With the kind permission of Strelka Press, we publish an excerpt from Richard Sennett's The Master.
"Do not strive to hit the target!" - this behest of a Zen master is so perplexing that a young archer might want to shoot an arrow at the mentor himself. But the master does not mock the student at all. He just says: "Do not overdo it." He offers practical advice: if you try too hard, push too hard, you will aim badly and miss. This advice is broader than a recommendation to use minimum force. A young shooter must work with resistance in his bow and try different ways to direct the arrow - approach the matter as if the shooting technique is ambiguous. As a result, he will be able to aim with maximum accuracy.
This Zen master's teaching applies to urban planning as well. In the twentieth century, urban planning is largely based on the principle of "demolish what you can, level the site and build from scratch." The existing urban environment is seen as a hindrance to the implementation of the planner's decisions. This aggressive recipe often turns out to be a disaster: sturdy, comfortable buildings and the very way of life fixed in the urban fabric are destroyed. And that which replaces the destroyed, too often turns out to be worse. Large-scale projects suffer from excessive definiteness of form, adequate only to its only function: when their era, as it is characteristic of it, is leaving, these rigidly defined buildings are of no use to anyone. Therefore, a good master city planner will take the advice of a Zen teacher to act less aggressively and love ambiguity. This is about attitude - but how can this attitude become a skill?
How can a master work with resistance?
Let's start with resistance, that is, with the facts that hinder the implementation of our will. Resistance is of two kinds: discovered and created. A carpenter stumbles upon unexpected knots in a piece of wood, a builder finds quicksand under a building area. Such discovered obstacles are one thing, and it is another thing for an artist to scrape off an already drawn and quite suitable portrait, because he decided to start all over again: in this case, the master creates obstacles for himself. The two types of resistance may seem fundamentally different: in the first case, we are hindered by something external, in the second, the difficulties come from ourselves. But in order to work fruitfully with both of these phenomena, many similar techniques are required.
The path of least resistance. Boxes and pipes
How do people behave when faced with resistance? Consider one of the basic commandments of an engineer: follow the "path of least resistance." This advice is directly related to the design of the human hand, with a concept that combines minimal effort and the ability to relieve pressure. The history of urban development provides us with an object lesson in applying this maxim to the environment.
Modern capitalism, according to Lewis Mumford, began with the systematic development of mineral resources. The mines gave man coal, coal became the fuel of the steam engine, the steam engine gave rise to public transport and mass production. Tunneling technology has created a modern sewerage system. Thanks to the underground pipe system, the threat of epidemics has been reduced; correspondingly, the population has increased. The underground kingdoms of modern cities still play a critical role: now fiber-optic cables are laid in the tunnels, providing digital communications.
Modern technology for the construction of underground structures began with bodily discoveries made with a scalpel. Andreas Vesalius, Brussels physician and founder of modern anatomy, published De humani corporis fabrica in 1543. Almost simultaneously, modern methods of working underground were systematized in the Pirotechnia of Vannoccio Biringuccio. Biringuccio encouraged readers to think like Vesalius in mining, using techniques that lift stone slabs or remove entire layers of soil rather than cutting through them. It was this path underground that he considered the path of least resistance.
Towards the end of the 18th century, city planners felt an urgent need to apply the same principles to the space below the city. The growth of cities required the creation of a system of water supply and wastewater disposal, exceeding in scope even the ancient Roman aqueducts and cesspools. Moreover, planners began to guess that townspeople would be able to move underground faster than in a maze of terrestrial streets. London, however, is built on unstable swampy soils, and the methods of the 18th century, which were suitable for coal mining, were not particularly applicable here. The tidal pressure on the London quicksands meant that the wooden supports used in the coal mines would not support the tunnel vaults here, even in relatively stable areas. Renaissance Venice gave 18th century London builders a hint on how to locate warehouses on piles floating in muddy soil, but the problem of deepening into such soil remained unresolved.
Could this underground resistance be dealt with? Mark Isambard Brunel was sure he had found the answer. In 1793, the twenty-four-year-old engineer moved from France to England, where he eventually became the father of the even more famous engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel. Both father and son viewed the resistance of nature as a personal enemy and tried to overcome it when, in 1826, they jointly began construction of a road tunnel under the Thames east of the Tower.
