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

5. Voltaire's Children

Between the newly ordained Jesuit, the young Marxist, the fresh staff officer, Enarque or MBA, there is no appreciable difference. All five are dominated by method and each of their methods arises from a common source. Appearances suggest that there must be some serious differences among them, since they regularly do battle with each other on behalf of their countries or professions. The differences must lie, therefore, in the content which they subject to their universal method. Or perhaps their rivalry is the result of their respective interests which, if the ferocity of their battles tells us anything; differ greatly.

Yet when you examine these differences or the content involved or even their respective interests, you search in vain for any remarkable contradictions. All that separates them are the positions they occupy. They defend the structural interests assigned to them by their system. And even then, if you remove the screen of ideology, the ends they seek are pretty much of a kind.

At first glance this seems to be good news -- proof that rational structures and the resulting education have broken down the barriers of narrow nationalism. Here are indications of an international order uniting all modern elites.

But has this rational education system produced the elites imagined by the philosophers of reason? Are they children Voltaire would recognize? Men like McNamara and Chirac are famous alumni, but are they really fair examples? The way' to answer these questions is to compare the original intent of rational education with that of its contemporary descendant. If, for example, our elites seem to be trained with methods and intentions which betray Western civilization's declared values, perhaps it is because the original creators of those values misunderstood what they were dealing With. If we are producing elites which serve neither. our needs nor our desires, perhaps the problem is that our expectations have always been ill founded. Perhaps these elites are the perfectly logical products of a rational society.

A unified Western elite, using a single system of reasoning, was precisely what Loyola set out to create in 1539. Thanks to his extraordinary invention, the Jesuits constituted the first international intellectual system. And yet, in the few years between the creation of the order and Loyola's death, the unfortunate reality of his invention clarified itself. The Jesuits rapidly became either the tools of local interests or simply replaced them. Within forty years the modern method, although remaining profoundly international, had linked itself inextricably to nationalism.

The second half of the twentieth century has marked the apotheosis of that original marriage. Systems dominate everywhere, as do the systems men. At the same time nationalism has never been so strong, so much an end in itself.

Americans have become obsessed by the state of the United States and with the American dream and why it doesn't seem to work. The Western Europeans have turned in upon themselves. The purpose of their supranational body is largely to deal with the disorder of nationalist forces elsewhere, including the growing nationalism of the United States. The Third World is made up of a hundred or so new nations, just starting down the long, complicated trail of the national dream. The Soviet abstraction has inadvertently loosed its multitude of nationalisms in a dangerous and unpredictable way. And five nations in Central Europe, which had struggled unsuccessfully through much of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to establish rational, tribal identities, are now desperately trying yet again to rev up their dreams. In other words, despite the internationalist rhetoric which is so fashionable, we are now at the beginning of the most nationalist era the world has known.

The simple fact of belonging to what the Romans would have called a tribe -- although what we have today are increasingly intellectual and political constructions which simulate tribalism -- now gives legitimacy and justifies action. The national unit has become the ultimate tool of the modern manager and of his system.

And yet these men and, increasingly, women are Voltaire's children. They are the product of his attack on a corrupt society propped up by superstition, elaborate formality and the use of unlimited power. He had concentrated his criticism on the old elites and called for new, rational leaders who could see through the facade of eighteenth-century society. His ideal man of reason knew. And what he knew, he processed through morality and common sense.

The technocrat of today knows something. But his means of processing uses neither morality nor common sense. The differences between the imagined modern man of reason and the real thing can be found in his very name -- technocrat.

Technology is a relatively new word, combining the Greek techne (skill, metier) with logos (knowledge). The skill of knowledge. But the noun technocrat has a very different meaning. Techne is, in this case, attached to kratos (strength, power). The technocrat's skill lies in his exercise of power. The skill of power. His is an abstract profession involving only narrow bands of knowledge. He hires himself out as a mercenary to organizations that control wider bands of knowledge and create, serve or sell. In other words he hires himself out in order to assume other people's power.

Voltaire used to ridicule the elite of his day by pointing out that, apart from their titles and their money, they were pitifully ignorant. They simply bought knowledge and advice -- whether financial, architectural, ministerial, artistic or military. The elite's ignorance was so profound that it made them incapable of leading. Voltaire was not arguing that in order to lead or to assume responsibility you must be the perfect Renaissance man. But there was a need for general and perhaps for in-depth knowledge in some direction. And on that foundation there was a need to be interested in the ideas and creations of one's time. To read, to think, to ask questions, and to talk in wide circles, well beyond any particular competence. To look upon society as an organic, living thing.

The technocrats of our day make the old aristocratic leaders seem profound and civilized by comparison. The technocrat has been actively -- indeed, intensely -- trained. But by any standard comprehensible within the tradition of Western civilization, he is virtually illiterate. One of the reasons that he is unable to recognize the necessary relationship between power and morality is that moral traditions are the product of civilization and he has little knowledge of his own civilization.

Literacy is only defined as the ability to read because the assumption of Western civilization is that man wishes to read in order to participate fully in that civilization. Literacy refers to civilization as a shared experience. One of the signs of a dying civilization is that its language breaks down into exclusive dialects which prevent communication. A growing, healthy civilization uses language as a daily tool to keep the machinery of society moving. The role of responsible, literate elites is to  aid and abet that communication.

What then is to be thought of elites who seek above all to develop private dialects? Who seek to communicate as little as possible? Who actively discourage the general population from understanding them? They are proponents of illiteracy.

What is to be thought of doctors, earning several hundred thousand dollars a year, whose annual reading is at best made up of two or three formula thrillers? Whose political understanding is limited to a schematic view of Capitalism versus Socialism? Who, by virtue of their profession's internal class system, are increasingly rewarded and ad- mired as their knowledge of medicine narrows? In the nineteenth century, doctors were at the centre of political, social and cultural change. Today, a doctor tends to reach her summit when her view of the human body consciously limits itself to a single organ. Is this woman not illiterate?

What of a full professor of English literature who views fiction as an exercise separate from society? Who encourages such ideas as deconstructionism, which render literature inaccessible except to the most intimately initiated? Who seeks to destroy the great populist tradition of literature as a weapon used in the forefront of social change? Who recognizes in modern literature only those forms incomprehensible to the outsider? Who recognizes as proper subjects for literature only subjects distant from the world of the citizen? And in the process, who becomes himself incapable of understanding the movements of the outer world? Is he any more literate than, say, a small farmer who cannot read but who has an immediate and real understanding of the world about him?

What of the banker or economist, called upon to make real decisions about the evolution of his society's economy in a time of instability and inflation, who either has never heard of John Law or has endeavoured to forget who he was and what he did? He probably thinks even less about the nineteenth-century railway "bubbles" or the crash of the 1880s. What does it mean when he talks seriously '"f the catastrophe which awaits if debts are forgiven, given that he doesn't know that the entire strength and civilization of Athens -- upon which we still model Western civilization -- was created through Solon's wiping out of all crippling loans? Or indeed that America's economic strength in the twentieth century was in great part the result of constant financial defaultings during the nineteenth?

None of this is illiteracy as we normally understand it. Nor is it functional illiteracy. Perhaps the right term is willful illiteracy. It isn't surprising that the modern manager has difficulty leading steadily in a specific direction over a long period of time, He has no idea where we are or where we've come from. What's more, he doesn't want to know, because that kind of knowledge hampers his kind of action.

Instead he has learned to disguise this inner void in ways which create a false impression of wisdom. Voltaire had a genius for deflating the credibility and thus destroying the legitimacy of established power. His weapon was words so simple that anyone could understand and repeat them. Genius, unfortunately, is something which can't be passed On. Voltaire did however introduce an auxiliary weapon which was perfectly transferable. Scepticism. It was a useful tool when applying common sense to the unexplainable mysteries of established power. Scepticism was something that most men of average intelligence could handle. It was to become the great shared tool of the new rational elites.

But it is virtually impossible to maintain healthy scepticism when power is in your hands. To do so would require living in a state of constant personal conflict between belief in your public responsibilities and self-doubt over your ability to discharge them. Instead the new elites rolled these two elements together into a world-weary version of scepticism, which is what we know as cynicism. It involves a restrained contempt for both themselves and the public. To this was attached the elite's assumption -- often justified -- that whatever was done would be in the public's best interests.

