The Doubter's Companion (26 page)

This idea of unregulated warfare appeals to our foolish self-pride by suggesting that only a weakling, a coward or an incompetent could be afraid to come out from behind artificial protection in order to fight like a man. Of course only a fool rises to this kind of taunting, because an unstructured playing field favours not only the strong but also the large and the inefficient. Even with the fairest of rules, smaller groups must always work twice as hard and be twice as smart. They must use rapid action, mobility and guerrilla tactics, all the time keeping a safe distance from the sweeping might of the great imperial forces. If you remove the rules, you remove the tools for survival of the small force.

History is filled with a long list of small armies and small nations who have risen to the taunts of large neighbours. The next recorded event is their destruction. Whatever the explanation for these moments of confusion and error, a fool is a fool and history buries one with little comment.

In short, the people who cry loudest for a level playing field fall into two categories: those who own the goal-posts and fools. See:
IDEOLOGY.

LOS ANGELES
   A Biblical city built, as the parable goes, on sand, subject to earthquakes, flooding, mud slides, forest fires, drought, race riots and gang warfare, as well as record levels of police corruption, violence and pollution. It is home to the film and television industry, which is devoted to selling the American way.

LOVE
   The solution to all problems in inverse ratio to income. A state of emotion which is usually, but not always, focused on at least one other person. A term which has no meaning if defined. See:
ORGASM.

LOYOLA, ST. IGNATIUS
   Inventor of the modern rational-education system by which our élites are trained in staff colleges, business schools and schools of public administration. He also single-handedly stopped the Reformation by substituting for content what we would call games theory. There is a castrating or asexual aspect to Loyola's theory of education which appears to have come quite naturally to him. See:
GANG OF FIVE.

LUDDITES
   Highly trained individuals whose careers were destroyed by technological progress. This progress was treated as inevitable and uncontrollable. The Luddites therefore occupied the only remaining intellectual position, which consisted of rejecting technological progress.

This reduction of attitudes to two extreme positions was accomplished between 1811 and 1830 when the introduction of Watt's steam-engines and water-driven wool-finishing machines made hundreds of handicraftsmen redundant. Industrialization was spreading from sector to sector and quickly eliminated most crafts along with tens of thousands of jobs.

The Luddites (named after an imaginary leader, Ned Lud) broke up and burnt factories. Their revolt ended in a group trial in 1813. Five were hanged. The attitude of society towards unrestrained technological progress was made perfectly clear. The judge said the Luddites' actions were “one of the greatest atrocities that was ever committed in a civilized country.”
¹

This was a classic case of provocation and order versus despair and disorder. Wilfrid Laurier described the nature of this type of conflict when he spoke in 1886 about the Riel Rebellion. “What is hateful…is not rebellion, but the despotism which induces that rebellion; not rebels but the men who, having the enjoyment of power, do not discharge the duties of power; the men who, when they are asked for a loaf, give a stone.”
²

What society misunderstood early in the nineteenth century when faced by the industrial revolution was the full nature of the change. The debate should not have been over whether there should be technological progress or not. It was more accurately a question of progress in what conditions: what progress, when, in what circumstances? Market extremists would argue that what happened was inevitable and eventually brought general prosperity. Their view ignores the social disorder, followed by suffering, followed by serious social disorder that this approach towards change brought on. Communism was the direct result. England, France, Germany and Sweden suffered recurring internal violence throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, some of it expanding into civil wars. Most of these countries passed within a shadow of revolution.

The question is therefore not whether technological progress was necessary, but whether it was necessary to go about it in a barbaric manner. It can be argued that the Luddites were wrong in 1811. But society spent the next 150 years rendering progress civilized and thereby proving that the infuriated craftsmen had been right at least in spirit. Did these decades of wasted time, effort, lives and money represent an intelligent use of human talents?

This is precisely the question which the remarkable technological change of the late twentieth century raises. As in the early nineteenth, great social disorder has been unleashed. High levels of unemployment have become so endemic that they are disguised as retirement or pre-retirement or part-time unsecured labour.

The 50 million unemployed in the West are today's Luddites. Their preliminary revulsion can be seen in the rise of destabilizing and often falsely populist movements throughout the West. The question therefore is not whether the automatization of factories, for example, is a good or a bad thing, but whether allowing undirected technology to lead society by its nose will not create far greater problems in the short, medium and even long term than it solves.

Why are we so eager to revive the crises of the industrial revolution? We have the clear memory of what it involved. We are only just beginning to come out of the profound social and political divisions it created. The naïve outsider would be surprised at our determination not to pursue a moderate, balanced approach. See:
PROGRESS.

LUDENDORFF, ERICH
   Brilliant First World War German staff officer whose abstract analyses of military problems consistently produced short-term technical gains followed by long-term real disaster.

In 1914 his revised Schlieffen Plan got the German army almost as far as Paris, but it left them short of their destination and locked into trench warfare. The party with the largest population (the Allies) stood the best chance of winning by default the slugging match which followed simply because they were better able to survive sustained bleeding.

In 1917 he approved unrestricted submarine warfare against the British in order to break their blockade of Germany. This ensured American entry into the war and guaranteed German defeat.

Again in 1917 he facilitated the return of Bolshevik emigrés (including Lenin) to destabilize the new Russian republic and force peace. The result was the Soviet regime which lasted seventy years and in 1945 decimated Germany.

The collapse of his remarkable 1918 offensive led him to believe that his skills had been betrayed by the citizenry. As so often with highly skilled technocrats, they can find no explanation for the failure of their perfect systems and so blame the imperfections of the human race.

