Site Map

VOLTAIRE'S BASTARDS -- THE DICTATORSHIP OF REASON IN THE WEST

4. The Rational Courtesan

To believe that any class will act in a gratuitous, disinterested manner over a period of several centuries would be misplaced optimism. The intellectual and practical creation of our rational civilization by a succession of courtiers can only have been an act of self- perpetuation and self-promotion.

That doesn't exclude idealism from their motives or real improvements in our condition from their acts. But their underlying approach was that of courtiers and, however admirable parts of our society may be, at heart it is a civilization of courtesanage.

We don't see this in ourselves because we have learned to describe in admirable and positive terms those characteristics which" stripped down, would have been appropriate in Versailles or the Forbidden City. And we concentrate on the conflicts between Such sectors as bureaucrats and businessmen rather than admit that they all use the same methods. The very idea of the courtier has been relegated carefully to a past filled with absolute monarchies.

But there is nothing about courtiers which is proper to royal courts. They are characterized not by function, but by an approach towards gaining power. Only one important factor has changed over the centuries. In the past, when they succeeded in seizing real power, they were obliged to make a difficult choice. They could maintain their parasitic methods behind the screen of the old ruling class or they could transform themselves into a responsible ruling elite. The eunuchs behind the Manchus in the nineteenth century chose the parasitic route and gradually drained China of its energy and its direction. The Georgian eunuchs did the same thing in the seventeenth century when they controlled the Safavid dynasty of Persia. The Baghdad caliphs of the great Abbasid caliphate were so discredited by the power of their eunuchs in the tenth century that the military took over and left them as mere figureheads. Individual courtiers -- even eunuchs -- did occasionally transform themselves into true leaders. But a class of courtiers has never transformed itself into a responsible elite.

Rational society has refined that difficult choice between courtesanage and leadership almost to the point of rendering it irrelevant. After all, our society was largely conceived by the courtiers, with their own private and elitist skills in mind. They dominate the very idea of modernism -- particularly our wider sense of it -- and therefore influence our denigration of other social forces as being retrograde or inefficient. For the first time in Western history, the courtiers don't need to change when they win power, because power has been designed in their image.

The modern technocrat and the royal courtier are virtually indistinguishable. Of course, superficial details have changed. The great accomplishment of the rational approach was to remove the need for external characteristics by creating an all-inclusive abstract method. For example, in many places castration was standard practice.

Picturesque though this absence of testicles may seem in such cases as the Chinese emperor's eunuchs or those of the Persian shah, it was only an incidental detail. Castration established the fact that by function, or lack of it, the courtier did not have dynastic pretensions. He was the emperor's man. More to the point, however, was the division between inner court and outer court, which was particularly clear in China. The eunuchs were in the inner court and thus served power and not the population. The notion of "inner" meant they served in a secretive and arbitrary manner. Their personal power could be increased to the extent that they were able to elaborate on the formal structures surrounding the emperor. Perhaps the most eloquent surviving illustration of this power is the maze of high walled lanes which carve up the Forbidden City in Peking. Each short section leads everywhere and nowhere and was part of the unlimited manipulation which the eunuch lived.

Life at Versailles turned less on geographical intricacy and more on a maze of rules and dress codes and minutely carved-up privileges. The man who tasted the king's food (his brother). The man who carried his hat. But which man with which hat for which level of ceremony? The right to enter here but not there. Presence at the waking-up ceremony. At the king's meal. Hunting with the king. Not permitted to hunt but permitted to follow the hunt. The permutations were endless. In Diderot's words, they were "artificial productions of the most sought after perfections." [1] And in the process religious policy was set and wars declared or not, In all of this Versailles resembled the court of the Baghdad caliphate seven hundred years before, when the powerful eunuchs were ranked by their responsibility for the caliph's personal property, The Bearer of the Inkwell, for example. At the top was the one who wrapped his head with a special crown.

The second Duc de Saint-Simon was the great diarist of Versailles and himself a consummate courtier. The first duke, his father, had begun life in the stables and a terrible social inferiority complex drove the son to waste his genius in working the palace corridors. Like most courtiers he was filled with contempt for others but incapable of the introspection which permits irony. And so he could describe another man, who might have been himself, as "one of those court insects that one is always surprised to see and to find everywhere and whose very existence is built on a fear of being consequential."  [2]

A sharp tongue in itself is harmless enough. As harmless as the nightly gatherings early in the sixteenth century in northern Italy of a handful of aristocrats. They sat in a circle in the sala delle veglie of the Duchess of Urbino in order to determine the characteristics of the perfect courtier. One of them -- the diplomat Baldesar Castiglione -- later published the entire "debate" as The Book of the Courtier and this instant best-seller was felt to have captured all the elegance of the Renaissance. Here was the bible of civilized behaviour. And the participants were also men of consequence, who went on to become a bishop, an archbishop, a cardinal, a secretary to the pope, a doge of Genoa, a duke of Nemours, a prefect of Rome. They didn't manage to settle whether beauty or fine dancing or elegant clothes were or were not superior to using deception in the interests of the master or honesty or loyalty or personal courage for the sole purpose of distinguishing oneself. However, the mastery of reason was one of the few undoubted requirements: "Reason has such power that it always brings the sense to obey it and extends its rule by marvelous ways and means, provided ignorance does not seize upon what reason ought to possess." [3]

The reality behind all this chat was the Duchess's father-in-law, the first Duke of Urbino -- one of the most battleworn mercenaries of his day. He operated in an Italy overcome by political violence and disorder. The Duchess was married to his only son, the second Duke, who was crippled and impotent. In effect, despite all the elegant talk about court life, the duchy was up for grabs and one of the Duchess's guests did indeed end up running the whole thing in the name of the pope. Of course, the charm of the Duchess of Urbino can't be denied, anymore than that of the Earl of Essex, so long as he stayed within close range of Elizabeth I's palaces. The moment she sent him off to deal with the real world in Ireland, his charm evaporated and the result was a military and political catastrophe.

Because everything in society was centered on the courts, so they seemed to harbour as much good as they did evil. Versailles permitted the King to protect Moliere. Holbein's genius flourished in the shadow of Henry VIII. But the essence of the courts was power not creativity or elegance. A glance at Holbein's court drawings is enough to see that they depict the faces of manipulators, bullies and disciples of uncontrolled ambition, of cowardly violence and of betrayal.

What all this tells us about the modern variety of courtiers isn't very clear. McNamara, for example, may well be an evolved version of Richelieu. Or Giscard d'Estaing of Saint- Simon. But what really matters is that society has been restructured in order to convert these sorts of people into the mainstream of the social order. And that's why it is important to pause long enough to examine a handful of contemporary individuals in order to clarify what the modern courtier is like.

These individuals don't lead in the old political sense. They don't create policy in response to public needs. Nor do they function as forerunners of public need, formulating that which the public has not yet consciously formulated. Sometimes they are idealists, unconsciously dominated by their mechanical genius, like Robert McNamara or Michael Pitfield. Sometimes they are cynical opportunists, like Henry Kissinger, Harold Wilson or James Baker, playing the narrow field between the system and 'the politicians. Sometimes, as with Simon Reisman, the disequilibrium between apparently uncontrollable emotions and advanced technical skills seems to be so great that the resulting conflict carries public policy off course. There are also men who would like to have a moral or an ideological position but are dominated by a mechanical version of intellectual skills, like Jacques Chirac. Or men, like Valery Giscard, of intelligence severely limited apart from the narrow mechanical skills necessary to carry them to the fore. Or men like Sir Robert Armstrong, of great intelligence, but all of it consumed by those same mechanical skills, so that they function brilliantly and with absolute self-confidence, although to no apparent purpose.

Taken together, they form a group, a class, a type, linked by a particular sort of intelligence involving their central talents as systems men. They are men who create and work principally within and through the systems of which they are emanations. Men who deal in power. Men given to the manipulation of facts and contemptuous of public debate. The differences between them are in part generational, in part a function of their surviving traits of individualism. And yet their unity is not simply a function of society's training. It does not come only from a shared form of education. Rather, they are outstanding examples of the sort of man who is attracted to contemporary systems and who does well within them.