And therein lay the tragedy of the new elites. The heart of reason is logic, but Voltaire had imagined this logic well anchored in common sense. He had seen reason as logic used reasonably. Scepticism had seemed to be no more than a complementary device. But cynicism was quite another matter. It severed the lines holding logic to common sense and suddenly logic was again adrift, as it had been under the old regimes -- free to be blindly self-justifying or violently efficient or whatever suited the unfolding argument.

At least one thing is clear about the modern elites. They are truly international. But the curious self-deceptions of contemporary nationalism include the pretence that this isn't so. It seems to suit the national unit to believe that all characteristics tied to leadership are proper to the genius of the unit. No doubt it also suits the elites. If they are a manifestation of the national tribe, they are legitimate elites. Thus, never is the Enarque of one country compared with the MBA of another or the Marxist of a third. And since being a "professional" is one of the central values of our time, everyone is careful not to compare professions. The staff officer is never compared to the Jesuit or to the technocrat or to the manager. And yet, five minutes of conversation with any one of the above could be transformed into a conversation with any of the others by the simple device of interchanging their "professional" vocabulary.

This obsession with the particularity of the various professional groups is so strong that even when people wish to criticize their elites they cannot. There is no language available for outsiders who wish to criticize intelligently. The references to each profession are almost exclusively internal. In many ways the differences between various languages today are less profound than the differences between the professional dialects within each language. Any reasonably diligent person can learn one or two extra tongues. But the dialect of the accountant, doctor, political scientist, economist, literary historian or bureaucrat is available only to those who become one. This self-protective, self-satisfied provincialism resembles, if anything, the dialect and mannerisms of declining aristocracies.

***

The eighteenth-century rationalists would not be happy about the human product of their educational initiatives. Nor, for that matter, would Ignatius Loyola. And yet the lines of evolution are clear.

Loyola's intellectual church army had a dramatic air about it during the disorders and violent times of the Counter-Reformation: But the heart of his concept was an extremely modern and undramatic military structure. It had nothing to do with either the knight-errant tradition or personal valor. Instead his concept used the professionalism of the mercenary armies which were so prevalent in his time. Loyola converted this into modern professionalism.

He gave the Jesuits a highly centralized and autocratic structure. The general was elected for life. He in turn had absolute power to appoint the next level of leadership, the provincials. But Loyola's model went far beyond military autocracy. He introduced two revolutionary elements -- a new kind of education. and accounting for oneself regularly to superiors. The institutionalization of the second prolonged the effects of the first throughout the Jesuits' life. Absolute obedience lay at the heart of both the education and the accounting. Loyola's definition of obedience included the following:

More easily may we suffer ourselves to be surpassed by other religious Orders in fasting, watching and other austerities ... but in true and perfect obedience and the abnegation of our will and judgement, I greatly desire that those who serve God in this society should be conspicuous.

Abnegation of will and judgment were at the core of the new method. They have travelled unaltered through the last four centuries and now determine the shape of our contemporary elites.

Loyola's new style of obedience was induced by rigorous training, which began with a two- year novitiate. One year would have been normal. The purpose of these twenty-four months was to dismantle a young man's will into its component parts in order to isolate within those parts anything undesirable. The idea was not to change the man's ideas or beliefs but simply to eliminate the troublesome elements. The training then went on to purify what was adaptable and useful and to cement it all back together with the structure of the Society.

Dismantle. Clean and disinfect. Reassemble with the glue of the Society -- its structures, rules and habits. The final product was then costumed in the ideology of the Kingdom of God. [1]

Ten to fifteen years of intense training followed. Long periods of learning, of pure spiritual discipline, of teaching, and of being tested in action succeeded each other as the Society observed and gradually decided whether the candidate was suitable for full membership.

The whole process was carefully and discreetly controlled through private interviews between the superior and the candidate. These were "the Accountings of the conscience." As always with Loyola, concepts of morality were submitted to rules of measurement. The idea of subjecting a man's conscience to a profit-and-loss examination, in which fault and blame were consciously sought out, was revolutionary. The mutual understanding, which these accountings established between the new priest and the Society, as to the nature of real power, was then maintained through the regular writing of reports by each Jesuit to his superior. These reports dealt with his work but also with his fellow Jesuits. Thus, reporting on other priests was placed in the context of group interests.

No detail was too small to be communicated. Meals. Sleep habits. Loyola spoke, almost seriously, of counting and reporting fleabites. This appeared to be paternalism. 1t was gradually formalized as part of the system, part of the Jesuits' obedience or professionalism. Observers called it despotism of the soul. And certainly there was nowhere left for individual characteristics to hide. The best modern term for this process might be depersonalization.

At first glance Jesuit training seems to resemble our contemporary brainwashing or reeducation methods. Modern interrogations and indoctrinations do not use violence or even the threat of violence. They concentrate on dismantling and disinfecting the mind of the victim before reassembling it in a different pattern. As for the Jesuit accountings and reportings, they appear to be the originals of the twentieth century's systems of social control through anonymous informants -- systems we tend to identify with repressive societies, secret services and ministries of the interior.

If this unprecedented training and shaping of individuals produced the dominant intellectual force in Europe, it was in part because the Jesuits provided the most complete education. Loyola and the other founders had at once begun to analyze the best existing universities Catholic and Protestant. That done, they set up their own colleges based on the latest methods and knowledge. And then they observed and experimented for forty years until, in 1599, they finalized their official Ratio Studiorum, or "study plan." If the system and the message were removed, what remained was a remarkable education. Francis Bacon himself couldn't help admiring their work, once he had set aside the message. In no time at all they were educating not only future Jesuits but the elites of Europe. This infuriated other orders and the political authorities. Jesuit control over the intellect and emotions of future civil leadership was an integral part of the Society's complex politicking -- a natural extension of their influence over governments.

It is no accident that Richelieu and Descartes came through their system, any more than. Voltaire and Diderot. But resistance to both the implicit message it contained and to the Society's political manipulations began to grow. Moreover, once the Ratio Studiorum had been formalized, the whole system stopped evolving. It was as if a highly effective machine were functioning without reference to reality. This disconnection became obvious in 1755 after the Lisbon earthquake. It was a leading Jesuit -- Gabriele Malagrida -- who launched the argument that this massive and indiscriminate death and destruction was a judgment from God. Popular reaction was the exact opposite to what he had intended.

The practical manifestation of the Jesuits' failure to keep up with social evolution was that new rational schools began to appear in the eighteenth century -- schools more clearly tied to national interests and to separate, concrete definitions of professionalism. They dropped the Society's message and a good part of its humanist education. They kept the astonishing methodology and applied it to such institutions as military staff colleges and engineering schools. By the middle of the nineteenth century, these were proliferating into administrative schools -- first aimed at public service, then at business. As the obsession with professionalism grew, so the focus narrowed and the actual educational content shrank still further. The jesuitical concept of obedience also disappeared, but the new professionalism manifested itself by concentrating on such things as structure, accounting, reporting, manoeuvring and mastery of detail, all of which could be summarized as an unconscious and undirected version of Loyola's "abnegation of will and judgement."

To those on the outside, the most visible sign that someone had received Jesuit training was his ability to outargue anyone. This weapon of "argument" has also been adopted by our elites. The Jesuits called it "rhetoric." To outsiders it appeared to be a pompous style of formal address. Given our informal era, it seems to have been buried with the past. Its formality, however, was merely its public disguise. Rhetoric was more than modern. It was revolutionary. And it is still very much with us.

Rhetoric began to overwhelm the Jesuits even before Loyola died -- not because he sought it, but because it was the logical and inevitable extension of his own system, which called for priests to reason with the people. Clearly, to "reason" did not mean to enter into dialogue or to discuss or to explore. It meant to convince. That is to say, to argue in a manner which controlled the exchange and automatically resulted in the victory of the initiator. By reason he meant a predefined argument in which the people's questions and answers would inescapably lead them to accept the pope's authority. Everything lay in the advance definition of the form of the interchange between the priest and the individual. Rhetoric was the science of that form. Elegant phrasing was merely the decoration of the argument and, as such, distracted individuals from how the nuts and bolts of their interchange had been rigorously denaturalized and predetermined.

