Engineering and the Liberal Arts: A Technologist's Guide to History, Literature, Philosophy, Art and Music

by Samuel C. Florman

Overview

From the author who inspired inaugural poet Richard Blanco! Engineering and the Liberal Arts remains a fresh and provocative book, using the familiar world of technology to guide a new generation of engineers through the stimulating world of the liberal arts.

Beginning with a penetrating and enlightening discussion of how exposure to the arts can enrich and reward nearly every aspect of an engineer's life, Samuel Florman—himself a decorated engineer with over fifty years' experience in the field—boldly explores the natural relationship between liberal arts and technology. Sweeping away traditional barriers separating the two fields, Florman establishes a rich and vital communication of ideas between scientist and artist.

By linking the history of technology to world history, the truth of science to philosophy, utility of form to painting and sculpture, and the world of view of the engineer to literature, Florman builds a series of bridges connecting science to art. A complete survey of the arts in and of itself, this impressive volume constitutes an introduction to the infinite variety of pleasures afforded through study of the liberal arts, paving the way to a richer, fuller life for the engineer.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781466884991
Publisher:	St. Martin's Publishing Group
Publication date:	12/15/2015
Sold by:	Macmillan
Format:	eBook
Pages:	278
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Samuel C. Florman, a civil engineer, is a principal in a major New York-area construction company. In addition to scores of articles, Mr. Florman is the author of the novel The Aftermath, as well as The Introspective Engineer, The Civilized Engineer, Blaming Technology, and his classic, The Existential Pleasures of Engineering. He lives in New York City.

Samuel C. Florman, a civil engineer, is a principal in a major New York-area construction company. In addition to scores of articles, Mr. Florman is the author of the novel The Aftermath, as well as The Introspective Engineer, The Civilized Engineer, Blaming Technology, and his classic, The Existential Pleasures of Engineering. He lives in New York City.

Read an Excerpt

Engineering and the Liberal Arts

A Technologist's Guide to History, Literature, Philosophy, Art, and Music

---

By Samuel C. Florman

St. Martin's Press

Copyright © 2002 Samuel C. Florman
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-8499-1

---

CHAPTER 1

The Civilized Engineer

Those of us who are engineers in the last third of the twentieth century are among the most fortunate of men.

In a time of widespread despair our constructive work gives us reason to be sanguine. In an age when most men are confused by the complexity of the scientific revolution, we are uniquely equipped to understand and enjoy the marvelous technological happenings all about us. It is said that the condition of man in our era is one of increasing alienation. But we engineers are needed by our fellow men; our place in society is secure; we feel at home in the world. Our work brings us comfortably in touch with the real world of "things"; our days are spiced with the tang of novelty and inventiveness. Financially, although we might not always consider ourselves adequately compensated for our efforts, we need never know want.

Busy, secure, and dissatisfied

Nevertheless, we are not content. We can see that the world is teeming with treasures of the arts about which we know little. We find ourselves somehow excluded from the intellectual and philosophical discourse in which the values and goals of our society are shaped. Not only are we not participating in the artistic and intellectual life of our time, but we find that our professional product, the technology of which we are so proud, is being misused and misdirected, dominated by forces beyond our control. We are unhappy about our "image" and about the fact that we are not receiving our proper share of respect and responsibility.

In sum, we may be busy and secure, but we are far from satisfied, either with our personal lives or with our role in society. Anyone familiar with the literature of our professional journals knows this to be the case.

Our dissatisfaction seems related to a certain flaw in our professional personality, a flaw which limits both our capacity to experience life to the full and our ability to play an important role in the political, cultural, and social developments of our time. This flaw stems from our failure to become "well rounded," a failure resulting from our admitted concentration on the technical aspect of our profession. To pinpoint it, the source of both our inadequacy and our discontent is rooted in our lack of a broadly based education, our lack of a civilizing education in the liberal arts.

According to Webster's dictionary, civilization consists of "progress in education, refinement of taste and feeling, and the arts that constitute culture." If we take this definition literally, the average engineer today is simply not civilized. It is paradoxical that without us civilization could not exist, yet we are somehow isolated from the civilizing influence of the culture of our time. This is a misfortune for us as individuals, for our profession, and for the world.