The idea of innate human qualities was much debated in the first half of the Age of Reason, then submerged beneath the growing need to prove everything by means of what were coming to be known as facts. And yet it is their innate mechanical and logical talents which link our new men of power together. They have what can most easily be summarized as a talent for manipulation. The system merely rewards them for this. They invariably seem to be lacking in applied moral common sense -- that quality which accounts for a straightforward respect of the individual -- in other words, a sense of proportion in dealing with those individuals and an understanding of the value of content over form. In other words, they resemble seventeenth- or eighteenth-century courtiers or courtesans.

Only gender separates those two words. English, for some reason, makes a greater distinction than French or, indeed, Italian, from which the words arise. English differentiates between social action and sexual action, as if to say that selling your honour isn't so bad as selling your body. For the Italians and the French, both words refer to clever and obsequious behaviour at court; whether this involves the soul, the body, or the mind, something is being sold. And since the role of the courtier is actually that of the mythological female at her most untrustworthy and amoral -- that is, seeking favour by flattery or behaviour -- as opposed to the real female, it is far better to describe the modern technocrat as a courtesan and his methods as courtesanage.

***

Robert McNamara is the individual who most dramatically fills the role of the man of reason in flamboyant decline. He straddles our era like a colossus, and yet, in any public poll ranking identifiable names, he would be lucky to pick up 1 percent. He is a man who believes in the forces of light and of darkness. A man of honour. He resigned as Johnson's secretary of defense because he felt the Vietnam War was spinning out of control. As head of the World Bank, he attempted to save a desperate Third World by sending a flood of money in its direction. He believes that the application of reason, logic and efficiency will necessarily produce good. And yet his actions have resulted in uncontrollable disasters from which the West has still not recovered.

When Robert McNamara left the presidency of the Ford Motor Company to become John Kennedy's Secretary of Defense in 1961, he was seen to be bringing modern management methods from private industry to government. No one imagined that those methods would turn out to be as disastrous for private industry as for public policy.

McNamara immediately set about reorganizing the Pentagon and the American armed forces. That is, he set about rationalizing them. No doubt he discovered great inefficiency. No doubt he exposed antediluvian methods and situations. He also set in motion three separate processes, the first two of which -- the application of rational business principles to officer training and to arms production -- will be dealt with at greater length in later chapters.

The idea behind training officers as rational executives was to incorporate "a number of business practices and techniques designed to make the Pentagon bureaucracy more "efficient." [4] These apparently worthwhile techniques did far more than that. They revolutionized the American officer corps by introducing, in the words of Richard Gabriel, "the habits, values and practices of the business community." [5] This, in turn, changed the motivation of officers from self-sacrifice to self-interest. The effect was to transform the professional officer into half bureaucrat, half executive. In the process everyone mislaid the basic given of membership in an officer corps: that each individual in order to do his duty is prepared to do the unacceptable -- that is, to die. Getting killed; after all, is not logical, rational, efficient or what a businessman would perceive as being in his personal self-interest.

This restructuring initiated a long period during which the American armed forces have been incapable of winning. Or, to put it another way, capable only of losing. Richard Gabriel, who is becoming the sort of nagging teller of truths to the American army that Basil Liddell Hart was to the British after World War I, explains better than anyone how the army has become a bureaucratic organism incapable of fighting in anything other than a clumsy, heavy-handed manner. The need to overwhelm vastly inferior enemies with sheer mass confirms rather than disproves this.

The second process began by McNamara evolved naturally from the first. As an ex- automobile manufacturer, he noticed that armaments were expensive. Building upon the Henry Ford principle of production-line cost reduction, McNamara concluded that it would be rational to limit armament costs by producing larger runs of each weapon and selling the surplus .abroad. Foreign sales would cover perhaps not all, but at least part of the Pentagon's upfront investment in  R and D, as well as reducing the unit cost of each weapon the United States needed itself. America's allies, in buying these weapons, would also be repaying the United States for some of the protection it provided. Finally, the use of American, weaponry throughout the West would ensure a unity of material, thus facilitating both common action and emergency operational supply needs. Efficiency, return on the dollar, morality and sensible military strategy were all wrapped up together in a neat package.

The United States also happened to be running a three-billion-dollar general trade deficit. Foreign arms sales would be a way to balance the situation.

Thanks to all'this sensible reasoning, the International Logistics Negotiations Organization was created. Its name was a suitably obtuse management formula for the arms-dealing agency of the American government. Before long most other Western countries had followed suit and adopted the same management theories. We were on our way to developing the largest weapons market in the history of the world which, perhaps more significant, is now the largest market of any kind anywhere in the world economy.

The third area which McNamara set out to reorganize was American military strategy. It struck him as both immoral and irrational that Western defense was based on a nuclear deterrent which could only be used in a way that would destroy the earth. This strategy, known as Massive Response, was based upon an all-or-nothing view of nuclear war. If the weapons were to be used, they would be used massively to destroy absolutely the opposing side. Destroying the other side inevitably meant destroying oneself, either because the enemy managed to get off a similar counterattack before expiring or because the quantity of weapons unleashed by one side alone would be enough to make life impossible on earth.

In the absence of such a massive attack, there was no nuclear strategy, no organization; in fact, there were no nuclear weapons of a suitably limited size, equipped with suitably limited delivery systems, to permit any except cataclysmic use. The "rational" use of nuclear weapons was impossible. On the other hand, the door was theoretically open to some sort of accidental unleashing of the apocalypse. From McNamara's rational point of view, this meant that American nuclear superiority "did not translate into usable military power." [6]

He and the American government therefore proposed a new strategy to the NATO allies. It was called Flexible Response. This strategy consisted of neat, more or less parallel lines of in-depth defence, which began at the frontier separating NATO territory from the Soviet bloc. Response to Soviet armies attacking Western Europe would escalate as the lines were crossed, from an initial use of conventional weapons up to battlefield .nuclear weapons. And if the various levels of tactical nuclear weapons failed to stop this advance, the West would resort to the old massive and definitive, cataclysmic intercontinental strategic bombs. The lesser responses were intended to work. Therefore the strategy of Flexible Response lessened the risk of a cataclysm.

Of course, no one else, apart from McNamara and the American government, saw it that way. For Europe the meaning was quite clear: Washington was no longer willing to fight for its allies. Europe would have to be destroyed before the United States made up its mind to intervene seriously.

McNamara simply hadn't focused on the fact that he had drawn his neat, in-depth lines of escalating military response across the real world of Western Europe. Were Dusseldorf, Amsterdam, Bonn, Strasbourg, Paris and Rome in zones one, two, three or four? The flexible, measured, rational response which McNamara was proposing -- or rather, thanks to the controlling superiority of America's leadership, imposing -- was, in fact, a plan for the death and destruction of the people of Western Europe.

The imposition of Flexible Response in 1961 utterly destroyed Europe. an confidence in American leadership. The Allies refused this strategy for NATO, but they knew their refusal was meaningless." It is evident," de Gaulle said in 1963, "that no independence is possible for a country which does not have nuclear weapons, because without them it is forced to rely on a country that does and therefore to accept its policies." [7] However serious the debate within NATO from 1961 to 1967 pretended to be, Flexible Response was effectively the alliance's strategy from the moment the United States announced it. The Germans,  who -- being in the front line of the sacrificial lambs  were most opposed to the strategy, also gave up arguing first, out of fear that further protest would drive Washington into an even greater withdrawal from Europe.

As for the French, Flexible Response made inevitable both their own independent nuclear force and their withdrawal from NATO. When that time came, de Gaulle explained that they could not belong to a "Europe of which the strategy is, within NATO, the American strategy." [8]

The proliferation of nuclear weapons produced by McNamara's rational strategy went far beyond the French force de frappe. In order to meet the new flowchart gradations of a possible military engagement, nuclear weapons and delivery systems of all sorts and sizes had to be developed. And the Soviets· had to match each of them.

The result, apart from an ever-larger number of nuclear weapons developed at great expense, was a far higher risk of nuclear war than under the old strategy. First, there was a higher possibility of error, given that there were now weapons of declining size put more or less in the hands of a whole range of officials and officers of declining rank. There were now, for example, field commanders involved in the use of battlefield nuclear weapons and therefore subject to the risk of error. Second, the moral threshold involved in firing a "small" nuclear device attached to a tank or a cannon is much lower than that involved in releasing an ICBM.

