Recently I've been reading what I dub, for want of a better term, "science for poets." These are books like Lewis Thomas' Lives of a Cell and Stephen Jay Gould's The Panda's Thumb. I've wondered what drives me to read them. It is certainly not some aptitude for science. I almost failed physics (D+), was only a passable biologist, and avoided chemistry altogether. Instead, what attracts me to them is the intellectual excitement when the scientist, bearing his cargo of fact and method, treads on the airy and elite ground of the poet. What blooms is a bracing hybrid of vast thought with granite in its veins, large speculation tied to the dirt of the universe.
One book I came across struck me immediately by its title: The Existential Pleasures of Engineering, by Samuel C. Florman. I had never heard it put quite so bluntly before, but I knew from the moment I read the title that Florman was speaking exactly what I believed: that full engagement with material life, such as an engineer might have, provides one of the soundest pleasures derived from living. So, though the book was written in 1976 and reviewed in all the usual publications, I would like to offer my belated but nonetheless enthusiastic endorsement of what this book has to say.
Florman's purpose is to show that the engineer and the existentialist are not adversaries but instead are both engaged in the same pursuit of meaning and intention. He begins the book with an historical overview of the engineer's self-perception of his role in life. Florman points out that engineers not only took great pleasure in the physical changes their machines wrought but also believed that their way of thinking and doing would improve the world. Florman cites one engineer's words in 1895 which embody this attitude: "We are the priests of the new epoch, without superstitions."
Florman properly recognizes the dangerous hubris in these words, but he does not disagree with the essential truth in them: that being reasonable and open-minded, free of prejudices and preconvictions, approaching problems through the scientific method with an eye to the alleviation of drudgery and hardship, will inevitably add to rather than subtract from the general happiness of mankind. He then goes on to skewer the "anti-technologists" as he terms them, people like Charles Reich, Rene Dubos, Theodore Roszak, and Lewis Mumford who argue, often with great stupidity, against using technology to improve the lot of the world (often, as Florman wryly points out, from the comfort of offices heated by oil and built by working class laborers). His arguments are too involved to repeat, but he neatly upsets their posturing by systematically showing the inherent faults of their oftentimes emotionally appealing arguments.
With the anti-technologists safely neutered, he goes on to explore the delights and challenges of engineering, to detail for us what "existential" pleasures it offers to anyone willing to see it with unjaded eyes. He denies the usual animus in our culture that pure thought is superior to thought sullied by practical objectives, that materialism is a defect in human nature, by saying that "analysis, rationality, materialism, and practical creativity do not preclude emotional fulfillment; they are pathways to such fulfillment." He goes on: "We recognize that we cannot survive on meditation, poems and sunsets. We are restless. We have an irresistible urge to dip our hands into the stuff of the earth."
The rest of Florman's book is an exploration and explanation of the "existential engineer." What is truly refreshing about Florman's book is the unabashed delight he takes in material existence. It is not hedonism, which is really just exploitation, but instead a grappling with the forces of the earth that considers problems based on human needs or desires, tests and selects the best solution, and follows through to a finished product. It is the sort of drive that creates the word processor I'm using, prints my words, and makes the trucks that carry this manuscript to an editor. It is not prodigality but metamorphosis that informs Florman's book and, by extension, the life of the engineer.
I like Florman's book for another reason outside his veneration of the "stuff of the earth." It is his implicit but overwhelming reminder that whether or not a life exists beyond this one, our ultimate responsibility is to wrench into being those objects and processes that fulfill our desires for a better, more comfortable, more liberal and liberalizing world. This forces upon us the moral duty to become more politically and scientifically involved in the world, to base our lives as much as possible on facts, and, wherever possible, delete illusions which cripple and blind us. While the world we live on and our own selves are in some sense finite, we are infinitely capable of creative solutions to the problems of our lives, and it is to this realization and constant that Florman's book invites us to return.