Chapter 5: Rousseau

It really does rain a lot in the mountains on either side of the Willamette valley. Some of that rain is captured in the rocks and soil of the mountains, from which it slowly seeps out all summer. The Cascade mountain range derives its name from the countless small streams which pour over high and low cliffs, tumbling down to the valleys below. The water is cold, clear, and rapid, providing a beautiful backdrop to outdoor activities.

A fine place to be on a late fall afternoon. Sun dappled waters, the rush of the river blocking out all the noise that is the world of commerce and engineering, the smell of fir and willow on a warm breeze wafting down from the forest on the high side of the bank, dry moss on a massive bolder providing a comfortable place to sit, a young, strong body comfortably lounging with pole in hand. And a small, beautiful young woman sleeping higher up on the bolder, just at the edge of vision.

Well, beautiful to Bill. He'd shared a significant portion of the last couple years with her, and he really was beginning to appreciate the way she looked, especially when she was asleep. Her usual impishness seemed to melt away into an almost angelic slumber.

He was happy, and he wished he could always as happy as he was at the moment. He wanted it to be a right, a given, a fact of life, yet he knew it could not be so. Bill was unusually philosophical for an engineer, and the implications of this intimacy with nature and a woman were not lost on him. Sometimes it really did seem that, as the philosopher said, civilization was a corruption of nature, and violated his right to happiness.

Unfortunately, the philosopher hadn't really defined what he meant by civilization.

Rumination was part of the fun of fishing, for Bill. Actually, he found most activity to be just an excuse to think. Sleeping next to him with a gentle burble from the stream and maybe the wind in the willows for background music was what made fishing fun for Cindy. Though she sometimes found the discussion of life's deepest questions interesting, she was usually willing to let Bill take the lead in those discussions, intervening only too keep him from getting too far afield with her practical sensibility. Thus their discussions were often rather one sided. While she slept on, Bill kept up a conversation with himself, perfectly content for the time being with the discourse.

So, what was civilization? Was it the technological body of knowledge that employed him, paying him so well in a time of re-engineered salaries around the country? That provided the know-how to build the rod and reel he was so lazily casting, and the money with which to buy it? He considered this for a minute, and decided that it couldn't be. Technology was, after all, simply technical knowledge. So called high technology was merely technical knowledge not immediately accessible to the layman. It certainly had no "life" of its own. It was a parasite on true civilization, a tool to use, a good tool of course, but not to be mistaken for the society itself.

A fairly remarkable train of thought for an engineer.

"What, then?" he asked himself as he made another cast. The philosopher defined the social order as the sacred right which was the basis of all rights, and the only natural order as the family. But the obscurities and vacillations in his writings make precisely what he meant difficult to ascertain. And what was a right, anyway?

Did he have a right, say, to a job? Or to happiness? Were they connected? He had been extremely happy as an engineer when fresh out of college. Each new problem was a challenge he didn't know if he could beat, and each solution was a victory, savored and enjoyed in the retelling. (Which may, of course, have lead to his early career difficulty in getting a date, but that was a separate subject). It had all begun to seem rather old hat lately, though. Somebody would set up a difficult technical problem, and Bill would knock it down. He knew there was more than a little hubris in that ennui, but it was there all the same. Bill was a very capable engineer, and after 10 years with the company was beginning to glide along without much effort. It was generally recognized that Bill was ready to be a project manager, which represented a whole new set of exciting challenges, but he was not yet ready to take on that responsibility. Management, after all, isn't just another engineering job, another set of problems to deal with. He saw it as philosophical guidance for the team and, if he moved up the ladder, guidance and responsibility for the company as a whole. He couldn't take on such a task lightly. He wanted to be as good at it as he was at engineering, and without worrying too much about the specifics he felt that his relatively recent interest in philosophy was in some way preparing him for that. He was beginning to ask why rather than being satisfied with merely asking how.

And why was that? He smiled to himself. "Because the managers I too often have to deal with are just clueless. They don't get it, don't realize that they need to be establishing why a thing needs to be done before deciding what things to do." For instance, the time when a whole team of engineers chased off after a contamination problem rather than making the system tolerant of contamination. Or the time another team beat their brains out for two years trying to adjust a manufacturing process to make a particular taper repeatably rather than adjust the design so that the taper angle was no longer critical. Or the time a whole printer was designed from scratch to be a low cost device in the market (tying down half an R&D lab for years), when in fact the old design, once up the production volume ramp, met the same cost objectives through sheer volume efficiencies. He could go on ad infinitum. He didn't want to manage like they did.

"Engineers have to be good at dealing with the mechanics, the how, of technical solutions if they are to be effective. All of us are well trained for that" he mused to himself.

