Three Books on Technocracy

2,500 words

The word “technocracy” has recently become firmly established in Western political and media discourse. It’s tempting to define it as “rule by technology”, but that begs the question. The Ancient Greek word technē is the root of both modern words, “technology” and “technocracy”, and it means “to make or do, fashion or create.” For Plato, the best of those who exhibit technē —the best carpenters, horse-trainers, flautists and so on—would be the foremost practitioners of whatever their skill-set is. We might call them “experts”, but we should not lose sight of the Classical origins of a word describing those who are increasingly encroaching on our lives. It is not technocracy in itself which is causing us trouble, but those who carry it out: the technocrats.

Today, “technocracy” really does mean “rule by the makers and doers, those who fashion and create”, but this is not as healthy as it sounds. These are not carpenters, horse-trainers, or flute-players. They are the people in power, those who ultimately control the lives of the vast majority of us, and they are very far from being the philosopher-kings Plato wished for.

The various dictionary definitions of “technocracy” almost all refer to rule by “experts.” Governance under technocracy is thus rule by technicians and social engineers, those with expertise in systems. This sounds like a good thing on first hearing. Who would wish anything to be run or managed by people who were inexpert? The problem, however, is that expertise has become its own justification, and systematization has been deified at the cost of the one role of government which is generally held to be the most important (at least by the governed), that is, governance for the benefit of the people as a whole, and not just those who have made it to the top of the pile.

Three books written last century have much to tell us about technocracy, even if they themselves rarely use the term or its cognates. Two were written half a century apart, the latter during the First Iraq War, the first during World War 2, while the earliest of the three is a Russian novel written in 1924. From different perspectives, the three books examine the societal results of living in accordance with rules which are artificial and systemic rather than natural and organic. They also share a biographical common aim, in that they describe the rise of the technocrat.

James Burnham’s The Managerial Revolution was written in 1941, as the American philosopher and political theorist followed with interest the events unfolding in Europe. Burnham writes that Stalin and Hitler were like super-managers, putting their stratagems and operations into place like factory production-lines producing cars. An early Trotskyist who became a late-blooming conservative, Burnham’s central theory in the book is a variation on the Hegelian triad of thesis/antithesis/synthesis. Rather than either capitalism or socialism winning the battle between them, both are fading and dying, to be replaced by a third way: managerialism:

The ‘limited state’ of capitalism is replaced by the ‘unlimited’ managerial state. Capitalist society exists no longer or lingers only as a temporary remnant. Managerial society has taken its place.

This “shift in the locus of sovereignty” is far more developed today, where we live in a world of micro-management. The enemy of this new managerial class is the organic development of society, and the state they pursue must be run “exactly along the lines on which a manager, and engineer, organizes a factory.”

Burnham describes a historically pivotal point, as capitalism and its free-market ways fail and “the new managerial class fortifies itself not simply with regards to the actual means of production, but to the economy itself.” The new ruling class move from making money with machines to controlling it as though it were itself machinery. And those who keep the populace in line under a managerialist regime are not the jackbooted commissars popularly depicted under socialism or fascism, but a different type of domestic army composed of “production managers, superintendents, administrative engineers, supervisory technicians, commissioners, bureau heads, and so on.”

Burnham could have known nothing of the modern and ubiquitous HR (Human Resources) Departments, nor would he have been familiar with the term “line-management”, but these are today’s equivalent of his list of technocrats, bureaucrats and administrators. Anyone who has ever had a “line-manager” will know that much of what they do needlessly consumes the valuable time of people whose working day would be better spent doing their job rather than analyzing and recording it. The last time I was in a management position, I was expected to fill in a 50-page report every three months assessing my staff. I soon refused to keep doing this, informing my “line-manager” (this was in the property-management business, where these people are almost always women) that if I were to make a negative assessment of any of my staff, I would tell them myself. If under-performance persisted, or anything serious or illegal occurred, then I would make a report. The job was riddled with these time-wasting exercises: reports, pointless meetings, “team-building exercises”, more meetings. I soon realized that they were not letting me learn the job myself, but rather micro-managing my role at every stage and therefore leeching time that would have been better spent actually performing the duties for which they hired me in the first place. As an example, they felt it necessary to ask me into their head office in order to explain to me which font to use in company emails.

