- Hayward, Steven F.
Greatness.
New York: Crown Forum, 2005.
ISBN 0-307-23715-X.
-
This book, subtitled “Reagan, Churchill, and the Making of
Extraordinary Leaders ”, examines the parallels between the
lives and careers of these two superficially very different
men, in search of the roots of their ability, despite having
both been underestimated and disdained by their
contemporaries (which historical distance has caused many to
forget in the case of Churchill, a fact of which Hayward
usefully reminds the reader), and considered too old for the
challenges facing them when they arrived at the summit of
power.
The beginning of the Cold War was effectively proclaimed
by Churchill's 1946
“Iron Curtain”
speech in Fulton, Missouri, and its end foretold by Reagan's
“Tear
Down this Wall” speech at the Berlin wall in 1987. (Both
speeches are worth reading in their entirety, as they have
much more to say about the world of their times than the
sound bites from them you usually hear.) Interestingly, both
speeches were greeted with scorn, and much of Reagan's staff
considered it fantasy to imagine and an embarrassment to
suggest the Berlin wall falling in the foreseeable future.
Only one chapter of the book is devoted to the Cold War; the
bulk explores the experiences which formed the character of
these men, their self-education in the art of statecraft,
their remarkably similar evolution from youthful liberalism
in domestic policy to stalwart confrontation of external
threats, and their ability to talk over the heads of the
political class directly to the population and instill their
own optimism when so many saw only disaster and decline
ahead for their societies. Unlike the vast majority of their
contemporaries, neither Churchill nor Reagan considered
Communism as something permanent—both believed it would
eventually collapse due to its own, shall we say, internal
contradictions. This short book provides an excellent
insight into how they came to that prophetic conclusion.
- Bolchover, David.
The Living Dead.
Chichester, England: Capstone Publishing, 2005.
ISBN 1-84112-656-X.
-
If you've ever worked in a large office,
you may have occasionally found yourself musing, “Sure,
I work hard enough, but what do all those
other people do all day?” In this book, David
Bolchover, whose personal work experience in two large
U.K. insurance companies caused him to ask this question,
investigates and comes to the conclusion, “Not very
much”. Quoting statistics such as the fact that 70% of
Internet pornography site accesses are during the 9 to 5 work day, and
that fully one third of mid-week visitors at a large U.K.
theme park are employees who called in sick at work, the
author discovers that it is remarkably easy to hold down
a white collar job in many large organisations while doing
essentially no productive work at all—simply showing up
every day and collecting paychecks. While the Internet has
greatly expanded the scope of goofing off on the job
(type
“bored
at work” into Google and you'll get in excess
of sixteen million hits), it is in addition to traditional
alternatives to work and, often, easier to measure. The author
estimates that as many as 20% of the employees in large offices
contribute essentially nothing to their employer's
business—these are the “living dead” of the title.
Not only are the employers of these people getting nothing for their
salaries, even more tragically, the living dead themselves are wasting
their entire working careers and a huge portion of their lives in
numbing boredom devoid of the satisfaction of doing something
worthwhile.
In large office environments, there is often so little
direct visibility of productivity that somebody who either
cannot do the work or simply prefers not to can fall into
the cracks for an extended period of time—perhaps
until retirement. The present office work environment can be
thought of as a holdover from the factory jobs of the
industrial revolution, but while it is immediately apparent
if a machine operator or production line worker does
nothing, this may not be evident for office work. (One of
the reasons outsourcing may work well for companies is that
it forces them to quantify the value of the contracted
work, and the outsourcing companies are motivated to better
measure the productivity of their staff since they represent
a profit centre, as opposed to a cost centre for the
company which outsources.)
Back during my blessedly brief career in the management of an
organisation which grew beyond the experience base of
those who founded it, I found that the only way I could
get a sense for what was actually going on in the
company, as opposed to what one heard in meetings and read
in memoranda, was what I called
“Lieutenant Columbo”
management—walking around with a little notepad,
sitting down with people all over the company, and asking
them to explain what they really did—not what their
job title said or what their department was supposed to
accomplish, but how they actually spent the working day,
which was often quite different from what you might have
guessed. Another enlightening experience for senior management
is to spend a day jacked in to the company switchboard, listening
(only) to a sample of the calls coming in from the outside world.
I guarantee that anybody who does this for a full working day will end
up with pages of notes about things they had no idea were going on.
(The same goes for product developers, who should regularly eavesdrop
on customer support calls.) But as organisations become huge, the
distance between management and where the work is actually done
becomes so great that expedients like this cannot bridge the gap:
hence the legions of living dead.