Long ago he realized that he'd been taught to ignore the why questions and focus on the how in his technical training. Metaphysics had been dismissed as a field for glassy eyed dreamers with too many hours in the day. Physics was the field to study for contributing members of society, according to his teachers from high school on through the university. He had taken Philosophy 101 as part of his humanities credits while at college, but had found the discussions banal and the conclusions bizarre. He shook his head. Those professors had been clueless as well. It all seemed to have precious little to do with the real world. They had every opportunity, 5 credit hours worth for crying out loud, to get the importance of "why" across to their students, and instead they fooled around proving things unprovable, like the idea that there is no altruism, or that there was no God, or that every attitude can be deconstructed. Brilliant guesses, they said. No wonder the entire educated populace of the world considered philosophy to be a waste of time.

Over the last few years he'd begun to see things differently. Management, as he perceived, was all about asking why. The question became "Why create a 600 dot per inch marking technology instead of 300 or 1200?" rather than asking how to make a 600 dpi sized firing chamber function. Why was color important to the market place for inkjet printers? Why do engineers get so bent out of shape when their peer's contributions are recognized while their own incomplete results are not? Why was it so difficult to get prototype fluidic structures created rapidly? Why are we in this market and not another one? What is the nature of research, and why do it? Why not just do development? Study in the academic disciplines of mechanics, mathematics, and computer software didn't provide an adequate toolbox for dealing precisely with such questions. Bill was insightful enough to realize that he needed a different way of thinking to really be good at answering such questions.

But, though he'd been studying the why of things for a few years now, he still felt too uncertain about his answers to the questions to be a confident manager. Which brought up a second point. To lead, a certain amount of confidence was needed, a degree of ego, a belief in the answers one had for his project team. From the "why" questions derived the "how" questions, which a competent engineering team could then be turned loose on. Just asking the right questions wasn't enough. They had to be answered in a reasonable way and then presented with confidence. Without a solid foundation, a team gets demotivated and difficult to keep on task. And in his experience, not without reason; projects pursued without solid backing from management often changed suddenly, leaving a great deal of wasted effort on the table as the engineers switched from one objective set to another. Bill had picked up long ago that it wasn't hard work that engineers in general resented, it was wasted effort. Time and again he'd seen teams work very hard to meet an obviously important deadline, and he'd also seen teams move sluggishly in the same circumstances when the environment created by their leadership was full of uncertainty and doubt.

Thus, Bill wanted more confidence in his ability to ask the right questions and answer them well before he would try to be a manager. Funny thing, but few other managers in the company seemed to realize the importance of these two attributes to the performance of their jobs. Bill had never heard them mentioned as qualities to select new managers on or grade the performance of current managers, even though he had observed that these twin attributes, which might be called insight and decisiveness, were always present in highly successful managers. Most tended, instead, to look on their job as an entitlement for having been good as an individual contributor, and as a benefit to be passed around fairly and inclusively. So, to get a promotion he'd have to depend on his wit in the interview, his long term employment with the company, what his managers "felt" about him, and his obvious technical expertise. He would have to hope all this would overcome his genetic disadvantages. The corporate "inclusiveness" objectives would keep him from making the grade if he only did "well" in the interview process.

Enough about work. He looked over at Cindy, wondering if maybe it was time to go home. Here he was, up in the mountains with a beautiful woman and a fishing pole, and his mental ramblings had lead him back to work. Oh, but she was still asleep, and so peaceful. Maybe he could come up with something else to think about for a while.

So, what was a right? An abstract principle to chew on if ever he'd thought of one. Maybe he could come up with an answer empirically, by looking at sample rights. Did he have a right to happiness? That didn't seem reasonable, and the society, the civilization he found himself in certainly didn't seem bent on providing it for him. Did he have a right to equal treatment under the law? Theoretically, yet there were those inclusiveness rules which were based on laws which put the lie to that. Did he have a right to anything? Are there any rights? Where did they derive from? The philosopher had talked of them as if they were obvious, but had mostly proved them by proving what they were not; the divine right of kings, or might makes right, as a couple examples. His brow furrowed. The whole political discourse in the world was based on the concepts of rights. Surely someone, somewhere must have defined where they came from and what they were. There were, of course, the Declaration of Independence and the Rights of Man. But he'd rejected those documents long ago as being origins for "rights", the former because it explicitly gave a supernatural origin to rights and the latter because it simply posited rights without giving a satisfactory origin.

"Intuitively obvious to the casual observer" he said to himself, and chuckled. But where had he read anything better? He tried to think. Without a rigorous explanation of rights, he suspected he'd have trouble with defining what civilization was....

Just then his reverie was broken.

"Aren't you going to pull him in?" she asked.