Half a century after Burnham’s book, the Canadian political philosopher John Ralston Saul published Voltaire’s Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West. The book’s central thesis is that although the Enlightenment was obviously a vital period of history, and its consequences of major importance to the development of Western thought, science, industry and so on, one aspect of it has been fetishized, and that is rationality. This seems, at first, to be an absurdity, as though Saul were suggesting that we would be better off with irrationality, but his argument is more subtle. His description of the technocrats shows a ruling class who have mistaken system for achievement and, therefore, good governance:

Theirs is a mind-set obsessed by systems and by control of systems as the essence of power. It is the opposite of leadership. It is all about form over content; a mind-set in which continuity and mediocrity are the same thing.

Technocrats are fascinated by systems the same way Tolkien’s goblins were mesmerized by engines. This is the attraction of the mechanical for the systems people: that it is fixed, unfree, and capable of being regulated to a fine degree. The technocrat does not focus on the outcome intended by the system, but rather on the purity of the system itself. It’s like being able to strip a car engine down and reassemble it, but being unable to drive the car to the shops because you’ve never passed a driving-test.

This type of hyper-rationality sounds like something to be desired, but that is the whole point of the sub-title of Saul’s book: the dictatorship of reason in the West. Reason is useful, even vital, if employed appropriately. If it becomes dominant until it is its own justification, then this “still-growing obsession with method rather than purpose strikes me as psychotic.” This is not hyperbole. The singularity of purpose with which Western governments implement ruinous policy is making life in the West increasingly toxic. And the technocrats and their systems cannot be wrong because machinery cannot be “wrong”, it can merely malfunction and necessitate repair or replacement.

For Saul, the apparent triumph of reason is illusory:

The reality is that we have not moved beyond the basic ideas of the sixteenth century which, for want of any better description, should be called the concepts of reason. This Age of Reason will soon have been with us for 500 years. With each passing day more ideas, structures and beliefs are hung upon the fragile back of those few concepts.

Increasingly, the biggest problem with technocracy is that we cannot escape it. As corporate giants run more and more of our lives, aligning themselves and cooperating together, companies no longer have owners but rather technocratic master-engineers:

Most Western corporations are controlled by managers, not owners – managers who are virtually interchangeable with military staff officers and government bureaucrats.

Whereas companies once grew organically, and the owner and the manager were the same person, now there is no incentivization to be loyal. If a manager is unsuccessful, s/he just moves on to another position with another corporation. The British corporate environment is full of these interchangeable ciphers, switching between companies like so many atoms in Brownian motion. And, of course, performance is not important, simply the role played by the operative in the system. In this sense, Saul writes, “The modern technocrat and the royal courtier are virtually indistinguishable.”

Language is key to the technocratic enterprise, and specifically language which has been modified in order to obscure what is being talked about to any but fellow technocrats:

One of the specialist’s discoveries was that he could easily defend his territory by the simple development of a specialized language incomprehensible to non-experts.

There is a parallel here with what I have called “co-axial languages”, or languages within languages. “Palare” was coded speech used by gay men in Britain so that they could communicate in safety before homosexuality was decriminalized, and “Cockney rhyming slang” similarly came into being so that members of London’s underworld could communicate without attracting the attention of the police. Of course, neither group were in power in any way, but the principle of not being fully understood by any but those like you remains. Today’s political discourse tends to obfuscate by using ordinary language to avoid saying anything of substance. The practice of Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) means that repetitive catch-phrases repeat and return, saying nothing but giving the impression of great knowledge and capability. Here is a British Government Minister asked by an interviewer whether a particular piece of legislation may need to be altered as time went on. Rather than replying with a simple “yes” he said: “If there are wider policy concerns we need to draw, then we will.” This odd way of speaking also has the advantage of using a few seconds more than a simple affirmative would have done, and the political class is well versed in using up time in order to avoid giving answers of any real substance.

