Abstract
Social change is a difficult task. One of the barriers to change is the resilience of the professional corporations that have organized to solve problems. Habitually, after having been operating for some time, an organization (in our case the community of engineering companies) no longer pursues its original goal. The new real goal becomes to keep the organization existing, working and possibly growing. It means that the organization is pursuing something it has not been designed and established for. Because the organization mainly strives to outlive and grow, its goals and the means to pursue them shift from being merely technical to being substantially political. However, some new problems outside the traditional competence of the technician occur and need to be tackled. The technical corporations react in two ways: (a) to subdivide internally; (b) to turn to interdisciplinary collaborations. This argument leads to a crucial question raised in this essay: should we move from a traffic policy occupied by technicians to a political environmentalism which opens to a discussion on urban settlements? The problem includes ethical considerations about both the single engineers’ activity and their corporation policy. Environmentalists are responsible for not questioning the corporatist approach with enough conviction. But the ethical issue also concerns the personal goals of the engineers (and technicians in general) who act without taking into consideration the general consequences of their action and disregard the possible predominant negative side-effects of the technologies they employ.
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Notes
- 1.
Zygmunt Baumann (1993), describing tourist behavior in cities, highlighted their lack of belonging to any place. Also nomadic suburbanites, driving around all day through looking for food and services, do not recognize any place as their own.
- 2.
- 3.
Italics in the original.
- 4.
- 5.
Large, and even mid-size, engineering firms typically invest a lot of time and money in lobbying.
- 6.
See Myrdal’s introducing quotation of this chapter (1975). A propos, it is interesting to note how Paul Feyerabend reports that Thomas Kuhn, in writing his “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions”, spent a lot of time interviewing scientists, which is certainly an uncommon research method in philosophy. The rationale in Kuhn’s approach is clearly that even scientists choose their researches on the basis of considerations that often have little to do with a genuine lust for truth or knowledge.
- 7.
See, e.g., Walter Rostow, quoted in Chap. 2.
- 8.
The juxtaposition of the word “department” with the word “university” might appear almost ironic and an oxymoron. Defining the academy as a group of “Departments” is etymologically opposed to the “university of knowledge,” which by its nature would be difficult to compartmentalize. We must take seriously the condition in which the role of the Departments and of the specialist sectors grew to the detriment of the Colleges and of the University in its entirety. I will return to this later when arguing about education of traffic planners.
- 9.
“Great authors, scientists and philosophers since the seventeenth century … saw things never seen before, thought thoughts never thought before …” (Arendt 1998, chapter 6).
- 10.
“The academic world is in love with disciplines, departments, fields, programs, and schools. To some extent this is beneficial. Serious thought requires distinctions. Analytic methods rely on dividing and conquering the material under examination. Disciplines provide resources for these activities through their canons, methodologies, and vocabularies. They shape the questions that are asked, and help to define what counts as answers. Even when this love affair is not good it is often relatively harmless. Identifying with a discipline or department is like belonging to a guild or a union, or cheering for the home team. Some people like uniforms more than other people, but this is not a matter of great concern.
However, to some extent, this love of academic order is pernicious. It can be more like sophisticated (but still vicious) forms of tribalism than conformity to sensible epistemological canons. The love of institutional distinctions can distract or deflect us from the most urgent problems we face. The world’s problems do not respect the order of battle imposed by university administrations and policed by college professors, graduate students, and professional organizations. They come to us in their own terms. If we want to make progress on at least some problems, we must follow where they lead, rather than attempting to impose on them our favored categories of thought.” (Jamieson 2010)
- 11.
It goes without saying that this aphorism reports a very conservative and authoritarian bias. In fact, it does not presume any possible change, modification of social roles, nor class mobility.
- 12.
Fritjof Capra (2007) has recently proposed a biography of Leonardo da Vinci and an analysis of his unspoken scientific method. Capra claims that, if Leonardo’s approach to scientific procedure had prevailed over Galileo’s and Descartes’ Method, we would have now a different science. It is interesting to note that the Latin word “methodus”, of Greek origin, is composed by “meta” (beyond, above) and “odòs” (path) and thus it refers to something that connects all parts of knowledge. We need a method to unify disjointed notions. Paradoxically, Descartes’ Method has not produced a coordinated knowledge, but rather its opposite. In fact, all pieces of knowledge became coherent thanks to the method which was able to unify them. The unity was only theoretical, though. As soon as the theory was questioned because it was becoming ineffective to solve new problems, the unity was necessarily transformed into an ideology and into a dominating scientific discourse. My philosopher friend Alessandro Tessari pointed out to me that, the word and the notion of “method” being philosophically very sophisticated, they were rarely used by the Romans (except occasionally by Vitruvius and by a fourth century A.D. poet, Claudianus, who referred to something very practical) who had no interest in – and somehow despised – theoretical thinking. The word and the concept of method regained the limelight with Descartes’ “Discours de la méthode”. Romans preferred to use the word “ars” akin to the idea of skills, craftsmanship. Nonetheless, Tessari claims that Descartes drew ideas and concepts from the Catalan thirteenth century philosopher Ramon Llull and by his followers, as it is proved in his private and public correspondence. Llull anticipated Descartes’ attempt to provide a method for universal knowledge, except that his attempt was identified with Latin names such as “ars”, “clavis” or “mathesis universalis” and so it generated some confusion. In fact, Llull studied Kabala and searched for the “araba phoenix”, i.e. the cornerstone of all knowledge.
