--- date: '2026-03-28' description: on graduation and learning from university id: iron ring modified: 2026-06-05 15:08:08 GMT-04:00 tags: - o/life - progress title: iron rings created: '2026-03-28' published: '2026-03-28' pageLayout: default slug: posts/iron-ring permalink: https://aarnphm.xyz/posts/iron-ring.md generator: quartz: v4.6.0 hostedProvider: Cloudflare baseUrl: aarnphm.xyz full: https://aarnphm.xyz/llms-full.txt --- ![[thoughts/images/Still Life with Apples.webp|_Still Life with Apples_. 1895–98. Oil on canvas, 27 x 36 1/2" (68.6 x 92.7 cm). Paul Cézanne.]] In April 2026, a year past the centennial of the obligation, I recited a piece of Kipling from 1923 with a room full of strangers. The Corporation of the Seven Wardens runs the ceremony out of twenty-eight camps in Canada and had spent the year before mine on what they called a modernization, which involved a few moves: the religious imagery stripped out, the gendered language reworked, two new poems commissioned (one English, one French) to replace the older Kipling material around the edges, and Chris Hadfield brought in to deliver a modern gloss on the obligation more or less in the register of a TED talk. The obligation document itself, written in 1923 by the same Kipling responsible a quarter-century earlier for “The White Man’s Burden,” was left word for word. Half a million Canadian engineers have gone through one version or another of this since 1925, the count growing year by year, mine added to it in April. The ring has been on my pinky four months. It sits with a rotation of other jewelry I have been wearing daily for a few years now. --- I have been chewing on a Catholic phrase since I came across it in a footnote in March, _ex opere operato_, from the work worked. The argument behind it is medieval, and the Reformers fought it for two centuries. The Catholic side held that a sacrament works through being performed, with the priest’s state and the recipient’s belief and the room’s emotional weather all set to whatever they happened to be set to. The corner the Reformers could not push back on was the baptized infant, who cannot consent and is taken to have been baptized anyway. The whole of the spring of 2026 I have been working out, slowly, that the ring on my pinky has been doing the infant argument on my behalf. I took the obligation. The room held what it held. The wardens have set up the institution so that no setting later will ever require me to produce the obligation as a fact about me. The other thing I keep going back to is a Pullman novel I read last fall, _The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ_ \[@pullman2010goodman\]. McMaster library copy, long overdue. The setup is Jesus has a twin named Christ. Christ follows Jesus around with a wax tablet, writing down what Jesus says, except sometimes Christ writes down what he thinks Jesus should have said instead. Late in the book a stranger comes to Christ at night and tells him the institution he is going to build on Jesus’ name will betray the message, and if the institution does not betray the message the message will die with Jesus. Christ keeps writing the edited Jesus down. I finished the chapter on the kitchen counter where I am writing this and could not pick up another book that night. --- I went looking after the ceremony. Slow Saturday, laptop sitting on top of a textbook I hadn’t opened in weeks. There’s a PDF of the original 1922 talk on the Engineering Institute of Canada’s website, scanned out of typescript with the page numbers still visible in the corners. Herbert Haultain gave it on January 25 1922 under the title “The Romance of Engineering.” He was a mining engineer who taught at the University of Toronto, fifty-three years old at the time. I read the talk twice because I wasn’t sure the first time whether the phrase he keeps returning to, _tribal spirit_, was actually his or whether I’d put it in his mouth. It was his. The bridge that pulls the talk into focus is the Quebec Bridge, which gave way in August 1907 under its own weight before construction had finished, with workers still on it.[^bridge] Seventy-five men into the water. I kept getting the number wrong on the first few read-throughs and had to check it. Thirty-three of the seventy-five were Mohawk ironworkers out of Kahnawake, which I had to look up separately, and which the ceremony does not name. Haultain would have been somewhere around forty in 1907, by then enough of a career engineer to be paying attention. The line he uses about why he wanted the ritual is prevention of a second Quebec Bridge. That is what the page says. Reading the talk the second time, sitting on my apartment floor with the PDF on the laptop next to me, I noticed it wants something else too. I am still not sure exactly how to phrase the something. The closest I can get on the page is engineers who belong to each other the way men in a tribe belong. Born or sworn into a unit, with a line drawn around the unit that has the force of expulsion behind it. The competing option for what the engineering profession could look like in the twenties was the examination route, the way the bar and the medical college were already running. Haultain’s talk goes out of its way not to endorse the examination route. The carefulness of the not-endorsement is what stayed with me. [^bridge]: The Quebec Bridge collapsed twice. In 1907 the cantilever arms gave way during construction because the chief engineer, Theodore Cooper, had been told by his own inspectors that the lower compression chords were buckling and had decided not to halt the work. 75 men were on the bridge when it went into the river. In 1916, during reconstruction, the central span fell during a hoisting operation and killed another 13. 