In The New Atlantis: A
Journal of Technology and Society, Roger Forsgren writes “The Architectureof Evil,” in which he reflects on the life and work of Albert Speer. Speer was
the engineer, the architect that built the impressive structures, buildings and
monuments from which Hitler launched the Nazi cause.
Albert Speer did not, as far as any
historians know, personally design any death chambers, nor did he personally
kill another human being. But Speer did use his brilliant technical expertise
and talents to enable the war efforts of the most evil regime in history,
allowing it to murder millions of human beings. But even as we condemn him, we
must ask—especially we engineers and technicians—is Speer so different from us?
How many of us would be willing to compartmentalize our emotions, suppress our
consciences, almost to sell our souls, for the opportunity to work on the grand
projects that Speer was involved in? How many of us are so focused on solving a
technical problem that we fail to contemplate where that solution might lead?
To many engineers, Speer and his
experiences during the war may seem irrelevant today. But although there seems
to be little chance (we hope) of a highly industrialized power again waging a
war of world conquest, the essential questions that Speer faced still pertain
to the work of many engineers today. You may be an engineer sitting in front of
a computer-aided design screen, creating a seemingly benign component that will
become part of some sophisticated weapons system that will be sold to unknown
people in a far-off land. You may be a computer security researcher, or a
virologist, and discover some new potential weapon or security vulnerability,
and have to decide how to make the information public to shield against such
attacks, but without helping those who would launch them. Or you may design
automobile parts, and be faced with a compromise between saving your company
production costs and protecting the lives of customers.
These are good issues. To be seduced by the magnitude of
a project so that we begin to make a series of tiny compromises is easy, and
the danger involved can seem small enough to not count. Having a worldview
rigorous enough to sustain the necessary reflection and a community lively
enough to nourish such reflection is essential for all of us. All of us live
out our vocations within an ethical context because we live in God’s world and
bear his image.
There is another danger, one that we all face. It is to so
pursue excellence in our work, to so bury ourselves in the demands of our
vocation that we get lost in the details until we no longer are committed to
anything larger. This is a creeping danger, a slow process, not something that
suddenly arrives with trumpets blaring. Still when Work and Vocation are
elevated to the status of idolatry, they are cruel masters. If excellence in
architecture is capturing in design the vision and purpose of a structure,
Speer achieved a rare and brilliant excellence. But at a horrific cost.
It might be said that
Speer exemplifies what happens when a technical person becomes too absorbed in
his work. Speer claimed at his trial that he was simply doing what nearly any
other architect would have done; he was too busy “studying far into the night”
to even discuss the political world exploding all around him, too lacking in
the ability to think discriminately and critically, and so he found himself
“unable to deal with the arguments” of his cohorts, and instead just went
along. Perhaps it is the inherent nature of the technical disciplines that
brings their practitioners to view the world with a practical eye, to possess a
preoccupation with efficiency and order—even to the point of ignoring the
humane values of dignity and justice. These are characteristics that will
surely sound familiar, to some extent, to those who have worked with engineers,
even if in far less sinister contexts.
The difficulty with this is that few of us are like Speer:
we are not engineers working on great projects. We are ordinary people working
on ordinary things. The danger here is to assume our smallness automatically
shields us from hard choices, or that our hard choices do not matter so much
because they are small. As Francis Schaeffer was fond of saying, in God’s
economy there are no small people and no small places. The children of God are
to pursue their callings, their work, their vocation with excellence—and that
cannot be accomplished unless our pursuit is shaped by a growing discernment
that brings all of our life consciously under the Lordship of Christ.
Source: “Evil’s Architect,” on The Dish (25 Nov 2012 08:07
AM)
Yesterday Margie, Anita and I drove from Toad Hall to the
historic Hamm Building, built in 1915 in St Paul. On the first floor is the
lovely Meritage restaurant, with sidewalk seating when the weather is nice,
which it almost is now even though it is too early in the spring for that sort
of thing here in Minnesota. On the corner is Heimie’s Haberdashery, where the
window display always makes me want to go in but I’m never there during store
hours. On the third floor is a lovely music hall where we heard the Parker Quartet in concert. After the concert we walked down St Peter Street to Ruam Mit Thai, a small intimate restaurant where we ate and talked about the music
we had just enjoyed.
The concert began with Mozart’s (1756-1791) String Quartet #23 in F Major, K. 590.
It was played with the passion I’ve always associated with Mozart, and the
second movement ended with a single high note on the violin that was so
exquisite it made my throat ache.
