The modern view of engineers...
What does it mean to be an engineer today? Engineers without a shadow of a doubt, are the single most important group of people in society today. Without legions of engineers quietly working away behind the scenes, you would have literally none of the things you can see right now. That glass of water? Engineers are managing the water supply that brought it to you, built the taps that you poured it out of and the glass you caught it in. That book? Engineers provided the paper it was printed onto, the printing press it was produced with and the shelf it’s now stored on. The development of a society is better measured, rather than by any cultural measure, by the level of technological advancement it has achieved. Without good engineering, great thinkers throughout history would not have had the time they needed to sit down and ponder those great ideas if they still had to hunt and forage for their food. It was the advancement of technology that for the first time in evolutionary history, gave a species time that did not need to be spent merely surviving , but could be used to develop other areas of the human mind.
You could therefore be forgiven for thinking that engineers are some of the most respected figures of modern society… Sadly you would be mistaken. The modern engineer is too often seen as a figure of fun to the rest of the world – mocked for being obsessed with the minute details of seemingly trivial items. This says a lot about the ‘civilised’ world where the most productive and hardworking are mocked and trivial celebrities are obsessed over.
The only groups to really see the value of engineers are those, who through no coincidence are the most powerful entities in the capitalist system. Graduate engineers are targeted and fought over by multinational corporations and investment banks. While those who profess to seek social change turn the other way. For an illustrative example, take a few minutes to look for engineering jobs offered by charities and non-profit organisations and compare to the numbers available for policy managers, advocacy officers and engagement campaigners. It is almost impossible to remain an engineer and a committed advocate of the left, which only goes to further entrench capital.
For the other radical left wing engineers out there: you are therfore required to carve out your own area. Undervalued and ignored by the majority of the left, and constantly courted by big business, there are no easy solutions for you. Start your own projects, develop your own ideas and stay in touch with those precious few engineers out there who feel the same way.
That’s a very good point and one I hadn’t considered before…get the thinking hard hat on.
I admire the fact that you make a clear case and present it pretty forthrightly. But I think it’s overstated.
With the main point I couldn’t agree more: engineers are very important now and they will be in any future society, but at the moment their only realistic option post-university is to reproduce the current system. There is no real opportunity to fuse being politically radical with being an engineer, but there should be. Fine.
The problem I have is with the exaggerated assertions: ‘Engineers without a shadow of a doubt, are the single most important group of people in society today.’ All one can respond to this is ‘well, it depends how you’re looking at it.’ If your view of society is a functional one – i.e. does stuff work properly? – then, yes, engineers are probably the most important group of people. But if your view of society is political, not to mention radical, then to state that a small number of highly-trained technical specialists, most of whom I imagine (though I don’t know) originate from relatively wealthy backgrounds, are the most important people in society is somewhat perverse. I thought we were here because what used to be called the ‘working-class’ was the most important group of people in society? That they, far more than engineers, are the people behind the scenes quietly suffering to make the world go round?
You also write ‘The development of a society is better measured, rather than by any cultural measure, by the level of technological advancement it has achieved.’ Again, it depends what you mean by ‘development’. If you mean ‘mechanical development’ then, yes, your tautology is somehow logical. But if by ‘development’ you mean that when something is ‘developed’ it’s good and when it’s ‘not developed’ it’s bad, then it’s not true that technological advancement is a useful measure. Again, politically, the measure of a good society is based on notions of equality, community, justice, creativity and so on. Of course, engineering would play a vital role in providing those things, but it’s not unthinkable that one could have a society that was very pleasant to live in – just, equitable, etc – but which didn’t have the latest iPod or flat-screen TV. On the other hand, it is also quite conceivable that a society with mind-blowing technological capacities could be a dictatorship: just look at China.
As for the modern engineer as a figure of fun to the rest of the world, that may be the feeling amongst engineers but for the rest of the world it’s not true. The world doesn’t mock engineers, it just isn’t aware of their existence.
