Hildegarde

It’s the fourth of July, and I should probably be off doing something about something.  I know I’m supposed to be making chicken salad.  There are things.

But it’s also just after five in the morning, and I’ve just put away another big hunk of Gregor novel, and I don’t really want to get up and move away from the computer for the moment.  Besides, I have tea, and I can put the music on in the background if I want to.

On the other hand, I’m not feeling too serious this morning,  or too coherent.

So, instead of writing something comprehensive, with a good persuasive arc–or even trying to–let me throw out two ideas.

The first is this:  people who talk about the public sector vs the private sector are misunderstanding the real nature of the problem. 

The big divide isn’t between public and private, between government and business.  The big divide is between bureaucracy and the lack of it.

An enormous private corporation–say, for instance, Toyota or BP–exhibits not only exactly the same amount of dysfunction as a large public agency, it exhibits exactly the same kind of dysfunction.

And the first symptom of this kind of dysfunction is the proliferation of completely unnecessary people–people who do absolutely nothing to further the goal of the business or the agency.  These people are hired and retained for a raft of reasons that sound plausible until you actually start looking into them. 

There are “diversity coordinators,” and people who do nothing but plan parties for all-department meetings.  There are people who put out the company newspaper, full time.  The list is different in each organization, but in every case it is a list of people whose jobs do not need to exist for the organization to fulfill its function.

There are also other people with jobs that do need to exist for the organization to fulfill its function, except that there really need to be only about half of the people the organization has.  It now has twice as many as it actually needs because it has complicated its paperwork to the point where documenting a function has become so complicated you need more people to do that than you need to fulfill the actual function. 

People always say that this is a disease of government, and that business, always needing to be mindful of the bottom line, is largely immune–but a short look at any multinational corporation will show that this isn’t true. 

Bureaucracies, once started, feed on themselves.  The purpose of any bureaucracy is not to get something done, but to preserve itself, and that’s true in the private as well as in the public sector.  What’s more, that causes exactly the same kinds of problems for those of us who have to deal with the bureaucracy in question. 

When self-protection is the only goal, almost everything (lying, cheating, falsifying documents, blaming the victims of your incompetence for your mistakes) is acceptable.

My second point is this:  bureaucracies happen so often and so spectacularly in modern industrial societies because, in modern industrial societies, the vast majority of working aged people are not needed to do any necessary work.

I put that into italics for a reason.

At the base of every society, there are jobs that have to be done for that society to survive and prosper.  And as a society becomes more sophisticated and technologically advanced, there are more kinds of jobs that are needed to make that possible.

But at the same time there are more kinds of jobs necessary to make the society survive and prosper, the percentage of the population required to be in such jobs gets smaller.

Five hundred years ago, a majority of your population had to be engaged in agriculture just for your society to eat.  These days, that percentage is down to single digits. 

Of course, we need other people that that old agricultural society did not–engineers, electricians, plumbers, mechanics, computer hardware and software designers.

The problem is, we don’t need enough of these people to engage a majority of our citizens in what is actually, at base, useful work.

And I’m using an expansive definition of “useful work.”  I don’t think, for instance, that entertainment is negligible. 

But even with that expansive definition, we have an awful lot of people with nothing significant to do.  

And to deal with them, we invent “professions” that are often fun, but also sort of silly–think of “fashion.”  The making of clothing is certainly useful work, necessary for any society to survive.  Fashion magazine production, runway modeling, and designing “couture” originals made of clear plastic and strategically placed conch shells are not.

The problem is this:  people who do actually useful work have a different experience of themselves and their society, and a different perspective on both, thanpopel who do things that are not actually useful work. 

For one thing, if nothing else is different, there’s the fact that there’s a lot more give in the non-useful professions than in the useful ones, because the society-wide consequences of failure are so much smaller, if not nonexistent.

And that leads me to this: the political and philosophical and moral ideas of people who do useful work are likely to be different from those of people who do work that is not useful, and to be so because their experiences will have taught them almost contradictory things about the way the world works.

I’ve gotten to that place where I’m beginning to think I’m blithering unbelievably.

So I’ll go off and listen to music, among other things. 

And I’ll just leave this here as it is.

Last year at this time, I was in the middle of trying to find a way to get to my 40th high school reunion.  That only partially worked out, but it put me in touch with people I hadn’t seen in forty years, and that seems to have cut loose some kind of nostalgia trip.  Or something.

I don’t want to say nostalgia.  I’m not really a nostalgic person, in the way that word is commonly and properly used.  I do have times in my life that I miss–any time with Bill in it, for instance–but for whatever reason, I don’t long to live there instead of here.  And I don’t sugarcoat, or at least not much.  That was then.  This is now.  I’ve always liked living in the now.

All that being said, I’ve found myself, over the past year, sort of stumbling over things I haven’t seen or read or heard of since high school, and sticking with them for a while just to see what they were like.  Or are like. I’m not sure you can recreate a reaction.

A couple of days ago, what I ran across was, of all things, Atlas Shrugged. 

For those of you who don’t know, Atlas Shrugged is the most famous novel by a woman who immigrated to the US from Russia between the World Wars and renamed herself Ayn Rand.  Rand was enormously popular as a novelist in her time, and still is–Atlas Shrugged alone still sells in the tens of thousands of copies a year. 

