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ECE C96 - ENGINEERING DESIGN & ENTREPRENEURSHIP

CANDOR - The Language of Engineering


can·dor ( kan-der ) n. 1.Frankness or sincerity of expression; openness. 2. Freedom from prejudice; impartiality. [Middle English from Old French from Latin from candere to shine; See kand- in Indo-European Roots.] (American Heritage Dictionary, 1995)


When I was an Electrical Engineering undergraduate at M.I.T. from 1956 - 1961, Ethics was not part of the engineering curriculum. This was not an oversight; instead, it was assumed that almost all of the overwhelmingly Judeo-Christian, European-origin student body had received religious and ethical instruction from their families, churches and synagogues and therefore the subject could be integrated into the required humanities courses which taught the origins of Western (i.e. European) civilization. Indeed, these assumptions were largely true.

My undergraduate classmates were -with very few exceptions- native-born Americans of European ancestry. Those that were not U.S.citizens came from other countries in the Western Hemisphere such as Canada, Mexico, Cuba and Venezuela. Student diversity was often defined in terms of only a few miles - Did you come from the North Side or South Side of Chicago? To the extent our dormitory housed foreign or international students they were from European countries and I can only remember four others from Egypt and India. Thus, by today's standards, we were a rather homogeneous group sharing many common experiences.

One of the experiences we shared was growing up in America during and after World War II. For all of us, that war was a defining part of our lives in two material respects; namely, 1) we understood the necessity of cooperating and sacrificing for the common defense and 2) we recognized the role that technology played in our country's victory.

For Jewish students, such as I, who were raised in major urban areas that became home to Displaced Persons or DPs- as the refuges of that war were then called, the war was also a lesson in man's inhumanity to his fellow man as we learned about the true extent of the Holocaust. The Holocaust was the organized genocide of Jews and others by Nazi Germany during World War II that occurred as part of a policy of the Third Reich to murder whole classes of people that Nazis classified as undesirable. To provide you with a metric for understanding the magnitude of Nazi crimes, I offer the following data:

In my East Rogers Park neighborhood on Chicago's North Side -which is just south of Northwestern University along Lake Michigan, it was quite common after the war to see DPs on our beach with serial numbers tattooed on their skins by Nazis, as well as other evidence of obvious brutality and maltreatment. In those days,the DPs rarely spoke of their tragedies and we were too respectful to ask. However, some of our neighbors were GIs who had liberated German concentration death camps and they willingly described by narrative and with photographs they had taken the torture tools, furnaces for burning bodies and record books that the Nazis used and the stench, disease and rot that the GIs found. We never forgot what the GI veterans told us and what we saw in newsreel movies and magazines. The magnitude and bestiality of these crimes were so huge that none of us could ever expect that anyone could forget. We could not identify people who committed such crimes as being part of the human race with us or that we had anythingin common with them. Sadly, however, this was not true.

The America I knew in my youth was a far different country than the America you see today. While our country had many virtues, it also had serious sins - some of which it shared with the very nations - especially Germany- we had just defeated. Of these, institutionalized racism was perhaps our most important problem.

By federal statute and regulation, by state and municipal law, by private contract and by institutional practice; our countryhad established degrees of citizenship. White Christian Americans (with some exceptions for Catholics and Mormons) had first-class citizenship. Negroes, Jews, Gypsies, Asians, Hispanics and American Indians were expected to accept lower status without complaint. For example, it was almost universal in the South to see separate drinking fountains (black for Negroes and white for everyone else) and our Negro soldiers always served in segregated units until1948. Jews and others who were not both white and Christian were prohibited -either by practice or by municipal ordinance- from owning or occupying real estate in many communities including Evanston, Wilmette and Kenilworth (overturned by the IllinoisSupreme Court in 1957). They were also prohibited from practicing certain occupations (many large companies such as Sears Roebuck& Co. prohibited employment of Jews and others) and entering the premises of certain businesses where signs were posted stating Restricted or No Jews Allowed (considered criminal trespass in some states into the 1960s). Even Northwestern University had a policy of limiting admission of Jewish students to 5% of its student population. In 1961, I -with Semitic black hair and brown eyes- was denied a license to marry my Jewish blond, blue-eyed fiancée by the Clerk of Dauphin County, Pennsylvania until I took an oath stating that I did not have Negro blood. So, sixteen years after the defeat of Nazism, I was confronted by a public official of my own country who was only too eager to enforce a state law based on the Nazi justification of racial purity to deny to my fiancée and me our God-given right to choose our spouses.

Now, you are right to ask What does all of this have to do with Engineering and Ethics? My answer is Everything because our technology makes it possible for others to commit genocide on a massive scale. I will explain this in concepts familiar to Electrical Engineers.

Consider the Universe as a source of signals. By definition,a signal is an impulse or a fluctuating electric quantity, such as voltage, current, or electric field strength, whose variations represent coded information. (American Heritage Dictionary). In my model, the coded information is contained in packets and the Universe contains every packet of information which is conceivable or capable of being understood by man.

Because the Universe's data base is almost infinite, we must develop some method of prioritizing our search for signals that are important and useful - since, as individuals, we have limited time and limited brainpower. Our mammalian genetics gives us something of a head-start; since by the process of evolution, members of prior generations who could not distinguish harmful or false information had less opportunity to reproduce. We, like other animals, learn habits of survival from our parents and community. Still, 75,000 or so years of species existence is too short a timespan in our Universe to depend on genetics and contemporaneous teaching for achievementof human technological capabilities. Something else is needed to distinguish our capacity to learn from that of other animals. In my judgment, that something else is the human race's ability to record important packets of information in formats that not only can pass from one generation to the next; but, can survive many generations (i.e. The Torah or the first five booksof the Hebrew Scriptures revered by Jews). Thus, as a Northwestern University student, you have a unique advantage of benefiting from the packet filtering or screening functions of millions of people - most of whom have lived long before you or come from neighborhoods of this planet that you will never visit. This resource is unique to human beings and, I believe, more important in our progress than other physiological traits such as a thumb, an erect posture, color vision or the conception and use of the wheel.