Interesting points Dan, but I don’t think you’ve thought things through properly.
You have taken issue with the assertion that engineers are fundamentally the most important group of people in society, arguing instead that it is the workers who are most important. You seem to have forgotten or failed to appreciate that engineers are workers themselves. Engineers design, construct and operate things, so it would be interesting to hear your view on the differences between my friend Nath an engineer who I’ve never seen without a thick coating of oil and ash, and a ‘worker’.
You gloss over the function of society, as though it is just one facet that is in your opinion not of great importance. Perhaps it would be worth taking some time to think about what life would be like within a society that did not function. A society without clean water, food or shelter. Without electricity, sewerage, transportation or communication. Can you realistically think of a society that could do without those things and remain a ‘good’ society to live in? To look at it from another angle, if every day you had to hunt and forage for your own food, find wood to burn for warmth and walk a 8 mile round trip to get water from the nearest stream, how much time for reading and ideas would you have. I think it would be reasonable to say that it is precisely because you have so many things to make your life easier, that you have reached the level of knowledge you now have. Further than that, would any great thinkers have had the time to contribute to human development if it was not for the fact that people designed and built wells and houses and ploughed fields, to allow others the time to dedicate to other cultural activities? You are correct that there are many other measures to judge a good society, but those others would not be possible without technological development.
Yes, you are correct that technological development, does not necessarily provide a good society, hower it would be impossible to create a good society without it.
Also – forgot to say that most of the engineers I know have come to the profession from fairly deprived backgrounds. The power industry is full of engineers who grew up in the 70′s/80′s in towns such as rotherham, doncaster, barnsley and bolton. Wealthy backrgounds is something I wholeheartedly reject.
In my opinion, the most important point in your post is that engineers’ creativity isn’t used in a healthy way. We don’t need new I-pods, faster cars etc. (ecologically worthwile, yes) that’s just needless invention. The inventions you mentioned (water etc.) were necessary, but which inventions are really necessary today? I don’t like the fact of constantly making peoples’ lives easier (except some medical inventions etc.). Take a simple example: Do we need a kitchen machine to knead the dough for our bread? Isn’t the time of preparing food an expedient time to spend? I’m not against progress, but against needless progress.
Does there exist a sort of independent society for leftist engineers?
I agree to an extent… However most of the inventions that we consider to be integral to our lives were not things that we needed when they were first produced. I think we need to be very careful if we start dictating things as being necessary or superfluous.
What we’re talking about is the balance between ‘needs’ and ‘wants’. I would not want to stop engineers working on cutting edge technology that people want, and that I personally see as an artform in itself. However, it is absolutely wrong that so many engineers find themselves building fast cars and Ipods for the welathy when there are so many people without access to food, water or shelter.
Oh, and as far as I’m aware, there are no left wing socities for engineers and almost no routes into international development specifically for engineers. There are a few things in place whilst at university (engineering without borders for example), but it’s a cold and lonely world once graduated.
Joe, I don’t think you’ve paid any attention to what I actually wrote. I think you’ve responded to what you assumed I would reply. To avoid pointless reiterations, I’ll just cut and paste the bits of my comment you didn’t read:
‘With the main point I couldn’t agree more: engineers are very important now and they will be in any future society’
‘politically, the measure of a good society is based on notions of equality, community, justice, creativity and so on. Of course, engineering would play a vital role in providing those things’
These two quotations foresee and rebut the following of your points:
‘Perhaps it would be worth taking some time to think about what life would be like within a society that did not function. A society without clean water, food or shelter. Without electricity, sewerage, transportation or communication. Can you realistically think of a society that could do without those things and remain a ‘good’ society to live in?’
‘You are correct that there are many other measures to judge a good society, but those others would not be possible without technological development.’
‘you are correct that technological development, does not necessarily provide a good society, hower it would be impossible to create a good society without it.’