The only minor criticisms of Voltaire’s Bastards are that it is a little overlong, and that it doesn’t mention Burnham’s The Managerial Revolution once. There are somewhat tedious chapters on the likes of Cardinal Richelieu and Robert McNamara, but then there are also historical passages which are brilliantly crafted. A lengthy consideration of the Renaissance in the context of the historical development of visual representation is perhaps the finest example. As for Saul’s apparently not knowing Burnham’s book, that surprises me as his range of reference is vast.

The final book under consideration is a science-fiction novel. Yevgeny Zamyatin wrote We in 1924 in his native Russia, but it was suppressed throughout Soviet rule and was only published in Russia in 1988. It is a dystopian novel which George Orwell called a major influence on his own 1984. Set far into the future, it takes place in a perfectly geometric city, where the citizens of OneState are ruled over by The Benefactor. Their lives, although perfectly regulated, are empty and meaningless until one man has an epiphany. He is a mathematician named—or rather numbered—D-503, and he makes the disturbing discovery that he has a soul. This both affects his sanity and forces him to re-think the mathematical confines that have previously held him captive: “The philosophy of cranes, presses, and pumps, is as perfect as a compass-drawn circle. Is your philosophy less compass-drawn?”

I’ve written before concerning the seriousness of the category error which leads to the belief that an apparent philosophical or ideological truth can have the epistemological integrity of a (correct) mathematical or geometrical equation or function. Put simply, mathematics is a useful tool, but it is no way to run a society. The master-metaphor of the machine is central to We, and the book has something in common with E. M. Forster’s The Machine Stops. Zamyatin’s skill, however, allows him to extend that concept into what should be free, natural, and human:

Why is dance beautiful? Answer: because it is unfree motion, because the whole profound meaning of dance lies precisely in absolute subordination, in ideal unfreedom.

We is a very entertaining and thought-provoking novel, not least because the principles along which this dystopia is run are fundamentally technocratic. The word “technocracy” had been coined just a few years before Zamyatin wrote his novel, in 1919, when an American engineer, William Henry Smyth wrote an article entitled “Technocracy – Ways and Means to Gain Industrial Democracy”.

So, three very different books written in different countries over around three-quarters of a century are linked by a central theme: control. This is the attraction of the machine, as noted. It can be controlled, maintained, repaired, and engineered. The organic world can be similarly controlled, of course, as any rose-grower or dog-breeder will know. But take that control away, and nature will force her way back in, as Horace notes. Machinery also requires surveillance. An important part of engineering is inspection, and this observation is now being transposed to people rather than machine-parts. We are all too aware of the increase in malevolent surveillance in the modern world.

Systems fetishists now increasingly run our lives. We are vulnerable in the face of their obsession with structure and system, with ideological mechanization, planning, with committees, with targets and quotas, and with line management. These have been allowed to dominate modern social, political, industrial, and financial practice to the exclusion of actually doing anything useful for anyone but the technocrats themselves. The machine simply churns on, with the technocratic class enriching itself in the process, as part of the process, and the atomized lives of ordinary people become more empty and irrelevant, like the drones in We. The only escape is self-realization, self-knowledge, what I’ve called “autognosis.” John Ralston Saul at least gives us a glimmer of hope that escape via this route might have been still possible at the end of the last century, but each day that passes now makes escape from the machineries of the technocrats less and less likely:

Faced by the power of a whole civilization bound up in structure, the true individual flees. He refuses the rational dream of a world in which each man is an expert and thus only part of a man. What he resents is not so much that he has been turned into a cell in the social body. Rather, he finds it unacceptable that each cell has little knowledge of the whole and therefore little influence over its workings.

Welcome to the machine.