The secondary result of Europe's loss of confidence in America's willingness to respond decisively to all attacks was, of course, a drop in the Soviet fear of a U.S. nuclear reprisal. The risk of the Soviet Union being tempted by military action had therefore risen. This in turn fuelled new military spending on both sides. Finally, continued American military failures added further to the risk." When a nation has a record of successful military operations," Gabriel points out, "the available options of its adversaries are often self- limiting." [9] The failures which so damaged America's credibility were, of course, the product of McNamara's rationalized army.

The practical effect of Flexible Response was exactly the opposite of its theoretical intention, except that it did translate nuclear weapons into a "usable military power," as McNamara put it, and that was the original rational impetus for his reform.

What could be more surprising, therefore, than to find the same McNamara resurfacing in the early 1980s with virginal ingenuity as an opponent of Flexible Response? There he was in 1984 signing an appeal by Western "statesmen" which called for the withdrawal of nuclear battlefield weapons. The document's title had a familiar ring to it -- Managing East-West Conflict. In 1986 McNamara published an entire book devoted to the dismantling of nuclear arsenals. What we lack, he said, is "an agreed conceptual framework for the management of relations with the Soviet Union." Why? "The substantial raising of the nuclear threshold, as was envisioned when Flexible Response was first conceived, has not become reality." What went wrong? he asks. Things were too ad hoc, he replies. The current situation is the "unplanned -- and to me unacceptable -- result of the long series of incremental decisions taken by military and civilian leaders of East and West." [10]

At no point does he mention, or indeed appear conscious, that the present situation of nuclear proliferation and strategic uncertainty is largely of his own creation. Nor does he acknowledge that it was done precisely through the use of advanced planning and management as devised by himself. Nor does he seem to realize that he has travelled in a complete circle.

The movement of history is the great enemy of someone like McNamara. History is linear memory and, as such, beyond organization and indifferent to reason. The characteristic  common to the modern man of reason is this loss of memory; lost or rather, denied as an uncontrollable element. And if it must be remembered, then that evocation of real events is always presented as either quaint or dangerous. The past, when it involves a failed system, disappears from the mind. The past is always ad hoc. The future is always optimistic, because it is available for unencumbered solutioneering. And the present lies helpless beneath his feet, just begging to be managed.

It isn't surprising, therefore, that anything which was not on Robert McNamara's flowchart is not his fault. And none of what has gone wrong appears to have had anything to do with his planning.

In 1991 he proposed that all nuclear weapons should be destroyed, except for a few hundred on either side. These would be monitored by effective mutual policing. But if there were only two hundred missiles on either side, a nuclear war would become a practical possibility simply because people would believe that it could be fought without destroying the world. Policing would be possible. But at such low levels of weaponry, a single, minor deceit by either side would radically alter the strategic balance. And that would make such a deceit very tempting. Today's horrifying mass of weaponry has the peculiar characteristic of making strategic advances almost meaningless. Two thousand weapons on one side versus 1,900 on the other, or even 2,000 versus 1,500 is strategically meaningless. But 300 versus 200 is of capital importance. Even 250 versus 200 would be decisive.

A reduction in the number of nuclear warheads is clearly a good and sensible objective. The last few years have seen some small steps in that direction. These have been presented as major reductions by politicians eager for easy credit. The reality is that they are minor. However, for as long as the reform-minded leadership survives in Moscow, these reductions will continue to grow.

But what would be the advantage to man of actually rendering nuclear war rational? That, of course, is not a question which a man like Robert McNamara could ask. Rational is good. There is nothing more to say. The untouchable simplicity of his advanced logic rarely takes the human factor into consideration. To do so would cause an unprofessional distortion in his conceptual framework.

McNamara resigned for moral reasons, after eight years as secretary of defense, and devoted himself between 1969 and 1981 to a task which suited his vision of public service. His attempt to turn the World Bank into a Western bridge to the Third World could be seen as a personal act of atonement for his years in the Pentagon. There are indications that, in a confused manner, he himself saw the situation that way. It was as if, by shouldering a personal and private blame modelled on the emotive mechanisms of Christian guilt; he was able to avoid questioning his own methods. But this decision to distance himself from a war of which he had come to disapprove was in itself an astonishing act. He had been the most important Vietnam hawk within the administration. He had fought a tough insider's battle to carry the case for war. He had done this in the face of the antiwar advice the President was getting from such people as George Ball, Senator Wayne Morse, Senator Richard Russell, Senator Mike Mansfield, Vice President Hubert Humphrey and Senator William Fulbright. What's more, President Johnson was inexperienced in international affairs and was himself rather soft on the war.

If the fighting was allowed to drag on until America began to rip itself apart, it was in large part because Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara had succeeded in making it his own war. And then. when things didn't work out, he admitted no error and gave no hint of an apology. He simply walked away. More astonishing still, he walked away in protest against a war out of control, as if by that simple act he had washed his hands of it all. He seemed to believe that in this way he had removed himself from the history of the war.

From the Pentagon to the World Bank was only a few city blocks. There he immediately set about trying to do "good." That attempt turned into an international disaster. His central idea was to increase the amount of money committed to the bank so that it could then help countries in need. In order to deliver this help properly, he restructured the bank's methods of evaluation.

This meant creating two new devices -- the Country Program Paper and the annual Country Allocation Exercise. The first "set out a five-year lending program for the Bank's International Development Agency in a given country against a detailed statistical analysis by sector of the country's economy." The second "set targets for the staff for each country and each sector within each country." [11] A truism of all technocrats is that they do not delegate and they are wedded to centralization. McNamara, therefore, oversaw these devices.

In 1973 the oil crisis began the flow of rapidly printed money out of the United States and other Western countries to pay the OPEC producers, who in turn sent it for deposit to the safest places on earth that is, back to the United States, Canada and Western Europe. This printing of money caused inflation. The payments to OPEC caused a trade imbalance. The returning investment from OPEC doubled this imbalance by creating a foreign debt.

The American economy, crippled by inflation, energy costs, and the resulting trade imbalance, was in no shape to make good use of these returning funds. The situation was difficult. McNamara intervened to make it catastrophic. He saw an opportunity, in the growing .mountain of unusable bank deposits, to push the cycle around another time by sending whatever money he could out to the Third World. He cajoled the commercial banks into following suit on the grounds that this influx of capital would create Third World prosperity. That prosperity would create local growth on the Western model and the accompanying needs would push the Third World countries to purchase Western industrial material and consumer goods. This would bring the money back again to the West in the form of a stimulation to production thanks to foreign sales. The depression would thus be ended and the trade balance righted.

Unfortunately, nowhere on McNamara's charts and models were the right questions asked. Is it wise to push fragile agrarian, often tribal, economies down the route of an oil-based, industrial development when there is an energy crisis which has already flattened the far- stronger economies of the West? Do these nations have any energy sources of their own in order to avoid the oil import trap which has done so much harm in the West? Do these new countries have the basic infrastructure to respond rapidly to such artificially induced growth? Should these agrarian societies, lacking in urban middle-class structures, often poor in natural resources, be pushed down this road at all? Does it suit their established economy? Does it suit their society? Wouldn't it be wiser to concentrate on improving their agrarian structure? If they are going to widen the base of their economy, would they not do better to concentrate at first on development which satisfies internal needs, rather than to throw themselves into the expensive, high risk international world of import-export wars?

Most basic of all was the question: what will happen if these massive loans from the West do not provoke Third World prosperity, and the poor nations are therefore unable to repay their debt? No one asked. And no one asked the related question: what will happen if the American and other Western banks, as a result of such a Third World failure, were themselves unable to repay their debts -- that is, to pay their depositors?

In fact, nobody even bothered to program debt figures into the World Bank's World Development Model until 1981. That was almost a decade too late. At first glance such an error seems criminally incompetent. At second glance it is perfectly understandable. Devoid of memory, anchored in the present, inescapably optimistic about the future, rational models always have great difficulty adjusting themselves to simple reality.