The insights in this book extend to why so many business books (some
seeming like they were generated by the PowerPoint Content Wizard) are
awful and what that says about the CEOs who read them, why mumbo-jumbo
like “going forward, we need to grow the buy-in for leveraging
our core competencies” passes for wisdom in the business world
(while somebody who said something like that at the dinner table
would, and should, invite a hail of cutlery and vegetables), and why
so many middle managers (the indispensable NCOs of the corporate army)
are so hideously bad.
I fear the author may be too sanguine about the prospects of devolving
the office into a world of home-working contractors, all
entrepreneurial and self-motivated. I wish that world could
come into being, and I sincerely hope it does, but one worries that
the inner-directed people who prosper in such an environment are the
ones who are already productive even in the stultifying environment of
today's office. Perhaps a “middle way” such as Jack Stack's
Great Game of Business
(September 2004), combined with the devolving of corporate monoliths
into clusters of smaller organisations as suggested in this book
may point the way to dezombifying the workplace.
If you follow this list, you know how few “business books”
I read—as this book so eloquently explains, most are hideous.
This is one which will open your eyes and make you think.
- Ronson, Jon.
Them: Adventures with Extremists.
New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002.
ISBN 0-7432-3321-2.
-
Journalist and filmmaker Jon Ronson, intrigued by political
and religious extremists in modern Western societies,
decided to try to get inside their heads by hanging out with
a variety of them as they went about their day to day
lives on the fringe. Despite his being Jewish, a frequent
contributor to the leftist Guardian newspaper,
and often thought of as primarily a humorist, he found
himself welcomed into the inner circle of characters as
diverse as U.K. Muslim fundamentalist Omar Bakri, Randy
Weaver and his daughter Rachel, Colonel Bo Gritz, who he
visits while helping to rebuild the Branch Davidian church
at Waco, a Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan attempting to remake
the image of that organisation with the aid of self-help
books, and Dr. Ian Paisley on a missionary visit to Cameroon
(where he learns why it's a poor idea to order the
“porcupine” in the restaurant when visiting that
country).
Ronson is surprised to discover that, as incompatible as the
doctrines of these characters may be, they are nearly
unanimous in believing the world is secretly ruled by a
conspiracy of globalist plutocrats who plot their schemes in
shadowy venues such as the Bilderberg conferences and the
Bohemian Grove in northern California. So, the author
decides to check this out for himself. He stalks the
secretive Bilderberg meeting to a luxury hotel in Portugal
and discovers to his dismay that the Bilderberg Group
stalks back, and that the British Embassy can't
help you when they're on your tail. Then, he gatecrashes
the bizarre owl god ritual in the Bohemian Grove through the
clever expedient of walking in right through the main gate.
The narrative is entertaining throughout, and generally
sympathetic to the extremists he encounters, who mostly
come across as sincere (if deluded), and running small-time
operations on a limited budget. After becoming embroiled in
a controversy during a tour of Canada by David Icke, who
claims the world is run by a cabal of twelve foot tall
shape-shifting reptilians, and was accused of anti-Semitic
hate speech on the grounds that these were “code
words” for a Zionist conspiracy, the author ends up
concluding that sometimes a twelve foot tall alien lizard
is just an alien lizard.
- Anderson, Brian C.
South Park Conservatives.
Washington: Regnery Publishing, 2005.
ISBN 0-89526-019-0.
-
Who would have imagined that the advent of “new
media”—not just the Internet, but also AM radio after
having been freed of the shackles of the “fairness
doctrine”, cable television, with its proliferation of channels
and the advent of “narrowcasting”, along with the venerable
old media of stand-up comedy, cartoon series, and square old
books would end up being dominated by conservatives and
libertarians? Certainly not the greybeards atop the media
pyramid who believed they set the agenda for public discourse
and are now aghast to discover that the “people power” they
always gave lip service to means just that—the people, not they,
actually have the power, and there's nothing they can do to get it back
into their own hands.
This book chronicles the conservative new media revolution of the past
decade. There's nothing about the new media in themselves which has
made it a conservative revolution—it's simply that it occurred
in a society in which, at the outset, the media were dominated by an
elite which were in the thrall of a collectivist ideology which had
little or no traction outside the imperial districts from which they
declaimed, while the audience they were haranguing had different
beliefs entirely which, when they found media which spoke to them,
immediately started to listen and tuned out the well-groomed,
dulcet-voiced, insipid propagandists of the conventional wisdom.
