The Doubter's Companion (3 page)

In fairness, the initiative had been taken by the corrupters not the corruptees. It began seriously after the Second World War with politicians seeking out ever-more academic advisers. They weren't paid much and they were exercising their own right to have political opinions. But as social and economic programming grew, with its inherent tendency to reduce the unlimited power of the large corporations, so those corporations began to mount a counter-attack.

Their answer to the practical and ethical arguments being made in favour of a stable and fair society was to develop absolute truths related to the market-place. Very early on they identified the need to cultivate their own independent experts capable of delivering truth. They began funding “independent” foundations dedicated to learning. Independence and learning were intended here to mean the development of ideas that would bolster the position of the corporation. On the leading edge of this movement were the
THINK TANKS
which went on to produce bevies of authoritative studies and annual reports intended to legitimize higher oil prices, deregulation, lower taxes, the debt crisis or whatever was the current agenda of their private-sector funders.

The final stage began in the 1970s when the social scientists began to notice a well-paid growth industry known as management consultancy. More and more, these academics began to think of themselves as consultants. And this was by no means limited to economists and professors of business administration.

The corporations and their foundations were far too sophisticated to concentrate on such a narrow and direct approach. Their mandate was to redefine half a millennium of Western evolution by re-examining how citizens see themselves and their society. In order for economic revisionism to make sense, there had to be a new view of philosophy, history, sociology and culture.

For a few years reform-minded governments competed against corporations in the race to purchase the aura of academic freedom. But most of the reform governments were gone by the early eighties and the spreading economic crisis limited the investment that public budgets could make. By then, the universities, the press and even the public seemed to have accepted without protest the new role of the professors.

The ideal of academic freedom and independence has now been severely damaged. To undo the corrupt system in place may be as complex as the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century battle to separate church and learning. There are some relatively simple problem areas. Should business administration be part of university education? Should a professor have the right to the ethical seal of approval of a university if he or she sells that aura in a separate business?

Universities are now desperate for money and only too eager to prostitute themselves. Presidents and their boards accuse the departments, who do not bring in their share, of fleeing reality. But do they have the right to destroy an essential creation of modern civilization? Rectors might well answer that the public purse is starving them. And yet the worst of all possible approaches would be to go on pretending that academic consultants are the descendants of Peter Abelard at the Sorbonne, in the twelfth century, or Giambattista Vico in Naples, in the early eighteenth. See:
TENURE
and
UNIVERSITY.

ACADÉMIE FRANÇAISE
   Housed in the most beautiful palace in Paris, the Academy, whose role it is to control language, has a particularly elegant cupola and internal staircase. The Perpetual Secretary occupies a wonderful apartment in the west wing, overlooking the Seine and the Louvre. The Academy also owns a large chateau and park in the Forêt de Senlis where Academicians go to relax.

The task of the Academicians is to identify correct meaning and use, then put it in an official dictionary. This may force them to favour the truth and beauty of language over the pedestrian needs of communication. The female members of the Academy, for example, must be addressed as if they were male, because Académicien is a masculine word.

The Academicians are self-perpetuating—that is, when one dies, they elect another—which may explain why they are called the Immortals. The chairs in the official meeting room upstairs are historic but uncomfortable. On being elected, members receive a sword after their own design. See:
SCHOLASTICISM.

ACAPULCO
   There are no sharks at Acapulco. The Mexican authorities are formal on this matter. If certain foreign tourists choose not to return home after their holidays, that is entirely their affair.

Furthermore, the sharks are not attracted to the waters around Acapulco by the raw sewage the hotels recycle into the bay. Suggestions of this sort are merely proof of the anti-Mexican sentiment found among foreign intellectuals, who disguise their prejudices in self-serving principles by suggesting, for example, that Mexican journalists are regularly murdered for expressing unflattering political opinions. These individuals are not journalists. Upon investigation by the responsible judicial authorities, it is often discovered that they are money-lenders or homosexuals who have managed to get press-cards under false pretences, and have then been murdered by poverty-stricken widows, whom they have been exploiting, or by under-aged male prostitutes.

These American intellectuals and their imitators in Canada are the same people who suggest that many Mexican workers live in cardboard shacks and that corruption is an integrated factor in the governmental system. This desire to maintain the Mexicans in a state of inferiority vis-à-vis the United States, by denigrating their accomplishments, is simply unacceptable, particularly when it is expressed with the do-gooding hypocrisy of the American élites who are themselves indifferent to the suffering of their own aboriginal peoples. See:
FACTORIES
.

ACCEPTANCE SPEECH
   The triumph of banality over ego. See:
AWARD SHOW.

AD HOMINEM
   The obverse of
HERO
worship. Both indicate an unwillingness to deal with content.

Public figures have complained for decades about the growing tendency to judge them by violent personal attacks, often aimed at their private lives. But as public actors have chosen to assume Heroic guises—whether majestic, saintlike, martyred, romantic or touching—so those they attempt to seduce have reacted with personalized integral vilification.

There is nothing new about such
ad hominem
attacks. They were widely used for political purposes in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. If public figures paid a little more attention to history, they would know that their predecessors led a much rougher life. Today they are protected by concentrated media ownership, the obsession of the large professional élites with respectable public behaviour and, in most countries, overly strict libel laws. Given that ours is a management-oriented society, we give far too much importance to the smoothness of public discourse and fear serious open verbal conflict.