The practical effects of McNamara's management were as follows. His centralized, abstract methods destroyed collegiality, whether it be among bank staffs or between the bank and its borrowers or the bank and its clients. At the heart of these methods was "management by fear," [12] a phrase which endlessly recurs as an effect of contemporary organization. His two program devices involved lengthy country and staff reports. These became self-justifying, both on the part of bank staff and of the borrowing countries. Once a five-year program had begun, the bank employee directly responsible became committed to it working. He had, after all, recommended it. That country and that program were his, He adjusted his paperwork to keep the money flowing. Borrowing countries learned to flood the bank with tons of statistics, graphs, and charts to fit every need and keep everyone happy. [13]

In the early 1980s, the Philippine economy, for example, was still getting glowing reports -- "one of the best in the Third World." Everyone was too committed to say what they really thought. At a certain point the debt crisis became so great that the truth could not be avoided. It came out of the blue, in total contradiction to everything that for years had been written inside the bank.

But Third World statistics had been favourably falsified for so long that the true figures seemed as unreal as the old ones. And when the International Monetary Fund (IMF) began to address the growing world crisis by imposing economic remedies of an impossible severity, its attitude was the result of years of statistics which seemed to have no relationship to populations. People hadn't actually prospered when their economies were relaxed and statistically doing well, so why should they actually suffer when the IMF made the same economies meet draconian tests of tight financial management? It could be argued that it has been decades since real people were included as a component in our widely accepted definitions of what an economy is; only the theory of people has been included or the statistical reflection of people.

McNamara is no doubt morally outraged by today's situation. He is the most perfect example of a technocrat holding great power while crippled by a personality cleanly divided between mechanical brilliance at one extreme and childlike idealism at the other, with absolutely no thread of common sense to link the two together.

***

Robert McNamara may be an exceptional example of the rational phenomenon, but he is not an exception to the rule. He is the rule in its most advanced form. Others like him abound in other countries. Edward Heath, for example, had the same unmeasured eagerness, combined with a conviction that systems will do good. The process that McNamara began in the United States, Heath initiated in Britain. His Central Policy Review Staff brought in bright outsiders. He had a planning and priorities style, which sought out methods for policy analysis and review as well as checking for program effectiveness. He, also, seemed unable to link his belief in methods with the actual effect of their application in a real world.

The sight of Edward Heath being ripped apart by the coal miners, during the disastrous strike which destroyed his government, demonstrated the weakness of the new man of reason when he ventures outside the protective defences of the system. And, unlike McNamara, he had been elected to do what he did. So the voters made him pay for his flaws.

Heath's failure is usually dealt with by referring to his brittle character and his overly intellectualized, view of how government worked. Neither comment is inaccurate. What is interesting about Heath is precisely his conviction that people and structures could be made to change radically by the simple act of showing them a better way to do things. It didn't really matter whether the ways he proposed were better. It was his absolute conviction that they were which marked him as an early version of the technocrat with political power.

Robert Armstrong, for a decade secretary of the British Cabinet and head of the Civil Service, is a far more classic example of the rational administrator. From his appointment in 1978 he carefully avoided the technocrat's inferiority in public affairs by staying out of sight while quite naturally combining enormous political power without public responsibility. By background and training he seemed very much an old-style bureaucrat, yet his methods were perfectly modern. He was obsessive about secrecy. He controlled information flows even within the government, thus excluding certain ministers. He was, by nature, a manipulator of men and of structures. As with McNamara, this leadership by manipulation led to a demoralization of the civil service. In descriptions of him, the word courtier seems to appear effortlessly." It is the courtier's role to endure, to appease, to employ guile and stealth, to manipulate power -- always behind the throne -- in such abilities, Armstrong excelled." [14]

On issues that interested him personally, he prevented, as far as possible, proper debate between ministers. The information fed out served only his cause. He didn't appear to believe in anything except the excellence of his own positions, which were determined by the immediate interests of his job combined with a class attitude.

Only with the Westland Helicopter crisis in 1985 did he finally step over the protective barriers of administrative structure in an attempt to protect his employer by managing the public debate. Westland was the last British-owned helicopter manufacturer. An American company wanted to buy it. The Prime Minister and some cabinet ministers were in favour of this sale, while the Secretary of State for Defence preferred a European consortium. What followed was a battle that split the cabinet, the business community and the press, This climaxed with the improper leaking of privileged information which helped the Prime Minister's position. Armstrong was called upon to calm the resulting storm by carrying out an official enquiry into how this information had been leaked. In truth, it's difficult to see how he could not have known the answers before he began. He presented the results of his investigation to the Prime Minister as if she were a distant observer, when there is every indication that Mrs. Thatcher was as involved as anyone else. Finally, he allowed himself to be called before the Commons Select Committee on Defence, The others, who were deeply involved and technically responsible, refused to appear. This turned him, the chief civil servant, into the defender of, and spokesman for, the political authorities. He did this with a Jesuitical splitting of hairs which obscured the truth behind gerunds.

"Perhaps it was his success in manipulating his way through that mess, in order to maintain a veil of unjustified secrecy and thus to save the government, which made Mrs. Thatcher send him off to Australia. Again the issue was secrecy. Again the circumstances required an artificial view of reality. A disgruntled retired British secret agent living in New South Wales had written his memoirs and, in the process, had revealed some of Britain's security methods. By the time Armstrong reached Australia, the contents of the book were already known. There was therefore nothing to be accomplished. However, for the rational, logical minds of Mrs. Thatcher and apparently of her senior civil servant, this public knowledge was merely an intervention by reality. They seemed to believe that by means of a determined legal, technical, and manipulative intervention, reality would be put back in its amateurish place.

However, the moment Armstrong stepped out of his protective cocoon in London, he no longer made any sense. The official view was that he had failed in Australia because it was a rougher sort of place -- less civilized, less liable to give him the deference he deserved. The reality was that the lawyers who badgered him owed him nothing. He had no control over them. No purchase. Nothing to offer or to threaten.

The technocrat outside his own system is like any child outside his own house. In a moment of frustration at his own helplessness, Armstrong let loose his famous phrase, "Economical with the truth." This can be interpreted in many ways, but twist it as you will, those four words remain the perfect epitaph for the rational courtesan.

Of course, there were far purer practitioners in equivalent positions in other countries. One of the most rational was Michael Pitfield; head of the Canadian civil service (clerk of the Privy Council) under Pierre Trudeau almost continually from 1974 to 1982. Pitfield's brilliance got him to university by the age of fourteen and into the most important nonelected government position at thirty-seven. His youth and close links to the prime minister marked him, unfairly, as a partisan appointment. But it was his abstract management style that kept this political reputation alive.

The bureaucracy and the politicians -- not only those in opposition -- felt that there was something seriously wrong with both his methods and his actions. Most of them were singularly ill-prepared to do battle with him, either because of Pitfield's intellectual superiority or because, like McNamara, he was constantly redefining the way things were done. His opponents were therefore unable to find solid and commonly recognized ground upon which they could fight him.

Pitfield believed in what he was doing. He had a moral conviction as to which was the right side of each major question and that side was invariably tied to decency, social justice and the protection of the weak. In all that he resembled McNamara. Even his appearance -- that of a tall, gangly doctoral student -- somehow resembled the American's severe air of an outdated but upright notary.

Pitfield was continually experimenting with the structure of government, attempting to raise efficiency, cause information to flow, force ministers to consider policy options in a rational manner. He experimented so well that the individual ministers were gradually drained of power and kept off balance by the young bureaucrats in his central Privy Council Office. They maintained an atmosphere in which the ministers were constantly frightened of losing their jobs and increasingly in the dark as to what was really going on in the Prime Minister's mind and therefore in the government of which they -- and not the Privy Council boys -- were the responsible officers. Pitfield was certainly the finest practitioner yet seen of that bizarre management method which consists of using massive quantities of information to create confusion which in turn creates ignorance and thus removes power from those who receive the information.

