"Winter's Tale" and the Spirit of Engineering

 

Once in a great while I will review a non-fiction book in this space that I think is worth paying attention to if one is interested in engineering ethics.  Winter's Tale by Mark Helprin is a novel, published in 1983, and even now I can't say exactly why I think it should be more widely known among engineers and those interested in engineering.  But it should be.

 

Every profession has a spirit: a bundle of intuitive and largely emotional feelings that go along with the objective knowledge and actions that constitute the profession.  Among many other things, Winter's Tale captures the spirit of engineering better than any other fiction work I know.  And for that reason alone, it deserves praise.

 

The book is hard to describe.  There are some incontestable facts about it, so I'll start with those.  It is set mainly in New York City, with excursions to an imaginary upstate region called Lake of the Coheeries, and side trips to San Francisco.  It is not a realistic novel, in the sense that some characters in it live longer than normal lifespans, and various other meta-realistic things happen.  There are more characters in it than you'd find in a typical nineteenth-century Russian novel.  There is no single plot, but instead a complex tapestry that dashes back and forth in time like a squirrel crossing a street. 

 

But all these matters are secondary.  The novel's chief virtue is the creation of an atmosphere of hope and, not optimism, exactly—some truly terrible things happen to people in it—but a temperate yet powerful energy and drive shared by nearly all the characters, except for a few completely evil ones.  And even the evil ones are interesting. 

 

The fertility of Helprin's imagination is astounding, as he creates technical terms, flora and fauna, and other things that are, strictly speaking, imaginary yet somehow make sense within the story.  One of the many recurring elements in the book is the appearance of a "cloud wall" which seems to be a kind of matrix of creation and time travel.  Here is how Virginia, one of the principal characters, describes it to her son Martin:

 

           ". . . It swirls around the city in uneven cusps, sometimes dropping down like a tornado to spirit people away or deposit them there, sometimes opening white roads from the city, and sometimes resting out at sea while connections are made with other places.  It is a benevolent storm, a place of refuge, the neutral flow in which we float.  We wonder if there is anything beyond it, and we think that perhaps there is."

           "Why?" Martin asked from within the covers.

            "Because," said Virginia, "in those rare times when all things coalesce to serve beauty, symmetry, and justice, it becomes the color of gold—warm and smiling, as if God were reminded of the perfection and complexity of what He had long ago set to spinning, and long ago forgotten."

 

The whole novel is like that.

 

Although there is no preaching, no doctrine expounded, and very few explicitly religious characters such as ordained ministers, a thread of holiness, or at least awareness of life beyond this one, runs throughout the book.  This is probably why I learned about it from a recommendation by the Catholic philosopher Peter Kreeft, who mentioned it in Doors in the Walls of the World.

 

The reason engineers might benefit from reading it is that machines and other engineered structures—steam engines, cranes, bridges, locomotives—and those who design, build, and tend them, are portrayed in a way that is both appealing and transcendent.  At this moment I feel a frustration stemming from my inability to express what is so attractive about this book. 

 

You may learn something from the fact that the reviews of it I could find fell into two camps.  One camp loved it and wished it would go on forever.  The other camp, of which I turned out to be a member, said that after a while they found the book annoying, and almost didn't finish it.  I think one reason for the latter reaction is that structurally, it is all trees and very little forest.

 

The very fertility of Helprin's imagination leads him to introduce novel and fascinating creations, incidents, and characters every page or two, and the result is a loss of coherence in the overall story and sequence of events.  A chart of every character and incident with lines drawn among them would look like the wiring diagram of a Boeing 747. 

 

But every time I said to myself that I was going to stop reading it, I picked it up again, and finally chose one free day to finish the thing, all the time hoping that it would get to the point.  There is no crashing finale in which everything is tied up neatly with a bow.  There is, however, a climax of sorts, and toward the end events occur which have parallels in the New Testament.  Farther than that I shouldn't go, for fear of spoiling the ending for anyone who wants to read it. 

 

The only other novel I can think of that bears even a faint resemblance to Winter's Tale is G. K. Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday.  It is also a fantasy in the sense that unrealistic things happen, and it features characters who are what Kreeft calls archetypes, embodied representations of ideas.  Not everyone likes or can even make sense of Chesterton's novel, and the same will undoubtedly be true of Winter's Tale.

 

For a fantasy, Helprin's book is rather earthy in spots, and for that reason I wouldn't recommend it for children.  But the earthiness is not gratuitous, and rounds out the realism of his character portrayals.  Many of the main actors behave courageously and even nobly, and would be good subjects for the exemplary mode of engineering ethics, in which one describes how engineering went right in a particular case with ethical implications. 

 

If you pick up the book, you will know in the first few pages whether you can stand to read the rest.  If you persist till the end, you will have experienced a world unlike our own in some ways, but very like what it could be if we heeded, in Lincoln's phrase, the better angels of our nature. 

