Henry Petroski, an engineer who writes, comes up with some Taoist sounding ideas in a discussion of his recent book, "Success Through Failure."

Success masks failure. The more a thing operates successfully, the more
confidence we have in it. So we dismiss little failures — like the
repeated loss of a space shuttle’s insulating tiles launchings — as
trivial annoyances rather than preludes to catastrophe.

    This, of course, made me think immediately of passage 2 from the Tao Te Ching:

All beneath heaven knows beauty is beauty
only because there’s ugliness,
and knows good is good
only because there’s evil.

Being and nonbeing give birth to one another,
difficult and easy complete one another,
long and short measure one another,
high and low fill one another,
music and noise harmonize one another,
before and after follow one another….

     It would be easy to write a next line: "success and failure turn on one another," or something like that.  It would be perfectly in keeping with Petroski’s irony.

    But, at the end of the day, the engineer is not a Taoist.  Petroski obviously believes that technical expertise can make things better, can improve upon the found world.  He may be right, but a Taoist would be deeply skeptical of such confidence, as passage 29 of the TTC reminds us:

Longing to take hold of all beneath heaven and improve it…
I’ve seen such dreams invariably fail.
All beneath heaven is a sacred vessel,
something beyond all improvement.
Try to improve it and you ruin it.
Try to hold it and you lose it….

    If our successful interventions are bound to fail in one way or another, and our failures are necessary for the next success, what happens when we create a truly horrendous failure – a global warming melt down, or a thermonuclear detonation?  Should we look at that as the prelude to a coming success?  Or will we wonder why we tried so hard to succeed in the first place?