One of the last reorganizations involved unifying two key departments -- External Affairs and Trade. The principle was sound: diplomacy and international commerce were two aspects of foreign policy and therefore ought to be coordinated. The document laying out how the new department would work was brilliant. It read like a coded medieval Masonic plot grafted onto a detective novel and was filled with intricate cross-references between the two sectors -- physical. not intellectual cross-references. In order to do what the organization chart required. an official would have had to think not so much about what his job required of him. as about how to play permanent hopscotch across the board. No one could possibly have had any idea of what he was actually meant to be doing on a practical level. Just keeping up with where one was in the structure and where everyone else was and which parts of what you were responsible for would be a full-time job.

Pitfield's organization was the final nail· in the coffin of Canadian foreign policy. His misunderstanding seemed to be that advanced organization would produce content. If anything, his structures were designed to define all possible activities and therefore,. in their very concept. to discourage nondefined activity. In other words, they were designed  to destroy content.

The public service in Canada had always been much admired by the public, who had seen in it a collection of men and women devoted to just that -- public service. That is, to the protection of the public. Pitfield's inaccessible structures led to the inevitable distancing of the public servant from the public. His admiration for the cool approach and his centralization of the decision-making process added to this distance and laid the foundations for a situation in which the servant would have contempt for his master -- that is, the civil servant for the public. As for the public. it responded with growing distrust and resentment, despite the fact that those same years saw a very real growth in social programs and in the protection of the citizen.

The growing atmosphere of distrust and of fear within the civil service was seized upon by the Conservative government which came to power in 1984. They actively used these elements to demoralize the bureaucracy, whom they perceived as the enemy, and to bully them into doing whatever was wanted. Their assumption -- that the public service was already political and in favour of the opposing side -- freed the new government to politicize it openly, bringing in a large number of partisan outsiders. Thus Pitfield's scientific and idealistic management of what had been, before his arrival, one of the most effective and popular bureaucracies in the developed world resulted in its reduction to a relatively, unpopular political tool for whatever politicians arrived in power.

***

McNamara, Heath and Pitfield seem scarcely to be born of the same egg as a man like Henry Kissinger. Whatever they did, they believed they were doing in the service of the public good. It was their methods and their lack of common sense which played against them. Kissinger used the same methods, but in a consciously cynical way. In their case the means were intended to serve the end. In his case the means served him.

Lermontov, in his poem attacking the men who had destroyed Pushkin, described the classic courtesan at his worst:

You, greedy crew that round the sceptre crawl,
Butchers of freedom, genius, and renown!
Hid by the bulwark of the law, and all --
Law, truth and honour in your steps cast down!

It is a vision which leads temptingly to Henry Kissinger, perhaps the technocratic personality who most neatly fills the traditional role. When Kissinger was playing Iago to President Nixon's Richard III, all the elements proper to a royal drama were present. But Kissinger wasn't simply the paragon of something past. He also used the modern techniques with a determined and narrow genius.

What isn't clear is whether he ever believed that he would be serving the public interest. We don't know what went through his mind during his first months as President Nixon's National Security Council Advisor. Perhaps he underwent a sudden private revelation that he craved power and had the manipulative talents to gain it. Perhaps, in the adrenaline rush of that revelation, he forgot about the nature of public service.

In those early, days he sounded like a prophet of the new way down the golden road to a rational heaven. He wanted men around him who had "addressed themselves to acquiring substantive knowledge" in order to give them an opportunity not only to solve problems but "to contribute to, the definition of goals." [15] They were to make 'up a new class of intellectuals, separate from the lawyers, bureaucrats and businessmen normally found in government.

But the true indicators of what was to come lay in Kissinger's past. His practical, intellectual and political hero had always been Prince Metternich, the man who dominated Europe for thirty-four years after the destruction of Napoleon. Those people in the government. the Congress and the press who ought to have been examining this newcomer's motives simply accepted the Metternich background as a sign of Kissinger's intellectual superiority. None of them questioned why they should be effortlessly seduced into believing that Kissinger was a voice of the future when he based his actions upon those of the most retrograde, hard-line, antireform political leader of the nineteenth century.

After the defeat of Napoleon, Metternich outmanoeuvred everyone in Europe who wanted the sort of humane peace which could absorb the social and political reforms produced by the preceding twenty-five years of revolution. He broke the power of any leader tainted by liberalism or interested in the idea of a fair society. As far as he was concerned, there had never been a French Revolution, Italian republics, elected assemblies or a claim to human rights. He subverted whatever good intentions the various kings of Europe had. He ensured the conversion of, Czar Alexander to unenlightened despotism, thus taking Russia off its Europeanization curve and launching it on the century-long trajectory which produced the explosion of 1917. Above all, he set out to defeat the design of the British Foreign Secretary, Castelreagh, for a European compromise, which, while protecting the monarchies and the form 9f the old order, was designed to integrate many of the reforms of the preceding quarter century. Metternich destroyed that compromise, and it was not attempted again until after 1945.

Having done all this, Metternich set about reconstructing the Europe of the absolute monarchs. The resulting long but unpleasant peace was his success, one that Kissinger greatly admired. The explosions of 1848 were the direct result, rendering inevitable the division of Europe into revolutionaries and conservatives. This artificial schism made it impossible to imagine reasonable, common sense solutions. All was to be a battle of extremes. Marx's convictions about the inescapable struggle of the classes made sense largely thanks to Metternich's Europe. Without stretching the point too far, the unprecedented European violence and bloodletting in the twentieth. century were made inevitable by Metternich's successful application of modern cynicism in a retrograde cause.  This cynicism fed upon the development of artificial divisions between political powers and upon their separation from the more practical interests of the population. Prince Metternich did for the nineteenth century what Ignatius Loyola had done for the sixteenth.

Only now, after two world wars and endless civil wars and revolutions, does Western Europe seem cleansed of his divisive spirit. As for Henry Kissinger, he revised the whole approach and made his own contribution to the Metternich school of political action.

Kissinger believed that the best time to deal with a troublesome area was when a crisis took events out of control. The heat of events -- preferably violent events -- would melt the old political, social and economic constraints which had made the area resistant to change. As these old structures melted in the white heat, Henry Kissinger, "Asbestos Man," would dash into the inferno and construct a completely different building. As Kissinger presented it, he was creating new hope out of old prejudices.

The press was understandably attracted to a man who was not only not frightened by danger but who loved risk and rose happily to the demands of crisis after crisis. More than newsworthy, this sort of action provoked great excitement. He was a front-page editor's dream. Better still, he was a tabloid editor's dream, because he rejected as ineffective the slow, careful building of relationships and development of solutions which were intended to prevent situations getting out of control. Henry Kissinger dealt with events as headlines and was one himself.

But hot moments do. not melt the structures created by time. History has an extremely solid frame built upon profound memory. The flames of crisis create smoke and obscurity. They destroy windows, partitions, even floors. But the structures remain. When they do change, it is either very slowly or as the result of an absolute cataclysm. And even then, memory somehow still resists. To be convinced of this, one has .only to look at France, Germany, Japan and Austria rising out of the disaster of the last war. Solutions imposed artificially in times of trouble leave everyone dissatisfied when calm returns. They are felt as personal aggressions, imposed against the tide of history upon people temporarily too weak to resist. The moment those same people recover, sufficiently to resist, they invariably do -- and often with violence, as in 1848. Or indeed as the Central Europeans did in 1989.

There is something else even more Hawed about Kissinger's white-heat approach. Rousseau wrote in the Social Contract:

Usurpers always choose troubled times to enact, in the atmosphere of general panic. laws which the public would never adopt when passions were cool. One of the surest ways of distinguishing the work of a law giver from that of a tyrant is to note the moment he chooses to give a people its constitution. [16]

Kissinger's instincts for usurpation were revealed soon after his arrival in Washington. A great deal of time could be spent, and indeed has been by others, on his involvement in the Cambodian operation or on his wiretapping interests. But these are secondary to his sense of power --  that is, to his sense of how to gain power through the manipulation of structure.

He began as the National Security Council adviser to the president. That was not a position of remarkable power. It counted for nothing in comparison to the secretary of state, the secretary of defense, or the council itself. And yet, by the end of Kissinger's tenure, it was the most powerful foreign policy-defence position in the United States. He wasn't even a member of the cabinet, responsible for a department legally charged by the American system of government with the administration of foreign or defence policies. He was little more than a creature of the president. Somehow he had got hold of the power.