 

Sources:  Winter's Tale was published in 1983 by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.  Peter Kreeft's Doors in the Walls of the World was published in 2018 by Ignatius Press.

Two Logics and Engineering Ethics

 

Though most of us never give a second thought to philosophers, we live in cultures which have underlying philosophical assumptions that are rarely examined.  Just as some things are hard to say in certain languages, some thoughts are hard to think in certain philosophies, including certain kinds of thoughts about ethics and morality.

 

Logic can be considered as a sort of language of philosophical thought.  It turns out that over the past century or two, there has been a revolution in the type of logic that has been taught and accepted by most philosophers, and as a result this revolution has insinuated itself through most Western cultures.  But there are a few philosophers who think this almost unnoticed shift has had profound effects that almost nobody understands.  And I'd like to take the rest of this space to explain why.

 

You might think that logic is just logic, but if you look a little deeper you will find that philosophers have come up with basically two different kinds of logic.  Historically, the first philosopher to take a disciplined academic look at logic was Aristotle, who lived from about 384 B. C. to 322 B. C.  His book on logic sets out various ways to argue from premises (things you believe or know are true) to conclusions, which are things that must be true if the premises are true.  One of these ways is the syllogism:  "All men are mortal; Socrates is a man;  therefore, Socrates is mortal."  The first two phrases are the major and minor premise, respectively, and the third phrase is the conclusion, which must be true if the premises are true.

 

Philosopher Henry Veatch calls this classic Aristotelian kind of logic "what-logic," because it is based on an intuitive, common-sense notion of what things are.  Aristotle believed that people could look at things and determine what they were essentially, at least to some degree.  Most people can tell apples from oranges, for example, and Aristotle would say that's because the essential makeup of an apple is different from the essential makeup of an orange. 

 

Aristotelian logic reigned until philosophers of the Enlightenment, such as David Hume (1711-1776) and Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) began to question things that up to then were thought to be obviously true.  The details are complicated, but basically, they began to say things like, "When you see an apple, the only thing you can be sure of isn't the apple itself—it's the idea of an apple in your mind."  Grossly oversimplified, Hume and Kant and their followers began to treat human thought and language as the only things we could be sure of, and tried to work outwards from thoughts to things in the outside world.  They believed that we could never really know what a thing is, and there was no point in trying.

 

In the centuries since then, among most philosophers Aristotelian what-logic has been replaced by what Veatch calls "relating-logic."  Another name for it is symbolic logic.  Electrical engineers have encountered it in the form of Boolean algebra, and it is embodied in all digital computers in the form of logic gates that perform logical functions like AND and OR. 

 

While symbolic logic has proved to be extraordinarily useful—computers excel at it, naturally, and philosopher Peter Kreeft compares the change from what-logic to relating-logic to the shift from Roman to Arabic numerals—it has some basic shortcomings.  The most serious is this:  it can never tell you what a thing is; it can only say how things relate to each other.  Here is Veatch on this defect:  "To take the case merely of human actions . . . since there is no such thing as a human nature that can be appealed to in a relating-logic, there is no way in which one can determine what man's function is or what sort of activity a characteristically human life must consist in."  For the purposes of ethical reasoning, these are major problems.  If you can't answer the question, "What is human nature?" you can't very well say this aspect of human nature or this action is better than that one. 

 

Kreeft, who has taught philosophy at Boston College for four decades, says that symbolic or relating-logic has taken over so thoroughly that it is beginning to disable his students from understanding aspects of reasoning that depend on what-logic:  analogies, for example.  After Kreeft had published a criticism of certain aspects of computers, a well-known expert phoned him and predicted that as society began to think more exclusively in the relating-logic computer mode, ordinary intuitive understanding would atrophy and the SAT (Scholastic Achievement Tests, formerly used for college admissions) would drop its section on analogies as fewer people could figure them out.  This actually happened a few years later.  Kreeft dusted off some old logic exams from 1962 and gave them to his current 21st-century students, and they failed spectacularly, especially when it came to analogies.  For example, in the sentence, "He pointed with his right hand to the hands of a clock," the word "hands" is used analogically.  But only three out of 75 students understood that.

 

Kreeft claims that losing the ability to do what-logic is tragic, and may be either a result or a cause (or both) of everything from the rise of utilitarian ethics ("the greatest good for the greatest number") which is a favorite of engineers, to the sexual revolution, which does not recognize anything like the natural form or "nature" of human sexuality. 

 

While relating-logic is great for making things work, it fails to tell us what anything really is.  And to the extent that modern thought and discourse increasingly exclude types of reasoning based on what-logic, we seem to be dumbing ourselves down to act more like computers and less like human beings.  In The Magician's Nephew, C. S. Lewis said, "Now the trouble about trying to make yourself stupider than you really are is that you very often succeed."  In leaving Aristotelian logic behind, the Western world may be doing exactly that.

