187. Removed

 

93. "Technocratic leader"

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.

60. Memories of the Newport Jazz Festival Riots of 1960

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When will we ever have a riot like the one that closed down the Newport Jazz Festival in 1960? I mean a riot like, when it's over things are clear. At Newport you had students just drunk, just partying, throwing rocks at the police just to make trouble. Rich kids' trouble. They'd come into town in MGs and BMWs (you saw dozens of them down by the beach — I was there) and their clothes (when they kept them on) were the latest Bermuda fashion. Moralists like me could express pure disapproval.

And what support we had! The music community was right with us, mad as hell about losing their festival. And to whom? Not to people worked up by the music. Not to people so eager for it that they'd fight to get tickets. No. To people who didn't know crap about the music. Or anything. I believe it was Whitney Balliett, jazz critic of the New Yorker, who called them "Yahoos." Yes, Swift's name for unregenerate mankind. Gulliver found them in trees, throwing excrement. Perfect.

And the intellectual community? Oh, they were with us. They had to be. The whole thing started in downtown Newport when a fight broke out between two fraternities. Intellectuals can't be seen close to fraternities. They run with the music community. Whitney Balliett.

So we were at the center of a solid moral, esthetic, and intellectual front with a clear view of the opponents we faced. They were the uneducated; we were the educated. They were the immature; we were the mature.

That was 1960. In a few years nothing was clear. What looked like the same youth, throwing the same rock at the same policeman, could not really be the same youth, the one we disapproved of. He had a cause. First civil rights, then ending the war in Viet Nam. We approved of those causes. We were, by and large, doing nothing to further them. How could we disapprove of this youth who was, at least, doing something? Who was "more moral"? Could you call somebody less mature and educated than you were when he was more moral?

Then there was the view of policemen. In 1960 the young people were looking at officials with no history. A few years later they were looking at officials with a history of "brutality," variously earned but surely named. That let the young refocus our attention, and quickly. The issue after a riot (or an act of "civil disobedience"; it all came under "lawbreaking") became the performance of the authorities. "Yes, we broke the law but you didn't punish us right." Well, sometimes the police punished right and sometimes they didn't. Oi. There were enough complications without adding that one.

The recent riots in England roused my memory of these sixties' complications. The riots' origin in a protest over police action against a minority immediately raised a banner like one I honored in the sixties. The subsequent mindless behavior raised the same doubts. The authorities' reaction raised the same question about punishment.

All this makes me realize how lucky I am, in a sad sort of old-age way. The chances of life seem to have put me far closer to significant riots (or acts of disobedience) than a moralist has any right to expect. After the Newport riots I was in the student march on the Pentagon in 1967 and I was on the campus of Ohio University in 1968. I knew all about the bombing of the ROTC building and the storming of the President's house and the coming of the National Guard and the closing of the University. And I was in Seoul, South Korea, close enough to the fall of Syngman Rhee to be inspired — no, thrilled — by an account of the march that brought him down.

At the same time I was lucky to be assigned to teach two authors not often found in one professor's course assignments, Herman Melville and John Milton. Nowhere else could I have stumbled on such well-timed wisdom about the riotous human being. In the next post or two I will, as I recall the riots and street actions I have witnessed, try to make something of my luck.