I am not talking about superficial refinement and the ability to sparkle at cocktail parties. I am talking about something more fundamental. It is not an exaggeration to say that liberal education for engineers could improve the quality of life for the average engineer, contribute to the sound development of the engineering profession, and help to preserve and enrich society as a whole. Let us consider some of the ways in which this is so.

Intellectual competence and imagination

First of all, a liberal education enlarges intellectual capacity, develops mental agility, improves our ability to think. As a noted educator has said, liberal education helps "to cultivate those skills and habits of reasoning which constitute intellectual competence, the capacity to think logically and clearly, the ability to organize one's thoughts on any subject on which essential facts are possessed or obtainable."

If we need the liberal arts to maintain and improve our intellectual competence, we need them even more to develop imagination, for without imagination reason is not equal to even the minimum demands of our exploding technology. Lewis Mumford has warned us that a concentration on pure technical training

... might defeat even its immediate purposes by depriving original minds of the stimulus and enrichment of wider interests and activities.

Has not Niels Bohr told us that he arrived at the doctrine of complementarity in physics by speculating on an ancient theological dilemma — the impossibility of reconciling perfect love with perfect justice? Men flew in dreams and communicated instantaneously in myths and fairy stories long before they achieved the technical apparatus for doing so. But would any chain of discoveries and inventions have produced a balloon or a telegraph if the dream had not first suggested these goals? Many significant inventions, from the helicopter to the motion picture, began as toys for amusing the young. Plainly the self-sufficiency of the specialist's world is a prisoner's illusion. It is time to open the gates.

Liberal education and leadership

As liberal education improves our intellectual competence and expands our imagination, it also develops those qualities of intellectual curiosity and general understanding, those traits of grace and wit and poise which characterize the leaders among men. Too often engineers are found lacking in these attributes. Scientifically made personality studies have revealed engineers to be "socially conforming, impersonal, introverted individuals." In industry the effectiveness of engineers has been found to be limited by their lack of "people-wisdom," their reliance on "coldly rational judgment," and the recurrent appearance of a "noncommunicative syndrome."

The president of a large corporation has said succinctly what many leaders of American industry have come to recognize as fact:

The specialist cannot function effectively at the top level of management if all he brings to it is his specialty. At that level, the daily problems call for broad general knowledge, open-mindedness, an understanding of human nature, an insight into human frailties, a fairness of mind, a clarity of thought. ... The qualifications needed for leadership in industry are developed largely through a liberal arts education.

The proposition has scarcely changed in the nineteen centuries since Vitruvius, the great Roman engineer, wrote that those who have acquired

... skill without scholarship have never been able to reach a position of authority to correspond to their pains. ... But those who have a thorough knowledge of both, like men armed at all points, have the sooner attained their object and carried authority with them.

The good life

In addition to helping each of us to do his job more effectively — and of even greater importance in the last analysis — liberal learning yields great riches to the individual in pursuit of the good life. Knowledge and understanding provide pleasure that needs no practical justification. Beauty evokes joyousness that is its own reward. The most precious treasure awaiting the engineer in the world of the liberal arts is enrichment of his personal life — enrichment and the tranquility of spirit which accompanies new insight.

We engineers pride ourselves on being members of a profession which engages our energies and challenges our capacities. We are usually too much absorbed in our interesting work to be overly bothered by the doubts and anxieties which plague many of our less fortunate brethren. This concentration on work is a blessing, but it contains a hidden flaw. Our questioning and doubting are liable to be postponed, only to emerge in later years, sometimes with disturbing effect. It is better surely to expose oneself early and often to the eternal problems of philosophy and art than to be awakened with a start in one's waning years by the sudden asking of the questions, "What is life all about? What have I been living for?" Socrates' admonition still rings true. "The unconsidered life is not worth living."

Mark Van Doren has spoken of the happiness won by the man who has sought inspiration and enlightenment in the "great tradition" of the liberal arts. "That happiness consists in the possession of his own powers, and in the sense that he has done all he could to avoid the bewilderment of one who suspects he has missed the main thing. There is no happiness like this."