 

Sources:  Peter Kreeft's article  "The Social, Moral, and Sexual Effects of Symbolic Logic" in his How to Destroy Western Civilization and Other Ideas From the Cultural Abyss (San Francisco:  Ignatius Press, 2021) contains a reference to Henry B. Veatch's Two Logics (Evanston, IL:  Northwestern University Press, 1969) and explains this situation a lot better than I did.

Should Engineers Think Like Computers?

Peter Kreeft is a philosopher at Boston College and author of a textbook on Socratic logic.  So far, so dull, you may think.  I have heard Prof. Kreeft speak on numerous occasions, and "dull" does not apply either to his speaking or his writing.  In the introductory section of his text, he says something that I think engineers need to hear.  It's about ways of thinking and knowing, and the two different competing kinds of logic that are taught today.

If you take a course on logic in college these days, it is most likely going to be what is called "symbolic logic" or "formal logic."  In fact, most electrical engineering undergrads get a sample of this kind of logic when they take digital electronics.  It turns out that digital computers use things called logic gates.  One of the simplest logic gates, called an AND gate, can have two inputs and one output.  As you may know, the numbers in digital computers are in binary form, meaning they have the value of either 1 or 0.  Typically, 1 is represented by a high voltage and 0 by a low voltage.  An AND gate looks at its two inputs, and the only time its output is a high voltage is when both one input AND the other input are high.  Otherwise, its output is low.

           

If you understood that, you have a firm grasp of an element of what is called Boolean algebra, named after the nineteenth-century logician George Boole, who formalized this type of thinking in an attempt to bring the discipline and clarity of mathematics to logical thinking.  Boole's project was taken up by others, and now most philosophers think, do, and teach highly mathematical symbolic logic when they do any kind of logic at all.

But there's a problem with symbolic logic, a problem it shares with computers, whose structure is nothing more than a physical embodiment of symbolic logic.  The old expression "garbage in, garbage out" applies to symbolic logic as well as it does to computers.  Symbolic logic can do marvelously complicated things with its inputs, but it doesn't "know" what the inputs are any more than a copy machine knows Shakespeare after you've copied a page of King Lear with it.  Symbolic logic says nothing about the truth or reality of what you give it.  To understand what things really are, you have to get outside the pristine mathematical structure of symbolic logic and embrace what Prof. Kreeft calls Socratic logic.

It could just as well be called Aristotelian logic or classical logic.  You can get a sense of what gets lost if you think symbolic logic is the only way to think, by reading what Prof. Kreeft says about reason and logic: 

"The very nature of reason itself is understood differently by the new symbolic logic than it was by the traditional Aristotelian logic.  'Reason' used to mean essentially    

'all that distinguishes man from the beasts,' including intuition, understanding, wisdom,    moral conscience, and aesthetic appreciation, as well as calculation.  'Reason' now usually means only the last of these powers." (Socratic Logic, edition 3.1, p. 22)

He goes on to say that as first philosophers and then people in general have accepted these definitions of logic and reason, it's become harder to understand some concepts that earlier ages knew almost without thinking.  Take one of the most basic questions that even five-year-olds can ask:  "What is it?"  That goes to the heart of the being of a thing:  what is a horse or a man essentially?  Not just what is it made of, but what is its true nature?  Symbolic logic doesn't ask such questions.  It is a logic of manipulation and process.  As Kreeft says, instead of trying to understand the fundamental essentials of things, we "think about how we feel about things, about how we can use them, how we see them behave, how they work, how we can change them, or how we can predict and control their behavior by technology."  That last phrase—predicting and controlling behavior by technology—is largely what engineers do. 

And it's a good thing to do, rightly applied, and symbolic logic is essential to the task, especially these days now that everything engineers do involves information technology.  But it is a great mistake to think that symbolic logic is all we need to make our way in the world, and we can safely ignore the questions of what a thing really is on our way to bending it to our technological will.

As Kreeft points out, animals have feelings, use their environment, and even make use of rudimentary tools in some cases.  But we do not share with animals the higher operations of the human mind, including the ability to see connections between apparently different things, and to achieve true understanding about universal concepts such as freedom or love.  No animal and no computer (sorry, all you artificial-intelligence folks) will be able to do that. 

Kreeft is concerned that we will give in to the ancient temptation to idolize the work of our hands:  symbolic logic and the computers it gave rise to.  But if we do so, we will lower ourselves to the level of the beasts, and neglect those powers of the mind recognized by classical logic as what makes the difference between humans on the one hand, and animals and computers on the other hand. 

The takeaway from all this is simply to remind us that scientific thinking in the sense of symbolic logic is not the only kind of thinking or knowing that there is.  Engineers of all people should recognize that they do their work in the context of human society, which is forever beyond the grasp of symbolic logic to analyze or comprehend.  Something more is required.  We can call that something classical logic, or wisdom, or even faith.  But to limit ourselves to the kind of logic that computers can do is to leave our humanity behind. 

Sources:  Peter Kreeft's Socratic Logic, edition 3.1 was published by St. Augustine's Press in 2010.