88 dead across two attempts produced one ceremony, which is some kind of ratio. Haultain wrote to Kipling in October 1923 from somewhere in Toronto, asking for help. The letter is in the McGill archives, which I have not been to. What I have to go on is what other people have written about the letter. They say Haultain was asking Kipling for help giving the obligation a literary form Canadian engineers would take seriously. Kipling was the obvious pick. He was the last famous living British poet anyone could think of by 1923, and “The White Man’s Burden” was already a quarter-century behind him. McGrath’s phrasing for what the reputation was, writing about it in the _New Yorker_ a couple of years ago, runs: variously labelled a colonialist, a jingoist, a racist, an anti-semite, a misogynist. Kipling was alive and willing to take the job. Canadian engineering valued the willingness over whatever it minded about the labels. The first ceremony went off at the University Club in Montreal on April 25, 1925. Six engineers showed up. I come back to that number every time I am tempted to take the centennial seriously, with its commemorative coin from the Royal Mint and its press releases about modernization. There is the story that the rings were forged from salvaged Quebec Bridge steel. I heard a version of it at a co-op interview in summer 2023, the panel of senior engineers around a glass table on the twelfth floor of a building near King and Bay, the one who told me had no reason to have checked and I had no reason to push back. I looked it up the spring after the ceremony, between assignments, half-thinking it would be true. It isn’t. Hospital stainless. The early ones came out of the Christie Street Military Hospital in Toronto, made by First World War veterans, and the metal switched to stainless sometime in the seventies because the older iron used to leave pinkies discolored and people had been writing in to complain about it for years.[^myth] The wrong metal has stuck with me harder than I expected it to. Half a million Canadians walking around with what they think is 1907 wreckage on a finger, and what they have on is hospital stainless from probably the eighties, and I have brought this up at recruiter dinners and a wedding in November and once at a friend’s parents’ dinner table, and the response has always been the same polite half-nod and the change of subject. The wrong-metal story is the kind of edit Christ keeps making to Jesus on the wax tablet in the Pullman novel: a small weight inserted where the original had only an accident. [^myth]: Kipling designed the rough facets and said in a letter that they were meant to symbolize the unrefined character of the young engineer. The ring goes on the little finger of the working hand, where it scrapes the paper when the engineer signs drawings, and over a working life the facets wear smooth. Whether the metaphor is Kipling’s, or whether it is just what happens to small steel objects rubbed against paper for forty years, the ring stops reminding you that it is there. It has been four months since the ceremony in April and the degree is two months away from being on the wall. Some weeks I forget the ring is on; some weeks I am very aware of it, depending mostly on what hand I am writing with that day. Neither ceremony in the end has asked whether I meant it, and the word _student_ has been gradually falling off me whether or not I have a replacement word lined up. --- Winter term I would catch the 6:47 GO out of Union most Tuesdays and lose two hours against the window before the Escarpment came in past Oakville. McMaster I passed through more than I lived in. The morning was two classes I had not done the reading for. By lunchtime I would be in the atrium of ITB triaging some structured outputs issue with vLLM, where I tended to stay until about six. The 8pm GO carried me back across the lake. On weekends I sometimes stayed in Hamilton. There is a bar on Locke I like, where I would order pasta and ask the chef what he was working on. There is a vegan grocery a couple blocks up whose yogurt cost something like two and a half times what the Fortinos five blocks down charged for the same brand. I am still upset about the yogurt. The ring was on my hand through all of it and I forgot about it most of the time. When it came back to me it was usually a hoodie sleeve snagging on it. Once it clicked against a wine glass at the bar. I sat for the better part of three seconds trying to identify what had clicked before working out it had been the ring. The speed of the conversion is the part that has stayed with me. You stand in a room reciting Victorian-imperialist lines about honour and cold iron, and it moves you. Or it moved me. By November I was tapping the ring against a desk during recruiter calls the way you might tap a Rolex if you owned one. I did that on a call with a startup in Palo Alto. The engineer in the critical paragraph here is me. The feeling in the room had been real. By dessert at the dinner afterward it was already converting into something I could use in a sales pitch. At the dinner after my own ceremony nobody said the words “bad workmanship” once that I heard. We were talking about who had signed where. Two engineers in any room outside a