This is precisely the method used today by the MBA or the Enarque. The modern technocrat attempts at all costs to initiate any dialogue. Thus he is able to set, in the first sentences of any exchange, the context of the theoretical discussion about to take place. In written arguments briefing books play the same role. The intended audience unthinkingly accepts the parameters laid out. It is then caught up in the coil of the resulting logic and kept busy rushing back and forth between the questions and answers which the predefined structure imposes. In the process it feels the satisfaction produced by simply keeping up or the despair of inferiority if it does not. There is no time for reflection or consideration of the basic parameters.

We have difficulty linking the Jesuits' intellectual approach with that of the technocrats because we believe that formal eloquence was central to rhetoric. Modern argument doesn't rely upon the modulated qualities of the voice. Nor does it attempt to seduce by pleasing. There is no artifice. We are not enhanced by its appearance. In fact, modern argument is usually ugly and boring. The awkward bones of facts and figures are there as signs of honesty and freedom. The charts and graphs layout lines of inevitability, which always begin in the past and advance as a simple matter of historical fact calmly into the future. There is no appearance of guile.

But this awkward, boring surface is the new form of elegant phrasing. The facts, the figures, the historic events used to set the direction of lines on graphs are all arbitrarily  chosen in order to produce a given solution. To this is added an insistence that the constant questioning involved in modern argument is proof of its Socratic origins. Again and again the schools which form the twentieth century's elites throughout the West refer to their Socratic heritage. The implication is that doubt is constantly raised in their search for truth. In reality the way they teach is the opposite of a Socratic dialogue. In the Athenian's case every answer raised a question. With the contemporary elites every question produces an answer. Socrates would have thrown the modern elites out of his academy.

Why, then, do they so insistently claim him as their godfather? First, no one can give greater legitimacy to intellectual honesty through openness to doubt than Socrates. Second, they who can claim to carry the torch of Athens can also claim to carry the light of Western civilization. In Western mythology the Athenian inheritance is a mandate to struggle for the rule of philosophy and law, the citizen state, justice and beauty. And, on top of all of that, Socrates is the Christ martyr of the Athenian myth.

Along with the false questioning, the boring awkwardness and the endless facts, the claimed Athenian inheritance is also there to distract us from the predetermined mechanics of technocratic arguments. Rhetoric still dominates our lives. Unchanged from the seventeenth century, it has merely reversed its style from elegance to ugliness.

This becomes more intriguing if you observe the way in which a technocrat deals with a discussion when he arrives on the scene after it has begun. By his standards this is an argument out of control, so he does not join in. What he does is find a way to abrogate the discussion so that it can begin again on his terms. The classic method is to make a violent, irrational entry, which often involves personal invective. The very rudeness of the attack will stop the discussion. The technocrat then picks one or two small points -- the weakest -- out of the argument and concentrates all his sarcasm upon them. Such a reductio ad absurdum catches everyone unawares and before they can recover he reintroduces the entire discussion in his own manner. This form of public debate made its entry into the twentieth century via the Heroes -- Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin. After 1945 it was adopted by the new elites.

The Society of Jesus had been overtaken by the new lay professional schools and by their elites as early as the middle of the eighteenth century. The Jesuits had not, however, lost their influence on modern trends. After being disbanded from 1773 to 1814, the Society returned to support conservative forces throughout the West. In the process there were endless intellectual marriages between their educational system and that of the new lay schools. The French Field Marshal Foch, for example, carried the jesuitical approach into the staff college and thus helped to set the disastrous direction of twentieth-century warfare.

The Society also continued its political manipulations. In 1860 the Jesuits were central to the organization of the First Vatican Council. The final battles for Italian unity were under way and the new nation's gains were automatically the Church's temporal loss. The Jesuits' aim was to use the Vatican Council to institutionalize the infallibility of the pope. Their idea was to create an uncontrollable sort of power. They succeeded. The pope became legally infallible. He was then free to demand a certain kind of loyalty from his followers. But the use of legal structures so late in the nineteenth century to enforce unquestioning obedience merely provoked revolt. The pope's infallibility has hung around his neck like an albatross ever since.

At first glance this seems to demonstrate the old rhetoric's inability to produce the intended result. And yet, if one can just disregard the outer shell, what difference was there between winning agreement on the pope's infallibility and Henry Kissinger's Vietnam peace plan? They were both classroom victories -- brilliant on paper. And both were swept away by the next real event to come along. They are both perfect case studies. The pope's Jesuit adviser and Henry Kissinger would have received the best possible marks for these solutions, had they been presented as a case study at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.

But this is a dramatic comparison and there is no need to seek out, in this way, exceptional events. Loyola's methods are integrated into those of our contemporary elites and can be found in thousands of banal social details. A characteristic proper to rhetoric, for example, is that its science of decorating all arguments extends to the presentation of itself. Thus, in England, the London Business School claims that the central concept of its Masters Program "is that management can be taught as a unified body of essential knowledge which can be applied to an organization." [2] The statement deforms our understanding of what the school does by misrepresenting the word knowledge. There is no such thing as knowledge which is universally applicable to all organizations. Knowledge is concrete and particular. What they mean by "knowledge" is method. And the casual throwing in of the adjective essential is positive charlatanism. What do they mean by "essential"? If that were true, then the majority of businesses in England, which do not yet employ business school graduates, would be bankrupt.

In other words, the London Business School teaches manipulation. And part of that manipulation is to present the art of manipulation itself as truth -- that is, as knowledge. The presentation also attempts to leave an impression of universality, of open-mindedness and flexibility, But what they are really talking about is the training of managers who can do anything, for anybody, anywhere. That is the description of a mercenary or a condottiere.

***

Jefferson wrote the American Declaration of Independence. On the document itself, he and the other men who signed it pledged to each other their "lives, fortunes and sacred honour." Jefferson spent the rest of his life advising young Americans on their education and attempting to render it rational, as he understood reason, given his own experiences. And yet if one thing is certain about the modern manager, he pledges to no one his fortune or his life. As for honour, it simply isn't part of the equation. Some of the titles of the books written by professors at the Harvard Business School give a better sense of the manager's education -- Power and Influence, The New Competitors, Competitive Advantage, Managing Human Assets, The Marketing Edge -- Making Strategies Work. These professors have a very specific view of values. Take, for example, the description of the course which the same school offers on Comparative Ideology. It deals with "the role of ideology in modern business": "Ideology is a crucial analytical concept and an indispensable management tool, whose importance stems from the intimate connection between ideology and economic performance." [3]

It isn't surprising that the school's first Alumni Achievement Award was given to Robert McNamara. But what lies at the core of the minds which produce these titles? They are, they say, "preparing people to practice management." [4] In other words, they see themselves as "practicing," like doctors or lawyers, members of a reasonably specialized group which combines applied knowledge with a code of professional ethics. 

The school was created in 1908 and, in that same moment, was fused together with its method. As the founders saw it, "business administration was. the newest profession." [5] Schools of commerce had been multiplying around the United States for more than half a century. However, the determining event came in 1895 when a gruff, difficult, upper- iddle-class Protestant -- Frederick Winslow Taylor -- gave a speech to the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. This was the formal public beginning of Taylorism or Scientific Management. On a concrete level Taylor was proposing a new way to organize factories. Yet from the beginning he designed and explained this reorganization as part of a social revolution which rejected both the pessimistic view of the class struggle and the optimistic humanist view of such things as profit sharing.

Taylor replaced both with a rational, scientific system to which all employees would adhere. Their reward for unquestioning adherence would be more money. The whole system would turn on the rise of a managerial class." As a general rule," Taylor said, "the more men you have working efficiently in the management ... the greater will be your economy." [6]

The future deans of the Harvard Business School visited Taylor in 1908, were seduced and decided to design their program around this theory. Taylor and his disciples supported them by regularly coming to Harvard to lecture. In 1924 there were already six hundred students and the Harvard casebooks were being used in one hundred colleges.

Taylor believed his system would produce "a conflict free, high consumption utopia based on mass production." [7] Subjection to machines would destroy man's natural tendency towards evil. A reign of technocrats would replace the corrupt and inefficient political elites. Individual choice would be submerged beneath systems and discouraged by cash benefits. Depersonalization of production would be the key to success.