One need only glance at the cratering audience figures for the old
media—left-wing urban newspapers, television network news, and
“mainstream” news-magazines to see the extent to which
they are being shunned. The audience abandoning them is
discovering the new media: Web sites, blogs, cable news, talk radio,
which (if one follows a broad enough selection), gives a sense of what
is actually going on in the world, as opposed to what the editors of
the New York Times and the Washington Post
decide merits appearing on the front page.
Of course, the new media aren't perfect, but they are
diverse—which is doubtless why collectivist partisans
of coercive consensus so detest them. Some conservatives may be
dismayed by the vulgarity of
“South Park”
(I'll confess; I'm a big
fan), but we partisans of civilisation would be well advised to party
down together under a broad and expansive tent. Otherwise, the bastards
might
kill
Kenny with a rocket widget ball.
- Dalrymple, Theodore.
Our Culture, What's Left of It.
Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2005.
ISBN 1-56663-643-4.
-
Theodore Dalrymple is the nom de plume of Anthony
Daniels, a British physician and psychiatrist who, until his recent
retirement, practiced in a prison medical ward and public hospital
in Birmingham, England. In his early career, he travelled widely,
visiting such earthly paradises as North Korea, Afghanistan, Cuba,
Zimbabwe (when it was still Rhodesia), and Tanzania, where
he acquired an acute sense of the social prerequisites for
the individual disempowerment which characterises the third
world. This experience superbly equipped him to diagnose the
same maladies in the city centres of contemporary Britain; he is
arguably the most perceptive and certainly among the most eloquent
contemporary observers of that society.
This book is a collection of his columns from
City Journal,
most dating from 2001 through 2004, about equally divided between
“Arts and Letters” and “Society and Politics”.
There are gems in both sections: you'll want to re-read
Macbeth after reading
Dalrymple on
the nature of evil
and need for boundaries if
humans are not to act inhumanly. Among the chapters of social
commentary is a prophetic essay which almost precisely
forecast
the recent violence in France three years before it happened, one
of the clearest statements of the
inherent
problems of Islam in adapting to modernity, and a persuasive
argument
against drug legalisation by somebody who spent almost
his entire career treating the victims of both illegal drugs and
the drug war. Dalrymple has decided to
conclude his medical
career in down-spiralling urban Britain for a life in rural
France where, notwithstanding problems, people still know
how to live. Thankfully, he will continue his writing.
Many of these essays can be
found on-line
at the City Journal site; I've linked to those I cited
in the last paragraph. I find that writing this fine is best enjoyed
away from the computer, as ink on paper in a serene time, but it's great
that one can now read material on-line to decide whether it's worth
springing for the book.
- Young, Michael.
The Rise of the Meritocracy.
New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, [1958] 1994.
ISBN 1-56000-704-4.
-
The word “meritocracy” has become so commonplace
in discussions of modern competitive organisations and societies
that you may be surprised to learn the word did not exist before
1958—a year after Sputnik—when the publication of
this most curious book introduced the word and concept into the
English language. This is one of the oddest works of serious
social commentary ever written—so odd, in fact, its author
despaired of its ever seeing print after the manuscript was
rejected by eleven publishers before finally appearing, whereupon
it was quickly republished by Penguin and has been in print ever since,
selling hundreds of thousands of copies and being translated into
seven different languages.
Even though the author was a quintessential “policy wonk”:
he wrote the first postwar manifesto for the British Labour Party,
founded the Open University and the Consumer Association, and
sat in the House of Lords as Lord Young of Dartington, this is
a work of…what shall we call it…utopia? dystopia?
future history? alternative history? satire? ironic social
commentary? science fiction?…beats me. It has also
perplexed many others, including one of the publishers
who rejected it on the grounds that “they never published
Ph.D. theses” without having observed that the book is
cast as a thesis written in the year 2034! Young's dry irony and
understated humour has gone right past many readers, especially
those unacquainted with English satire, moving them to outrage,
as if George Orwell were thought to be advocating Big Brother.
(I am well attuned to this phenomenon, having experienced it myself
with the Unicard
and
Digital
Imprimatur
papers; no matter how obvious you make the irony, somebody,
usually in what passes for universities these days, will take
it seriously and explode in rage and vituperation.)