wardens’ room end up talking about the dinner and the picture at the door and the friends who were there. The obligation drops out of the conversation pretty fast. --- In the Corporation of the Seven Wardens’ own description, the obligation of the calling of an engineer is “not an oath but a solemn expression of intention.” The Corporation administers the ceremony across 28 camps and has been explicit about the distinction. An oath binds its taker to a fact, with consequences if the fact later turns out false. An expression of intention is a state of mind in a room, and a state of mind in a room is not the kind of object a court can later make the engineer produce. The text: > I, \***\*Aaron Pham\*\***, in the presence of these my betters and my equals in my Calling, bind myself upon my Honour and Cold Iron, that, to the best of my knowledge and power, I will not henceforward suffer or pass, or be privy to the passing of, Bad Workmanship or Faulty Material in aught that concerns my works before mankind as an Engineer, or in my dealings with my conscience. My time I will not refuse; my Thought I will not grudge; my Care I will not deny towards the honour, use, stability and perfection of any works to which I may be called to set my hand. Kipling’s archaisms (_henceforward_, _aught_, _compass or wrest_) give the document a 17th-century weight it does not actually have, since the thing was composed by a Victorian in 1923. The ceremony is semi-secret. Only engineers and the engineers about to become engineers are allowed in the room. [[thoughts/performativity|Butler]]’s constitutive performance fits with one catch: the taking of the obligation creates the membership it claims to describe, and the resulting constitution cannot be undone by a later ceremony in the way Butler’s framework otherwise allows.[^secrecy][^turner] [^secrecy]: The semi-secrecy is doing specific work. The Hippocratic Oath is public, and you can take a doctor to a court that will quote it back at him. The iron ring obligation is private and is between the engineer and his own conscience, which is between him and nothing verifiable. The secrecy turns the ring from a public ethical standard into a tribal marker. [[thoughts/performativity#goffman: dramaturgical sociology|Goffman]] would have called this a backstage rite. [^turner]: Victor Turner gave the name [[thoughts/performativity#civilisation requires performance|liminality]] to exactly the state the ceremony places its participants in \[@turner1969ritual\]. They are between the student they have been and the engineer they have not yet been called. The _communitas_ that Turner identified in such states is real, and it was real in the room where I took mine. But _communitas_ is a feeling, and feelings are the thing emotivism is most interested in. --- I read A.J. Ayer’s _Language, Truth and Logic_ \[@ayer1936language\] in third year, the ethics elective, picked because it fit my timetable around a database systems course I cared about more. Ayer wrote the book at twenty-six. It was a hit on theology, with most of philosophy of religion taken out across a couple of chapters, and on its own terms it took out moral philosophy too as a side effect. Ayer admitted as much later. Moral statements had stopped being statements. _Stealing is wrong_, in Ayer’s reading, carries about the factual content of _boo to stealing_. Stevenson came along a few years later and tightened the account \[@stevenson1944ethics\], pointing out that a moral statement was doing two things at once: expressing the speaker’s disapproval and trying to pull the listener into disapproving alongside him, which is closer to how moral talk actually goes in a room. Ayer and Stevenson agreed that whatever the moral statement was doing, it had stopped reporting anything about the world. By its own constitutional terms, the obligation is emotivist. “Not an oath but a solemn expression of intention” is the Stevenson position turned into policy. The engineer expresses an attitude toward bad workmanship, the expression is supposed to influence his own future conduct, and an expression of intention with no enforcement attached is in practice just a feeling, which tends not to make it through the year.[^ayer-bridge] [^ayer-bridge]: Ayer built the verification principle to put theology out of business and was honest enough to notice that he had also put moral cognitivism out of business at the same time. As I wrote in my [[hinterland/research/analytic-atheism-research|notes on analytic atheism]]: theism and morality go in the same boat, and if eliminating theism is a win then you have also eliminated moral cognitivism. The iron ring sits at the intersection of the two. It has a quasi-religious form (semi-secret, administered by wardens, structured around an obligation) and a moral content. Ayer empties both halves at once, which makes the ceremony doubly emotivist and the engineer who took it the inheritor of two things that have been denied any standing for the better part of a century. _After Virtue_ was on the same syllabus, later in the term. MacIntyre wrote the book in 1981 \[@macintyre1981aftervirtue\], taking the emotivists at their word and working out what kind of culture would have to follow from that. If moral language is only expressions of preference, what eventually gets built on top of moral language is a culture in which persuasion has collapsed into manipulation. Persuasion in the older sense needs a moral fact in the room for both parties to point at, and in