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News :: Miscellaneous |
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IN TECHNOCRATS WE TRUST |
Current rating: 0 |
by Sam Smith, The Progressive Review
(No verified email address) |
24 Oct 2001
Modified: 25 Oct 2001 |
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The American response to the current crisis illustrates well the degree to which technocracy has replaced Christianity as our favorite religion. Americans only profess Christianity, but increasingly - and in a deeply fundamentalist manner - they practice technocracy, relying unquestioningly upon the systems that make it work. |
Almost without exception, the reaction centers on technocratic solutions of security, warfare, propaganda, and surveillance. At every level - academic, media, and government - such issues are considered stripped of moral, philosophical, ethical, historical, or anthropological content. One need look no further than your own TV screen to observe this. The "experts" on the network news and talk shows are invariably those of technocratic skill rather than those who have demonstrated wisdom, foresight, or human understanding. They exemplify a quality that John Ruskin called "intricate bestiality."
These experts, like so many American leaders of the day in virtually every field, are products, propagandists, and servants of technocratic systems that are not only amoral but are designed to keep out anyone and anything that might question their validity, value, or decency.
The closed nature of these systems is fostered not just by the rules of the professions. It starts at colleges and universities that purport to be citadels of free thought but which, in fact, are now mainly technical schools indoctrinating pupils into a closed logical loop not unlike that self-justify religious fundamentalists and brutal cops.
Once graduated from Yale Tech or the Georgetown School of Technology they move into fields such as law, media, and politics largely immune to any ideas or challenges alien to the closed logic of their systems.
The results have become increasingly absurd. The Hillary Clinton health plan, the mania for standardized testing, and the war against drugs are just a few examples of what can happen in a society in which honest analysis, moral considerations, and natural skepticism are not encouraged or, in many cases, even allowed. This closed loop is maintained by the servility of institutions such as the media and universities that control the rhetoric of the time and limit the range of, and participants in, discussion.
Eric Fromm called the technocrat homo mechanicus, "attracted to all that is mechanical and inclined against all that is alive." It is an apt description of American leadership today. We have now reached the point where not even NPR or the New York Times can find much time to consider how we can hope to get along with one billion Muslims absent endemic air power and extinct democracy.
Unlike your average American politician, journalist, or academic, Osama bin Laden understood this. The assaults have been pinpointed - with almost satiric precision - against the very icons of America's supposed technological superiority. This is not only war, it is ridicule. Yet because the technocratic mind can't escape its rigid curriculum, the only way we know how to respond is with a further demonstration of our supposed technological superiority.
We now have about a century's experience with the technocratic fetish. One of the main intellectual spirits was Frederick Winslow Taylor, who sought to improve production through "scientific management" of workers, including time and motion studies as well as performance-based pay. Taylor not only had a huge impact on American industrialists such as Henry Ford, but he was part of the inspiration for the Harvard Business School and its case study approach. Peter Drucker ranks Taylor with Darwin and Freud as the top thinkers of modernity. Ford he dismisses as just someone who knew how to use Taylor's principles.
Not long after this death in 1915, Taylor's ideas found their way to Nazi Germany. The concentration camp has been described as an extreme example of Taylorism at work. Richard Rubenstein, writing in "The Cunning of History," notes that "I.G. Farben's decision to locate at Auschwitz was based upon the very same criteria by which contemporary multinational corporations relocate their plants in utter indifference to the social consequences of such moves." Among those enthralled with Taylorism was Albert Speer. John Ralston Saul credits the efficiency expert's ideas with helping Germany hold out against superior Allied forces later in the war.
But Taylor had other fans as well, including Lenin, who learned about Taylorism while in exile. He returned to Russia determined to "Taylorize Communism." Saul writes: "The First Five Year Plan was written largely by American Taylorists and directly or indirectly they built some two-thirds of Soviet industry. The collapse of the Soviet Union was thus in many ways the collapse of Scientific Management."
And the ironies continued: "The Russian government immediately hired a Harvard professor of economics, Dr. Jefrey Sachs, to help them out of the crisis. His methods - filled with complete abstract systems - were strangely reminiscent of Taylor's . . . These brilliant financial and structural reforms lacked only one element: a recognition that several hundred million people live in Russia, that they must eat every day. Or at least every second day."
The same is true of one billion Muslims. Sooner or later we will have to face up to the fact that technocratic solutions to our current crisis will only make matters worse. We will then have to ask what is the right, sensible, moral, and practical thing to do - not according to the sort of closed technocratic rules that created the Final Solution but according to a warehouse of common sense and common decency that has been placed in dead storage by America's myopic elite. And then we may be both safe and human again. |
See also:
http://prorev.com/indexa.htm
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Comments
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Feedback: To Sam Smith's Article |
by ML
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
25 Oct 2001
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Posted by Sam on The Prgressive Review website, 10/25/01:
CARL BERGMAN, DC: Your lead note [on technocracy] prompts me to write about three points you make. First is what's going on in higher ed. You've managed to lump every public and private school in the country into one doctrinaire, stereotyped group. In doing so, you sound exactly like a red scare politician's screed against 'those perfessors.' While there is no simple way to know what 's going on campus, I strongly suggest that you spend some time reading stories from the college press. They are far more varied than you give them credit for. I just have difficulty believing, as you purport, that public and private colleges in this country have been brainwashing kids and no one's objected. I don't doubt that there schools such as your describe, but it's not all of them or even most of them.