She is best known, however, not for being a novelist but for being an ideologue, the most libertarian of all the libertarians, a woman who wants to privatize the roads and do away with all social welfare programs.

And as an ideologue, Rand has been enormously influential.   Alan Greenspan, the man who served four terms as chairman of the US Federal Reserve, was a Rand disciple, and the libertarian movement that gave rise to things like the Reason Foundation and the Cato Institute has been fueled by people who came to libertarianism first through Rands novels.

Rand herself started a foundation, now called The Ayn Rand Institute, specifically to popularize her ideas, and you can find it here:

http://www.aynrand.org/site/PageServer?pagename=objectivism_intro

But the ideas were popular enough already, and have become increasingly so in the US.

They were not, however, popular with conservatives.  She was roundly ridiculed, and worse, not only by the left by by the right, especially by Bill Buckley and The National Review, with one conservative writer dismissing the popularity of her work as being due to the “dirty bits”–the sex scenes.

These days, Rand’s “dirty bits” wouldn’t raise an eyebrow on prime time network TV, and she’s still popular.  My guess is that whatever’s going on, it isn’t about the weird boddice-ripper-romance-novel-not-really-rape scenes she was so fond of giving her favorite heroes and heroines.

That said, I have a relationship to this book that I have to no other.  Sometime between junior high school and the start of college, I read it over twenty times.  I read a couple of paperback copies absolutely to pieces.  And I did it even though, even at the time, I knew for a fact that it was, on any technical level a very bad book.

Well, no.  Let me take that back. Rand was a meticulous plotter.  She could keep three dozen balls in the air at once and make sure the pieces all fit together perfectly in the end.  The idea for Atlas Shrugged is original, which is hard to do at this stage in the history of the novel.  So there’s that.

There’s also her one great virtue, which is that she wrote completely plausible, completely true-to-life villains–true enough so that, forty years on, I run into these people all the time and go, “Oh, wait, I know how that mind works,” because of her.

And she got those villains right, too.  She got them perfectly.  She understood–in a way no writer has before or since, including writers with far more talent for fiction than she had–a certain kind of mind.  Or maybe I should say a certain kind of disease of the mind in the modern world.

The drawbacks of the fiction as fiction are threefold:

First, English was not her native language, and it shows.  The writing is often stiff, and overly “proper.”

Second, the woman was a Romantic, in the sense that her sense of a human life propery lived had more in common with Byron and Shelley than with real life as we know it.  She liked significance, and striking poses, and the Great Man tortured by the stupidity and venality around him.  It was just that her Great Men were industrialists and commercial inventors instead of artists.

The result of this is that she got her heroes wrong to almost the exact extent she got her villains right.  And she got them wrong internally even when she got them right externally.  Some of her heroes hang out in old blue jeans and flannel shirts, but as soon as you get into their heads they’re thinking in terms of “bearing anything he needed to bear just to keep on going” and “glimpsing the greatness that should be possible but that the world around him would not let him reach.”

My guess is that the only Great Man Rand ever knew was herself, and that she grafted her way of thinking onto other people almost as a matter of course.  That certainly seems to be what happened in the case of Frank Lloyd Wright, who was Rand’s friend and her inspiration for the character of Howard Roark in The Fountainhead. 

Rand managed to get it all exactly backwards–she portrays Roark as failing all his architectural school design classes and excelling at engineering, while Wright himself was a great designer and a terrible engineer.  Still, he appreciated the appreciation, and designed a house for her.  I don’t know how it’s holding up.

The third problem with Atlas Shrugged as fiction is that too much of it isn’t fiction.  Periodically, one of the heroes will deliver the kind of monologue that really should have been an essay in a magazine or a collection than a characcter speech in a work of fiction. 

And those monologues are not minor.  There is an entire chaper in Atlas Shrugged, called “This Is John Galt Speaking,” in which Rand outlines her entire philosophy–morally, aesthetically and politically.  In the hardcover, this chapter takes up 70 pages.

Of course, in a book that’s 1168 pages long, that’s a drop in the bucket.

I don’t really want to bitch about the monologues. They taught me some things that I didn’t know and that have been very useful to me, not least of which is the necessity of understanding how people are defining the words they use.

And I always read every word of those monologues, because the ideas were (and are) interesting.  It’s just a terrible way to write a novel. 

You can get the monologues separately, by the way–they’ve been reprinted in collections of her work, along with the many nonfiction essays she wrote at the end of her career.

It’s odd, though, to read it again after all this time.  It still comes closest to what I believe both politically and philosophically, even though I’m now sure that she got her heroes not just wrong but perversely wrong–and that getting the heroes right is important.

Of course, getting the villains right is also important, so there’s that.

This

http://www.newenglishreview.org/custpage.cfm/frm/66894/sec_id/66894

was linked to on Arts and Letters Daily this morning.

It’s by Theodore Dalrymple, and it’s got some interesting things to say about meritocracies and equality.

And, you know, like that, to go along with today’s actual post, below.

Well, we’re now on the third day of the new computer, and things are definitely better.  I actually got a big whacking hunk of work done this morning without yelling at the keyboard even once.  And nobody on earth sympathizes with the fact that I really did love WordPerfect, even if nobody else on the planet did.  So I’ve got WORD now. I seem to be getting used to it.