Sounds very much like Austin’s tactic, doesn’t it? The mechanical engineer’s world is mechanical, prescriptive, predictive. Unlike the pattern-producing chaos other world views describe, the mechanical engineer inhabits a tidy, knowable universe, or one capable of being tidied up. So they tidy. They hammer and nail and paint, oblivious to deeper philosophical questions, focused upon completing the assignment.

Hooray for them! If only the rest of us could perform so carefreely. But we are tangled in one or another conundrum. We fuss. We fear. We experience a more organic, subjective, surprising world; a messy universe glimpsed in shifting patterns of meaning and feeling and not so easily mastered. We, too, might hammer and nail and paint, but while struggling with deeper philosophical conundrums, leaving, if not a physical mess, at least some deeper meaning unresolved. Because we are not mechanical engineers. We are not any more or less human than mechanical engineers, but our humanity seems to play a more dominant role in our lives.

I’m merely describing temperaments. The decisive and the phlegmatic. The journalist and the poet. The realist and the dreamer. If mechanical engineers ruled the world, the dreamer might well be classified as unproductive rather than inventive. Placed on an assembly line, dreamers are dangerous, but wouldn’t immersing a realist in ambiguity produce similarly disjointed results?

One client described as an outright assault on intuitive thinkers by sensing doers the Bush administration’s attempt to reform via process improvements Los Alamos scientists’ proven generations-old practices. Physicists do not approach their work as a mechanical engineer might, and their methods seem inefficient and meandering in comparison to the straight-forward mechanics any engineer would employ. But the problems physicists pursue are different in class than those engineers resolve. They demand meandering, intuitive thoughtfulness, rather than active, predictive solution. They are not merely employing hammers, but inventing them.

The result? At Los Alamos, the assault yielded dramatic improvement in the productivity of the scientific investigation, not because the speed of scientific discovery was increased, but because a significant number of scientists choose to leave the Labs, reducing the overhead cost. What will this savings cost long term? No engineer could calculate this cost.

In Mark Frost’s novel The Second Objective, Nazi spies hold counterfeit passes to gain entry to Allied headquarters, but discover that “headquarters” is misspelled as “haedquarters” on their counterfeits. The Nazi spies produce replacement counterfeits to correct this error, only to learn later, after their intrusion is thwarted, that the genuine passes contained the misspelling. A French detective who helped crack the case comments about the Nazis, “They didn’t really make the trains run on time, either.” Their attention to the way it was supposed to be blinded them to the way it was.

And this kind of blindness is the very foundation of the mechanical engineer’s world view. Their certainty about how things should be, supported by rigorous scientific investigation, blinds them to the way things actually are. We can observe only the observable, and much of what dictates success in human endeavors remains tenaciously unobservable. We might decide that behavior can serve as a stand-in for all we cannot see, and conclude much based upon easily observable actions, and miss seeing the presumption this construction teeters atop. A house of cards.

If Mechanical Engineers ruled the world, we might find a world obsessed with measurement, one focused upon mechanical efficiency, and one improving meaningless as well as meaningful processes. This mysterious world would be characterized as ultimately predictable, and our economies would become roulette wheels rigged by a cruel fate. Our governments would be endlessly bailing out institutions grown so huge and essential that we cannot afford for them to fail, but ones which ultimately fail from focusing upon engineering clockworks to master organics. When they crumble, we find few guilty of any crime save those crimes classified as collusion, conspiracies created to contain natural messiness into predictable portfolios. We wonder how different these outcomes might have been had their energies been focused upon more fully acknowledging the way it is rather than enforcing the way it otta be.

Our survival might well depend upon us fighting this global movement toward Taylorism. In education as well as business, in government as well as industry, the mechanical mindset has gained significant credibility. And no wonder. It can, does, and has produced dramatic short-term improvements in the standard of living, as measured by income, capital, and wealth. But as the roller-coaster performance of our industries as well as our governments show, these improvements are short-lived. They boom then bust. They provide before producing privation. They are ultimately unsustainable.