- 13.
I mainly refer to continental Europe and particularly to Italy and France. In the US there is a clearer separation between architects and planners, the latter being more open to social approaches than to physical planning.
- 14.
I owe this idea to the architect Paolo Soleri with whom I recently had a conversation in Arcosanti, Arizona. Arcosanti is a utopian village/community on the road from Phoenix to Flagstaff. The experiment is very interesting and successful. However, the participants do not consider any possible political promotion of it.
- 15.
A book is like a key. Keys can open doors in as much as books should open minds. However, keys are used also to close doors in as much as books may imprison minds. We are inclined to think that an open mind is good and to imprison the mind in fixed schemes and biases is something to be avoided. It is not so all the times. Most intellectuals cannot resist the appeal to know, to reinvent, to elaborate new ideas. Pioneers of innovative thinking are generally more loved and admired – although usually less powerful – than the gray catalogers focused on details and rigor. But new ideas and alternative interpretations, no matter how fascinating, are often vague and flawed. Nonetheless, gray catalogers – the ones who codify, make clear and procrastinate the use of shared concepts, in which they lock the lazier thinkers and who are drawn to technique rather than to philosophy – operate in the spirit of the ethics of conservation and short term efficiency. Thus, books, the keys of knowledge, are necessary either to open the minds or to lock them by binding students and technicians to a few certainties that provide psychological self-confidence. Assumed that books work both to open and to lock, I dare to claim that for some decades we have given too much importance and prestige to catalogers than to innovators. Maybe, it has always been like this: in order to assert new ideas – if they are really new and keen to change the world – it is not enough to compare them with the old ones: one ought to fight in order to be listened to and to win the right to promote them. I am not claiming that all new ideas are good per se and new thinking is always pure. I just maintain that it is necessary nowadays as time has come to unhinge old paradigms.
- 16.
According to the classification I proposed in chapter two, I should better refer to organizations dealing with environmental issues, having defined environmentalism as something more specific.
- 17.
See again chapter two about the “sustainable development” fraud and the problem of the missing environmentalist ideology.
- 18.
Or maybe fortunately!
- 19.
Besides the basic readings of Kuhn and Feyerabend that have inspired the general approach of my essay, I drew more than an inspiration also from Bruno Latour’s more recent essays (2004, 2005) and in his classic Science in Action (1987). Precisely, when I propose how to plan urban traffic, the reader will find some echo of Latour’s “practical metaphysics” and of his claim for the necessity to consider the plurality of worlds. In the introduction to my essay on “Città flessibili” (Flexible Cities) (2009) I extensively argue on Utopias and claim that a contemporary utopia should be the transformation of Utopia from an island into a continent so that a major issue becomes the tolerance and the connections among different utopias. The essay will soon be available in English. Hopefully.
- 20.
To explain how people can avoid responsibility let me report the famous story by Oxford bioethicist Jonathan Glover: “Suppose a village that contains 100 unharmed tribesmen eating their lunch. 100 hungry armed bandits descend on the village and each bandit at gun-point takes one tribesman’s lunch and eats it. The bandits then go off, each one having done a discriminable amount of harm to a single tribesman. Next week, the bandits are tempted to do the same thing again, but they are troubled by new-found doubts about the morality of such a raid. Their doubts are put to rest by one of their number … They then raid the village, tie up the tribesmen, and look at their lunches. As expected, each bowl of food contains 100 baked beans … Instead of each bandit eating a single plateful as last week, each takes one bean from each plate. They leave after eating all the beans, pleased to have done no harm, as each has done no more than a sub-threshold harm to each person.” (Quoted in Shrader-Frechette 1991: 70).
- 21.
W. Shakespeare, Hamlet, III, 76–82.
- 22.
I have been studying Luhmann’s sociology intensively during my post-doc years. My interest in his writings was not, as it happens most of the times, that I liked his depressing ideas. On the contrary, I was interested in finding a way to escape from the trap Luhmann built describing the “system dictatorship”. In this respect Luhmann acted as Dewey’s good pedagogue who entraps his students so that, if they want to escape, they must learn. Arendt, Myrdal and Crozier readings helped me to escape Luhmann’s gloomy trap of pessimism. At this point of my essay, I probably need to justify my recurrent quotation of Arendt. It is a consequence of some classes I have been giving since 2004 at the University of Bergamo (Italy) on An environmentalist reading of Hannah Arendt’s Human Condition. I find this reading useful since I can put together issues such as epistemology, an analysis of contemporary society and end up with a call for action. Arendt’s Human Condition has seldom been studied and quoted by scholars in environmental studies, but I believe that we can extract interesting clues which would help in understanding the contemporary environmental crisis from a political and scientific point of view.
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Poli, C. (2011). Mobility and the Corporatist Society. In: Mobility and Environment. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-1220-1_4
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