Looking up at the voice, he saw a sunburst with a face on it, and the face was smiling at him.

"Do you know you are incredibly beautiful sometimes?" he said. Her short blond hair, hanging around her neck, was glowing in a ray of light, and looked particularly striking against the dark green of the overhanging mossy rock they were perched on.

"Only sometimes?" she giggled. Cindy did that a lot. "But, he-ello-o, what about your fish? He is going to get away!"

"Oh, yeah, yeah." And he turned his attention, reluctantly, back to the pole that he'd forgotten about while lost in thought. "Come on Charlie, come to papa. Cindy, could you get the net please?"

"Oh, sure." And she climbed delicately down the rock, gingerly picking up the fishing net. It was old, handed down to Bill from his father (who'd wanted a new one) and each of the hundreds of fish who'd been caught in it had added a bit to the odor it now generated. Charlie should feel right at home.

"Awesome fish Bill! Keep working it! Oh, you're going to get it! Don't lose him. Oh! Look at him go! Yuck, this thing smells. That's it, bring him closer, here he comes," and, with one graceful motion, she bent down, scooped the fish out of the river, and presented it to Bill. "There!"

Bill pried the hook out of the trout's mouth and then held it up proudly. Why so much pride involved in hooking a dumb animal? This wasn't the time.... "Hah! Isn't it beautiful Cindy! It will taste great tonight for dinner, over a foot if he's an inch. He and the smaller one we caught earlier will be fine." Looking up at the shadows now climbing up the east bank of the stream, he made a decision. "Ah, well, I think its time we headed for home, what do you think?"

"Oh, probably, but I hate to leave such a beautiful spot. It is always fun listening to you talk to yourself. Still, I guess we can come back up here some other day. I'm going to have to tell Jenny about this place. She would love it."

"Hey, don't go giving all my secret fishing holes away to Californian immigrants! The state's practically over run as it is."

Cindy made a face. "Jenny tells me great places to go, usually on the coast, so I should return the favor. Besides, don't forget, I'm not an Oregon native either."

He grinned. "Oh, I forgot. Well, tell her not to fish."

She agreed. "OK, that shouldn't be a problem. She doesn't like dealing with hooks, worms, and fish guts any more than I do."

"Ha! Then my place is safe." A new thought crossed his mind. "Does Jenny have any fishing friends she might bring up here with her?"

"Why are you so greedy? It is possible she might know a guy or two who like to fish, yes, but I wouldn't think she'll be doing that any time soon. Her current flame is too wrapped up in..." Cindy stopped, embarrassed. Despite her mannerisms and affectations, she wasn't a bubblehead. She avoided gossiping about her friends, for instance, and she was really quite a good technician. "Never mind. I'm ready, let's hike back to the car."

Bill was tempted to ask, but he thought he knew what she was going to say. Steve was a friend of his, one he'd like to see think a little more about where his life was going, and he was interested in finding out what Jenny thought, if Jenny was really interested or just playing with him. But, that would be gossip. Rats.

They walked in silence up to the car, each with their own thoughts.

After putting their things into the trunk of the old Honda Accord, they climbed in and Bill drove back down the mountain, into the valley and toward Corvallis.

"Do you want to have dinner with me tonight, Cindy?" he asked, nonchalantly (he hoped).

Coming out of her own thoughts, she looked over and smiled at him. "Yes, I was planning on it. I wouldn't want you to ruin these fish."

"Well, I'd make sure you got one. But I would appreciate it if you'd cook them up. I'll buy everything necessary for the dinner and leave the left overs in your refrigerator."

"Cool!" she said.

A thought crossed her mind, a thought that had intruded often lately. Wouldn't it be nice if they could just know that they were going home to have dinner and spend the evening together rather than always being so tentative about it? After dinner he would ask if she wanted to watch TV or something and, if not, he'd go home. And who says only married people get into ruts? Bill had never asked her about marriage, nor had he ever asked to live with her. She wasn't certain that she didn't want to move in together, but she'd cohabited before and it just didn't seem quite like something she would want to do again. No particular moral reason, but her observation of the lives of many of her friends who did live together hadn't impressed her. She felt that Bill would agree with her. She preferred longer term connections, more security, less thrashing around. Marriage was kind of a novel concept, but she lately had found herself warming to the idea of life long commitment. She hadn't brought the discussion topic up, of course, because that would be fishing of an unacceptable kind. She stared out at the fields and barns rushing by, thinking. Being around Bill had begun to rub off on her.

Oddly enough, Bill was thinking along the same lines. The philosopher had, after all, said that the family was the only natural societal state.... but what was family? And hadn't a later philosopher demonstrated that there was no natural state for society? A dance of the atoms...