Civil Commotion

There is not enough love and goodness in the world to allow us to give any of it away to imaginary beings.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Human, All Too Human, §129

Nietzsche was not only one of the most clear-headed thinkers of his time — till he went off his rocker — he also is one of the very few philosophers who can be read simply for the pleasure of the prose and the incisive observations.

It probably is worth remarking that every publisher in the universe has issued an edition of Nietzsche’s works, most of them relying on translations so old that they are in the public domain — and cheap to produce; some of them are good, and some are very bad. The Barnes and Noble editions are generally well-regarded and affordable.

The New York Times is making much of its verification that the Catholic Church has written protocols for dealing with priests who father children.

Now, the Vatican has confirmed, apparently for the first time, that its department overseeing the world’s priests has general guidelines for what to do when clerics break celibacy vows and father children.

“I can confirm that these guidelines exist,” the Vatican spokesman Alessandro Gisotti wrote in response to a query from The New York Times. “It is an internal document.”

The Catholic Church is the oldest continuously operating business on earth, and has been dealing with the problem — embarrassment, mainly — of priests’ illegitimate children for 1000-years. Why is it a surprise to anybody that the personnel manual addresses the matter?

Ho-hum.

Discussing “black collar crime” a while back, I drew a distinction between myself and some of the other bloggers who devote attention to the sexual abuse of children and fragile women in church.

On one important point, I depart from Bruce [Gerencser], the Wartburg ladies, Jeri Massi, and all the others who have done so much to drag this problem out to the light of day. I don’t believe that exposing the problem is going to lead to reforms that will end the problem, la-la-la. I believe, rather, that the problem inheres in the ontology of Christianity, that the problem is part and parcel of what Christianity is — a social machine that degrades people and then exploits them.

What do you know? It turns out that Gerencser and I are actually more closely aligned on this than I thought.

There’s this naïve notion floating around the Internet that if Evangelicals would just honestly deal with the current sex abuse scandal and make changes that protect children, all would be well within the Evangelical bubble. However, even if Evangelicals demonstrated through actions, and not words, that they really, really, really do care about sexual abuse and other sex crimes within their churches, the fact remains that their beliefs are still psychologically harmful and can, at times, lead to physical harm.   [ … ]   As long as Evangelicals believe the Bible is the inspired, inerrant, infallible Word of God, they will remain joined at the hip with all sorts of abhorrent anti-human, Bronze-age beliefs.

I regret that I misrepresented Gerencser’s thinking on this — and welcome the company.

I’ve remarked often through the years that virtually everything you can see from your desktop, every activity in which you participate, is touched by engineers. The computer and monitor on which you’re reading this, the desktop your keyboard rests on, the television that is on in the background, your shelf of reference books, your Mr. Coffee … it is all brought to you by engineers.

Hell, if you use birth control even your sex life is touched by the geeky characters who walk around with clipboards. If you don’t use birth control, the odds are pretty good that your child will be born in a hospital that is a showroom for engineering genius.¹

And behind the engineers are the standards people, the people who define exactly the meaning of measurements, how to conduct tests, the meaning of technical jargon.

This is why civil engineers are so annoyed when somebody speaks of a “cement sidewalk.” No. It’s a concrete sidewalk; cement is the component that holds it together.

Our modern existence depends on things we can take for granted. Cars run on gas from any gas station, the plugs for electrical devices fit into any socket, and smartphones connect to anything equipped with Bluetooth. All of these conveniences depend on technical standards, the silent and often forgotten foundations of technological societies.

The objects that surround us were designed to comply with standards. Consider the humble 8-by-16-inch concrete block, the specifications of which are defined in the Masonry Society’s “Building Code Requirements and Specification for Masonry Structures.”

This book distills centuries of knowledge about the size and thickness of blocks, seismic design requirements and the use of materials like concrete, glass and mortar.

Few people have any real understanding of what engineers do for a living, and to many engineers that’s a source of great pride; it means we do our job so well that society hums along and we are taken for granted.

But standards matter, and comprise the bedrock of the common language used by professional engineers. Try to imagine, if you can, a world in which the measurement 1-millimeter means one thing to an American engineer, and something different to a Chinese engineer.

What a nice surprise it was, then, that the New York Times saw fit to publish a piece about the importance of standards.

Standards have always struggled with an image problem. Critics worry that a standardized world is dull and mediocre, a nightmare of conformity and Kafkaesque bureaucracy. Yet the champions of standardization insist that standards create the foundations for a better world. Albert Whitney, who was the standards committee’s chairman from 1922 to 1924, argued that many accomplishments of civilization involved “the fixation of advances.” The committee’s motto in the 1920s declared: “Standardization is dynamic, not static; it means not to stand still, but to move forward together.”

In an age of breathless enthusiasm for the new and “disruptive,” it’s worth remembering the mundane agreements embodied in the things around us. It’s very ordinariness and settledness of standards that enable us to survive, and to move ahead.

Well said.

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¹   Just so’s you know, engineers don’t ask their friends if they’re hoping for a boy or girl. No. Engineers ask, “What sort of engineer are you hoping for? Mechanical? Civil? Electrical?”

You’re probably wondering, “Huh? Why would I expect God to be ashamed to call himself my God in the first place?” Because you’re no damn good, and your puny little mind, working at capacity, cannot conceive a god any more elevated than a cartoon character; because being associated with an ambulatory putrescence like yourself would embarrass Him if He had peers who could laugh and point at His ridiculous, ragtag followers.

Honestly, I marvel that clowns like John Piper make such a good living by degrading people.