The Doubter's Companion (16 page)

This “science” of economics seems to be built upon a nonscientific and non-mathematical assumption that economic forces are the expression of a natural truth. To interfere with them is to create an unnatural situation. The creation and enforcement of
STANDARDS OF PRODUCTION
are, for example, viewed as an artificial limitation of reality. Even economists who favour these standards see them as necessary and justifiable deformations of economic truth.

Economic truth has replaced such earlier truths as an all-powerful God, and a natural Social Contract. Economics are the new religious core of public policy. But what evidence has been produced to prove this natural right to primacy over other values, methods and activities?

The answer usually given is that economic activity determines the success or failure of a society. It follows that economists are the priests whose necessary expertise will make it possible to maximize the value of this activity. But economic activity is less a cause than an effect—of geographical and climatic necessity, family and wider social structures, the balance between freedom and order, the ability of society to unleash the imagination, and the weakness or strength of neighbours. If anything, the importance given to economics over the last quarter-century has interfered with prosperity. The more we concentrate on it, the less money we make.

ECONOMIST, THE
   A magazine which hides the names of the journalists who write its articles in order to create the illusion that they dispense disinterested truth rather than opinion.

This sales technique, reminiscent of pre-Reformation Catholicism, is not surprising in a publication named after the social science most given to wild guesses and imaginary facts presented in the guise of inevitability and exactitude. That it is the Bible of the corporate executive indicates to what extent received wisdom is the daily bread of a managerial civilization. See:
MUSSOLINI
.

EDUCATION, PUBLIC
   The single most important element in the maintenance of a democratic system.

The better the citizenry as a whole are educated, the wider and more sensible public participation, debate and social mobility will be. Any serious rivalry from private education systems will siphon off the
ELITE
s and thus fatally weaken both the drive and the financing of the state system.

That a private system may be able to offer to a limited number of students the finest education in the world is irrelevant. Highly sophisticated
ÉLITE
s are the easiest and least original thing a society can produce. The most difficult and the most valuable is a well-educated populace.

What happens when those who have power concentrate on their own training is hardly surprising. A study in 1993 suggested that almost half of America's adults were functionally illiterate.
¹
This explains why
ENGLAND
and the
UNITED STATES,
having made such essential contributions to the rise of democracy, have ever greater difficulty making their systems work.

What remains incomprehensible is the apparent failure of public education throughout the West. Teeth gnash every day over the effects of electronic communications and weakening family structures. Yet all we do is fiddle with the content of courses and agonize over teaching methods.

Specialists in the science of education hold great sway. They are the management consultants of the adolescent mind. But the quantity of teachers is constantly being reduced, as are the budgets for general education. If such things as television and social disorder make it difficult to capture and hold the attention of students, then what and how they are taught is of little importance. What matters is the intensity put into teaching them.

We could do worse than to reduce classes from the typical twenty to thirty students down to ten. This would mean hiring more teachers and our public budgets tell us there is no available money. A more important point is that there'll be even less money in a society of functionally illiterate citizens.

How much does an unemployed teacher or an unemployed, university-educated potential teacher really cost the state if integrated accounting methods are used? There are the direct social costs; the loss of a long-term investment in their training; the removal of their powers of consumption from the economy, and of their contribution to property values. Does all of that add up to less than the salary of a teacher? This is not a question which our systems of public accounting can entertain. They refuse any sort of inclusive weighing of our profit-and-loss situation.

The conclusion of our sophisticated system is that we cannot afford to educate properly our citizenry. We know that this is a suicidal and lunatic policy position. What we are doing, therefore, is passively accepting the conclusion of lunatics. See:
ÉLITE EDUCATION.

EFFICIENCY
   A skill of tertiary importance which can be useful if kept to its proper level and closely controlled.

Efficiency is also, of course, a very good thing. It would be foolish to waste time and money unnecessarily. On the other hand, what is actually necessary? What unnecessary?

The question that must be asked about efficiency is whether it should be treated as a driving force in a civilization or even in a society or even in an economy? Or is it no more than one of those useful little tools which can help us all to do better if it is used appropriately?

Those who preach the
HOLY TRINITY
of competition, efficiency and the market-place tell us that only the most efficient competitors will win in the new
GLOBAL ECONOMY
. Yet we can see from our own experience that those who become obsessed by efficiency often go bankrupt. The reason is simple. The market-place—if allowed to function in a reasonable manner—will try to favour better products. These are produced to some extent by competition and are to some extent reflected in low prices. But above all, they are the result of creativity and imagination, neither of which is efficient.

The great capitalists and the great companies make good use of efficiency but in such a manner that it must follow in the baggage train. If it is allowed to become a form of leadership, efficiency will go straight for the throat of imagination and strangle it until no breath of life remains. Then the economic problems will begin.

If efficiency must be carefully controlled in order to be helpful in business, that principle is doubly true in other areas such as government and the arts. In places where the primary function is reflection, the intent being to search for solutions—legislatures, for example—efficiency is quite literally the enemy of the public weal. See:
INEFFICIENCY.

ELECTORS OF BRISTOL, ADDRESS TO THE
   A fundamental statement on how representative democracy ought to work.

