COB-38: attacks on bureaucrats

After a hard day of bureaucratic work, you might enjoy a bed-time gothic thriller:

A crime has been committed.

The country has been robbed in one of the greatest ripoffs and dirty deals in modern industrial history.  And in the commission of the crime, the nation’s largest and most socially minded corporation was defiled and destroyed.

A department of forensic accountants, sleeping soundly in a dark, clear night with crickets chirping vigorously all around in the bog in which they have camped after a long, fruitful day of team-building and sharing exercises, mysteriously begins to stir.  One accountant bolts upright in her sleeping bag and puts on her glasses.

So why was Ma Bell attacked?  Who is to blame for the rape of Ma Bell?  At whom can we point the finger?

“Something’s just not right,” she mutters to herself in the dark.  Listening carefully, she hears sounds of others moving.

A federal reguatory authority, usurping state powers, ignoring its mandate to protect the public interest.  …

Some government lawyers who saw a chance to make a reputation.

A press that failed to inform the public.

A Bell System management that was derelict in mounting an effective public information program.

“I hate to wake up my co-workers,” she reminds herself, “but this is an extraordinary situation. Something’s happening.”

Uncontrolled connection of terminal equipment

Destruction of end-to-end responsibility

Disregarding of the National Academy of Sciences panel’s warnings and recommendations

FCC’s Computer II decision depriving customers of modern services and stalling technological progress

Destruction of the integrated network [*]

Groping, stumbling, blindly crawling in different directions, the department finally manages to come together for a meeting around a recently filled-in hole at the center of the damp ground where they set up camp.  A quiet tenseness hangs over them like a dense fog.

“Something’s happening,” she finally says quietly but firmly.  Dead silence.  “Are you sure?”  ultimately responds the Senior Accountant who has only 312 more days of work until retirement.

Then everyone starts talking at once.  “How do we know?”  “Everything will be ok.”  “Don’t get upset, don’t get worried, don’t get nervous.  My mobile is auto-dialing the police.  The second the fog lifts, the phone will get enough bars to connect.  Oh, I should have switched to a service provider with better coverage!”  “I use T-Mobile.”  “Let’s just go back to bed.”  “Mind if I go to the bathroom?” “Not on my tent!”  “If we just stick together, we’ll be all right.”

And then, dear reader, you fell asleep.  Bureaucrats are impervious to attack and have no fear of change.

In other bureaucratic news, a true horror story from David Kassel at the Accountable Strategies blog:

Many terrorist groups, such as al-Qaeda and Hamas, have organizational structures that look like any bureaucracy, Helfstein says.  They are staffed with financial, operations, and strategy officers, and even public relations personnel.  Computers and hard drives seized by counterterrorism officials often contain bureaucratic forms outlining standard operating procedures.

If terrorists start acting like bureaucrats, they will be invincible.

Minoru Morita reports that government bureaucrats in Japan are scared.  He quotes a governnment bureaucrat saying:

Lately, when I meet government officials, they seem a little tense. They’ve been feeling this way ever since people starting realizing political change could occur, especially once the Democratic Party of Japan started talking about dismantling the bureaucracy and the mass media joined in the bureaucrat bashing. If the DPJ wins, it will join with the media to bash the bureaucrats even more.

The mass media cannot be serious about bureaucrat bashing.  Bureaucracy is the foundation of all civilizations.  It will endure as long as civilization endures.

Dave E. at Fish Fear Me observes that one must trust bureaucrats because laws are written incomprehensibly. Convoluted, obscure, and baroque laws form the basis for a meritocratic society.  Those who study laws the most thoroughly are the most successful. Bureaucracy and meritocracy are thus closely related.

Aguanomics features an excellent discussion on bureaucrats.  Consider this insightful comment:

The term “bureaucrat”, like “salesman” or “lawyer” carries a negative connotation these days; yet we rely on these people, and can be very very well served by them. I just returned from 3 days touring the Hetch Hetchy system in a group largely composed of what would be called bureaucrats. I came away very impressed with their dedication, pride, and professionalism. Theory dictates that monopoly agencies staffed with civil service employees should become stultified backwaters. Yet, many people in government or agency jobs really are driven by a commitment to lead a useful life, and to serve society.

This is a good example of the many intelligent and highly perceptive comments found on blogs, YouTube, Twitter, and many other fine internet sites.

That’s all for this month’s Carnival of Bureaucrats.  Nominations of posts to be considered for inclusion in next month’s carnival should be submitted using Form 376: Application for Bureaucratic Recognition.