Directly or indirectly Taylorism has dominated business school methodology and changed business structures around the world. But it was also adopted in varying forms by both the Soviet and the Nazi regimes. Lenin structured his economic reforms on his version of Scientific Management. "We must," he said, "organize in Russia the study and teaching of the Taylor system and systematically try it out and adapt it to our purposes." [8] Trotsky militarized Scientific Management during the civil war, using it for example, in his transportation policy. Stalin turned it into a Communist truth. The first Soviet Five-Year Plan was drawn up with the help of leading Taylorist advisers imported from the United States. As a result some two-thirds of Soviet industry was built by Americans. And now, some seventy years later, the business consultant descendants of Taylor are being invited. back to the shattered Soviet Union to advise on how to undo the mess for which their approach is in good part responsible. The same principles were adopted by Albert Speer in his economic organization of the Third Reich. With a few adaptations, Scientific Management was used to run military production, forced labour and racial genetics programs, which included such things as gassing polio victims and genocide.

Of course it would be foolish to deny that Taylorism played a major role in early-twentieth-century industrial advances. On the other hand, it always preached that technocratic leadership was the new morality. Its antidemocratic premises were justified by "the redemptive role of a technically trained, professional middle class." [9] No doubt its proponents would refuse responsibility for the Soviet and Nazi experiences by arguing that any system can go wrong if misused. However, the astonishing thing about Scientific Management is that it has never gone wrong by its own standards. It has simply been more or less controlled by different civilizations. And, in any case, it would be wrong to ascribe too much blame or credit to Taylor and his disciples. Absolutist theories such as his tend to appear to be freestanding when they have in fact picked up on already existing trends and simply articulated them.

In the United States the drive towards a dictatorship of the technocracy was and is limited only because other social forces are at play. Harvard's version of the whole business school method is therefore fascinating. University authorities say it is "field-based and empirical," not "isolated in a laboratory or in hypothetical models." They add, of course, that it is based upon the school's "distinctive and continually developing teaching method -- the case method." But there lies a major contradiction. The case method is above all famous for bringing a detached, abstract approach to the conduct of business. Harvard insists that the case approach "sharpens the qualities of understanding, judgment, articulateness, human sensitivity and intuition, necessary to the successful practice of management.... It obliges the students to confront unruly, intractable reality." [10]

In other words, they train the technocrat to tame reality. And reality being what it is -- that is, real -- they must deform it in order to accomplish this. There is nothing empirical about the process because it begins with a solution and a predetermined argument into which the problems must fit in order to arrive at that solution.

The student who succeeds best at this game invariably has an aptitude for abstract structures combined with an aggressive personality. Intelligence in this situation consists of a combination of analytical skills, untutored ambition and banal materialism. Creativity -- which leads to new products -- is not rewarded. Imagination -- which enables the businessman to develop markets and sell -- is also absent. And there is no hint that the values of society might be taken into consideration. How could they be? The methodology Harvard teaches is freestanding. It is constructed to be free from memory, beliefs and nonmanipulable obligations. As the London Business School might put it, their methodology is a unified body of essential knowledge which can be applied to any organization.

Whether they succeed or fail in their battle with reality is of little importance. In the absence of memory, there is no long-term reflection on results. Instead, one moves rapidly to the next case. The interference of any "unprofessional" outsider in the application of their system presents the only great danger, because he might insist upon the use of memory. [11]

This training can't help but have an effect on students. What it seems to do is to encourage their natural tendencies. Thus, if they were, as most people are, equipped with an unbalanced distribution of talents, the Business School doesn't try to redress this in search of a healthy equilibrium. Instead, it actively seeks students who suffer from the appropriate imbalance and then sets out to exaggerate it. Imagination, creativity, moral balance, knowledge, common sense, a social view -- all these things wither. Competitiveness, having an ever-ready answer,  a talent for manipulating situations -- all these things are encouraged to grow. As a result amorality also grows;'as does extreme aggressivity when they are questioned by outsiders; as does a confusion between the nature of good versus having a ready answer to all questions. Above all, what is encouraged is the growth of an undisciplined form of self-interest, in which winning is what counts.

Such sudden respectability for undisciplined self-interest is one of the most surprising developments of the last three decades. It seems to indicate just how confused our society has become. In two and a half thousand years of Western social history, one of the very few things that most societies have agreed upon is that individual restraint is central to any civilization. In an authoritarian society, this restraint is imposed in part from above. In a free society, the individual imposes it, In part, upon him- or herself. In the complexity of the real world, there is always a combination of imposed and self-imposed restraint. The late twentieth century is actually the first era in which the leading centres of elite education have either turned their backs on the question of restraint or have actually taught that it should be thrown off. In other words, for the first time in Western history, our most respected institutions are preaching social anarchy.

The effect on contemporary students of pushing them further into imbalance has been to create ever-increasing human problems. They do have within them, even if dormant or mutant, the elements of every human being. Increasingly these frustrated human elements play havoc with the carcass they occupy. The Harvard School responded with a new course -- The Social Psychology of Management -- aimed at the "problems of the family, the individual's emotional life and the tension between career goals and personal aspirations." The professor assigned to this course admitted that "we have been abstracting people out of management as if they didn't exist.... Students have been taught to be utilitarians and calculators. [As a result] often they are running away from the intimacy of family life and running away from themselves." He went on to draw a surprising conclusion: "The capacity for intimacy and nurturing is a characteristic of the most effective leaders. Not only is there a direct connection between the capacity to give and personal satisfaction, but also it seems to release more creativity." [12]

The basis for this assertion isn't clear. An enumeration of the private lives of leaders and creators, good or bad, might well consist of a litany of disasters. In any case, the professor's answer to the student's personality problems is that more happiness is required. He teaches his course by the case method, thus attempting to "abstract" an a priori definition of personal happiness into management in an attempt to counterbalance the absence of the human element, which had previously been abstracted out.

If one looks at the situation from the school's point of view, this attitude is perfectly understandable. The school needs to compensate for undermining both the individual's decency and his or her role as a citizen. If it can do this by co-opting the combined idylls of family and personal happiness, it will have maintained its system intact.

These characteristics are not at all particular to Harvard. When the British felt their business methods had fallen behind, they asked Lord Franks to carry out a study. In 1963 he recommended the creation of a business school and went on: "We have a great deal to learn from the successful practices of the leading American Business Schools and from their fruitful experimentation ... in methods and curricula." [13] This study led to the creation of the London Business School, which uses the same admissions test as do most  American business schools. [14]

The results of these methods, when applied in two very different societies, are almost identical. The schools were created to improve management. It was argued that this improvement would lead to real growth, a revivified industrial base and healthier economies. But where have these modern managers gone to practice their profession? Seventy-one percent of Harvard MBA graduates go into nonmanufacturing. The figures in England are almost identical. Worse still, more than 80 percent of graduates are not in line functions. More than 80 percent do not manage. [15] In both America and Britain they are in consulting, banking and property developing. They have joined the sectors which do not provide capital goods -- the service industries. It could be argued that their desire to avoid real management and to concentrate on areas as superficial and as abstract as their own training is one of the causes of our industrial decline and of our unhealthy concentration on services.

At its most basic the idea that personal self-gratification is the right counterbalance to the overemphasis in business schools on competition and Winning is also a problem of geography. Industry today 'has great difficulty recruiting the first-class rising managers, who don't want to go where industry is physically situated. They wish to stay in the great centres of postindustrial self-gratification -- New York, London, Toronto and Paris, for example. Pittsburgh and Birmingham, Hamilton and Lille are not target towns for personal nurturing.

In England the new elites avoid industry on an even larger scale than elsewhere and head for the City or for West End jobs. Their refusal to live in the towns where industrial activity takes place can be identified as an important element in the decline of British industry. Throughout the West this is one of the reasons for the perceived panacea of service industry growth.

***

The creation of contemporary government elites has followed the same path as that of the new business elites. The phenomenon has different superficial characteristics, but the underlying theme is identical. In many countries the trend began with the growth of the social sciences, which forced the full array of real social questions into a falsely scientific straitjacket. The postwar schools of political science and economics are a prime example, with their reliance on abstract models, flowcharts and impenetrable specialist dialects. Apart from being indescribably boring, they have also been almost flawlessly wrong on every issue they have addressed. The experts in these fields have projected Our societies in a multitude of directions over the last forty years. Each time they have been able to prove their case with quantitative arguments and graphs as artificial as a case laid out by a prospective MBA.

