Greece and Italy now have premiers they are calling "technocratic leaders" (NYT, 11-11-11). The term distinguishes them from "democratic leaders." It's a distinction to die for these days in Europe, where the people of these two countries accept, in principle, the need for austerity measures to get themselves (and Europe) through the debt crisis, and punish the democratic leader who puts the principle into practice.
No distinction promises to play out better. In the capital one leader speaks for the principle, gets agreement, then leaves. Another comes on and does the practical part. In the streets there is pain, especially among all those losing jobs they got under the political patronage system. "Those dirty politicians!" says one sufferer. "No, no," says another, "this one's not a politician, he's just a technician, making sure the machinery works. You can't blame him." A "technocratic leader" is a leader who can't be blamed.
No premiers will ever be loved more by the premiers they replace. Technocratic premiers preside over an "interim government," which is also a "government of national unity." Those wonderful terms tell the nation that they're not a threat, they'll be gone, the politicians can come back, and, bless the technocrat, there'll be harmony when they do.
Nowadays we're likely to see a computer expert. He takes the program the nation needs, plugs it in, pushes the right buttons, and the machine cranks out the desiderata while everybody else is enjoying their coffee.
What we're looking at is essentially an ends-means machine, and everybody who dislikes dirty work (the old name for what the machine does) should have one. It leaves you free to go for good ends without getting stained by any of the bad means attached to them. This machine just makes the connections on its own.
I would think democratic leaders would want to provide every voter with one of these ends-means machines. Then every time voters demanded that he go for a good end the leader could say, "Call up the program. Follow it through. Decide whether you have the courage to go all the way with it. Then tell me you want it." What a teaching device! The voter's inattention or incapacity, the great plague of democratic leadership, would no longer plague him. He'd never be blamed for failing to produce the impossible.
Would we want this machine to be like the punitive one in Franz Kafka's famous story "In the Penal Colony"? That machine inscribed its lesson on the body. The technician fed it a diagram and needles traced out the crime until the subject, in pain, understood it. Surely our technology could produce its equal.
Our answer will no doubt depend on our view of our fellow human beings. Are they capable of paying sufficient attention? Of doing what's required of them? If we think they are then we'll be willing to punish them for not doing so. Inattention and cowardice become crimes. At the end of the line here is vindictive pleasure: "Neglect your homework, will you? Ruin the country with your ignorant demands? Shame your friends with your timid dodges? Well here's something that will teach you!"
On the other hand, if we think they're not capable we'll scorn the machine, as the humane Europeans in Kafka's story scorn theirs. We'll stick to patient instruction in the world's cause-effect sequences. What's at the end of the line here depends on how serious those sequences can be. If one of them ends in the disappearance of democracy (or, God help us, in the disappearance of the world) then the end for this view is in an appalling complaisance, people sitting around at the last trump wishing they'd been harder on inattention and cowardice.
No comments:
Post a Comment