Engineering Education and Practice: Embracing a Catholic Vision

Preface. Elegant Design Is Not Enough: Embracing the Tangled "We" to Critique Technology

Preface Elegant Design Is Not Enough: Embracing the Tangled “we” to Critique Technology fATHER JOHN STAUDENMAIER, S.J. There is a theological premise that underlies my thinking as I have prepared this essay on engineering and Roman Catholicism. It’s a twosentence description of what is distinctive about the Roman Catholic theological tradition (when contrasted with other Christian theological traditions). It starts like this: The world is good more than it is suspect. That is to say, the Roman Catholic theological tradition understands god to be approaching the fabric of reality as good, that god does not first of all approach the human condition with distaste or suspicion. The second sentence states: Conversion is gradual and lifelong more than it is sudden. Catholics baptize babies who are not capable of a lifechanging decision (as in the expression “born again”). Catholic baptism , even for adults, is understood primarily as initiation into the believing community. The born-again adult baptism idea is rooted in a theological understanding that grace intervenes from somewhere outside your life and turns you around. Catholics do not deny such moments of dramatic conversion, but they tend to understand them in the context that conversion is gradual and lifelong. This implies that we should seek god primarily within the human fabric of our times, with the specific graces and temptations to which we citizens of this time and place are subject. god sends believers into the world but not from a starting point that is independent of the world in which the believers live. The starting point for being sent in the service of god’s redeeming grace is my own need for redeeming grace, a need for conversion that xiii lasts my whole life long. Thus, to conclude this introduction, I never approach my own human context as if I were not deeply embedded in it. How does this theological approach bear on engineering education? Let me begin by suggesting that engineering schools need to teach their students to understand technologies according to two different standards for technological success. The first is this: a design succeeds if it works, given its constraints. I think all engineers understand this. And a truly elegant design, blending the realism of a project’s constraints with engineering creativity, moves an engineer by its sheer beauty. The second meaning of success is less often talked about by engineers: a technology is successful when it gets embedded in its host society so deeply that if it were to suddenly disappear, society would be thrown into chaos. Consider two technologies, dental floss and paved roads. According to the first standard, dental floss is much more successful: it is elegantly designed for its purpose, economical to produce, effective , easy to dispose of. Roads are not—potholes, temperature-change damage, storm surge run-off flooding, and so on. But according to the second standard, dental floss is not very successful. If all the floss in the world disappeared, life would go on more or less as before. But if all the paved roads were to disappear, to be replaced with a network of rails for long distance travel and haulage and short-run roads subject to mud and dust or labor-intensive stone surfaces (the situation in the US ca. 1900) the United States could not function. Not today. Even if all the paved roads vanished, the layout of buildings, designed for car and truck traffic with large surrounding parking spaces, would be too far from rail heads to manage travel almost everywhere in the current US. You see the point. Take any deeply embedded technological system—water distribution, electric light and power, petrochemical fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides, the internet—and you find that, as it becomes more successful in the second sense, it also becomes so necessary a part of societal life that it ceases to look much like a technology in the first sense. Its design constraints become more or less invisible. It is just “the way things are.” One only pays attention to a successful technology when something happens that calls attention to its constraints (as in wheelchair access to public buildings in the last quarter century). xiv John Staudenmaier, S.J. Let’s look at the two kinds of technological success in terms of engineering education. At the University of Detroit Mercy, we require a course titled The Politics and Ethics of Engineering for all our incoming undergraduates. I always...