That is how we came to flip from the absolute public conviction that Keynesian economics are right to the absolute certainty that they are wrong. That is how monetarism abruptly became a cure-all. How the mixed economy dropped from being next only to God to become the devil's device. Inflation was a harmless economic tool. Moments later it was little better than the assassin of free men's hopes. Then we woke up to discover that an investment device called debt was an even greater evil. Evil only, however, for governments. The same men who asserted this also asserted that commercial debts of historic sizes were good things. And nationalizations of state corporations, which for years we had been told were central to rebuilding the West's economy after the depression of the thirties, suddenly became the source of our problems. The new truth was privatization and competitiveness.

Never in these abrupt flips was the best of the last system hailed and the worst of the new  identified. Calm, practical sense was impossible. The social scientists carry truths and assert them. To resist is to be on the other side.

One of the most fascinating phenomena in the "professionalizing of governance" has been the rapid growth of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. The Kennedy School has gradually applied to the public sector criteria identical to those already applied to the private sector by the Harvard Business School. They see themselves as "a Professional School of Government." "What is needed," they say, "is nothing less than the education of a new profession. This profession should include persons elected to public office, individuals appointed to executive positions and career civil servants." The idea takes on frightening dimensions when one realizes that this school does not distinguish between the public servant and the elected official. But there is no reason for surprise. These are merely updated reiterations of the need for a technocratic dictatorship, as proposed by Scientific Management. The myth of salvation through efficient management is now so strong that no one pays much attention to the premises upon which the new elites are being educated.

Efficiency. Professionalism. A belief in right answers, which can only be produced by professionals. All these concepts simply exclude the basic democratic assumptions. Members of this single professional class of politicians, appointed ministers and civil servants "should be distinguished for their analytic skills, managerial competence, ethical sensitivity and institutional sense."

So much lies in these words. For example, they must be distinguished not for their ethics or their sense of ethics, but for their ethical sensitivity. That is, their sensitivity to other people's ethics and their ability to manipulate them in the interests of management. The idea that society is based upon an ethical foundation, to which the leaders as well as the citizens are bound, is not entertained.

The more management is explained, the more it sounds like raison d'etat. The idea of governments invoking the public interest, as a justification for taking unjust or illegal action, has been with us since the French satirist Mathurin Regnier coined the phrase in 1609. It has been inseparable from the rise of reason and of the nation state. Now raison d'etat is being turned into a blanket principle which could be summarized as: The technocrat knows best. Without anyone actually saying so, the citizen is eliminated as a participant. He or she is there to be managed. These professional politicians and civil servants are to have no sense of ideas, of policy or of responsibility. "Problem solving" is to be their central skill. "Obtaining answers after asking the right questions will often depend on the decision-maker's ability to recognize opportunities to use formal quantitative methods to structure problems and draw information from the data." [16]

What they are attempting. to do, probably without consciously understanding their own motives or actions, is to create a class into which entry will be limited by common standards. That class will control public affairs. An aristocracy of public affairs. A rational, management meritocracy. They will share an obligatory methodology which, like a court ritual, will exclude all citizens who are not properly admitted. This class will deal with public affairs in a professional language which will be as inaccessible to the public as court ritual and Jesuit rhetoric used to be. And all of this is to be done in the name of reason, for the good of the public.

Never have ideas of Left and Right seemed less relevant. People who believe themselves to be liberal reformers are proposing an apparently reasonable form of government by elites. Only at second glance does it become clear that this form subverts the democratic process. People who think of themselves as part of the conservative forces -- those who, by accepting the term conservative, ought to be protecting established values -- embrace the new methodology eagerly as a faster way to profit personally at society's expense.

The heavy-handed verbiage of the Kennedy School and its limited power in American government seem strangely primitive when compared to those of the greatest school of public servants -- l'Ecole Nationale d'Administration.

The desire to create a strong, technically minded French elite had been in the air since Richelieu. The first Grandes Ecoles were begun under Louis XVI and the most important of the great engineering schools -- the Polytechnique -- appeared during the Revolution, a creation of the Convention. The first attempt to create an equivalent training centre for the bureaucracy came under the Second Republic, in 1848. It disappeared rapidly, with Louis- Napoleon's coup d'etat, but in 1871 a Monsieur Boutiny created l'Ecole Libre des Sciences Politiques. It was private and he was backed by bankers and industrialists. The future bureaucratic and eventually political elites began to funnel through Sciences Po, as It came to be known, and ten years later Jules Ferry, a moderate, reforming government minister, tried to nationalize it, with the support of its founder. Leon Blum, a Socialist, tried again in 1936. Finally, it was de Gaulle, aided by Jeanneney and Capitant, two left-wing Gaullists, who in a single act nationalized Sciences Po and created ENA.

Each of these advances in the education of a public elite took place during moments of revolution or of great reform immediately after a revolution. The rich conservatives who founded Sciences Po, like the solid bourgeois who created ENA, were republicans acting in the aftermath of terrible civil violence. These initiatives were the continuation of a long dream which carried the conviction that democracy and equality would be advanced by a well-trained bureaucracy. The future prime minister, Michel Debre, had been put in charge of writing the law creating the school and then of organizing it. It isn't surprising that in his official report he wrote of the need to "take up again the belief and the hope of the republicans of 1848 in the value of public moral virtue, taught and understood." To accomplish this he said that ENA must give its students a taste for certain key skills -- "a sense of what man is, which gives life to all work; a sense of decision-making which, after weighing the risks, allows one to decide; a sense of the imagination required to create with originality." [17]

In the midst of this hymn to the rational, humane and republican virtues of an administrative elite, Debre interrupted himself with a  burst of pessimistic clarity. What would happen, he asked, if "this new elite developed a belief in their caste, a belief which would pervert the civil service?" He quickly recovered and produced arguments to prove this outcome impossible.

But that, after a period of enthusiastic creativity, is precisely what has happened. Simon Nora, a recent director of ENA, described how he had gone straight from the Resistance to become a student in the new school." Blowing up trains or going to l'ENA was about the same. In both cases, we were a small band who knew better than the others what was good for the country. And we weren't completely wrong. We were the best looking, the most honest, the most intelligent, and we had carried the flame of legitimacy." [18]

This little outburst of passion and mystique and ego makes a certain amount of sense. After all, the first generation of Enarques had proved themselves before getting their ultimate education. They arrived in the school with a practical determination to change their world for the better, because their shattering wartime experience had convinced them that it could and must be done. Then they went on to run the country. And given the great problems of the fifties and sixties, they ran it well. People assumed that the new rational training of ENA had made it possible for them to do this. In reality that training had merely polished human characters which had been irrationally formed in the crisis of war.

From 1950 on, that same training was being applied to unformed characters, which contained the usual raw ingredients of youth. These students arrived fresh from the classroom and the bosom of their families. The result was not the same. Each year's class varied with the fashion of its time, but in general the students graduated with an undirected personal ambition. In the hands of young men who knew nothing about the real world but were rapidly given real power, abstract organization became an overwhelming, self-evident and absolute truth for all situations.

Within forty years ENA, and with it the other Grandes Ecoles, had completely changed. In the words of Jean-Michel Gaillard, an Enarque himself and a former adviser to President Mitterrand: "Whatever their official reason for existence or supposed vocation, they are institutions without content, machines for choosing multi-purpose elites and creating men good for anything and nothing." [19] The Enarques alone now number some four thousand. They control absolutely the civil service, have more than thirty-seven elected deputies, range between twenty-five and forty percent of the cabinet positions and around a third of the positions in the ministers' private offices, have had one president of the Republic and seven of the last eleven prime ministers. They produced all of the leading candidates for the 1988 presidential election, except the incumbent. What is more, the annual graduating class has now been reduced from 160 to 90, which will not reduce their power, but increase the power of those who have already gone through the school, as well as future graduates. Given public uneasiness over the growing power of ENA, this has been presented as a measure to restrain its power. In fact, every political figure involved in making the decision was an Enarque.

That they have become the multipurpose empty carcasses described by Gaillard is beyond doubt. Everywhere in Paris they can be seen, instantly identifiable in their ill-fitting, sombre clothes, which continue the Jesuit tradition of physical anonymity befitting a man of power. Their unsmiling, busy expressions convey a certain weary superiority. Their conversation is so certain, so full of banal phrases, that the listener hardly notices the structures leading to answers.

