FRANKENSTEIN AND ENGINEER

Greymouth Evening Star, 13 February 1940, Page 3

FRANKENSTEIN AND ENGINEER

ARMAMENTS MONSTER AT LARGE 1 am tired of Frankenstein. In trade depression and in war the question is repeated: “Has the engineer created a Frankenstein monster which will destroy our civilisation?” I do not. know the answer. 1 do not know how much of our civilisation is worth keeping, and how much should be destroyed, but I do know that most of our questioners do not have any clear idea what they mean by the question (writes C. S. Jeffrey, in the 1 Sydney “Morning Herald”). Frankenstein’s monster has become a figure of speech; it has achieved the permanence of the dictionary. But it originated in one of the strangest bits of unreason that ever claimed attention. Mrs. Shelley’s novel is now seldom read. It is one of those books which depend on the literary quality of “atmosphere,” but in “Frankenstein” the atmosphere is so thick as to constitute a fog. Many who have not read the book do not distinguish between Frankenstein and the monster he created. The author, at least, is clear on that point, but I do not agree with her. The real monster of the book is Frankenstein himself, not his preposterous creation.

The story appears to the engineer, accustomed to the ideas of planned production, as utterly silly. For one reason, if Frankenstein had had any power to create life, other than out common endowment, he would have called for “a nice fresh corpse" as did Mark Twain in the museum, and practised on that; or, like H. G. Wells’s Doctor Moreau, he. wo'uld have bought a. dog. My sympathies in this story are entirely with the monster. In liquidating Frankenstein he did the ■right thing, although that is not wholly the moral I wish to convey here. That is enough of Frankenstein in person, but Frankenstein as a figure of speech is another matter. Here I would urge critics to turn to worthier writers than Mrs. Shelley. There is a fine chapter on the engineer as a creator of forces which he cannot control in Samuel Butler’s “Erehwon.” Unfortunately, Butler .was not in earnest, but was only poking fun at Darwin. But from Swift to A. P. Herbert, English literature contains many criticisms of engineering works. The following - characteristic explosion from Ruskin is among the more reasonable: —

“Civilisation.” says the Baron, “is the economy of power, and English power is coal.” Not altogether so, my chemical friend. Civilisation is the making of civil persons, which is a kind of distillation of which alembics ’are incapable, and does not at all imply (he turning of a small company of gentlemen into a large company of ironmongers.

Have we then in our mddern armaments created forces which have destroyed or will destroy real civilisation ?

USE AND ABUSE. There is a temptation to-day to argue that the horrors of war come not to those who possess modern weapons, but to those who do not. We may say that the strength in defence has exceeded that in attack. We may go on to: imagine warfare in which more and more machinery is operated by fewer and fewer men until at

last wars are lost and won by national exhaustion of machine power and not of man power; but, unhappily, that pretty theory may be exploded with devastating thoroughness at any m-c-ment. 1, therefore, shall not attempt to justify modern machine armaments and must accept their use, but not their creation, as the negation of civilisation. I say “use” because 1 do not know how we can distinguish between the swift airship which carries messages of goodwill, and the- dynamite which blasts a. tunnel to let water to a. thirsty laud, from the bomb-j ing aeroplane, which is a simple com-! bination of the two. Individually they i are the work of the- engineer, but any! man may unite them into a weapon ‘ of destruction. ■ I shall not enter .into familiar details of how science has made leisure, [and so has given man the opportunity! ‘to become civilised, time to cultivate! his soul. All people, perhaps most of; us, have not done so. Leisure- has! gone sour and turned to the nasty! mess we call unemployment. Power i to build has become power to destroy. | Is that the fault of the scientist and, engineer? ■ ! In past times man has not lacked weapons of destruction. We may even say that modern Weapons only facilitate the work of our old enemies, lire and water. The incendiary bomb destroys by tire; the torpedo gives the! sea its victims. We have not so much j created new forces as organised the: old ones and handed the control over, to evil men. But be it noted that the soul of man has rebelled against some i old uses of fire and water. Burning! at the stake is now one of the things that is really not done, and we even frown on the gangster who applies the persuasion of a. match to the soles of his victim’s feet. Slow motion drowning at the stake by means of the rising tide is not now encouraged anywhere. i

MAN MUST GROW j I I We may use poison gas to-day. but, we don’t poison the soup of our guests, as did the Borgias. We could to-day manufacture those simple mechanical devices, the thumb-screw and the rack, in large quantities at very; small cost. That we no longer use’ them, 1 can only attribute to the] growth of the human soul. The point! I want to make is that if we try to deprive belligerent inhumanity of its' weapons, we cannot stop until we have prohibited the manufacture ' of false teeth to prevent people biting each other. There is only one way to I get rid cf bombs and poison gas, and] that is to cultivate the human soul.' We have outgrown many evil things,] but all mankind must grow, not only] the scientist and engineer. , I We will now, if you please, turn to’ Kipling’s Mac Andrew. MacAndrew’si engines sang to him of “Law, order,! duty and restraint, obedience, discipline.” These are the virtues of the good engineer, as an engineer. As a man he has the usual vices. Without the virtues sung by Mac Andrew, machinery will not function. They are only a part of civilisation, but an im-| portant part. Machinery is the child] of man’s brain. Undisciplined and lawless men can never use it effectively. Law and order cannot be destroyby a machine which depends on law and order for its operation, any morei than the Kilkenny cats can really eat each other. __ | Law, order, duty, obedience, arid discipline may exist in the kind of civilisation we believe to be utterly bad. The civilisation all good men want

has other elements —charity, justice, mercy, unselfishness, and humility in

its true sense; but these do not enter into , engineering calculations' They have their part in our dealings with men, not, with machines. There is, of course, no such person as the scientist or- engineer who has no human contacts, but these contacts are not engineering. Long ago, some wise old owl classified certain subjects of study in Scottish universities as “the Humanities,” but these do not form part of engineering training. It is the Humanities that make the difference between a good and a bad civilisation. In past times men built cathedrals as well as castle dungeons. They built the cathedrals to the Glory of God. The engineer to-day builds, in the words of Tredgold. in the “Constitution” of the Institution of Civil Engineers, “for the use and service of man.” Men still build temples to false gods,

.and engineers build machines for evil

■ men. | Let me. therefore, come back to iFrankenstein. My ■object is to do to I that figure of speech what the monsl ter did to the man, choke it. Let us (rather bring the Devil back into pub- ] lie life. If lam told that the engineer I has sold his soul to the Devil, I will at least admit that the gas mask has turned man into the image of the" ! Devil. If one could travel through'(eighteenth century England with modor cycle and gas mask, I think the ! churches would fill up very quickly. ■But if you unmask that grotesque figr j ure to-day as likely as not you will; (find a genial clergyman, so that things are not always what they seem. There 'are still people who throw salt over 1 the shoulder to keep the Devil away. ' It is quite a good practice, really, if I only to remind us that the Devil is ' not yet dead.