The second piece, played before an intermission was more
modern, Henri Dutilleux’s (1916- ) Ainsi
la nuit, composed in 1976. There were no program notes, so one of the
members of the Quartet introduced the piece, which was helpful. In seven
movements, the piece is written to evoke the mysterious and elusive,
threatening and promising sounds of the night. It begins and ends with
fragments, with bits of melody appearing elsewhere in the movements so that we
seem to remember yet cannot know for certain. Margie and I have been opening
the window in our bedroom at night, since nighttime temps have only been going
down into the 40s, and the piece was like a discordant jumble of sounds I hear
when something outside awakens me, the sound merging with left over memories of
sounds from a dream that I can’t be sure are real. Plucked strings sounded like
drops of water falling off our neighbor’s roof when it rains, landing on the
ground, a bit of sidewalk, and the metal frame of his AC compressor. And then
sections were like the early morning awakening of birds that we wake to each
day, robins, cardinals, mourning doves, and the cacophonous chirping of English
sparrows. Margie read to us the notes she had quickly scrawled while listening,
the phrases marking her impressions becoming almost a poem:
A child wakes, a child
cries. Rats flee into holes. A cat climbs a tree. Fog rises from a pond.
Fingers turn a lock. A gas value turns on. Birds wake in a nest. Fumes drift up
a stairs. A creature scratches at the door. A shade falls. A shade rolls up. A
faucet drips. Eyes open. Leaves fall off a tree. A mother tumbles down a
stairs. A door opens. A door closes. The wind dies. Insects hatch. The moon
darkens. Coins drop into a well.
After the intermission they played Schumann’s (1810-1856) String Quartet #3 in A Major, Op. 41, #3.
It was like restoring peace after the strange mystery of the night, a sweet
calm, as if the sun had arisen to bring light into the corners where shadows
had reigned during the darkness, a gentle reassurance that tulips would open in
the sunshine and coffee could be brewed to sip in the quiet of the new day. The
second movement swept us into the busyness we cannot escape, and then ended
with a simple resolution of harmony so delicate it seemed to place a blessing
on all that went before. I listened for that benediction to be repeated, but I
did not hear it, the tension of so much to hear, to do taking over so that the
grace had to be remembered if it was not to be forgotten in all that swept by.
So much loveliness, and yet our being there was possible
because we bought tickets of no-shows, at the last moment before the concert
began and I wondered who they were and why they hadn’t attended. How can the
grace of such beauty come to one and miss another?
OK, I need a new word.
Here's the definition: when one's inbox is so full that by the time an email is answered the sender has not only forgotten they ever sent it, they have moved on in their life enough as to be no longer interested in the topic.
Maybe I need more than one word.
One for that situation. Another for the email response that no longer connects with reality. Another for the sort of emailer I am.
One more thing: if I am the only person with this problem, kindly keep that information to yourself.
A new website has appeared that might be of interest for busy people who are hungry, don't want to eat out, but who don't have time to go grocery shopping.
myfridgefood.com allows you to simply log on, use a handy check-off list to note what is already in your refrigerator, and find recipes that use only those ingredients.
And if the recipe that results happens to be unhealthy? Well, it's your fridge.
A few thoughts on time, energy, busyness, and the fact we are finite, limited creatures who were made to live and work in 24 hour days, 7 day weeks, with one full day in each week set aside for rest. (God called this arrangement “good,” by the way.)
From bnet business network:
Dr Richard Swenson, a physician who does a lot of work on margin and burnout, is fond of reminding people of Lazlo’s Chinese Relativity Axiom: No matter how great your accomplishments or how tragic your defeats, approximately 1 billion Chinese don’t know and couldn’t care less.”
From lifevesting.com:
“Stress makes people stupid. Burnout reveals it to the world.”
Three suggestions about how to increase stress, reduce margin, and move towards burnout:
1.) Run on fumes for extended periods of time. Keep saying ‘yes’ to every request, demand, or suggestion that is hurled at you. Skip vacations and days off. Keep going with inadequate sleep. Over commit, believing that somehow, someday your boss and family with notice and reward you. Always be available to offer concern and help, but never place yourself in the position of accepting it.
2.) Continue to spend yourself in ways you aren’t talented or gifted. Keep doing extroverted things with your introverted personality, or vice versa. Neglect what you are passionate about in order to make a living. Never admit your limits or that you suck at some things—keep trying to improve.
3.) Eliminate all margin or gaps from your life. Have two phone numbers, text messaging and email, and keep on top of them all. Keep some sort of noise—TV, music, anything—in the background at all times. Always rush, and always arrive late. Put off everything until you absolutely have to do them.
If you decide to follow these three suggestions, please do the rest of us a favor and pin a note on your shirt where to send the body.