MacIntyre’s culture there are no moral facts available, so what you have left is one person trying to move the other and calling the result whatever sounds right at the time. He picks three character types as exemplars of the resulting culture (the manager, the therapist, the wealthy aesthete), and the engineer slots in alongside them cleanly enough that MacIntyre would probably have added the engineer too, working through Canadian examples. The engineering job as I have been doing it: someone gives you a requirements document, you build whatever satisfies the document, and whether the something built should have existed in the first place is the client’s problem from the moment you accept the requirements. A manager’s setup with investment money runs roughly the same way. The board picks a profit target, the manager hits it, and the question of what the profit is for stays upstairs. A paper in _Frontiers in Sociology_ runs the same analysis on the iron ring directly \[@paul2023stubborn\], calling the situation social captivity. The grammar of the obligation looks factual on the page; the verbs are indicative (_I will not suffer bad workmanship_), which is how factual commitments get written. Four months of wearing the ring around has had me running it as an attitude expression of the kind Ayer and Stevenson were describing. From inside that gap an engineer gets to claim a kind of technical objectivity while standing inside a moral structure that formally declines, in its own constitutional papers, to be a moral structure at all. A dilution problem keeps coming back to me here. Thaler, Sunstein, the rest of the nudge literature have been making the same case for two decades, that small physical reminders shift behavior at the margin, and a stainless steel ring catching on a hoodie sleeve every few minutes is, on the page, exactly the kind of nudge the literature is about. The mechanism fails at the social reading of the object. Emotivism as a behavior-modification scheme depends on the room reading an expressed attitude as one, and the rooms engineers spend their professional lives in have been reading the ring as a credential for most of a century. The credential reading drains the emotive content out of the object within the first month or so on the finger. The Frontiers paper concludes that the ceremony “has served to reproduce and map boundaries around engineering ethics and responsibility in Canada.” Mapping the boundary was the function. Crossing it would have been the [[thoughts/ethics|ethics]]. --- I have been chewing on Hare’s word _blik_ since I came across it in a footnote of the analytic atheism stuff I had been reading in March. The word came out of the 1950 Theology and Falsification symposium, where Flew set the bar by inviting his interlocutors to say what observable event would force them to give up the claims they were making, and Hare answered with the parable of the don who believes the other dons are out to murder him and finds reassurance in every kindness and proof of the conspiracy in every slight. The don has a _blik_ about the dons. Nothing the dons do dislodges the _blik_. Hare’s claim was that everyone has one or another about something. Sitting with the ring on my pinky for four months, I have started thinking the ring is one of mine. The obligation says I will not suffer bad workmanship. Suppose I sign off tomorrow on a drawing I should not sign off on. The ring is still there the next morning, my colleagues notice nothing, I notice nothing, the ring goes on doing whatever it has been doing on the finger and the obligation goes on doing whatever it has been doing in the head, and no observable event has occurred that would falsify either. Stainless steel welded to a _blik_, with Flew’s gardener thrown in for company. [^hare]: From the Theology and Falsification symposium of 1950. Hare’s position was that religious claims function as unfalsifiable attitudes that organize a believer’s experience, and that everyone has a _blik_ of one kind or another. The lunatic who believes the dons want to kill him has one. The man who believes the dons do not want to kill him has one. The question is which _blik_ to wear. The iron ring is a _blik_ about engineering ethics, and Flew’s challenge applies to it: the obligation dies the death of a thousand qualifications. The engineer who passed bad workmanship still wears the ring. The ring does not come off. There have been half a million takers across the hundred years the obligation has been running, and things those takers signed off on have failed across the same hundred years; bridges, dams, pipelines, tailings ponds, the rest of it. The audit asking whether the ring made any of those failures less likely has not been run, because the profession does not want the audit run. Running it and finding nothing would mean a public concession that the ring had been theatre, and the theatre has been useful enough to engineering that the concession would cost engineering something on the way out. By the time my ceremony came around in April 2026, the wardens had a year of modernization behind them, released as the centennial version on April 25, 2025. They describe what they did this way: religious imagery removed, gendered language reworked, English and French poems added at the edges where the older Kipling material had been, Chris Hadfield reading a modern gloss on the obligation more or less in the register of a TED talk. The Kipling at the center, the obligation document itself, was kept word