It should by now be obvious that I already agreed with these points. I think it’d be a pretty bizarre approach which didn’t.
Which leaves: the engineers as workers and the importance of functionality. I chose the ‘working-class’ as an alternative because I wanted to avoid the playground game of picking another sector of society who might count as ‘the most important’. For example, it wouldn’t surprise me if a teacher replied ‘Yeah, but who educates the engineers? You couldn’t have engineers if you didn’t have teachers.’ Or a doctor could respond, ‘Yeah, but what good is engineering if you don’t live long enough to do it and to reap the rewards?’ And so on ad infinitum. (To all of which you’d probably respond, ‘yes, but who built the school? And who made the scalpel?’ Basically, choose anyone or anything in any situation, and the omnipresent, god-like Engineer somehow got there before them!)
It’s true that engineering in the vague sense you define it – ‘Engineers design, construct and operate things’ – could apply to a lot of people. A sales assistant in a call centre ‘operates’ a computer and telephone system- does that make him an engineer? An African tribesman constructs a hut – does that make him an engineer? Dyson designs and constructs domestic appliances – is he an engineer in the same sense as the tribesman and the man in the call-centre? Almost anyone could be an engineer by this standard.
Though this doesn’t change the problem of defining what constitutes ‘working-class’ – which is why I said ‘what used to be referred to as “the working-class”’. In the equally vague sense in which I was using it there, it can effectively mean two things: firstly, those who sell their own labour-power in return for a wage, or, secondly, a more general sense of those who are downtrodden by the principal forces and structures of society. We’re almost all workers, but – by old-school standards at least (and here I openly admit that they need rethinking – as I’ve stressed in several blog posts) – we’re not all working-class. How much of a ‘thick coating of oil and ash’ one sports on a daily basis is perhaps not the most suggestive alternative to this problem.
Now, functionality. I think it’s important. Obviously. What I was challenging was your argument that functionality is the best and only standard to employ when judging a society (which is what your initial post argues, but which you tone down for your reply). Because it’s not. It’s important and plays a role in other, more beneficial, ways of judging societies, but by itself is politically useless.
A further two points that might help to clarify and problematise simultaneously. From the way you describe it, the only reason we ever escaped the daily toil of the hunter-gatherers is that suddenly an engineer appeared amongst them. I don’t dispute your basic argument – if we didn’t have machines and certain mechanical systems to do lots of things for us, we’d have to work a lot more and think a lot less. But to project back the concept of ‘engineer’ is to perform an argumentative sleight of hand. ‘Engineer’, when it arrived in the English language in the 15th century, meant simply ‘one who contrives, designs or invents’ – that included writers, poets, painters (all of whom had totally different statuses and functions than today) as well as what we would now call more ‘practical’ workers. It then became associated with builders of military machinery. Finally, from the late 17th-century on, but especially in the late 18th century, it acquired something like the meaning it seems to hold today (designing and constructing of works of public utility, such as bridges, roads, canals, railways, harbours, drainage works, gas and water works, etc. OR contriver or maker of ‘engines’). So to describe any old handy-man since the dawn of time as an ‘engineer’ is misleading.
Secondly, it might be worth pointing to an alternative history of the engineer. I’m sure we all accept the positive contributions, but what about the negative ones? Arms, bombs, gas chambers, highly dangerous factory machinery (I’m thinking early mills etc), and so on.
This is why no one sector of society is ever good or bad in and of itself: to assess the contributions of a sector one must think it through in terms of a broader historical narrative. And this is where the political sphere becomes important.
I think the point that Joe is trying to make is that actual solutions to the worlds current problems are most likely going to come from engineers (21st century usage, not 15th). Therefore the left would do well to engage with them a bit more.
I think the point you make Dan about other types of professions also being able to lay claim to ‘most important’ status is fair enough, but Joe’s point doesn’t deserve to be completely rebutted because I think there is a fair amount of truth in it.