Ludendorff was the very model of the technocrat. To the end he believed that reality could be altered by imposing perfect abstract systems. In the postwar period his desire for guaranteed absolute solutions led him to become a Nazi. See:
TECHNOCRAT.

M

MCDONALD, RONALD
   Post-modern philosopher. In somewhat the same way that Voltaire was the public intellectual face of the Enlightenment, Ronald McDonald is the face and the voice of consumer culture.

The moral underpinning of this movement is addiction. The philosophical dilemma proposed by the phrase “fast food” is: how fast can the seller make the buyer buy more? Thus the seller is a spiritual child of those religious leaders who must first incite desire in order then to channel it in a useful direction. Religious leaders can reinforce desire with fear, an advantage not shared by fast-food leaders.

The latter, on the other hand, are reinforced by
ADVERTISING
and science. Since Galileo it has increasingly been argued that scientific progress has fundamentally altered our philosophic possibilities. For example, even before modern public relations, desire was amplifiable by illusion. The desire for fast food is no different. It is based not on hunger but on the illusion of hunger. Science, however, has contributed a better understanding of three key elements capable of accentuating that illusion: salt, grease and sugar.

Salt, somewhat like monosodium glutamate, attacks the taste receptors on the tongue and excites them. If grease is combined with the salt, a chemical reaction is provoked which accentuates this excitement, which in turn translates into a meaningful simulation of hunger. The further addition of sugar will then provoke an abrupt rise in blood-sugar levels. As on a roller-coaster this can only be followed by an abrupt fall, which takes the form of a yet more extreme sensation of weakness and hunger. At this point fast food, through the ingenious use of basic science, comes close to reconstituting the old religious marriage (in fact a philosophical tension) between desire and fear. Indeed, with a new outlet opening somewhere in the world every eighteen minutes, Ronald McDonald may be the most successful scientist/philosopher since Albert Einstein. A suitable heir-apparent to Mickey Mouse. A philosopher-king. See:
A BIG MAC
and
WHITE BREAD.

MACHIAVELLI, NICCOLO
   Author of the first how-to-succeed-by-getting-power-and-keeping-it business book, which could have been the non-fiction best-seller for Christmas, 1513. See:
GANG OF FIVE.

MAINSTREAM
In the humanist ideal, the mainstream is where interesting debate, the generating of new ideas and creativity take place. In rational society this mainstream is considered uncontrollable and is therefore made marginal. The centre ground is occupied instead by structures and courtiers.

The professional administrators of power—the managerial élites, the falsely Heroic leaders patterned on stars, the stars themselves and the lobbyists—appear to have gained control of the public mechanisms. In a healthy society, particularly a healthy democratic society, this would not be the case. The courtiers would be in the wings gossiping about how to get on stage.

It is easier for an intelligent divine monarch or pope to identify this sort of problem. Being the central repository of power and the sole focus of the courtier, the potentate can easily see the difference between the mainstream and the margins. Thus Pope Julius II sought out Michelangelo, not some reassuring court painter. And Louis XIV did not give power to the Duc de Saint Simon. This was the advantage of strong leadership which many Enlightenment thinkers admired. However, few monarchs or popes are intelligent. And even those who are, are quickly overwhelmed by the flood of power-seekers.

Democratic society's strength—the absence of a concentrated repository of power—is also its weakness. In the disorder of the average day, those with the skills of power can easily present themselves as indispensable, while those with something to contribute will seem insufficiently focused on immediate problem-solving. And so they will be swept aside.

The citizen's problem is how to keep the mainstream open to the needs of the public weal. This can only be done if great effort and care are expended on differentiating content and manners.

MANAGER
   Drawn from the French word “ménager” or one who does domestic housework, this function has gradually been elevated to the noblest of levels.

The strengths of the manager are continuity, stability and the delivery of services and products from existing structures. Unfortunately managers also discourage creativity, imagination, non-linear thinking, individualism and speaking out, an insubordinate act by which problems are identified. The manager distrusts public debate, abhors any admission of doubt and stifles unpredictable behaviour.

Management is a tertiary skill—a method, not a value. And yet we apply it to every domain as if it were the ideal of our civilization. Our confusion can be seen in the current attempts to revitalize basic school training by aligning it with the “needs” of the business community. In a time of prolonged economic crisis we have decided to concentrate on utility. But these business attitudes are themselves part of the managerial obsession. They reduce even science and mathematics to a narrow, goal-oriented management tool.

If growth and progress are what we need to get out of our crisis, then it will be found not through managerial attitudes but through the release of talents. That means teaching students to think. If mere utility is what we want, then its place is not in the schools but in a revised and modernized apprentice system.

At the level of élite education our assumptions have taken on disastrous proportions. For example, between 1975 and 1993 Canada created 3.1 million new jobs of which 2.1 million were managers or professionals. One million were low-paid and unskilled. Managers and professionals represent an important cost to the economy while producing nothing. Where then is the wealth to come from to pay for the managers? Instead of asking themselves this question, they continually look for reasons to increase the percentage of their own kind in any organization.

The more we train these people as if management were a primary skill, the more we handicap their ability to become citizens capable of providing direction. It is an understatement to say that the Western élites have increasingly failed in their obligations over the last quarter-century. They spend their time cleaning houses that are falling down. See:
SAT.

MANNERS
   People are always splendid when they're dead. See:
POLITENESS.

MARKET-PLACE
   The market-place is as amusing and charming as a risqué Peter Pan, endlessly believing in true love yet seeking the pleasure of free love, endlessly re-creating its own virginity, unequipped with memory or common sense, which is its strength and its weakness.