Contemporary
ad hominem
resembles that of an earlier period—the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This was a society of courtiers constantly in pursuit of meaningless power. Court life was measured by personal details—orgasms, medals, gloves, cleavages and titles.
Ad hominem
fed the endless appetite for gossip which filled the salons and occupied the days of those caught up in the complex structures of the state. These were powerless people living by irrelevant criticisms in the shadow of false human gods—the absolute monarchs. That such detached
ad hominem
attacks have returned with a vengeance in the late twentieth century suggests that we have also returned to the courtier-based society of the great palaces, which have been transformed into the great professions and the great organizations of the public and private sectors.

ADVERTISING
   A once-important word now used in ever-narrower circumstances because it is in such direct contradiction with its traditional meaning.

Samuel Johnson said to advertise was “to inform another; to give intelligence.” Advertising was thus linked with the moral value given to knowledge. This no longer being the case, the professionals have taken to using “public relations” where they once used advertising. This phrase suggests a self-interested negotiation rather than communication. See:
BAD PEOPLE
and
CONSUMPTION.

AGRICULTURE
   See:
IRRADIATION.

AIR-CONDITIONING
   An efficient and widely used method for spreading disease.

One of the keys to the revolution in architecture and planning which struck Western cities after the Second World War was the gradual realization by engineers and architects that systems of forced air could heat and cool large numbers of people in a cost-effective manner.

This removed one of the major restrictions on the size of buildings. If windows needn't be opened, then neither density nor height had to be limited. Once heated or cooled, the air could be endlessly recycled through buildings.

This revolution was soon being applied in the air. Before the arrival of the Jumbo Jet, most commercial planes expelled air continually and took in fresh air, which then had to be brought to cabin temperature. With the Jumbo, fuel savings were chosen over air quality. Passengers, from first-class to steerage and smoking to non-smoking, began travelling across the Atlantic in a classless fug. Fifty per cent of the air was recycled. After a few hours in the plane, passengers began to feel as if they were breathing dead air. It was as if each airplane contained a single pair of lungs shared among three to four hundred bodies.

By the early 1980s, standard frequent-flyer rhetoric referred to air travel as exhausting. People began to notice that working in large office towers was far more draining than in buildings where windows could be opened. Then a dramatic incident focused attention. A group of old American veterans staying in a hotel to attend a convention began to die, as if struck by a plague. It was explained that legionnaires' disease was the result not of recycled air but of defective recycling.

There were more common experiences which weren't fatal. People began to expect that following one flight out of every two or three they would fall sick. Sometimes they merely caught a cold; increasingly it was a virulent strain of what was called the flu. But these flus could bring on vomiting, dangerous temperatures and exhaustion. They often killed the elderly or fragile. In fact, they seemed to come in international waves which changed character each season. Every few months there would be a mutation in the type of virulence. The planes made these flu strains instantly international. And the office towers then spread them around in each city. What passengers didn't know was that some airlines were cutting back further on the fresh air quota in order to save money in the hard times brought on by
DEREGULATION
and the
DEPRESSION.

Modern hospitals were also being built with these air-flow systems and it soon became common knowledge that hospitals were places in which you caught things. The hard-learned medical lessons of physical isolation clarified in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries seemed to have been forgotten.

Much of modern medicine is based upon controlling diseases by controlling movements. Now there were new and unexpected waves of viral diseases. Small epidemics in fact. One year it would be viral pneumonia. The next there would be a line of executives struck by ill-defined symptoms which exhausted them, sometimes for several years.

Air-conditioning also became a clear example of the inflexibility of modern industry and of technocratic structures generally. Economics seemed to be painfully linear. Every hour of work lost to a company through sickness is also money lost. It is common during the winter in places with moderate climates to find that 20 to 30 per cent of office workers are home sick. There seemed to be no room for applied thought which used practical observation in order to re-evaluate earlier policies.

This absurd rigidity is reminiscent of the old European colonial armies in the tropics. Well into the twentieth century British soldiers in India wore heavy clothing to protect them from the sun. In addition, a flat metal cross wrapped in cloth was placed beneath their jacket. This cross ran down the spine and over the shoulders. It was meant to stop the rays. Regiments functioned with permanently elevated levels of soldiers in hospital suffering from heat prostration. Attempts to bring in light clothing were resisted by most of the General Staff, who argued that the army would be decimated by the sun. When the change was at last introduced, and the hospital beds emptied, the Staff was amazed.

In manufacturing circles it is widely known that the least advanced area of aeronautics engineering is air treatment. In public, the press officers busily deny there is a problem. The number of formal complaints, they insist, are “statistically insignificant.”
²
But then airline industry organizations don't compile data on these sorts of complaints. In 1993 American government officials investigated the case of a flight attendant with tuberculosis who seemed to have infected twenty-three other crew over a short period of time. TB is spread by airborne bacteria. Uncirculated air was therefore a likely factor. However, the mechanism of general
DENIAL
kept turning.

Corporations inquiring whether windows can be made to open in office towers are told by architects and the construction industry that this is impossible, or only for a significant extra charge, plus long-term air-management costs. In spite of thousands of books about management and competitiveness, many of which talk about getting the most out of executives and other employees through leadership, training and encouragement of individual talents, there seems to be no calculus for integrating the costs of sick-leave into those of air-conditioning.

In truth, the only barrier to airplanes taking in a constant stream of fresh air, cooling it and then expelling it is the absence of pressure from passengers, the airlines' employees and the airlines. The case of office towers is even simpler. The air-conditioning system is rarely mentioned by companies when they build, buy or rent. Nothing prevents them from demanding air-conditioning systems limited to small areas—less than a floor—and which constantly take in and expel air. Nothing, that is, except the inability of our system to integrate widely recognized medical costs with those of engineering.