The other issue is the statement that "the sort of closed technocratic rules that created the Final Solution but according to a warehouse of common sense and common decency that has been placed in dead storage by America's myopic elite." I have two problems with this. First, I don't believe there is one elite myopic or otherwise. The Lynds tried to sell this in the 30s and lord only knows how many similar power and conspiracy theorists have made good livings trying to prove the point. I don't buy it. If there were one, you'd spend your time finding out what they planned for us next, and give up any interest in polls. Were it only us against them, life would be much simpler and not nearly as much fun.
My greatest objection, however, is your allusion to the Final Solution. I don't take the Holocaust lightly, and I think references to it should be saved for those matters that warrant true comparison. Cambodia, Armenia, Rwanda, yes, current foreign and war policy, no. It's one thing to use a strong comparison for emphasis, but to invoke a monstrous horror in order to make the stretch between scientific management and a war you find repugnant is lazy. It also dilutes both your argument and the Holocaust's meaning.
[SAM: Elites are as elites do, and if there's an alternative elite in this country it ain't doing much. Otherwise you would find more than one Democrat voting against a major anti-civil liberties bill in the Senate. You would find professors debating the war rather than running for cover as colleges and universities already clamp down on dissent. You would find strong voices against a violent solution to this crisis permitted on C-SPAN and other talk shows. You would find disputations in the major media. Instead, as George Bush said, either you're with us or you're against us.
There has clearly been a decline of elite dissidence in recent decades. This is also true at colleges and universities not because of brainwashing but because the job of these institutions is to help their graduates succeed and the best market for graduates is in the great American technocracy.
As for the Final Solution, its motivation was ethnic hatred but its means were technocratic to a theretofore unprecedented degree. While humans have always hated others, the rise of technocracy made the 20th century by far the most gratuitously deadly in human history. Once you become loyal to a technocratic system one doesn't even have to be intrinsically evil to do evil; you just need to follow orders or put the internal needs of the system ahead of everything else. (See item below) We are not taught to think about Nazi Germany this way because it brings it too close to home.
One of the best books on why ordinary people became Nazis was written in the 1950s by Milton Mayer: "They Thought They Were Free." In it he examined not the horrific perversions but the horrible normalcies of the times - through a study of the same workaday Nazis before and after the war. Mayer summed up his own experience this way:
"Now I see a little better how Nazism overcame Germany . . . It was what most Germans wanted - or, under pressure of combined reality and illusion, came to want. They wanted it; they got it; and they liked it. I came back home a little afraid for my country, afraid of what it might want, and get, and like, under pressure of combined reality and illusions. I felt - and feel - that it was not German Man that I had met, but Man. He happened to be in Germany under certain conditions. He might be here, under certain conditions. He might, under certain conditions, be I."]
TECHNOCRACY AND THE FINAL SOLUTION
SAM SMITH, from "WHY BOTHER?":
http://prorev.com/orderwb.htm
[John Ralston] Saul gives a devastating example of the limits of management: "The Holocaust was the result of a perfectly rational argument - given what reason had become - that was self-justifying and hermetically sealed. There is, therefore, nothing surprising about the fact that the meeting called to decide on "the final solution" was a gathering mainly of senior ministerial representatives. Technocrats. Nor is it surprising that [the] Wannsee Conference lasted only an hour - one meeting among many for those present - and turned entirely on the modalities for administering the solutions . . . The massacre was indeed 'managed,' even 'well managed.' It had the clean efficiency of a Harvard case study."
Marshall Rosenberg, who teaches non-violent communication, was struck in reading psychological interviews with Nazi war criminals not by their abnormality, but that they used a language denying choice: "should," "one must," "have to." For example, Adolph Eichmann was asked, "Was it difficult for you to send these tens of thousands of people their death?" Eichmann replied, "To tell you the truth, it was easy. Our language made it easy."
Asked to explain, Eichmann said, "My fellow officers and I coined our own name for our language. We called it amtssprache -- 'office talk.'" In office talk "you deny responsibility for your actions. So if anybody says, 'Why did you do it?' you say, 'I had to.' 'Why did you have to?' 'Superiors' orders. Company policy. It's the law.'"
Yet for all the words we have devoted to the Holocaust, go into almost any bookstore and you'll find far more works on how to manage, manipulate and control others - and how to use "office talk" - than you will on how to practice the skills of a free citizen. Some of the most important lessons of the Holocaust are simply missed. Among these, as Richard Rubenstein has pointed out, is that it could only have been carried out by "an advanced political community with a highly trained, tightly disciplined police and civil service bureaucracy."
In "The Cunning of History," Rubenstein also finds uncomfortable parallels between the Nazis and their opponents. For example, in 1944 a Hungarian Jewish emissary meets with Lord Moyne, the British High Commissioner in Egypt, and suggests that the Nazis might be willing to save one million Hungarian Jews in return for military supplies. Lord Moyne's reply: "What shall I do with those million Jews? Where shall I put them?" Writes Rubenstein: "The British government was by no means adverse to the 'final solution' as long as the Germans did most of the work." For both countries, it had become a bureaucratic problem, one that Rubenstein suggests we understand "as the expression of some of the most profound tendencies of Western civilization in the 20th century."
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