Architect of Death

Roger Forsgren looks at ethics for engineers, architects and technical professionals through the life of Albert Speer (h/t the Dish):

The technical professions occupy a unique place in modern society. Engineers and architects possess skills most others lack — skills that allow them to transform dreams of design into reality. Engineers can convert a dry, infertile valley into farmland by constructing a dam to provide irrigation; they have made man fly; and architects have constructed buildings that reach thousands of feet into the sky. But these same technical gifts alone, in the absence of a sense of morality and a capacity for critical thought and judgment, can also make reality of nightmares. Ferdinand Porsche, the engineer who designed the Volkswagen — an automobile that revolutionized personal travel for the common man — also designed a terrifying battle tank that helped kill millions of Russians on the Eastern Front. Wernher von Braun, who would later design the Saturn V rocket that brought American astronauts to the Moon, designed the V-2 rockets with which the Nazis terrorized Antwerp and London in the waning months of the Second World War.
Few men better exemplify this danger than Albert Speer, Adolf Hitler’s chief architect. From bold, looming edifices, to giant swastika banners, to the intimidating searchlights of the “cathedral of light” piercing the night sky around one of the Nazi Party rallies at Nuremberg, Speer’s designs became icons of Nazi megalomania. He shared with the dictator a vision of a redesigned Berlin that, when the Third Reich conquered the world, would be a lasting monument to its power for ages to come. “Your husband is going to erect buildings for me such as have not been created for four thousand years,” Hitler told Speer’s wife, reflecting both the scale of their shared ambition and the shared admiration and peculiar friendship that developed between the two men over the course of the war.
Hitler was so enthralled with Speer’s creativity and ability to carry out orders with efficiency and speed that he appointed Speer Minister of Armaments and War Production for the Third Reich during the height of World War II. In this powerful office, Speer was for the final three years of the war in charge of supplying the German military. He oversaw the management of a substantial portion of the German economy; he kept the factories running, and the troops supplied with tanks, bombs, planes, and ammunition, continuing to increase production even during the height of Allied bombing. These accomplishments earned him recognition, from both within the Third Reich and outside it.

He makes the case for engineers to be exposed to a broader, liberal arts education:

Today’s engineers need a more well-rounded education — one that stresses not only the analytical skills necessary to be a good engineer but also the liberal arts that are necessary to teach these good engineers the wisdom of history, to provide the foundation for young students to grow and mature as citizens with responsibilities beyond the immediate technical concerns of their work. And the liberal arts can train a young mind to think critically and discriminately about moral questions — aiding in the ability to determine what is right and what is wrong. Most engineers are gifted in math and science; this alone is not sufficient to make them responsible or moral human beings.
Peter Drucker, the business consultant who was instrumental in pushing the management team running General Motors to train its managers in the liberal arts, once wrote that “first-rate engineers ... tend to take pride in not knowing anything about people. Human beings, they believe, are much too disorderly for the good engineering mind.” Perhaps it is time that the engineering profession acknowledged this attitude, and rejected it. We engineers are better and more than the machines we create; we are responsible, not only to ourselves and to our employers, but to our fellow human beings. The humanities offer engineering students the lessons of life and history that are not found in our technical world.

The whole article is a valuable read.  I have to agree with many of the points.  I, myself, have said that I feel much more comfortable dealing with numbers than dealing with people.  That isn't a very successful plan for a complete life.  It is more of a cop-out which allows for me not to work very hard at fitting unpredictable and irrational humans into a life which would require effort on my part to be flexible with those players I don't naturally understand like integers. 

As I have gotten older, I've valued the few non-technical classes I was required to take at Notre Dame to fulfill their requirements for a liberal arts education.  I wish I had the time and opportunity to take more of them.  Now, I try to expose myself to a number of perspectives I never would have when I was younger.  In a way, I have heeded some of the warnings given in this article.  However, there is much more work to be done.