In our class discussions on Ethics, I plan to teach to you a number of important ethical concepts which, I hope, will guide you successfully in your engineering career as they have shepherded me. They are part of my family inheritance and I learned them at my father's knee.

We start with a foundation principle; specifically -

Every right has a concomitant responsibility.

For example, you have a right to use a resource and you have a responsibility to leave that resource in at least the condition that you found it (normal wear and tear excepted). Thus, you have a right to use Northwestern University's libraries and in accepting that right you also accept the responsibility to help maintain the physical integrity of the materials you borrow from the collection.

From our foundation principle, we now explore the prospect ofderiving another principle; specifically -

When you 1) access a packet of information, 2) recognize that it contains a material error and
3) are in a position of authority with respect to that packet; then you have a concomitant responsibility to disclose voluntarily that material error and to correct (or at least register an objection to) that information packet or one linked to it.

There are some important questions to ask. For example, Does it matter how the error occurred or who caused it? If you believe that others who have filtered information packets owe you a duty of candor, what is your responsibility with respect to information packets you analyze? How would you define the terms integrity and credibility? How would you (re)define this or another derived class?


LABORATORY EXERCISE

The question of your duty of candor is especially important for engineers because it is the engineers who are called upon to provide politicians with engines of death. For example, crematorium furnaces used by Nazis to destroy bodies of Holocaust victims were engineered, built, modified and refined by German engineers- not all of whom were members of the Nazi Party.

In this exercise, we will concentrate on events relating to the Holocaust because as a Jew who lived through a part of that period, I have knowledge of events and because the Holocaust is well documentedon the INTERNET. You may, however, elect to study other acts of state-directed genocide - currently called ethnic cleansing - which occurred (and are occurring) in the Twentieth Century such as the Turkish genocide of the Armenians, the Soviet genocide against the Kulaks, the Japanese genocide of the Koreans and Chinese, the Croatian genocide of Serbs in Yugoslavia, the Serbian genocideof Muslims and Croats in Bosnia or the several tribal wars now under way in Africa.

The objectives of this exercise are to:

It is my hope that this exercise will sensitize you in later years to the need to consider the long-term consequences of your actions when you may control tools capable of mass destruction.


ASSIGNMENT

    With the use of your favorite WWW search engines, use your list of terms to identify articles on the WWW relating to the use or non-use of those technologies to commit genocide. Be certain to identify articles in which authors deny that the Holocaust occurred and assert technical arguments in support of their denials.

  1. Write a short essay which focuses on the concept of candor in relation to the materials you have studied. Consider the following questions:

You are encouraged to call upon your religious or ethical training provided by your family and your church, synagogue or mosque.


ADDITIONAL SOURCES OF INFORMATION

  1. When you have time, make a list of names of prominent Nazi and Allied officials and use these names with both a WWW search engine and our Northwestern University Library server to identify individuals such as Albert Speer who was Adolph Hitler's architect. You may wish to read Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich: memoirs, Translated from the German. Northwestern Library Location - SCHAFFNER - 943.086 S742eX 1971. For an American view, I suggest Gen. Omar N. Bradley's book A General's Life : AnAutobiography to be found at MAIN - 940.542 B811Z
  2. A number of books have been written by survivors of the Holocaust. One that I especially recommend is William V. Mishell's book entitled Kaddish For Kovno to be found at MAIN - 947.5 M678k, ISBN 1-55652-033-6. Kaddish is the Yiddish word for requiem and Kovno is the Yiddish name for Kaunus, Lithuania which was a major center for Jewish life in the Baltic and where Vula was born. Vula - who was my wife's cousin and our dear friend, together with his sister and mother, survived the Nazi liquidation of the Kovno ghetto as well as Dachau Concentration Camp. The Mishells came to the United States after the War. His book should be of special interest to you because he was an engineer and because he described a period in his life when he was just about your age.
  3. If you have access to a C-Band satellite television receiver,you may wish to watch DeutscheWelle - German State television - which regularly broadcasts programs about German history - including programs and motionpictures about the Holocaust.
  4. Heimat(Homeland) is an excellent German 18-hour motion picture serieson the transformation of Germany between 1918 and the 1950s. It illustrates some of the impact of new technology on German society and politics. A version is available with English subtitles.
  5. The Simon Wiesenthal Center has a WWW site. Other interesting materials relating to free speech and the Holocaust can be found by pointing a search engine at the name Wiesenthal. For example, see a letter on the responsibility of Internet Service Providers to protect free speech. Should the same policy advocated for an Internet Service Provider apply to a university, government, newspaper, television or corporate server? Compare this letter with that of President Bienen. What are the implications of each for new communications technologies capable of widely dispersing propganda?

Sheldon L. Epstein

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N.B. The contents of this page are the sole responsibility of its author and have not been approved for teaching purposes by Northwestern University. This page originally appeared on a Northwestern University server as CANDOR - The Language of Engineering. See C96 Last Call and CANDOR.

23 OCT 96 - Updated 6 OCT 96 - Updated 21 NOV 96