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[*] Above quotes from Constantine Raymond Kraus and Alfred W. Duerig (1988), The Rape of Ma Bell: The Criminal Wrecking of the Best Telephone System in the World (Secaucus, NJ: Lyle Stuart) pp. 12-3, 14, 187.

Seneca’s Controversiae: effects of competition for attention

stone-man

Elite men competed intensely for public attention in the Roman empire.  Oratory was a primary field of this competition.  According to one Roman authority:

it is impossible to imagine {a pursuit} in our state richer in advantages, more splendid in its prospects, more attractive in fame at home, more illustrious in celebrity throughout our whole empire and all the world.  … {“armed” with the art of oratory} a man can always bring aid to friends, succor to strangers, deliverance to the imperiled, while to malignant foes he is an actual fear and terror, himself the while secure and entrenched, so to say, within a power and a position of lasting strength [1]

Sophisticated Roman texts on oratory tend to emphasize the appeal of eloquent oratory to an elite audience. A leading public intellectual of the third century GC chronicled the triumphs of sophists through the ages.  He described the attention accorded to a sophist who in the second century GC held the prestigious Chair of Rhetoric in Rome:

they listened to him as to a sweet-voiced nightingale, struck with admiration for his facile tongue, his well-modulated and flexible voice, and his rhythms, whether in prose or when he sang in recitative.  So much so, that, when they were attending shows in which the vulgar delight — these were, generally speaking, performances of dancers — a messenger had only to appear in the theatre to announce that Adrian {holder of the Chair of Rhetoric} was going to declaim, when even the members of the Senate would rise from their sitting, and the members of the equestrian order would rise, not only those who were devoted to Hellenistic culture, but also those who were studying the other language {Latin} at Rome; and they would set out on the run to the Athenaeum, overflowing with enthusiasm, and upbraiding those who were going there at a walking pace. [2]

Ordinary court cases created most of the demand for instrumental oratorical skills in imperial Rome.  But as lawyers soon learn, much of the action in ordinary litigation is quite dull.  Competition among orators for attention, students, and speaking fees created, as if by an invisible tongue, scholastic oratory focused on sex and violence.  Here are some mock cases that were the subject of discussion about two millennium ago.

  • Law: A priestess must be chaste and of chaste {parents}, pure and of pure {parents}.
  • Discuss: A virgin was captured by pirates and sold; she was bought by a pimp and made a prostitute.  When men came for her, she asked for alms.  When she failed to get alms from a soldier who came to her, he struggled with her and tried to use force; she killed him.  She was accused, acquitted and sent back to her family.  She seeks a priesthood.
  • Law: Whoever catches an adulterer with his mistress in the act, provided that he kills both, may go free.  A son too may punish adultery on the part of his mother.
  • Discuss: A hero lost his hands in war.  He caught an adulterer with his wife, by whom he had a youthful son.  He told the son to do the killing.  The son refused.  The adulterer fled.  The husband now disinherits the son.
  • Law: A girl who has been raped may choose either marriage to her ravisher without a dowry or his death.
  • Discuss: On a single night a man raped two girls.  One demands his death, the other marriage.[3]

These sort of discussions now tend to be associated with legal education.  Law professors might solemnly describe them as fine training for developing the skill to think like a lawyer.  That’s quite sophistic.  These cases developed out of intense competition for attention, students, and speaking fees among the Roman equivalent of law professors.[4]  That competitive pattern is also seen in modern trends in the content of television talk shows, reality TV, and network news.  Intense competition for attention naturally generates representations of sex and violence.

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Notes:

[1] Tacitus, A Dialogue on Oratory, 5 (circa 102 GC).  Quoted from Complete Works of Tacitus, trans. Alfred John Church and William Jackson Brodribb (New York: Modern Library, 1942) pp. 737-8.

[2] Philostratus, Lives of the Sophists, 590 (circa 235 GC).  Quoted from Philostratus and Eunapius, trans. Wilmer Cave Wright (London: William Heinemann, 1961) pp. 231, 233.  The sophist described was Adrian the Phoenician (fl. mid-2’nd century GC).

[3] Seneca, Controversiae I, 2.1, 4.1, 5.1 (circa 37 GC).  Quoted from Declamations, trans. M. Winterbottom (London: William Heinemann, 1974) pp. 59, 105, 121.  I’ve added the tags “Law:” and “Discuss:”.

[4] Stanley Bonner, Roman Declamation in the late Republic and early Empire (Liverpool: Univeristy of Liverpool, 1949) p. 39 states:

the Senecan declamations were mostly delivered at gatherings of quite mature people. … it is also true that nearly all these themes were invented for and debated in the schools, as is witnessed by their survival in the Lesser Declamations attributed to Quintilian, where they are prefaced by the professorial sermo.  But most of the Senecan declamations appear to have been based upon debates where rival professors used the school-subjects to exhibit their powers and win the plaudits (or be shamed by the ridicule) of their contemporaries.