Elected for Bristol in 1774, Edmund Burke immediately laid out in a speech to his electors the extremely difficult balancing act he would try to maintain, constantly weighing their opinions and local interests against his judgement of what was responsible action in a national assembly:

It ought to be the happiness and glory of a representative to live in the strictest union…with his constituents. Their wishes ought to have great weight with him…their business unremitted attention. It is his duty…to prefer their interest to his own.

But his unbiased opinion, his mature judgement, his enlightened conscience, he ought not to sacrifice to you…or to any set of men living.

Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgement; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices to your opinion.
²

This is not a neat recipe. It's not even a structural guide. Burke is making a humanist statement about the impossibility of formulae or ideology in a healthy democracy. He is saying that the responsibility of the representative, like that of the citizen, is to maintain a sensible and ethical
BALANCE.

ÉLITE
   More common than a lumpenproletariat.

Every society has an élite. No society has ever been without one. There is therefore little to be gained by worrying a great deal about the creation or protection of an élite. They protect themselves and someone is always ready to take their place.

The thing élites most easily forget is that they make no sense as a group unless they have a healthy and productive relationship with the rest of the citizenry. Questions of nationalism, ideology, and the filling of pockets aside, the principal function of an élite is to serve the interests of the whole. They may prosper far more than the average citizen in the process. They may have all sorts of advantages. These perks won't matter so long as the greater interests are also served. From their point of view, this is not a bad bargain. So it really is curious just how easily they forget and set about serving only themselves, even if it means that they or the society will self-destruct. See:
EDUCATION, PUBLIC.

ÉLITE EDUCATION
   Something in which the élites are personally interested.

Those already in responsible positions feel the need to fund the training of their successors. The rising power of specialist groups increasingly ties this training to what is called utility. In order to attract money from and for these groups, universities are now reorganizing themselves to serve directly a variety of specific interests. The thousand-year struggle to create independent centres of learning and free thought is rarely mentioned.

Those faculties unable to adapt—including most of undergraduate education—are increasingly of marginal importance, as are such things as reflection and inquiry, including, of course, pure science. Anything that concerns basic intellectual training or the use of the imaginative capacities isn't considered much use.

In other words, élite education is very effective at sucking up a good part of the funds which its graduates administer. This leaves public schools and liberal arts institutions to scramble about for whatever remains. See:
INTELLIGENCE.

ENGLAND
   The only remaining purely ideological nation.

The English pride themselves on their peaceful common sense and take great pleasure in accusing the Europeans of intellectualism and a vain addiction to the abstract. On the other hand, the English also pride themselves on being the only truly ironic race, which may explain why this intellectually divided and militaristic people insist so on their practicality. It may also explain their devotion to gardening and pets.

These are strange characteristics to find in a nation which once made such essential contributions through literature and politics to the very idea of the modern individual, to the development of democracy and to
HUMANISM
itself.

Public decisions on this half-island are taken by the forcible reduction of complex issues to false clarity so that everyone must choose sides. Even the details of everyday life—clothing, accents, innocuous opinions—are broken down into ideological positions. These are sometimes called class differences, but when class no longer reflects utility, it has mutated into
IDEOLOGY.
The result is a highly structured form of rational conformism from which relief is sought through the celebration of the irrelevant but amusing eccentricities of a small minority.

Since ideology incapacitates leadership, most of the successful fighting, talking and doing is done for them by the Irish and the Scots. The best tailors, however, are English. See:
EDUCATION, PUBLIC and NANNYISM.

ERROR
   Error is the result of a peculiar human strength: the ability to act in an unprogrammed, that is illogical, that is conscious, manner, by thinking and communicating unconventional thoughts. To err is a sign of intelligence.

In science, error is still recognized as a permanent characteristic of progress. Why then is the same not true in politics or business? Errors that lead to altered policies are the building blocks of civilization.

A society that punishes error—as Western civilization increasingly does—discourages individual responsibility. The false
HERO,
who obscures the real activities of power behind a screen of meaningless activity, is more likely to survive in high office than an individual who is honest about what he is doing and whose errors are therefore visible. But if those in office must hide their mistakes in order to keep power, those errors are more likely to be repeated.

Take the stubborn attempts over the last two decades to revive the economy by the repeated use of high interest rates in order to strangle inflation. While inflation had been repeatedly, though only temporarily strangled, the result has not been a revived economy. It didn't work the first time, nor the second nor the third. And yet it remains the official anti-inflation policy. Those who criticize are accused of being soft on inflation. But the solution to non-inflationary
GROWTH
is not high interest rates. Why not admit it and look for a fresh approach? Instead, with every repetition of this old-fashioned, sadistic policy, the economic hole in which the West is stuck grows deeper.

The inability to admit error is a problem at every level of society. As a result, fads seem to sweep ever more dramatically through industries and professions. When reality abruptly reasserts itself and the junk-bond market collapses, no one can be blamed. A few scapegoats may be found, but there was no error because all the experts were and remain in agreement.

The only place in which errors are used actively is in intellectual debate. Innovative thinking is greeted not with enthusiasm and open argument, but with a strangely desperate attempt to deflate all new ideas by demonstrating that they contain errors. Thus instead of being used as a force for improvement, modern criticism tends to become a support for received wisdom.

Our fear of error comes in large part from our specialist society. The very existence of the specialist is dependent on his or her ability to be seen to be right in matters of their own expertise. In this way they deny their own reality, limit their own progress and misuse the responsibility society has given them.