The profession of engineering, especially in America, is still young enough not to have become ridden with tradition and convention. It has developed rapidly along essentially pragmatic though perhaps narrow lines. Certainly it is not bound and circumscribed by precedent and convention like the legal profession, or even the medical profession. Above all, it derives its inspiration from powerful physical realities, and this constitutes its bulwark.
What the profession really lacks are two fundamentals, absolutely necessary for any group strategically located and desirous of leadership in society. These are: (1) an intellectual background based squarely upon a comprehensive study of the economic and political institutions of society, their history, growth, and function, together with a study of the larger aspects of human behaviour and rights; and, (2) the development of a facility for intelligent criticism, especially of engineering and economic enterprises. A wholesome intellectual background is necessary to interpret the new position and its prerogatives which the application of science has created for the engineer. A development of the critical faculty is desirable in order to enable him to detect the blandishments of cult, the temptations of formulas and systems expressed in indefinable abstractions, and the pitfalls of the status quo.
The responsibility for the American engineer’s function in society rests largely upon the schools which train him. Engineering education in America has done its task relatively well considered from the simple technical point of view. Of late, progressive engineering educators have stressed the necessity for paying more attention to the humanistic studies in the engineering curriculum. The beginning made in this respect is, however, entirely too meagre to warrant much hope that younger American engineers will soon acquire either that intellectual background or genuine critical faculty which will entitle them to a larger share of responsibility for the affairs of men.
The most hopeful sign in this direction is rather the fusion of the engineers into a large federation of societies, with service to the community, State, and Nation as their motto; a growing tendency, collectively, at least, to investigate the conduct of national industrial enterprises; and, finally, an attempt at a rapprochement, in the interest of society, between labour and the engineers. Ere long these developments will reflect themselves in the schools of engineering, and then, it is reasonable to expect, will the process of developing a truly worthy class of industrial leaders in this country really make its beginning. In America to-day no such leadership exists.
O. S. Beyer, Jr.
NERVES
Young as America is, she is nevertheless old enough to have known the time when there were no such things as nerves. Our earliest settlers and colonists, our proverbially hardy pioneers apparently managed to get along with a very modest repertory of diseases. They died, if not from malnutrition or exposure or from Indians, then from some old-fashioned, heaven-sent seizure or sudden pain, not to mention from “old age,” long a favourite diagnosis of a pious and not too inquisitive school of medicine even where the patient’s age had to be entered by the coroner as of forty or thereabouts. As for the various forms of nervousness which belong to our age of indulgence and luxury, they were unknown to those sturdier times, and would undoubtedly have put their unhappy victims under the quick suspicion of having had forbidden converse with the Devil.
If, nevertheless, we feel justified in assuming that this golden age of health and disease probably hid beneath its tinsel a good many of the nervous afflictions which had already made the Middle Ages so interesting, we must bear in mind that the pioneer neurotic of those days had at his command a number of disguises and evasions to which his fellow-sufferer of to-day can no longer have recourse. One of his favourite expedients for concealing his neurotic maladjustment was to take refuge in some form of religion or rather in some new variation of religious belief or practice, for it is, of course, not claimed here that religion itself can be exhaustively explained as a manifestation of nervous maladjustment. But the colonial period was an era when it was still good form, so to speak, for a neurosis to express itself in some religious peculiarity, and as this was a country without monasteries (which had proved to be such a haven for the neurotically afflicted during the Middle Ages), the neurotic was forced to exhibit his neo-religionism in the open. Often he blossomed forth in some new form of religious segregation, which allowed him to compensate for his social defect and often gave him positive advantages.
The neurotic legacy which he thus bequeathed to the nation can still be seen all around us to-day in the extraordinary multiplicity of religious variations, not to say eccentricities, which dot the theological heavens in America. For the neurotic as a religion founder—or better, inventor—quickly gathered similarly inclined adherents, formed a sect, and moved a little further West, so that the country was rather plentifully sown with strange creeds. He was thus freed from the criticism which would have overtaken him in a more settled society and his neurotic disguise remained undetected to a degree no longer possible to-day. For if nowadays we still occasionally encounter a brand-new and crassly individual religion all registered and patented like any temperance elixir, we usually discover that its prophet is either a defective or even an illiterate person who has distorted some biblical text in favour of a bizarre interpretation, or else a psychopathic individual who already has highly systematized ideas of the delusioned type. This class of neurotic has tended to disappear by somewhat the same process through which the more flamboyant type of hysteric such as flourished in the Middle Ages has gradually succumbed to progressive exposure—an analogy to which I refer with some diffidence in the face of one of the supreme ironies of the 20th century, namely, the canonization of Joan of Arc. But that lapse into the darkness of mediævalism is probably to be explained as a by-product of the war mind.
The other great loophole for the early American neurotic was purely geographical. He could always move on. In view of the tendency towards social avoidance so characteristic of the neurotic, this was of inestimable advantage. It is, of course, generally supposed that when the embryonic American trekked Westward it was either in response to some external pressure of political oppression or religious intolerance or to the glad, free call of wider horizons and more alluring opportunities, as was the case with the earliest colonists in their flight from Europe. In both cases, however, the assumption may be challenged as a sufficient explanation. For it is extremely probable that a good many of these pioneers were, like Mr. Cohan’s “Vagabond,” fugitives from their own thoughts quite as much as from the tyranny of others. They felt an urge within them that made a further abidance in their social environment intolerable. This geographical flight of the neurotic has always been the most natural and the most obvious, checked though it is to-day to a large extent by the disappearance of further virgin territory and the sophistication born of the knowledge wrought by a world-wide intercommunication which says that mankind is everywhere much the same, a truth which can again be translated into an internal realization that we cannot escape from ourselves.