Status for the profession

As the individual engineer profits from acquaintance with the liberal arts, so will the entire profession. Our lack of "status," our unsatisfactory "image" — these are concerns which gnaw away at our collective professional contentment. Only a vastly increased number of liberally educated engineers can remedy this situation. Self-praising pronouncements emanating from our professional organizations surely will not suffice.

The public relations problems of the engineering profession are nothing new. They already existed in the days of ancient Greece. Xenophon spoke for most of his fellow citizens when he said that "the mechanical arts carry a social stigma and are rightly dishonored in our cities." Technologists, he maintained, "simply have not got the time to perform the offices of friendship or citizenship. Consequently they are looked upon as bad friends and bad patriots...."

A hundred years ago Ralph Waldo Emerson looked at the technologists of his day and spoke sadly of "great arts and little men." "Look up the inventors," he wrote. "Each has his own knack; his genius is in veins and spots. But the great, equal symmetrical brain, fed from a great heart, you shall not find." Even Thomas Henry Huxley, nineteenth-century advocate of science and technology, expressed concern about technologists becoming "lopsided men." "The value of a cargo," he pointed out, "does not compensate for a ship's being out of trim."

In the early twentieth century, engineering achieved a certain level of prestige, although the profession was still regarded warily even by its greatest admirers. Thus Thorstein Veblen in 1917:

Popular sentiment in this country will not tolerate the assumption of responsibility by the technicians, who are in the popular apprehension conceived to be a somewhat fantastic brotherhood of over-specialized cranks, not to be trusted out of sight except under the restraining hand of safe and sane businessmen. Nor are the technicians themselves in the habit of taking a greatly different view of their own case.

Today, when in the midst of spectacular engineering achievements, this galling tradition persists. An American science editor informs us that "the image that has been projected of the engineering profession — and images are very hard to change — is of a prejudiced, conservative, non-involved group." An English science editor comments that engineers, "the men who daily make history, are still not accepted as important citizens!. ... Even the word engineer has connotations of a man in a boiler suit who is a kind of modern blacksmith." A public relations man captures the essence of a prevalent attitude in a few deft sentences:

I grew up in the tradition of the engineer being a man with no verbal skills whatsoever. He was one of these guys who if you gave him an applied kind of problem would go off in a corner and work it out for you but, God forbid, don't ask him to explain it. He's no good with the English language; don't expect him to articulate himself. He is this kind of faceless, anonymous character.

Engineers are certainly not insensitive to public opinion, nor do they engage in self-deception. A study has shown that "engineers themselves are convinced that the general public does not hold them in as great esteem as other professions."

Only liberally educated engineers can bring the profession the esteem it craves and, in so many important ways, deserves. For one thing, only liberally educated engineers will possess the eloquence with which to impress upon their fellow citizens the inherent worth of engineering and its importance to society. It has been charged, and rightly so, that the engineering profession "has not been in touch with the people and by default has permitted a working partner (science) to capture the imagination of the nation."

But there is a more important goal than "telling the story" of engineering to the public. If engineers themselves, as individuals, become truly cultured — that is, become educated in the liberal arts — then the word will spread without a "good press." If we engineers do not want to be known as "bad friends and bad patriots," "little men," "lopsided men," "overspecialized cranks," if we resent being characterized as a "prejudiced, conservative, noninvolved group," if we cringe at being looked at as "a kind of modern blacksmith," as "this kind of faceless, anonymous character," then it is up to us to make sure we resemble these things as little as possible. If engineers become increasingly wise, sensitive, humane, and responsible, we will not need public-relations techniques to sell us to the public.

The public good

And as the engineering profession gains prestige and authority, society as a whole will benefit. For the world is desperately in need of the leadership that only engineers can give. "The politicians, and even the statesmen," as James Reston of The New York Times has put it,

... are merely scrambling to deal with the revolutions in weapons, agriculture and industry created by the scientists and the engineers. The latter have transformed man's capacity to give life, to sustain and prolong life, and to take life; and the politicians no longer find that they can deal with all the new complexities and ambiguities....

