Ethics

In Borges’s story “The Theologians”, collected in The Aleph in 1949, two churchmen of the early Middle Ages spend their lives refuting heresies. Aurelian, coadjutor of Aquileia, writes against a sect that believes history repeats in cycles. His rival, John of Pannonia, writes against the same sect more briefly and more brilliantly, and Aurelian never forgives him. Years later, when a new heresy appears, Aurelian recognizes in its doctrine a sentence John once wrote in good faith. He reports it. John is burned at the stake. Aurelian dies some time later in a fire set by lightning, and in paradise he learns that, for the unfathomable divinity, he and John of Pannonia formed a single person. …

In the schoolbooks I grew up with, Simón Bolívar was not a man. He was a sequence. He swore an oath on the Monte Sacro in Rome, crossed the Andes with a ragged army in 1819, won at Boyacá, freed five nations, and died betrayed. Every town had a plaza with his name and a bronze version of him on a horse. He had no body except the statue, and no doubts except the ones history had already resolved in his favor. …

“Ask your doctor if it’s right for you.” Anyone who has watched American television knows the sentence by heart. It sounds like caution, but read it slowly and it’s a script: here is a feeling you may not have noticed, here is a product that addresses it, and here is a professional whose role in the transaction is to ratify or veto a decision you have already half-made. The ad doesn’t sell a drug. It sells a diagnosis and rents a doctor’s authority to close the deal. …

In traditional engineering—civil, mechanical, structural—a “Senior Engineer” is someone the insurance company will let sign off on blueprints. If those blueprints fail and a bridge collapses, there is liability. There are lawsuits. There are corpses. The title is not social; it is a legal and physical fact. It is directly tied to how much you can be trusted, which directly tied to what you can earn. A Senior Engineer can be trusted because the product is permanent and failure is irreversible. …

Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude offers a vivid moment when José Arcadio Buendía dismisses a fantastical flying carpet, claiming he could achieve superior results with science: “Una tarde se entusiasmaron los muchachos con la estera voladora que pasó veloz al nivel de la ventana del laboratorio llevando al gitano conductor y a varios niños de la aldea que hacían alegres saludos con la mano, y José Arcadio Buendía ni siquiera la miró. «Déjenlos que sueñen», dijo. «Nosotros volaremos mejor que ellos con recursos más científicos que ese miserable sobrecamas.»” …