This depersonalized and asexual language is the very worst of French. And yet, when subjected to such noncommunicative verbal authority, the listener is discouraged from dissent by the emanating murmurs of "raison d'etat" and "privileged information."

The school now seems to have accepted that its graduates will continue in the same pattern, although this acceptance came only after years of attempting to maintain the initial postwar drive towards disinterested public service. With the passing of the Resistance generation, that drive slipped away and in 1958 the school's program was completely reorganized. This was done to make it much more abstract and theoretical. The idea of the multipurpose civil servant made its official entry into state education. No matter what careers lay ahead of them, all candidates were to be judged on identical tests of culture and knowledge, then trained at the school in an identical manner. In 1965 there were further changes in the same direction.

This system created profound problems in the national bureaucracy. The candidates for ENA were becoming a type suited to the constricted criteria of the entrance exams. Most of them would graduate successfully and go on to invest the French state with their narrow approach. By 1971 the directors were obliged to admit that the knowledgeable, multipurpose graduate was an impossible abstraction. That idea was replaced by one which abandoned knowledge. It concentrated instead on molding the students to fit into a single system which would deal with all areas of government. The individual was to be unidimensional but equipped with a multipurpose method. In its own words, the school was after students capable of "a polyvalent point of view." [20] The genius of their administrative system would permit them to deal with everything from theatre to taxes.

They were now very close to the Harvard idea of management. And, indeed, Taylorism had had a great vogue in France early in the century, as it had everywhere in Europe except Britain. France, however, was the mother of rational structure, with an evolution stretching back to Richelieu, and so produced its own theories of Scientific Management. The inventor was Henri Fayol, and he and his disciples rivaled Taylorism in influence for several decades. Then, in 1925, the two groups formally merged into one and became part of the larger historic process which led to ENA and the Enarque problem.

In spite of the new polyvalent theory, most people sensed that the problem had not been resolved. The elite was ever stronger and ever less creative. It was self-serving and self- protecting. Nevertheless the process continued and in 1986 the new director of ENA, Roger  Fauroux, declared: "We must build into the civil service the sense of efficiency, of return on investment and of performance." [21] In other words the founding intentions of the school -- reform and public service -- had been completely lost.

And yet, when the subjects dealt with at ENA are examined, the first impression is encouraging. The courses seem to address the problems of the real world. Even the instructions attached to the entry examinations seem reasonable. They call for reflection rather than memory work, and for the use of intellect to dominate the subject. Above all, the applicant is instructed to attack the subjects from the high ground in order to dominate them. By "domination" the Enarque means "control." This is what Harvard called "taming unruly reality." And "reflection," in this case, means taking the time to work out the answer expected by the examiners. The professors' comments on the previous year's entry exams are always printed up as a guide for new students. There the form which replies ought to take is laid out chapter and verse, sometimes down to the headings. It is a highly sophisticated game of intellectual painting by numbers.

The comic level to which this control descends can be seen in the section of the entry exams devoted to sporting events. These events are laid out in government decrees filled with such sentences as: "The order of testing the candidates in the different sports is left to the discretion of the jury in function of the requirements of the organization." The events include:

Distance Covered in a Given Time: competition with a maximum of fifteen competitors on the starting line. When the signal of the end of the race is given, the competitors should continue their efforts to the next control post where the performance they have accomplished will be registered. [22]

The nonsporting management problems which the professors give these students, along with encouragement to use their imagination, are presented in the same prestructured, suffocating manner.

Harvard and ENA are the high points of a general state of affairs. Business schools and administrative schools have popped up all over the West and reproduced the same logical errors of answer-oriented, multipurpose elites. Few of their graduates have the sense of relative truths produced by exposure to a real society, Absolute truths based on detached abstraction reign supreme. These truths are endlessly defendable and interchangeable. The Harvard-ENA graduate is unlikely to understand either the irony or the relativity of truth in Voltaire's discussion of the wildly different sorts of circumcisions to be found around the world: "A Parisian is taken aback when he is told that the Hottentots cut off one testicle from their male children. The Hottentots are perhaps surprised that the Parisians keep two." [23]

***

The quality of, and investment in. these technocratic leadership schools continues to increase at a time when the quality of general education is in a steep dive. Given that the very idea of reason began as a conversation among middle- and upper-middle-class elites, who believed in the value of excellence, it isn't surprising that more popular forms of education have always been a secondary consideration.

Within the ethos of reason there was also the idea of encouraging generalized education. Education instilled knowledge. Knowledge dispelled superstition, thus making it possible to reason. A man capable of reasoning was fit to be a citizen. But this idea of creating citizens was vague. What did the elites want them for? The eighteenth-century philosophers believed, after all, in permanently established but benevolent authority. Educating the masses was intended only to improve the relationship between the top and the bottom of society. Not to change the nature of the relationship.

Like any elite holding great power, the technocrats are not particularly interested in the creation of subsidiary elites. Thus, while a fortune continues to be spent on state schools and universities, the entire system continues to decline. The intellectual muscle needed to give it direction is concentrated instead upon the continued refining of the education of the technocratic elite. Indeed, whatever may be quoted about the need for general education, there has always been an underlying contradiction in what the nation-state wished to teach the citizen. The masses, it was believed, could not be given more than a basic education: basic skills and -- nowhere in elite education does this appear -- a moral framework. In other words. they were to receive the nuts and bolts of a humanist formation.

But from the beginning, the men of reason complained about the interfering weight of humanism or what they called, when dealing with education, the humanities. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the humanities were the area where superstition and prejudice could most easily hide. To flush them out, the victory of science was required. And yet, when Richelieu complained that the humanities took up too much space. one senses that he was already concerned not about the dangers of superstition but about the threat represented by a humanist education when the state is attempting to create a useful elite. This sense of the humanities. as a time-consuming interference in useful education, resurfaces again and again over the centuries. Boutiny evoked it when he created Sciences Po in 1871. It is evoked today whenever education is discussed.

Not only have the humanities been singled out as the enemy of reason, but there has been a serious attempt to co-opt them by transforming each sector into a science. Thus architecture has become a quantitative, technological formation in which the details add up to the building. Even art history has been converted from a study of beauty and craft into a mathematical view of creativity. The new art historians are interested not so much in art or in history as in technical evolution. The social sciences, new creations of the mathematical obsession, are of course the principal example of the humanities deformed. The reduction of politics, economics, social problems and the arts to mathematical visions and obscure, hermetically sealed vocabularies may well be looked upon by those who come after us as one of the greatest follies of our civilization.

The removal of the humanities from education has undermined common sense and restraint and thus encouraged us to lurch from extreme to extreme in public policy. And yet there is still too much of the humanities in education to suit the technocratic elites. They blame the troubles of state-funded education on this.

In fact our elites no longer believe that it is possible to offer a general, universal education. Perhaps in Britain they never believed it, except in the most abstract way and in small idealist circles. Even the Labour Party leaders tend to send their children to private schools, while calling for improved state education. Yet when they are in power, it doesn't improve. In the United States large sections of the population were happily abandoned to illiteracy from the very beginning. Now new sections are added to this lumpen proletariat with each passing year. Everywhere one hears. the elites saying to each other, in private: "Well, of course, they are not educable." There are endless statistics to confirm the already educated in their pessimism. Seventy-two million Americans are illiterate, the majority of them white. This doesn't include the functionally illiterate. One-quarter of American children live below the poverty level. Forty percent of children in public schools are from racial minorities. The whites who can afford to are slipping away into the private school system. Twice as many children are born to American teenagers as to those of any other democracy. [24] But if you begin to add such facts as that forty million Americans do not have access to medical care, you are also obliged to wonder if the problem lies not with the population but with the elites, their expectations and their own education.

If Harvard, to remain with the same example, is what it claims to be and its graduates are to be found everywhere, then why are they showing no signs of being able to deal with their society's terrifying problems? Were Montesquieu's proverbial Persian to look in upon American society today, the only possible conclusion he could draw would be that never has such a magnificent elite failed so miserably and done so with such little grace, insisting as it does upon blaming the lowest end of the social scale for much of what is wrong.

Outside the United States, the decline in general education has been marked but less frightening. The German and the French are among the finest surviving public education systems in the West. Of the 5 percent who do go to private schools, most seem to come from broken homes or from among the aristocratic remnants and the very rich, two groups which often prefer exclusivity to quality.