I think it more likely that the school subjects followed the professors, rather than the professors the school subjects.

literary reading & the status of men in social communication

Dana Gioia, serving as Chairman of the U.S. National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), released in 2004 an NEA study entitled Reading at Risk.  This study, which surveyed a representative sample of the adult U.S. population, found that 37.6% of men and 55.1% of women had read a work of literature in the past year.  The share of men and women reading a work of literature fell 11.5% and 7.9% respectively over the previous two decades.  The Gioia-led NEA emphasized the grave public danger of the decline in literary reading.  The NEA downplayed the large difference between men and women.  If literary reading has great public importance, then programs to encourage more men to read literature would seem to be sensible policy.  The male Chairman of the the NEA, deeply concerned about the extent of literary reading, seems to have been uninterested or unable to express concern about ordinary men.

Lisa Jardine, CBE, Centenary Professor of Renaissance Studies at Queen Mary, University of London, formerly Head of the School of English and Drama, and Dean of Arts, now Director of the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters, also led an examination of literary reading.  The Orange Prize for Fiction, a prize that explicitly excludes male authors, commissioned Jardine for the project.  Jardine first focused on women.  In 2004, she and her colleagues surveyed “400 women from the worlds of academia, arts, publishing and literary criticism … including many previous judges of the Orange Prize.”  The results of this survey, called “Women’s Watershed Fiction,”  appeared in a press release and twenty-nine newspaper article references. Three years later, Jardine did a similar survey of “400 men from the worlds of academia, arts, publishing and literary criticism.”  This survey was called  “Men’s Milestone Fiction.”  It differed from the earlier survey of women primarily in alliteration.  This study also generated a press release and seven newspaper article references, as well as some carefully posed attention from scholars on a literary blog.

Professor Jardine’s statements reported in a newspaper article on “Men’s Milestone Fiction” provide an interesting counterpoint to the NEA study of literary reading. According to the newspaper article, Jardine and her colleagues were shocked by the sex differences that they found:

“We were completely taken aback by the results,” said Prof Jardine, who admitted that they revealed a pattern verging on a gender cliche, with women citing emotional, more domestic works, and men novels about social dislocation and solitary struggle.

For a post-modern creationist unaware of the social construction of the social construction of gender, these results would indeed be shocking. But they probably wouldn’t shock any scholar who had read the results of the NEA’s research three years’ earlier. Even a rudimentary appreciation for evolutionary biology makes sex difference in communication likely.  Comparative anatomy and ethology across primates is consistent with sex differences in communication.  So too is considerable human behavioral data.

Jardine’s communicative behavior differed significantly from Gioia’s.  According to the newspaper article, Jardine declared:

Prof Jardine said that the research suggested that the literary world was run by the wrong people. “What I find extraordinary is the hold the male cultural establishment has over book prizes like the Booker, for instance, and in deciding what is the best. This is completely at odds with their lack of interest in fiction. On the other hand, the Orange prize for fiction [which honours women authors  – Guardian editor] is still regarded as ephemeral.”

Jardine was Chair of Judges of the Orange Prize in 1997. She declares that her survey supports more power and honor for the organization that commissioned her work and for persons like her.  But Jardine also has broader public interests:

“On the whole, men between the ages of 20 and 50 do not read fiction. This should have some impact on the book trade. There was a moment when car manufacturers realised that it was women who bought the family car, and the whole industry changed. We need fiction publishers – many of whom are women – to go through the same kind of recognition,” Prof Jardine said.

Perhaps she would like fiction publishers to publish more works by women authors.  That would benefit the relatively small share of women authors in the overall population of Britain.  It might also lead to women reading more fiction, and men, less.  Perhaps that would also benefit women, or at least women not interested in having relationships with more imaginative men.  Like Gioia, Jardine doesn’t seem interested in encouraging men to read more fiction.

Gioia and Jardine exemplify elite behavior deeply rooted in human male and female evolutionary psychology. Men’s lives tend to be less valued than women’s because the fecundity of human communities has been more positively correlated with the number of women than the number of men.  In modern democratic societies, elite men gain their status by out-competing other elite men and elite women in delivering goods to ordinary women.  Elite women gain their status by out-competing other elite women and elite men in delivering goods to ordinary women. That the fate of ordinary men is of relatively little concern to either is a deeply rooted psychological problem that societies may eventually have to confront.

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