Brunel Sr. invented a movable metal shelter that moved forward while the workers in it built the brick walls of the tunnel. The vault consisted of three interconnected cast-iron compartments about a meter wide and seven high, each of which was propelled forward by the rotation of a huge screw at its base. In each compartment there were workers who lined the walls, bottom and ceiling of the tunnel with bricks, and behind this vanguard was a large army of builders, strengthening and building up the brickwork. In the front wall of the device, slots were left through which the muddy mass seeped inside, thereby reducing the counter resistance of the soil; other workers carried this liquid mud out of the tunnel.
Since the technique developed by Brunel overcame the resistance of water and soil, and did not work with them at the same time, the process was very difficult. During the day, the shield passed about 25 centimeters from the planned 400-meter path. In addition, it did not provide sufficient protection: work was carried out only five meters under the river Thames, and a strong tide could push through the initial layer of brickwork - when this happened, many workers died right in the cast-iron compartments. In 1828, work was suspended. But the Brunelles were not going to retreat. In 1836, the elder Brunel improved the screw mechanism that propelled the shield, and in 1841 the tunnel was completed (the official opening took place two years later). It took fifteen years to cover a distance of 400 meters underground.
We owe everything to the youngest Brunel: from the use of pneumatic caissons in the construction of bridge supports to metal ship hulls and efficient railroad cars. Many are familiar with the photograph in which Brunel poses with a cigar in his mouth, the top hat is pushed to the back of his head; the engineer ducked slightly, as if preparing to jump, and behind him were the massive chains of the huge steel steamer he had created. This is the image of a heroic fighter, a winner who overcomes everything that gets in his way. Nevertheless, Brunel was convinced from his own experience of the low return of such an aggressive approach.
Those who followed the Brunels succeeded by cooperating with the pressures of water and silt, rather than fighting them. This is exactly how it was possible in 1869 without accidents and in just 11 months to lay the second tunnel in history under the Thames. Instead of a flat front shield like Brunel's, Peter Barlow and James Greathead created a blunt-nosed design: a streamlined surface helped the device propel itself through the soil. The tunnel was made smaller, a meter wide and only two and a half meters high, having calculated its dimensions taking into account the tidal pressure - such a calculation was not enough in the gigantic scale of Brunel, who was building almost a castle underground. The new elliptical structure used cast iron tubing instead of bricks to strengthen the tunnel walls. Moving forward, the workers screwed together more and more metal rings, whose shape in itself redistributed the tidal pressure over the entire surface of the resulting pipe. The bottom line came to light almost immediately: by scaling the same elliptical tunnel, Barlow and Greathead's innovations allowed the construction of an underground transportation system to begin in London.
From a technical point of view, the use of a circular cylinder for tunneling seems obvious, but the Victorians did not immediately grasp its human dimension. They called the new device "Greathead's Shield" (generously attributing it to a junior partner), but that name is misleading as the word "shield" suggests combat gear. Of course, Brunel's supporters rightly reminded in the 1870s that without the pioneering example of father and son, Barlow and Greathead's alternative solution would not have emerged. In fact of the matter. Convinced that willful confrontation does not work, the next generation of engineers redefined the task itself. The Brunels fought the resistance of the underground rocks, and Greathead began to work with it.
This example from the history of engineering primarily raises a psychological problem that must be brushed aside like a spider web. Classical psychology has always argued that resistance creates frustration, and on the next round, anger is born from frustration. We are all familiar with the urge to smash the naughty pieces of prefabricated furniture to smithereens. In social science jargon, this is called "frustration-aggressive syndrome." In a particularly acute form, the symptoms of this syndrome are demonstrated by the monster Mary Shelley: rejected love pushes him to more and more murders. The connection between frustration and fits of rage seems clear; it is indeed obvious, but it does not follow from this that it does not seem to us.
The source of the frustration-aggressive hypothesis is the work of observing the revolutionary crowds of scientists of the 19th century, led by Gustave Le Bon. Le Bon bracketed the specific reasons for political discontent and emphasized the fact that accumulated frustrations lead to a sharp increase in the size of the crowd. Since the masses are unable to deflect their anger through legal political mechanisms, crowd frustration builds up like energy in an accumulator, and at some point breaks out with violence.
Our engineering example explains why the crowd behavior that Le Bon observed cannot serve as a model for work. Brunelley, Barlow, and Greathead had a high tolerance for disappointment in their work. Psychologist Leon Festinger investigated the ability to tolerate frustration by observing animals exposed to prolonged discomfort in the laboratory. He found that rats and pigeons, like English engineers, often skillfully endure disappointment and do not go into a frenzy at all: animals rearrange their behavior so that at least for some time they do without the desired satisfaction. Festinger's observations draw on earlier research by Gregory Bateson, who became interested in double bind resistance, that is, frustration that cannot be avoided. Another side of this ability to cope with frustration was shown by a recent experiment with young people who were told the correct answer to a problem they had solved incorrectly: many of them persisted in trying alternative methods and looking for other solutions, despite the fact that they already knew the result. And it is not surprising: it was important for them to understand why they came to the wrong conclusion.