Nevertheless, in 1986, when the French National Institute of Educational Research carried out an interpretive survey of sixteen thousand students, 69 percent of the fifteen-year-olds were either illiterate or marginally so. That is to say, they were either unable to read the text given to them or were obliged to read it out loud, slowly, in order to convert it into an oral message. The government had announced not long before, with antihumanist, managerial clarity, that it wanted to improve public education to the extent of getting 80 percent of the students through the baccalaureate (the last test before university). The current level is 50 percent.

The survey concluded that what was wrong was the way students were being taught to read." To read you must invent." [25] Literacy requires the participation of the imagination of the reader. They also discovered that for 53 percent of the students, comic books were their primary reading pleasure. Television and films no doubt take up whatever inventive time remains.

Throughout the West the reaction to this crisis has been a growing chorus, calling for a return to basic education in order to stop the decline. But as always in a rational society, this return to basics is proposed as a narrow and absolute solution to what is a general problem. There is no accompanying hint that something ought to he done about the disastrous divorce of the humanities from the systems which control our societies. Or about developing a common sense line linking general with elite education. Or about evaluating why the most complex and competitive higher education systems ever seen in the history of the world do not produce elites capable of addressing the problems of their society. In fact, the assumed contempt for anything other than highly specialized education continues to grow. A general university education is increasingly considered to be of very little value. And the call for a return to basics in the classroom probably has more to do with attempting to quiet growing public fury over ballooning illiteracy than with a serious desire to understand the problem. If anything, it resembles another reactive and prepackaged formula. Another management fad. On top of which it echoes eerily the old calls for the working classes to work harder, bathe once a week and go to church on Sunday.

Meanwhile the elites continue to try to improve themselves by further eliminating the humanities. The result has been the gradual appearance of an evolved technocrat who almost inevitably has the character of an intellectual bully. These aggressive men and women have no talent for what might be called the public emotions. The remarkable form their education has given them is fundamentally empty, except when filled with the content of whatever job they are currently doing. And when they are attacked over their management of that job, they have a tendency to freeze hard on their positions, unable to compromise because they don't have the roots with which to penetrate into the matter. They often become stubborn, absolute defenders of things they care nothing for. This psychological rootlessness causes them to confuse power with such things as morality and understanding.

Even within the elites, however, there is a growing awareness that something is wrong, that their systems do not produce the announced result. The business community -- stuck with ever-larger legions of these seriously flawed human beings, who are often unable to deal with the unstructured problems to which senior management exposes them -- have begun paying lip service to the reeducation of their executives in midstream.

The Aspen Institute, the leading U. S. business seminar and thinking centre, now holds a one-week course on the humanities. [26] It has a darkly comic title: Can the Humanities Improve Management Effectiveness? and an appropriate course description:

AT&T, one of the world's largest and most influential corporations, believes that a study of the humanities is an Important educational experience in the executive development of middle managers. This course is open to upper-middle management personnel judged to be high achievers with potential for advancement into executive management positions. Primary objectives -- to improve management effectiveness, to develop more competent and socially-acclimated managers, and to assist in the succession process of managers to executives.... It is focused on five areas: leadership, interpersonal relations, problem- solving/decisionmaking, tolerance for change and personal introspection.

And a whole week to do it in. False and rather sad little remedies such as this are proliferating in an attempt to tack humanism, post facto, onto rationally formed beings. That does at least indicate that our contemporary elites are beginning to wonder whether, despite their satchels of degrees, they are in fact educated.

In keeping with their lack of historical baggage, they tend to read as little as possible, avoiding in particular history, philosophy and fiction, limiting themselves to escapist novels, newspapers and technical documents. They may read a few biographies, which have come to play the same voyeuristic, wish-fulfillment role that accounts of saints' lives played in earlier societies. At home they hang little or nothing on their walls. And, as they rise to the top, their preferred form of "official" culture tends to be nineteenth-century opera and classical ballet -- both dead arts. The once populist and sometimes revolutionary operas are now ritual, as are the ballets which, in any case, were never taken to be much more than high-class circus entertainment. Fine ankles, bare thighs and high leaps. Ballet's origins were as light interludes within operas. With the disappearance of functioning royal courts late in the nineteenth century, the great opera houses gradually became one of the focuses for the new elites. These palaces of marble and gold leaf were perfect reflectors of legitimacy for a civilization in which that concept was confused. It remains confused and, wonderful though the music and the performers may be, they are little more than background.

In short, unlike the Victorian upper middle classes, our contemporary elites are rarely wedded to culture. They tend to absent themselves from the continuation of their civilization. They therefore have little sense of the reverberations of their actions. The loss of an historical view is perhaps the most serious of their flaws, because they cannot imagine an impact which goes beyond a case study. In this context their adoption of Socrates as godfather makes sense. They simply don't have the coordinates to realize how silly it is to claim that relationship.

What is more, the entire process, which has developed rational education from the original formula of Ignatius through to today's virtual monopoly of the technocrats over Western leadership, has unfolded without any consideration of the woman as a participant, Women are now participants in large numbers. But the system has shown no sign of adapting itself to this relatively new reality. If the rational civilization is a male idea, then it isn't surprising that education should be an area particularly lacking in flexibility. Certainly the first area requiring transformation is the education of our elites. Since that education can be seen to be a failure, women might do better to become the catalysts leading to radical change, rather than just another ambitious group competing for a percentage of the top places in schools not worth going to.

The methods of the technocrats have now become parodies of those used by the courtesans in the last years of the divine monarchies. In the Russian court of the seventeenth century, "intricate intrigues were mistaken for shrewdness," [27] a deformation which would apply to most Western elites today. The methods now essential to power are pseudoscientific versions of life at court. The courtesan approach hardly seems to be a positive thing for modern women to aspire to. But if they want to beat our contemporary elites at their own game, that is the inevitable route.

***

At the heart of our problem lies the belief in the idea of single, all-purpose elites using a single all-purpose methodology. We have developed this in search of a social cohesion based on reason. Certainly, there is an essential need to find common ground on which an integrated moral view can be built. Without that, society can't function. But a society which teaches the philosophy of administration and "problem solving," as if it were the summit of learning, and concentrates on the creation of elites -- whose primary talent is administration -- has lost not only its common sense and its sense of moral value but also its understanding of technical advance. Management cannot solve problems. Nor can it stir creativity of any sort. It can only manage what it is given. If asked to do more, it will deform whatever is put into its hands.

One sign of a healthy Western civilization is that within a relatively integrated moral outlook - for example, agreement on democratic principles -- a myriad of ideas and methods are brought face to face. Through civilized conflict the society's assumed moral correctness is constantly tested. This tension -- emotional, intellectual, moral -- is what advances the society. These contradictions are what make democracy work, but they also create technological advance.

By concentrating on an integrated management method run by a single elite, we are giving power to people whose primary skill lies in the removal of contradictions or at least the appearance of contradictions. Managers are not profoundly disturbed by failure or error. But they are driven to nervous collapse by the public demonstration of contradictory solutions. Of course they aren't alone in this reaction. They are accompanied by that inevitable creation of technocratic civilization -- the Hero. Heroes take the whole process a step farther because they are mere exploiters and deformers of the elite's devotion to absolute truths.

How can social values be weighed when decisions are made on the basis of preintegrated logic? The ENA examiners recommend to their students that they dominate problems by attacking from above. From above what? From above society? From above its beliefs, standards and moral traditions? What is taught is efficiency freed from social reality. The more spectacular the successful creation of such an elite, the more rudderless the society becomes.

It is difficult to imagine how this can be dealt with unless we break down our education to more practical levels, for example by dismantling the funneling nature of elite education.

Jefferson, founder and patron of the University of Virginia, never allowed his university to give degrees. He considered them pretentious, irrelevant to learning and unconnected to the preparation for responsibility. This wasn't idealism, It was the opinion of the most successful practitioner of reason, The purpose of universities has now been inverted, Learning has become a goal-oriented process aimed at winning a degree.

As Gaillard has pointed out, we needed or thought we needed these sorts of elites when our societies were still under challenge from within by the forces of arbitrary power. That is no longer the case. [28] And we can't use the continued existence of such power outside the West as an excuse to continue creating a false elite inside our society.

