities that are impossible places in which to live, schools that are impossible places in which to learn, parks that are impossible places in which to relax--and lives so empty that in our helplessness, we look everywhere for more techniques with which to make them better. We read articles on "How to Use Your Leisure Time Creatively," "How to Bring a New Enjoyment to Sex," even "How to Watch Pro Football on Television." We can buy a book of Count Basie piano solos; but no matter how faithfully they're transcribed and no matter how well you read music, they never come out sounding like Count Basie.

And eventually--look around you--you get what the científicos of Porfirio Díaz got: a revolution.

You get a revolution, in part, because the científico mentality can't tolerate anyone who gets in the way of a simple solution to a simple problem. Give the technicians a difficult foreign-policy question, as in the Dominican Republic, and their answer is to call it a problem and to solve it by invading the country and interfering in its political processes: If this creates new problems throughout Latin America for 20 years afterward--well, we'll deal with those one at a time as they come up.

Give them a widening dissent to their activities (even if the dissent is not always to their methods) and their answer is to regard dissent as a problem and to solve it by widening their repression. The persecution of a few protesters leads to the persecution of Dr. Spock. The dubious conspiracy charges against Dr. Spock become the ridiculous conspiracy charges against the unknown Oakland Seven--charges brought only because conspiracy, a felony, is a tougher weapon against dissent. The harassment of Robert Williams grows to the constant bedeviling of Rap Brown and then to the merciless hounding of Eldridge Cleaver--and will grow further as they feel threatened by the many who are angry at Cleaver's treatment. When that, in turn, creates a new and even wider opposition, that, too, will be a problem to be dealt with as it arises.

Give such científicos as Mayor Daley a protest against an undemocratic Democratic Convention and their answer is to call the protest a problem and to solve it by turning loose frightened and overtworked cops with their billy clubs. If their viciousness brings out of their hotel rooms the quiet McCarthy supporters who were trying to work within the system, and calls them into the streets alongside the revolutionaries, "solve" that "problem" with unprovoked and club-swinging raids on McCarthy headquarters. And if that, in turn, creates a new problem, demand equal time on television.

Chicago's cops are as much a manifestation of the engineering mentality as chain saws in the redwood forests, 50-story buildings in San Francisco or bulldozers in the Mammoth Cave National Park. And more and more Americans--who really want nothing more than to relax with a drink or smoke some grass (another problem) with a congenial companion, listening to Aretha or watching Rowan and Martin--are being slowly but inexorably pushed into the position of the Indians of Díaz' Mexico, shunted aside as the dams and the bridges and the buildings go up and up, pacified with bread and circuses when we'll take it, and clubbed and Maced when we won't. Pan o palo, Díaz called it. Bread or the club.

The Indians revolted, partly because they didn't have enough bread, Most of us in the affluent part of the culture don't have that problem; nor are we, yet, as completely caught up in the spell of the científico mentality or as fully under its control. We can still look at every argument to see whether it depends on the hidden assumptions of the engineers and the growth-rate planners, and we can still respond to the feeling in our gut that it's wrong, no matter what the figures show. We can still claim our lives back from the technicians who pollute not only the air and water but the values of our humanity, the hopes and dreams by which we ought to live.

There's a final sobering thought about the revolution of 1910. Díaz was defeated in a war in which rifles, pistols and a few artillery pieces were all the weapons there were, and in which there were no tightly organized police forces, no National Guardsmen, no well-drilled Army with tanks and flame throwers and all the other appurtenances of modern warfare.

Given--like the Soviets in Hungary or Czechoslovakia or the Nazis of the early Thirties--a sufficient preponderance of technical equipment, the científicos of Díaz might well have put down the revolution and, for the moment, solved another problem.

It can all turn out to be a little hard on us Indians.