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)
Total 2009 profits earned by the U. S. Federal Reserve Bank:
$46.1 billion.
Of all years since its founding, which was most profitable
for the U. S. Federal Reserve Bank: 2009.
Average number of hours/day a U. S. child spends using some
sort of electronic device (including watching TV): 7.6.
[“Harper’s Index” in Harper’s
Magazine (April 2010, p. 13, 82)]
How many Americans are stressed about work according to the
American Psychological Association: 62%
How many working days are estimated lost each year in the U.
S. due to stress related absenteeism: 275 million.
In the U.S., how much is spent each year on stress related
health care: $22.8 billion.
[“Under Pressure” in Fast Company (April 2010, p. 112)]
When President Obama nominated Elena Kagan to the U. S. Supreme
Court, the National Archives were responsible to release all documents relating
to her work while in government service. Turns out she had received 50,000
pages of documents from the Domestic Policy Council (where she had been deputy
director) and 30,000 from the Counsel’s office (where she was associate
counsel). During this period she sent 11,000 pages of emails and received
68,000 pages. The estimated total comes to around 160,000 pages of documents.
This represents four years of government service.
[“Politico Playbook Daily Update” by Mike Allen (May 16,
2010)]
Before our friends, Peter and Dawn, returned to Australia, we asked them for some movie recommendations. The first one they mentioned was Kenny, about a guy who runs a porta-potty (Australians call them portaloos) business named Splash Down. “A great comedy,” they said, “real Australian humor,” and they started laughing just remembering the film.
Kenny takes his job seriously, and as he points out, if he didn’t the rest of us would be in deep, well, deep in the product he specialized in collecting and carting away. “I don’t know what all the fuss is about,” Kenny says, “it’s 80% water and we’ve got chemicals to take care of the remaining 20.” At festivals he puts in long hours, cleaning the toilets, fishing out rings that were mistakenly dropped, and dealing with plugged and overflowing facilities. “There’s another classic example,” Kenny says wearily, “of someone having a two inch arsehole and us having installed only one inch piping.”
Kenny is hardly a great film, but it succeeds by being funny and believable. Filmed as a mock documentary, Kenny introduces us to his work, his family, and to the grand convention of waste management, The International Pumper & Cleaner Expo in Nashville, TN—which Kenny affectionately refers to as “Poo HQ.”
I don’t remember when I’ve laughed so hard at a film, only to be surprised when the second half turns into a poignant story of broken human beings trying to make their way through a broken world amidst sadly broken relationships. Kenny is the story of a likable and decent worker who does a job well, only to be despised by the people whom he serves—if they bother to notice him at all. “I’d love to be able to say ‘I plumb toilets’ and have someone say, ‘Now that is something I’ve always wanted to do.’” G. K. Chesterton published a Father Brown mystery where, if I remember correctly, the murderer had initially escaped noticed because he was dressed a postman so nobody noticed him as he walked away from the crime down a busy street. I wonder how many other people remain invisible to me?
[Kenny is rated PG-13.]