for word. The Kahnawake ironworkers, thirty-three of the seventy-five who went into the river in 1907, got the same mention in the modernized ceremony as they had in the original, which is to say none. I take this swap as the giveaway. If the Kipling at the edges could come out and a Hadfield voiceover could go in without anything changing in what the ceremony does, the ethical content was never living in the words at the edges of the obligation. The weight was being carried elsewhere; by the liminal hour, by where on the hand the ring goes, by the _communitas_ in the room. The ritual incorporates a new engineer into a professional body, and incorporation is what the ceremony has been doing for the full hundred years, the same dynamic the [[posts/occupational licensure|history of PEO]] makes legible across the longer view. Durkheim has the account of why a delusion like this gets traction at all \[@durkheim1912elementary\]. His word for the phenomenon is [[thoughts/performativity#political dimensions|collective effervescence]], the emotional intensity that gathers when a room full of people perform a ritual together. Inside the intensity, the thing happening does feel like moral transformation. I want to say something about that before going further. I was inside that intensity in April, sitting in the room with the other engineers in the obligation chairs, and what I felt was not nothing. If I do not say so first the rest of this reads like a man patting himself on the back for having seen through a Victorian ceremony, which is the last position I would like to be defending. Treating the feeling as evidence of anything other than itself is where I made my mistake. The institution counts on the same mistake from a couple of thousand engineers a year, and the emotivist position turns into its own defense at that point, because if moral language is only feelings then the ceremony delivered what it had been advertising on the page, and the disappointment was something I had brought with me into the room. The degree has been doing the same kind of work on me. Deadlines were scaffolding I could lean against while building something else, and the scaffolding worked like a Hare-style _blik_, an unfalsifiable self-image that organized my experience without ever being tested against the world. For five years I lived inside the word _student_ as if it described what I was up to. At 11pm in exam week, when I was triaging issues for Bento and not studying, _student_ was doing for me what _engineer_ does for the man fresh out of his ring ceremony. Neither word asks anything in return, which is what made them comfortable to live in. Aristotle identified three kinds of friendship, utility, pleasure, and virtue.[^karlsson] It occurs to me that perhaps surviving five years of school is the human equivalent of a test of virtuous friendships. The people I still feel even tenuous connections to are the ones who were around in the design team freshman year, the ones I knew through the Vietnamese student association, and the team of six on my senior project group. Some of those friendships dissolved once those common obligations were completed. Two or three have survived until this Saturday in mid-May. I feel a bit suspicious about desiring that number, for now. [^karlsson]: Borrowing the framing from Henrik Karlsson’s [“Friends Missed”](https://www.henrikkarlsson.xyz/p/friends-missed). His point is that the test for which type a friendship was is whether it survives a context shift; you do not know in advance, you find out by losing. It’s the scaffolding of deadlines coming down at the end of June. I am not nearly sure whether what was built underneath is strong enough to stand on its own. I am writing all of this on a Saturday in mid-May, on the GO train somewhere east of Aldershot. The wardens modernized the iron ring ceremony this year. I have been reading the modernization through the lens of Philip Pullman’s _The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ_. In the novel, Jesus is the good man, the one with the message; the scoundrel Christ is his twin and his editor, the one who hijacks the message, rips the edges off, and leaves only what he thinks the ‘core’ of it is. The Jesus figure is Haultain, who watched seventy-five men go into the St. Lawrence in August 1907, who wrote the obligation in 1923, and who died in 1961, before the count of engineers who had taken the obligation after him reached half a million. The Christ figure is the Corporation of the Seven Wardens, who took Haultain’s idea, kept Kipling at the centre of it, and edited the edges until the modernization announcement was released on April 25, 2025. Whether it’s analogous or not, the work of drawing out paper boundaries where there weren’t any previously continues to show up for me as the stranger in the Pullman novel. I will attend convocation at McMaster University in June, in the David Braley Athletic Centre. I have walked into that gym every September since 2021 for course registration. People said it would help me if I described the shift in advance. It didn’t. I have been going at it since January, on every 8pm GO train back across the lake. Camus once wrote that every morning we have to choose who we will become. The morning part is the one that lands, for me, in some kind of relationship to the ceremony. The ring stays on my pinky finger, catches the edge of the desk when I am typing, and makes shower water bend around steel a little differently than it does around skin. ---