It wasn't his role as adviser which made this possible, although his talents for courtesanage were remarkable and helped him to deal with a president more susceptible than most to the courtly approach. Kissinger's rise to power lay in his ability to reorganize the structure of government so that the council and the secretaries of state and of defense all became adjuncts to the adviser. In doing so he accomplished something far more serious than any of the Watergate participants. He subverted the American system of government in order to put himself at its centre.

With President Nixon's acquiescence, he minimized the number of meetings the council held, thereby limiting opportunities for real debate in a forum where he was not in charge. Instead he chaired a subcommittee called the Review Group, which included deputy heads from the CIA, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, defense and the secretary of state. They, in turn, referred questions either to junior committees or to the full council.

This managerial power allowed him to control the evolution of all issues. In the absence of full council meetings, he became the voice of the President. The Review Group decided whether issues had been properly prepared by departments and were ready for the council. What's more, his staff inundated the departments with requests for studies and surveys so that they had the impression they were participating in the decision-making process. In reality they were being kept Busy in order to keep them out of the way. And when the council did meet, the President had been prepared to such a point of formality that he often made prepared statements on issues, thus rendering impossible any informal disagreements from cabinet members. And yet, the council's very purpose was the informal discussion of key security issues which, by their importance, stretched beyond single departmental responsibilities. Add to this the enormous briefing books -- constructed to support Kissinger's point of view, but couched in the unassailable guise of a sea of facts -- as well as the council staff, ready with the slightest extra fact or figure, and you have the whole government apparatus unable to move other than as instructed by the president's adviser.

The stultifying effect on practical democracy of the briefing books is an extraordinary modern phenomenon. If facts are knowledge and knowledge is truth, then these binders give a peculiar form of absolute power to those who prepare them. Whoever controls the briefing books controls the debate. The books kill the function of cabinet government, which was intended to make use of collegial common sense. They are one of the central tools of our time, beloved of all technocrats and used as a weapon of power throughout Western society wherever group discussion once played a role -- in cabinets, cabinet committees, interdepartmental committees, corporate boards of directors, executive committees, advisory committees, emergency committees and just plain committees.

Kissinger added to his organizational skills an advanced sense of how to place himself on the trajectory of information in order to become its messenger or its reinterpreter or simply in order to be able to stop it. His need to control the flow of information was tied to an obsession with secrecy and, of course, to a climate of fear which seeped into everyone's life as he ceaselessly manipulated everything within reach.

He had another characteristic often found in courtesans: radical character changes. In public he was, indeed remains, the master of noble logic. The wise statesman:

Last week. I had the privilege of meeting [Japanese] Prime Minister Nakasone.... I said it was quite striking how different the perceptions of security were in Asia from Europe. And he said something to me which he authorized me to quote. He said, 'The difference is the difference between European paintings and Japanese paintings." [17]

In private, however, Kissinger could switch abruptly into a devotee of gutter attacks and ridicule. Thus he insisted off the record that Secretary of State William Rogers was a "fag"; that Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird was a megalomaniac; that Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers, was sexually aberrant. [18] He apparently relished the collecting of FBI reports on the private lives of public figures and the gathering of wiretaps on anyone who was not helpful to his cause.

Kissinger's belief in his ability to control events made him the kind of man who inadvertently unleashes anarchistic events. He believed he could alter the course of history through his modernized application of the Metternich approach. Despite his apparent use of history, however, the disjointedness of his actions reveals his technocratic soul. For example, he decided that the Shah of Iran was America's man in the Mediterranean. He pushed the Shah, already on the road to modernization, to go faster and to arm against the Russians, against Middle East instability, against Libya's Colonel Qaddafi. Although oil rich, Iran had a large population. The Shah spent as he was encouraged to spend but was soon strapped for funds. Kissinger, in one of his moments of brilliant clarity, pushed the Shah to finance his arms, his roads, his modern marvels by raising the oil price. Just a bit. But the oil price rapidly revealed itself to be one of those anarchistic elements. Kissinger reacted along with others, by becoming an advocate of the inflationary route: through inflation America would drown out the impact of the oil price increases. His spokesmen were to be found in meetings around the world, hinting at this miraculous cure, if only everyone would print money and remain calm while inflation digits rose. [19] The floating currencies, the currency wars. (which are still with us). the Shah ever farther out of his depth, indeed on the road to extinction -- all these realities indicate that history continued along its established way after Kissinger had finished temporarily distorting its course.

***

When technocrats are in elective office, their weaknesses take on a different form. They may be masters of artificial self-resuscitation, but they rarely have the characteristics necessary to make themselves believable in the full public light.

Jacques Chirac, for example, although twice prime minister of France, has never been able to shake the image that he has not earned his position. The slightly strained, abstract manner in which he presents his thoughts makes people think he doesn't really think them. They sense that his ambition is not balanced by a belief in any particular idea which justifies him holding public positions.

Twenty years after the event. no one has forgotten the brilliant manipulations with which he swept his political colleagues aside in order to get Valery Giscard into the presidential office and himself, for the first time, into the prime ministership. Sharklike images, of a man ready to betray his friends and his party in order to get ahead, reappear in the public's mind each time he moves into action. And yet he is a man. one senses. who would like to do the right thing. In normal times he administers with a certain straightforward effectiveness. But in any explosive moment, when a real moral sense is required to control the situation, he panics and inevitably chooses the wrong side.

For example, in the week separating the two rounds of voting in the 1988 presidential election. when the polls showed him running seriously behind, he exploded into a myriad of "statesmanlike" actions. He ordered a military attack on nationalists in New Caledonia. The local military advised against it, but the prime minister wished to demonstrate his firm hand. As a result nineteen people were unnecessarily. mowed down, with no possibility of defending themselves, during an  assault on it cave in which they were hiding. He then attempted to demonstrate his humanity and international skills by negotiating the release of French hostages in the Middle East. All he did, in fact, was give in to a number of the kidnappers' demands. It is generally felt that -- in return for a few seconds on the evening news. which showed him at the airport welcoming the freed prisoners' home -- he endangered the lives of other hostages. And, of course, by giving in, he encouraged the kidnappers to Continue kidnapping. Finally, in order to , attract a small group of strong nationalist voters, he turned a commercial disagreement over fisheries with a close ally -- Canada -- into a major diplomatic, almost military, incident.

The French voters, filled with common sense, interpreted these three actions as concrete proof that this man was not presidential material. Not only did Chirac's mistakes cost him in the final round of voting, they also cost his party in the subsequent legislative elections. There should be no doubt about the public's ability to make the right choices when presented with clear alternatives. The point is that the new technocratic leadership usually manages to distort the nature and value of that choice.

Chirac's tendency to misfire spectacularly in public makes him appear to be the opposite of a man like Henry Kissinger, Not really. Both of them have technical skills. Both of them have great ambition. Both of them lack moral common sense. Kissinger fills this void with carefully measured cynicism.

Alone among the first generations of elected technocrats, Harold Wilson succeeded politically. Perhaps this was because he combined acting skills with the cynicism and the ambition of a Kissinger. And he knew how to mix them in the right quantities. Rather like Kissinger, he did not use his understanding of contemporary systems to carryon a modernization crusade. He merely sought power within them through the art of manipulation. After several years of governing the country, he had created an atmosphere of effortless acceptance -- acceptance, that is, that nothing disinterested or medium term, let alone long term, was possible when it came to public affairs. Only the crisis of the hour counted -- the latest wage dispute, the next run on the pound. A technocrat devoid of beliefs -- even misguided beliefs -- is little more than a card sharp, moving his attention from hand to hand. No action of Wilson's could be clearly identified as having involved wrongdoing, because the sense of what was right and normal had been lost.

In that atmosphere even the normally elastic standards of truth in politics had been strained. For example, he carried on a crusade against white Rhodesia by maintaining a British-government-controlled economic blockade. This also involved subjecting the world to idealistic rhetoric about racial justice and equality. At the same time he was fully aware that the British-government-controlled oil company was supplying energy to the Salisbury regime.