The meritocracy of this book is nothing like what politicians and
business leaders mean when they parrot the word today (one hopes,
anyway)! In the future envisioned here, psychology and the social
sciences advance to the point that it becomes possible to determine
the IQ of individuals at a young age, and that this IQ, combined with
motivation and effort of the person, is an almost perfect predictor of
their potential achievement in intellectual work. Given this, Britain
is seen evolving from a class system based on heredity and inherited
wealth to a caste system sorted by intelligence, with the
high-intelligence élite “streamed” through special state
schools with their peers, while the lesser endowed are directed toward
manual labour, and the sorry side of the bell curve find employment as
personal servants to the élite, sparing their precious time for the
life of the mind and the leisure and recreation it requires.
And yet the meritocracy is a thoroughly socialist society:
the crème de la crème become the wise civil
servants who direct the deployment of scarce human and financial
capital to the needs of the nation in a highly-competitive global
environment. Inheritance of wealth has been completely abolished,
existing accumulations of wealth confiscated by “capital
levies”, and all salaries made equal (although the
élite, naturally, benefit from a wide variety of employer-provided
perquisites—so is it always, even in merito-egalitopias). The
benevolent state provides special schools for the intelligent progeny
of working class parents, to rescue them from the intellectual damage
their dull families might do, and prepare them for their shining
destiny, while at the same time it provides sports, recreation, and
entertainment to amuse the mentally modest masses when they finish
their daily (yet satisfying, to dullards such as they) toil.
Young's meritocracy is a society where equality of opportunity
has completely triumphed: test scores trump breeding, money,
connections, seniority, ethnicity, accent, religion, and
all of the other ways in which earlier societies sorted
people into classes. The result, inevitably, is drastic
inequality of results—but, hey, everybody gets
paid the same, so it's cool, right? Well, for a while anyway…. As
anybody who isn't afraid to look at the data knows perfectly
well, there is a strong
hereditary component to intelligence.
Sorting people into social classes by intelligence will, over the
generations, cause the mean intelligence of the largely
non-interbreeding classes to drift apart (although there will be
regression to the mean among outliers on each side, mobility among the
classes due to individual variation will preserve or widen the gap).
After a few generations this will result, despite perfect social
mobility in theory, in a segregated caste system almost as rigid as
that of England at the apogee of aristocracy. Just because “the
masses” actually are benighted in this society doesn't
mean they can't cause a lot of trouble, especially if incited by
rabble-rousing bored women from the élite class. (I warned you this
book will enrage those who don't see the irony.) Toward the end of
the book, this conflict is building toward a crisis. Anybody who can
guess the ending ought to be writing satirical future history
themselves.
Actually, I wonder how many of those who missed the satire
didn't actually finish the book or simply judged it by
the title. It is difficult to read a passage like this
one on p. 134 and mistake it for anything else.
Contrast the present — think how different was
a meeting in the 2020s of the National Joint Council, which
has been retained for form's sake. On the one side
sit the I.Q.s of 140, on the other the I.Q.s of 99.
On the one side the intellectual magnates of our day,
on the other honest, horny-handed workmen more at home
with dusters than documents. On the one side the solid
confidence born of hard-won achievement; on the other
the consciousness of a just inferiority.
Seriously, anybody who doesn't see the satire in this must
be none too
Swift.
Although the book is cast as a retrospective
from 2038, and there passing references to atomic stations,
home entertainment centres, school trips to the Moon and
the like, technologically the world seems very much like
that of 1950s. There is one truly frightening innovation,
however. On p. 110, discussing the shrinking job market
for shop attendants, we're told, “The large shop
with its more economical use of staff had supplanted many
smaller ones, the speedy spread of self-service in something
like its modern form had reduced the number of assistants
needed, and piped distribution of milk, tea, and beer was
extending rapidly.” To anybody with personal experience
with British plumbing and English beer, the mere thought of
the latter being delivered through the former is enough to
induce dystopic shivers of
1984 magnitude.
Looking backward from almost fifty years on,
this book can be read as an alternative history of the last
half-century. In the eyes of many with a libertarian or conservative
inclination, just when the centuries-long battle against privilege and
prejudice was finally being won: in the 1950s and early 60s when
Young's book appeared, the dream of equal opportunity so eloquently
embodied in Dr. Martin Luther King's “I Have a Dream”
speech began to evaporate in favour of equality of results (by forced
levelling and dumbing down if that's what it took), group identity and
entitlements, and the creation of a permanently dependent underclass
from which escape was virtually impossible. The best works of
alternative history are those which change just one thing in the past
and then let the ripples spread outward over the years. You can read
this story as a possible future in which equal opportunity really did
completely triumph over egalitarianism in the sixties. For those who
assume that would have been an unqualifiedly good thing, here is a
cautionary tale well worth some serious reflexion.