"It is very dangerous," Northrop Frye wrote, "to assume that only emotions can stampede the mind." [29] We have embraced the analytic approach so absolutely that counterweights, such as the linear historical view, have been stampeded into irrelevance. This wasn't what Jefferson or the philosophers of the eighteenth century expected would happen, Analysis was a means for hunting out falsehood and superstition. But a clear, practical line back into past experience was the foundation upon which the rational man was to base his abstract examination. The Encyclopedists went to great lengths to layout what had come before them, precisely because the established powers of the church and the monarchy had cut those lines in order to produce absolute truths which justified their power. Jefferson, who thought a great deal about the practical shape of the future and did so with reasonable optimism, came back again and again to an analytical and scientific approach based upon a full and conscious assumption of the past. His advice to various young men turned constantly around the welding of optimistic analysis to a linear historic base as the best way to ensure change while limiting the risks involved, He used the University of Virginia as a place to put his principles into practice. [30]

This careful approach was swept away by the forces of pure reason, In its place we have an elite created and dependent upon the death of memory. Not simply our memory of the past, but of the recent past and even of the present. This could equally be called the end of relativity or of comparison. What remains is a cheapened memory -- little more than nostalgia -- which is methodically used for the purposes of patriotism and advertising. Real memory does not induce regret. It is no more a conservative force than analysis is a tool for change. Memory is part of a seamless web with the future, there to help us remember exactly what our civilization is constructed upon and therefore in what ways our actions ought to be shaped in order to serve our needs and our interests.

By throwing ourselves into the analytical arms of technocracy we have gained the illusion that every day is another day. Every intent can be freshly argued. But every day is not another day. Common sense tells us that it is both the day after yesterday and the day before tomorrow. One of the principal effects of our elite education has been to cut us off from the self-evident.

And the social sciences, which have monopolized our memory in this century, with promises of exploring every corner of it -- indeed of us -- have succeeded simply in dividing and obscuring any sense of our civilization. By occupying most of the humanist domains, they have further undermined humanism.

In order to improve this situation, we would first have to remove the contempt for the public which is buried deep within our elite education. Jefferson said that "Men by their constitutions are naturally divided into two parties: 1. Those who fear and distrust the people, and wish to draw all powers from them into the hands of the higher classes. 2. Those who identify themselves with the people, have confidence in them, cherish and consider them as the most honest and safe, although not the most wise depository of the public interests." [31] For the words higher classes we must substitute managerial classes or technocratic. These people have used the public's confidence in their judgment in order to insist that wisdom is the primordial public quality. That all other qualities are subsidiary, even dangerous for the public interest. Thus honesty and safety become metaphors for naivete. And wisdom is reduced to a single, narrow view -- their own. In other words, our modern elites fall into Jefferson's first category. They fear and distrust the people.

The depressing state of public education follows quite naturally from that, as does the reaction of the elites, which is to make greater efforts to strengthen their own training structures. It is harder and harder to raise money to pay for public education, because more and more of those who would pay the necessary taxes educate their children elsewhere. And the more expensive private education becomes, the more the middle classes resent being taxed for public education. They, after all, cannot really afford the private system. But they sense that education is becoming increasingly elitist. And to deprive their children of that kind of training is to deprive them of future opportunities as adults. To pay for schools and universities they must make enormous financial sacrifices. Thus the middle class, who were the heart and soul of the democratic, broadly based nation-state, are being converted into enemies of that society.

The curious thing is that the creation of competent elites shouldn't be a problem. In societies as rich and textured as ours, that is something which can almost look after itself. If the society is healthy, it will find outlets at the required levels or it will create them. And the more varied and contradictory these outlets are, the better. How this can be done will differ from country to country. The same is true for general, basic education. There is no need to search for global solutions, apart from an absolute necessity to destroy the idea  that such things exist. There is a need to dismantle the obsessional structure which imprisons us and to explode the vertical logic which dominates learning.

At the same time it isn't surprising that our democratic nation-states are finding it impossible to develop ideas which might get us out of our political and economic difficulties. To govern a democracy you require constant vibrations from the population. Between our superior, enclosed, contemptuous elites and our disintegrating system of public education, we have lost the unity which is needed to feel those vibrations.

One of the areas where most waits to be done is the integration of parents into the school system. The current elites are against this because they say it really doesn't work -- the wrong parents come forward, they don't understand modern education, and they demand restrictive forms of education. The periodic removal of controversial authors from school curricula under parental pressure is invariably given as an example of the dangers inherent in letting the citizens participate. Thus, the essential liberal democratic instincts of our society are themselves used to discourage people from democratic participation. The people are dangerous and the elites know best.

But what are the roots of this unhealthy democratic influence? Is not the problem that, even where school boards do exist, most citizens don't participate in elections, thus leaving control to fringe groups? If everyone believed it was more important to vote for school boards than for presidents and prime ministers, then a normal cross-section of citizens would appear on those boards. The decline of our school systems reflects perfectly our general problems. The elites preach power, not participation. They preach control, not contribution. They preach gratification of the ego, not the unglamorous duty of service to a larger whole.

Power is generally perceived as something exercised at the highest levels. And the lower levels are best occupied by experts -- by people who know best in their field, whether it be education or tax planning.

In countries where most of the middle and upper classes send their children to private schools, the situation is even worse. Those who hold the bulk of the powerful places in government and industry, and who are responsible for the central administration of the education system, know that whatever happens, it will not affect their children. The education they create for other people's children -- the children of less important people -- cannot possibly be the same as the education they would insist upon for their own. Again, in Britain and the United States, the two Western countries in which private schools account for most of the elite, the public system is in the worst shape. And in those countries you are bound to hear again and again from the mouths of their elites the private complaint that large sections of the population are uneducable.

Were Voltaire to reappear today, it is unlikely that rising technocrats anywhere would recognize in him their spiritual father, nor he in them his children. Perhaps there would be a repeat of the Dostoyevski story, in which Christ returns to Seville in the sixteenth century the day after an auto da fe, during which the Grand Inquisitor has had a hundred heretics burned at the stake, all at once with great pomp, in front of the royal court and the population. The cardinal recognizes the Son of God, has him arrested and threatens to burn him also unless he leaves town. In Voltaire's case our elites would immediately begin to marginalize him through logical arguments designed to prove that his positions all suffer from lack of professionalism.

The attack might well be led by the five Harvard professors who wrote Managing Human Assets. [32] They would prove irrefutably, with an "organigram," that whether Voltaire was right or wrong didn't matter. His presence was a danger to stability. Enarques and structuralists would be produced to prove that he was a fraud. If not, how could such an intelligent man so endanger the interests of the state of which he was a citizen? Political scientists, supported by a chorus of poststructuralists, would come forward to point out that Voltaire had never understood his own words. They would provide a properly professional analysis of his texts.

The prosecution could do worse for its closing argument than call on Dr. Madsen Pirie, president of the British Adam Smith Institute. Dr. Pirie had a great influence on Mrs. Thatcher's government. The rationalization (or destruction) of the National Health Service has been one of his great successes. He would probably argue that Voltaire was a flawed Voltairean because he was an unconscious presocialist. Dr. Pirie would prove, however, that he himself was a pure Voltairean and therefore bound to condemn the master. He would do this with the absolute conviction of a former professor of logic, which is what he is.

That attack, of course, would delight Voltaire. Professors of logic were always his enemy. His defence might be that by creating elites obsessed with the intellectual process that is used to produce decisions, we have indeed eliminated prejudice and superstition from that process. But we have also put ourselves into the hands of men who have no relationship to the organisms they govern. That is, we have abandoned to chance such things as social responsibility, identification with the organism and belief in what the organism represents. These have all been removed from the decision-making process.

All three may carry with them the risk of irrational decision making. But without them, only the abstract remains, devoid of common sense and moral responsibility. Reason, when so abstracted, becomes a series of unrelated assertions bereft of memory. And the elites who apply such abstractions give themselves over to competitiveness -- a state of being which is characterized by unfocused, uncontrolled ambition and a myopic obsession with profit. Voltaire once complained, in the wake of some state executions brought on by condemnations for blasphemy, that "every sensible man, every honourable man, must hold the Christian sect in horror." If he were alive today he would probably extend that horror to the Rational sect.

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