Even if the question of morality is put aside, can he really have imagined that the truth would not come out? In the context of the technocratic mind, truth, like history and events, is what suits the interests of the system or the game plan of the man in charge. Truth is an intellectual abstraction, and a man like Harold Wilson felt himself in control of the definitions.

This peculiar view of reality, being independent of both established practices and current events, was further illustrated by his attitude towards the press. He used the media in order to portray himself as a man of the people, but when it came to the exercise of journalistic freedom, he used the full weight of his prime ministerial power and of legal threats to keep the media from attacking him. If, during a television interview, he sensed that things were getting out of hand, he was perfectly capable of having the cameras stopped in order to threaten legal action of the most menacing kind against the producers and interviewers who, after all, had to earn a living.

Harold Wilson's long reign as prime minister was neither historic nor dramatic, except in the sense of theatre farce. There was a drama a day, but to no particular purpose. Instead the atmosphere surrounding government was seedy.  He sought power, played the system like an ordinary fiddle in a provincial orchestra, and then went away to the House of Lords. Only the fact that the system had been played rather than the country governed makes him interesting.

A much more extraordinary example of the early elected technocrat was the man Jacques Chirac helped to make president of France --  Valery Giscard or Giscard d'Estaing, if one takes into account his father's purchase of someone else's name in order to give his family the appearance of an aristocratic background. As the most hopeless of the' group, Giscard reveals a great deal about the technocrat and about power.

He is a man of limited intelligence from a highly ambitious nouveau riche family. which was Petainist during the last war. Giscard was raised to fulfill the family's destiny. He graduated from ENA in 1954 in his late thirties and set about becoming an important man. The talent with which he was born was the ability to move numbers about -- an accountant's talent -- which he combined with enormous self-assurance. This self- ssurance could be, and often was, put down to a class mannerism. In fact, it was the assurance of the technocrat, who begins all encounters by defining the meeting in his own terms. Giscard's unusual talent was his ability to define absolutely everything in his own terms -- from the world and France to individual problems.

His abstract financial talents, when added to his family's concrete financial backing, helped to make him a young minister of finance. There he appeared to be the first of the new breed of modern men. His ministerial responsibilities were relatively easy because Western economies were benefitting from an extended period of expansion. On top of this, Charles de Gaulle was giving the government creative and directed leadership, helped along by a number of inventive ministers who were provoking real growth. Giscard's job was to be the government's stick-in-the-mud. It was a negative, passive role, devoid of creativity and of leadership requirements.

Everyone else in the cabinet being a bit wild, Giscard's passive negativism was useful. He played the same role for a decade in an increasingly stable situation. When Georges Pompidou replaced de Gaulle, the relationship remained unchanged.

It was only after Pompidou had died in office and Giscard had become a presidential candidate that his character began to reveal itself. He started his campaign with a little administrative trick to destroy his Gaullist rival -- Jacques Chaban-Delmas. Somehow Chaban's tax return was leaked to the press. Giscard, of course, was minister of finance -- the man responsible for tax returns. Chaban had done nothing wrong, but he hadn't paid much tax. The returns of rich people under current tax systems throughout the West are invariably a shock. Giscard's own would probably have been far more shocking, but the minister of finance didn't leak his own.

This tax return was central to Giscard's presentation of Chaban as a tired, corrupt, old figure of the Right, while presenting himself as a liberal, ready to build the future. Technocratic skills were then considered synonyms for open, liberal attitudes. In reality there was nothing whatsoever in Giscard's record as minister of finance to indicate that he was a liberal. He had always been the conservative voice to the sometimes Jacobin, sometimes Girondin, Gaullist governments. Chaban, on the other hand, had been the most radical, socially conscious prime minister of the Fifth Republic.

Giscard's betrayal of Chaban was accompanied by Chirac's. In order to advance himself, the young cabinet minister provoked division within the Gaullist party and then delivered his part of it to Giscard. As a result It seemed as if all the young technocrats were rallying to Giscard.

This wasn't true. If you looked around the French administration, you discovered that Giscard had few friends. He was a solitary, isolated, ambitious number cruncher. All the interesting men in the civil service -- the thinkers, the policymakers, the doers -- were for Chaban or for the Socialist candidate, Francois Mitterrand. Chirac was simply after power and he got it. Giscard, once elected, rewarded the young man's betrayal of his friends by making him prime minister.

The squeezing of Chaban by Giscard and Chirac was a classic battle between the new men of power at their worst and the old at their best. Chaban was no doubt a bit of a rogue. But he was also a Resistance hero, someone who had chosen the defeated side early in World War II, when it seemed to have no hope of recovering. Thus, he had opted not to seek power but to support the better values in society. Chaban, when named prime minister, had seized the reins of power and begun active reforms. And yet it was Giscard and Chirac who, in presenting themselves during the presidential elections as new, rational and efficient, argued that they were the men of reform. In truth they didn't really know what to do with the political power once they had it. But in the battle between the flawed reality of Chaban's good policies and the illusory image of Giscard's and Chirac's modernism, it was the illusory image which won.

The moment the 1974 election was over, Giscard began lurching from one ridiculous gesture to another. Garbagemen were invited for breakfast at the Elysee Palace. On the other hand, at official dinners, he and his wife insisted on being served first, as if they were royalty of the ancien regime. Two elderly women who had done a great deal of voluntary work for good causes were invited to the palace for tea. They were given tea on their own, alone in a large salon, then led to a grander room, where Giscard was waiting to greet them. He was seated upon a large chair, as if upon a throne, and greeted them sitting down. There is an endless supply of similar stories.

At the same time Giscard's economic judgments were hopeless. He was the first Western leader, long before Reagan and Thatcher, to try to strangle inflation with high interest rates, thus causing bankruptcies and unemployment. Again and again he went before the public and explained with his absolute self-assurance that the problems were specific and temporary, when they were in reality general and long term. He was the first of the Western leaders to generalize the technician's view that the public ought never to be told the real economic situation, that they were not capable of understanding or helping.

In fact he very rapidly ceded to the evidence of his own incompetence by changing prime ministers. Chirac's replacement was Raymond Barre, an economist. Thus, before half his seven-year term was up, Giscard surrendered control over the very area which he had convinced the public would make him a good president.

The people now sensed that they had made a fundamental error, but they couldn't quite understand what it was. Since the modern definition of intelligence was an apparent form of technocracy, they did not have the language to say that Giscard was stupid or, to put it politely, that he had a narrow, limited sort of intelligence. He was defeated in the next presidential election in good part because the public had decided that he was intelligent but silly (his social pretensions) and dishonest (the diamonds which he had accepted from President/Emperor Bokassa of the Central African Republic). He was probably these things as well, but primarily his problem was a lack of usable intelligence. In 1991 his .career came full circle when he took advantage of rising intolerance, over the number of nonwhite immigrants in France, to announce a policy which could be described as based on race. His father, the Petainist, would have been proud.

***

Finally, James Baker and Simon Reisman -- both of whom belong to this same class but are quite different in their methods. Their conflict ended in a victory for indirection and it highlighted which characteristics give the modern technocrat an advantage in the use of power and which, being confused with those of public man, in fact weaken him. Simon Reisman, a product of the depression, rose to become deputy minister of finance in Ottawa, resigned to become a lobbyist for major corporations, then returned to government to negotiate the United States-Canada trade pact in the late 1980s. There he came up against James Baker, who was .then secretary of the treasury and whose career had been built in the shadow of George Bush. Baker is in .many ways the inheritor of the Kissinger method. He, better than Kissinger, seems to understand the Metternich principles of control and management at all times. One of the things which makes him superior to Kissinger in these situations is that he knows how to restrain his own ego.

Reisman, on the other hand, suffered from the worst possible of the technocrats' flaws. Whatever the issue at stake, his ego strode before him. This made him a boisterous and bullying but ineffective negotiator. Earlier in his career Reisman's flaws had appeared to be strengths. While the old-style public servants had exercised a certain reserve, Reisman seemed to be permanently throwing tantrums and shouting at people. In this way he passed for a man eager to get things done. His constant bullying seemed to indicate intellectual superiority.

