Go Big or Go Home

As a kid, I loved getting the Scholastic book catalogs. Several times a year, our teacher would hand them out, asking us to return book orders by the next week. I was an avid reader but my parents were not wealthy. I could order books, but was always given a modest limit. I would carefully look through the catalog, calculating how best to spend the money. Occasionally I would blow my entire budget on one large book, and that book was often the Guinness Book of World Records. 

The book was the largest in the catalog, offering hundreds of pages. I spent hours pouring over the lines of fine-print pages discovering the world’s largest ball of string, the world’s tallest skyscraper, the world’s heaviest twins, the record for the longest fingernails, the fastest human, the tallest human, and more. There were records for all kinds of interesting and crazy things. 

When I was growing up in the midwest United States, we took a family trip where I got to see the tallest building in the world. It was the Sears tower in Chicago, at 108 stories and 442 meters in height. That building is now called the Willis tower; today it ranks as the 23rd tallest building on earth. The tallest as of this writing is the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, at 163 stories and 828 meters in height.

Why are we so fascinated with the largest, fastest, or heaviest? In his blog titled “Hubris”, Tim Fernholz reviews a study by the Danish researcher Bent Flyvbjerg that explores monumental engineering endeavors, concluding that projects costing more than $1 billion almost always go over budget. Flyvbjerg goes on to identify four reasons society pursues large projects even though they cost so much.

• technological: engineers enjoy building the newest or largest item of its kind
• political: big public works can enhance the reputation and stature of a politician
• economic: big projects mean lots of business for construction companies
• aesthetic:large projects often have a certain artistic appeal

These reasons are good initial explanations for why society pursues massive engineering projects despite their huge costs, costs that almost always surpass expectations. However, they are all superficial symptoms of an underlying cause. The deeper reason is implied by the blog title that Fernholz uses,  “Hubris,” impling that these reasons boil down to the age-old vice of pride. 

We are familiar with stories of pride as a significant driver for big projects. Your neighbors that vie to build the largest, boldest Christmas display on the street are often driven by a measure of conceit. Pride at a national level was at stake for Americans in the 1950s. They woke up one morning to learn that the USSR had succeeded in launching Sputnik into orbit: the world’s first artificial satellite. This event drove a wave of scientific and technological development in the US, culminating with the massive engineering project to put the first human on the moon. 

Fernholz also mentions the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel as the paradigmatic symbol of big projects that failed. One of my colleagues at Calvin, professor Gayle Ermer, examines this story in a paper at the 2008 Christian Engineering Education Conference, titled “Lessons from the Tower of Babel”. Considering the tale of Babel, she says “The implication could be drawn from this interpretation that Christians should not be investing a great deal of time and effort in technological accomplishments on a grand scale. While it may be true that over-reliance on technological achievements can detract from trust in God, it is questionable whether this is the primary lesson of the Babel story. “ She goes on to describe a God-honoring approach to technology that does not depend on the size and scale of the technology, but more so on its direction. 

I suspect that big technological projects are often driven by pride, steering the project from the start in a direction that is not God-honoring. However, even if pride drove the initial dream of the big project, that should not prevent Christian engineers from redirecting that purpose so that the project itself is God-honoring. 

Furthermore, pride is not the only reason for pursuing a big technological project. In the name of stewardship of resources, we might seek economies of scale, such as building large wind turbines instead of smaller ones. In pursuing a calling to develop and unfold God’s creation, we might build big. Competition might drive a big project, not because of pride, but in order for a company to survive. Engineers might view a large project as pursuit of their spiritual calling, following Colossians 3:17 “And whatever you do, whether in word or deed, do it all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.”

Should Christians participate in big technology projects? I believe so. However, we should do so with a discerning spirit and a keen sensitivity to avoid pride, working to design and build in a way that honors God and loves our neighbor.