If people stop studying philosophy the world will keep on turning. If people stop training to be engineers then pretty much everything will eventually grind to a halt.
I’m studying computing at the moment, and its pretty practical and vocational. I’m basically learning how to make stuff. However I bow to the importance of engineers, partly because without electricity I wouldn’t be able to do what I do, but mainly because computing wouldn’t be high on my list of priorities if I had to work out where I was going to get my water from, and where I was going to poo.
I don’t know how many more ways it’s possible to say ‘I think engineering is very important and will be for all future societies’. I feel a bit like how I imagine someone with a disfigured face must feel: no matter what you say, it doesn’t matter because the only thing people remember you for is your disfigurement. Here, people associate me with literature, philosophy and theory and therefore no matter what I say contrary to the stereotypes associated with those domains, my utterances get translated into: “Literature and philosophy are better than everything! We don’t need clean water or toilets – just books! Glorious, glorious books!” The fact that I’ve spent my entire academic life arguing against people who think precisely like that – in literature and philosophy departments in three separate countries – doesn’t seem to count for much!
I didn’t even make a point about other professions – I said it was a stupid game in the first place. And I haven’t rebutted all of his points! I agree with them all except the obsession with functionality and the over-glorification of one group of people. So if we disagree on anything, it’s that. And I quite accept why you would disagree with me.
Give it a rest Hartley, we all know that’s what you’re really thinking
Dan, your last comment has simultaneously disappointed and (in a way) delighted me. It’s disappointed me, because whilst I am fully aware of the points you have made and have given considerable thought to them, you have failed to think things through as I asked you to in my last comment. On the other hand it has delighted me to an extent because you have managed to perfectly illustrate the point I was making in my original article: that the left marginalises engineering.
The statements you’ve copied and pasted in are unfortunately irrelevant because you have failed to comprehend what I’ve been trying to say. Let me provide you with 3 statements that I hope make it as clear as possible:
1. Without engineering, there would be no society
2. There is no measure of society more important than the existence of that society
3. Engineering is the most important measure of society because it is the only measure required to be in place for the existence of society
The problem I think you’re having is with statement 3. Now you’d be correct in saying there are all kinds of other measures that are fundamental to society, primarily language. However if you were to do a bit of research into the area you would discover that human development in areas such as language has been driven by development of technology (e.g. in the use of tools). Tool use in fact, predates the appearance of the human race. Modern social evolutionary theorists (including, amongst others, Marx and more specifically Engels who wrote a book on the subject) consider technological development to be the driving force between social evolution throughout history (e.g. in terms of both goods and means of production). All of which would tend to support my argument that Engineering is the most important measure of society.
The argument that you are continually putting forwards is that there is a more fundamental measure of society, such as its politics. This is a bit like saying “yes, breathing, a heart beat and neurone function are very important things about being human, but but not as important as the ideas of that person”. It is a statement that is incorrect by several orders of magnitude, which is probably why it is rejected by just about every anthropologist and social theorist I’ve ever heard of.
Now on to your propensity for splitting hairs over the use of language. I use the term ‘engineer’ to refer to someone who practises engineering. Regarding the term ‘engineering’, I would be very much onside with the ECPD (American Engineering Council for Professional Development) definition: “The creative application of scientific principles to design or develop structures, machines, apparatus, or manufacturing processes, or works utilizing them singly or in combination; or to construct or operate the same with full cognizance of their design; or to forecast their behavior under specific operating conditions; all as respects an intended function, economics of operation and safety to life and property.” Personally, I could not give a toss how it was defined in the 15th century, as I am using the definition that is in place today. As Wikipedia will helpfully point out for you, the concept of Engineering has been present throughout human history, taking the pulley, the wheel and the lever as examples (and as previously mentioned, the vast majority of thinkers would be in agreement that inventions such as these have driven the development of society more than any other measure). So to take your examples, the tribesman and Dyson both utilise engineering to different degrees, the call centre worker does not. I probably failed to get across exactly what I meant by ‘operate’, which is a slightly more specialised term within engineering. In the environment of a call centre, the operator from an engineering perspective would be the engineer or technician who maintained and managed the phone and call handling system. The person who answered the phone would be called the user.
