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Revisiting Moulakis on the Importance of Liberal Education for Engineers

In 1994, Athanasios Moulakis, then Director of CU’s Herbst Program of Humanities for Engineers, published a book titled Beyond Utility: Liberal Education for a Technological Age. As he notes in its introduction, Moulakis took up the project of writing the book to better articulate for himself the meaning and purpose of the Herbst Program, since it wasn’t really obvious to anyone how to situate or make relevant a program of humanities for engineers. Over the thirty-five or so years since its inception, Herbst’s successes attest in no small way to Moulakis’ leadership, insight, and vision. Now, with the recent debut of the Moulakis Lecture Series in Responsible Engineering, I think it is appropriate that we revisit and refresh for ourselves some of the main features of his defense of liberal education for STEM. In my own view, intervening developments in technology and culture have only made Moulakis’ concerns more pressing and the value of the Herbst approach to education increasingly salient. 

Beyond Utility is structured roughly around three key insights into technology and its governance that help make intelligible the value of liberal education for engineers. 

First, technology is morally and even practically ambiguous in its value and utility. Moulakis refers to Sophocles’ use of the ancient Greek word deinon to capture this notion. In the so-called “hymn to technology” from Antigone (332-72), human ingenuity is a “terrible (deinon) wonder – not merely admirable, but awesome, dreadful” (143). By the powers of their practical intelligence, humans have both liberated themselves from the harsh rule of necessity, while simultaneously magnifying their capacity for destruction. What makes the root of our own power over nature both positive and negative in its valence is that, on the one hand, by utilizing things like fire and technology, we provide ourselves relief and abundance where there was once scarcity; on the other hand, however, these same powers give us the equipment that intensifies the range and depth of our violence and brutality.  What is more, as humans free themselves from the direct rule of nature, we emerge into a world where our desires and appetites are not strictly governed. While humans become more resistant to nature they also become, therefore, more prone to greed, pleasure, error, illusion, and self-deception; or to put this differently, the question of how to live or how to structure one’s life becomes a problem as the direct governance of our instincts gives way to the competing claims of culture, religion, and law. What makes technological empowerment dreadful, then, at least in part, is that we humans have to become responsible for tending the source and distribution of the goods we need to survive and thrive, that it is up to us to ensure that this very same source doesn’t become harmful, and that we have to do this despite the fact that it is not obvious how to resolve all of our disputes or even whether any complete or lasting resolutions are possible.   

Second, the ambiguity of technology and the burden of its governance means that humans must assess technology from a non-technical standpoint. For Moulakis, this standpoint is best understood as moral or political; it involves the kind of judgement expressed by the wise lawgiver, the discerning judge, and the prudent statesman. To be effective, serious, and empowered citizens of our technological societies, we have to learn to see technology in the light of its problematic aspects and must be ready with freedom and agility to create or modify institutions to supply the appropriate guidance and correctives. What this means in practice is that we cannot take for granted the goodness of the systems we depend upon. So, for instance, are we willing as a culture to think seriously about the good and bad effects of smartphones or social media? If we find that social media causes harmful effects for certain users at certain times in their lives, do we have the will to respond meaningfully with regulation or correctives? Analogous questions can be posed to any number of devices. On the one hand, we in the West have set up numerous think tanks, academic institutes, lobby groups, and professional associations all aimed at addressing the potential problems of one form of innovation or another. But unless there is a serious commitment to rigorous critical assessment and an openness to action – action that might require suspending profit or growth for the sake of health or some other good like excellence or virtue – then our cultural capacity to meaningfully govern technology diminishes to mere tokenism or symbolic action.   

Third, the path to cultivating the kind of awareness and judgement we most need is the path of liberal education. By liberal education, Moulakis means the close study of the great texts and great achievements of the past. The value of this kind of education has multiple expressions. For one thing, it is important to make explicit for our own self-understanding the dominant political, moral, and philosophical positions that have structured Western civilization. That is, just because we are born, raised, and “professionalized” to become citizens of the West does not mean that we also understand the ideas, thoughts, and intentions that went into the institutions that influence and govern our lives. Each generation, if it hopes to see its own future clearly must make its past explicit to itself, if only to better understand what its institutional resources are and why it believes the things that it does. 

In addition, and perhaps more importantly for today’s purposes, by thinking through the intellectual diversity of the West, we learn to see and inhabit a spectrum of viewpoints and build thereby the kind of agility we need to respond to the novel challenges that innovation brings in its wake. Herein lies the liberating quality of Moulakis’ conception of liberal education. Because the West is itself not unified, that is, the West contains many tensions, whether it be between Greek philosophy or biblical religion, classical republicanism or classical liberalism, ancient metaphysics or modern science, learning the different arguments and positions in this history is itself a powerful source of individual freedom and awareness. If one can learn to appreciate Homer and Aristotle alongside Nietzsche, Picasso, Douglass, and Darwin – even or especially when one doesn’t agree with them – one thereby greatly expands and enriches one’s capacity to inhabit sympathetically multiple viewpoints. This ability is especially useful when it comes to identifying the dominant ideas that govern one’s age, particularly when those ideas are used to justify, often falsely, the political or technological status quo.  

In 1994, Moulakis’ ideas about the value of liberal education for engineering students were new and, in some sense, quite radical. Thinkers from different traditions have long since recognized that technology needs to be oriented by some form of external constraint. But in the United States, very few engineering schools had done much to integrate a serious and intentional approach to learning as a way of offsetting the rigors and often narrowed values of professionalized technical education. In the last three decades the West has seen dramatic shifts in innovation, especially in the domains of communications technology and artificial intelligence. Given three more decades, these developments, especially when mixed with other innovations in genetics, energy, weapons, and robotics, could have even more radical effects on our civilization. Moulakis’ worries about the danger of what is deinon in technology ring to us now in clarion tones and help to sharpen our sense of purpose. Now more than ever, we need engineers willing to think broadly and deeply about their practice in various contexts. It is precisely the liberally educated engineer who is best poised to help form a future society that can effectively steward our technological inheritance.