By the time there was enough evidence on which to doubt his intelligence and indeed to question his emotional equilibrium, the system already had him on the fast track. And a single success in the mid-sixties -- the United States-Canada Automobile Pact -- which he claimed was his own invention, became the concrete proof that he was a competent policymaker and administrator. In reality, he was a rabble-rouser for conventional wisdom, not intellectually strong enough to break away from the standard line of the economists.

Reisman was soon one of the pivotal deputy ministers and able to unleash fully his methods. With senior Japanese businessmen in his office, he is said to have phoned someone else and shouted down the line - ''I've got these goddamned Japs in here who want a lower tariff!" During a session with trade negotiators from the EEC in the late 1960s, Reisman suddenly began to bully them as he might his subordinates. When this didn't work, he swore at them. Within moments he had slipped into a screaming tantrum. The result was that Canada made enemies for nothing. The technocrat's power, after all, is limited to the system he dominates. [20]

While his energy and the fear he generated made his departments work, Reisman's obsession with power led him to undermine his effectiveness on the larger front. He constantly denigrated the other deputy ministers. Later, when he was at the summit of his powers. he managed to defeat a proposal for a guaranteed annual income, which an important part of the Cabinet favoured. Reisman boasted openly that he alone had blocked the people's elected representatives. When he resigned early in 1974 as deputy minister of finance, it was to create a lobbying company designed to serve precisely those interests he had been responsible for controlling as a public servant. The protests were so great that they led to strict new government regulations on civil servants and conflict of interest. These seemed to have little effect.

Reisman's reputation as a tough negotiator and his support for free trade with the United States persuaded the Canadian government to call on him to lead its team during the United States-Canada trade pact negotiations. Both sides knew that the results would alter profoundly North America's political and economic makeup. It was then that all his theoretical strengths revealed themselves as weaknesses.

He put together a relatively small team, cut off from well-organized support in the civil service. His aggressive leading from the front, in the manner of an old-fashioned cavalry general with quick spurs and a slow brain, undermined any hope of teamwork. All rested on his legendary powers as a tough negotiator. Washington played to this weakness by putting forward an unknown, quiet chief negotiator. Reisman saw this as an insult to his reputation and powers. He was drawn on to ever more egotistical, headline-oriented behaviour. Meanwhile, the American negotiator was quietly fronting for an enormous, invisible team in Washington. which was highly organized, highly professional, and walking away with the advantage on most key points. Out of sight and seemingly indifferent sat James Baker, perfectly in control.

Like Reisman, Kissinger and Chirac, Baker, without any accompanying moral purpose or devotion to ideas, is driven by a voracious taste for power and a profound hatred of losing. Unlike them, however, he is a master of the invisible manipulation which allows a systems man to make full use of the power he accumulates.

He mistrusts solutions offered in a loud voice and has no respect for those who offer them. [21] His negotiating methods are perfectly clear, in his own words:

The trick is getting them where you want them, on your terms. Then you have the options. Pull the trigger or don't. It doesn't matter once you've got them where you want them. The important thing is knowing that it's in your hands, that you can do whatever you determine is in your interest to do. [22]

That is Baker's description of how to kill a wild turkey. As Reisman stubbed out his cigar on the negotiating table and shouted and swore, the American secretary of the treasury can only have seen him as yet another bird, drawn to the feeding trough and prancing about nervously as the emotions associated with hunger are increasingly confused with those of danger. In the final, apparently desperate days of negotiation, Baker suddenly emerged, as if noticing for the first time that something was going on, and drew the confused Canadians into his office, where he fired the mortal shot. They died happily because they were concentrated on the trough when the bullet entered their collective brain.

Baker's first appearances as President Bush's secretary of state, however, were unimpressive. He and the President flung themselves into a series of foreign trips, which infuriated America's allies. Political observers began to mumble that he was no good outside the Washington system, where he had everyone under his spell. But Baker learns fast and within weeks he had withdrawn back into his old turkey-hunting stance. In no time at all he began to get the hang of international political games.

That he was capable of international manipulation on the Metternich level had been clear since his 1985 negotiation of the Plaza agreement, which was designed to deal with the then declining dollar. This required the unwilling cooperation of the President and of Donald Regan, who was both the ex-secretary of the treasury and the then presidential chief of staff. But it also required the cooperation of the other Western governments, who had a great deal to lose. Baker played them off against each other with such smooth and confident moves that they were never able to mount an organized counterargument. But a truly superior systems man can operate anywhere if he is careful to first get a handle on the structure into which he is venturing.

Baker quickly grasped the international mechanisms. He handled his home ground with great skill, slipping pieces of information into the public domain as he felt appropriate, but otherwise playing a hand which was often described as tight or disciplined. Quite simply, he functioned best in secret. He used the professionals of the State Department, but primarily as a source of information. He made Policy in a closed circle which consisted of four advisers.

The problem was that he appeared to have no particular set of values. Therefore, to make policy in isolation is to do so without direction or intent. And so his sophisticated methods were to little avail when applied against people who have an integrated view of what they want. In the months preceding and following Iraq's occupation of Kuwait, Baker was unable to make his skills work for him. In spite of unprecedented support in the international community, including the Islamic countries, his initiatives were ineffective. A disinterested look at the diplomatic configuration suggests that all the elements were there for a negotiated settlement, including enough time to put it together. Adequate time in an international crisis is a rare advantage for those who want a settlement. And yet the end result was a war with an unsatisfactory conclusion.

***

These rapid and incomplete portraits of complex men are concentrated on the common strains running through those who have been in charge of the Western world for the last few decades. Modern men of power come in many apparently different forms. But certain characteristics link them. First, a great difficulty in coming to terms with the democratic process. The talents of the technocrat do not suit public debate or an open relationship with the people. They become aloof in order to hide contempt; or ridiculously friendly, as if the people were idiots or simply confused. Their innate talents lead them in other directions. They are masters of structure, of backstairs battles, of prestructuring or withholding information. They are merchants of knowledge, selling it in return for power. They set enormous value upon secrecy.

Intentionally or otherwise, their methods induce fear among those  who must deal regularly with them. Almost without exception they are bullies. Primarily this appears to be intellectual intimidation. Combined with the use of secrecy arid systems manipulation, it is used to frighten people on the practical level of their incomes, pensions, and careers. In many cases, this degenerates into nasty, personal, off-the-record attacks. Others will make them on-the-record as ,a shock tactic. It therefore isn't surprising that these men are rarely surrounded or helped by friends. They are usually solitary beings, floating through the structures of the state in the manner of McNamara and Giscard. Or they attach themselves to a. single public figure, a front man, as Kissinger did or Pitfield or Baker.

In many ways they resemble the Chinese eunuchs at their worst. The modern eunuch keeps his testicles, but seems to suffer from the same effects of isolation. Perhaps castration is as much a state of mind as a  physical fact. The technocrats suffer from character defects which have to do with their inability to maintain any links between reason, common sense and morality. They believe themselves to be the inheritors of the Age of Reason and therefore do not understand why their talents fail to produce the intended results. Their abstract view of the machinery of human society prevents them from understanding the natural How of events and from remembering when they themselves have erred and why.

That is to say they don't seem to understand the historical process. Instead. they seem actually to believe that their definitions of the world will become both real and permanent simply because they are the result of applied logic. When these formulae refuse to stick, the technocratic mind, rather than deal with failure, simply wipes the slate clean and writes a new definition. They are, in that sense, slaves of dogma. At the same time they tend to avoid the maintenance of linear memory. An accurate picture of recent events would prevent the constant reorganizations which they use as a means of erasing the past and justifying current actions.

Their talents have become the modern definition of intelligence. It is an extremely narrow definition and it eliminates a large part of both the human experience and the human character. Suffice it to say that under the current definition of intelligence, Socrates, Byron, Jefferson, Washington, Churchill, Dickens, Joseph Conrad, John A. Macdonald and Georges Clemenceau would have been unintelligent or eccentric or romantic or unreliable.

The technocrats are hedonists of power. Their obsession with structures and their inability or unwillingness to link these to the public good make this power an abstract force -- a force that works, more often than not, at cross-purposes to the real needs of a painfully real world.

Go to Next Page