Moving on to the working class – I would like to point out here that I never brought up the working class, because I was not talking about class at all, I was speaking to an extent, about a profession, but primarily about a mode of thought and further than that a system that seeks to control and exploit that type of thought.
Obviously engineering cannot be a good or a bad thing, and I don’t think I ever said it was. I said it was the most important thing and therefore it has the greatest potential for positive or negative effects over any other sector of society (it would be hard to think of anything else that could bring about the destruction of all known life through nuclear holocaust as well as bring to an end enforced human labour). As you say, it is neither good or bad – the same as any sector; education could bring about a new Hitler or a new Marx; critical theory could bring about the reestablishment of socialism amongst workers or result in grad students splitting hairs over simple issues.
Sadly, it is the attitude of so many people like you, that abandons so many talented engineers to the clutches of large corporations (who became large corporations because they recognise the value of engineers). This has resulted in the majority of the people who would be of vital importance after any revolution becoming very firmly opposed to any changes in the status quo. This is the final point I was trying to communicate.
Here, I’ll take a leaf out of Rob’s (staringatfaraz’s) book and take some time to think these issues through. I’ll probably write a new post at some point to open the discussion to others.
Ok, so it has been established that the current system, capitalism, has appropriated engineering and engineers for its own means. Of course, capitalism has done this to everything, so the question of the left figuring out what to do with all the practical institutions that actually exist in the world is still a big one.
I think dan’s ‘measure of a society’ (be it dan’s idea or not) is simply to say that we cannot judge society by engineering per se but by the forces that occupy and mobilise engineering – ie, the ideological impulses of capitalism itself, of which engineering is but one facet. In this sense, engineering may be the biggest factor deciding the running of a particular system (be this the phone network of an office, a city’s upkeep or more generally the apparatus of society itself) but it is still ultimately used in manners symptomatic of that society. I think this is basically what everyone has already said.
That given, I feel its time to ask the pertinent question of what are we (and mainly you Joe as an engineer yourself) going to bloody well do about it? I am interested in the Anti-capitalist party here in France, and will do my best to see how they stand on the issue (which is most likely just asking for fairer pay for those engineers rather than trying to mobilise them to some revolutionary purpose).
Furthermore, following the conclusion reached two paragraphs ago – we might come to an accord in saying that not only do we need to rethink engineering and its uses, but we need to rethink the power structures and theoretical presuppositions that underpin any mobilization of engineering itself. The latter we’re trying to do in other areas of the blog, so we’re left with the former and the re-appearance of the question – what to do?
It seems that someone needs to set up a business/NGO etc that engages in such non-capitalist engineering activity. Any thoughts on the viability of this? etc etc…
would it be possible, for instance, to piggy-back on work done by other NGOs? I assume that most NGOs that maintain an amount of ‘on the ground’ work have a team of engineers employing current systems to the benefit of poor communities and those in need. Could these very charities/NGOs be convinced to set up seperate engineering sectors?
I guess the problem is less in very practical areas, but in technological issues, such as how nanotechnology can be utilised for more socialist means…but as you’ve pointed out Joe, this is an issue as it requires lots of cash. anyway, I’m off to bed (I thought of that last point whilst brushing my teeth)
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I just stumbled upon this blog via a random google and find the conversation fascinating but lacking any mention of Engineers Without Borders (www.ewb-international.org).
I’m not an engineer myself, so maybe this is an obvious referral, but the final paragraph of Mr. Morgan’s post seems to indicate that either he is unaware of the organization’s activities or he finds them ineffective (I hope it’s not the latter, because I’ve only read good things).