Of course, the mind machine can stall when faced with resistance that is too strong or too long, or resistance that cannot be explored. Any of these conditions can induce a person to give up. But are there skills that people can use to withstand frustration and still be productive? Three of these skills come to mind first.
The first is reformulation, which can foster a burst of imagination. Barlow recalls imagining that he was swimming across the Thames (not a very tempting picture in the era when sewage was poured into the river). Then he imagined an inanimate object that most resembled his body - and it, of course, was a pipe, not a box. This anthropomorphic approach is reminiscent of endowing an honest brick with human qualities, which we talked about above, but with the difference that in this case this technique helps to solve a real problem. The task is reformulated with a different actor: instead of a tunnel, a swimmer crosses the river. Henry Petroski summarizes Barlow's approach as follows: unless the approach to resistance is changed, many rigidly defined problems remain intractable for the engineer.
This technique is different from the detective skill of tracing an error back to its original source. It makes sense to reformulate the problem with another character when the detective gets stuck. The pianist sometimes physically does about the same thing that Barlow did in his imagination: if a chord is inconceivably difficult to take with one hand, he takes it with the other - sometimes, for inspiration, it is enough to replace the working fingers, to make the other hand active; the frustration is removed. This productive approach to resistance can be compared to literary translation: although much is lost in the transition from language to language, in translation the text can also acquire new meanings.
The second approach to resistance involves patience. Patience is the often-cited ability of good craftsmen to keep up with frustration. In the form of sustained concentration we discussed in Chapter 5, patience is an acquired skill that can develop over time. But Brunel, too, has been patient, or at least single-minded, over the years. You can formulate a rule that is opposite in its message to the frustration-aggressive syndrome: when something takes more time than you expected, stop resisting it. This rule was in effect in the pigeon maze that Festinger built in his laboratory. At first, the disoriented birds thrashed against the plastic walls of the labyrinth, but as they moved, they calmed down, although they were still in difficulty; not knowing where the exit was, they were already marching forward rather cheerfully. But this rule is not as simple as it seems at first glance.
The problem is timing. If the difficulties drag on, there is only one alternative to surrender: to change your expectations. Usually we estimate in advance the time that a particular case will take; resistance forces us to reconsider plans. We may have been mistaken in assuming that we would get through this task quickly enough, but the difficulty is that for such a revision we have to fail constantly - or so it seemed to the Zen masters. The mentor advises to give up the fight to the very beginner who always shoots wide of the mark. So, we define the patience of the master as follows: the ability to temporarily give up the desire to complete the work.
Hence comes the third skill of dealing with resistance, which I am a little embarrassed to say bluntly: merge with resistance. This may seem like some kind of empty appeal - they say, when dealing with a biting dog, think like a dog. But in craft, such an identification has a special meaning. Imagining that he was sailing across the fetid Thames, Barlow focused on the flow of water, not its pressure, while Brunel thought primarily about the force most hostile to his tasks - pressure - and struggled with this larger problem. A good master approaches identification very selectively, choosing the most forgiving element in a difficult situation. Often this element is smaller than the one causing the underlying problem and therefore seems less important. But in both technical and creative work, it is wrong to tackle the big problems first, and then clean up the details: quality results are often achieved in the reverse order. Thus, when a pianist is faced with a difficult chord, it is easier for him to change the rotation of the hand than to stretch his fingers, and he is more likely to improve his performance if he focuses on that detail first.
Of course, attention to the small and malleable elements of the problem is due not only to the methodology, but also to the life position, and this position, it seems to me, stems from the capacity for sympathy described in Chapter 3 - sympathy not in the sense of tearful sentimentality, but precisely as a willingness to marry own framework. So, Barlow, in his search for the right engineering solution, did not grope for something like a weak spot in the enemy fortifications that he could use. He overcame resistance, looking for that element in him with which he could work. When the dog rushes at you with a bark, it is better to show him open palms than to try to bite him.
So, resistance skills are the ability to reformulate the problem, change your behavior if it takes too long to solve the problem, and identify with the most forgiving element of the problem.