The world must listen to the engineer or it is doomed. Buckminster Fuller has stated the facts in the simplest terms:

If humanity understood that the real world problem is that of upping the performances per pound of the world's metals and other resources, we might attempt to solve that problem deliberately, directly and efficiently. ... But I find that approximately no one realizes what is going on. That is why we have been leaving it to the politician to make the world work. There is nothing political that the politician can do to make fewer resources do sixty percent more.

We engineers already possess most of the technical knowledge required to provide food and shelter in abundance, restore purity to our air and water, heal the blight of our cities, untangle the snarl of traffic, harness our rivers, reap harvests from the oceans, husband our resources, and develop power from the sun and atom. We will — if the world will let us — subdue floods, minimize the danger from storms and earthquakes, and eventually control the weather. We will perform new miracles in the fields of medicine, communication, and transportation, and develop a continuous stream of marvelous fabrics and household appliances. We can — if called upon — contribute to the preservation of peace by assisting the underdeveloped nations and by devising improved means of arms control.

But unless we achieve a position of leadership, our talents will continue to be largely wasted and misdirected. The world will persist in demanding our blast furnaces but not our smoke-control devices, our highways but not our parks, our bombers but not our hospital ships. Running wild and out of control, technological progress will become a disease — a plague of asphalt and armaments, pollution and blight.

Admittedly, there is a school of thought which holds that the world's ills are not attributable to lack of leadership by the technologists, but rather to leadership heading in the wrong direction. "In every country in the world," according to George Orwell,

... the large army of scientists and technicians, with the rest of us panting at their heels, are marching along the road of "progress" with the blind persistence of a column of ants. Comparatively few people want it to happen, plenty of people actively want it not to happen and yet it is happening. The process of mechanization has itself become a machine, a huge glittering vehicle whirling us we are not certain where, but probably toward the padded Wells-world and the brain in the bottle.

"It is apparently our fate," echoes a French scholar, "to be facing a 'golden age' in the power of sorcerers who are totally blind to the meaning of the human adventure."

Nor is this sentiment restricted to apprehensive artists and intellectuals. In his farewell address President Eisenhower warned the nation that its public policy might "become the captive of a scientific-technological elite." Senator Bartlett of Alaska has complained that "faceless technocrats in long, white coats are making decisions today which rightfully and by law should be made by the Congress."

It is true that in government and industry engineers are numerically abundant and potentially powerful.But the extent of our actual influence in directing the course of our society is a moot question indeed. In either case — whether the world is racing toward disaster in spite of us or because of us — clearly what is needed is enlightened engineering leadership.

Someone must step forward to say, "We can afford to make that automobile a little safer," "Let us build a factory that is more attractive," "Let us consider the possible harmful effects of that insecticide before we market it," "Let us develop a plant process that will not pollute the water we use," "Let us make that machine a little quieter," "Let us not demolish that historically precious old building," "Let us locate that dam, not only where it will generate the most power, but also where it will serve the interests of the community — esthetically, politically, and socially," "Let us build a rapid transit system for this city rather than a freeway that will bring more cars into an area already choked with traffic."

(Continues...)

---

Excerpted from Engineering and the Liberal Arts by Samuel C. Florman. Copyright © 2002 Samuel C. Florman. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---

Table of Contents

Contents

Title Page,
Copyright Notice,
Dedication,
Note from the Author for the 2015 Edition,
Preface,
1 The Civilized Engineer,
2 The Bridge to History: The History of Technology,
3 The World of History,
4 The Bridge to Literature: The Engineer as a Protagonist in Fiction,
5 The World of Literature,
6 The Bridge to Philosophy: The Truth of Science,
7 The World of Philosophy,
8 The Bridge to The Fine Arts: Utility and Beauty,
9 The World of the Fine Arts,
10 The Bridge to Music: Sound as Environment,
11 The World of Music,
Notes,
Index,
Subject Index,
Also by Samuel C. Florman,
About the Author,
Praise for Olmstead Award–Winning Author Samuel C. Florman,
Copyright,