Sergeants and Gentlemen
Sergeant Colon is a character from Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series, described as a natural-born sergeant, someone who would immediately gravitate to that rank in any organization. In a moment of satori, I became aware of just how many equivalents to sergeants there are, and the parallels between military and other hierarchies, and especially of the curious division between officer and soldier.
Rank hath its privileges, and responsibilities. Rising in rank at any level brings greater pay, oversight over more people, answerability to higher authorities. But the distinction between non-com and junior officer is sharp. Hierarchies have a line marking the boundary between those who make decisions and those who carry them out, with titles to match.
This doesn’t always make much practical sense. While officers are put through additional training, the distinctions between a lieutenant leading a platoon and a sergeant leading a squad, or between a lieutenant and a sergeant serving as adjutant can be invisible in practice. Yet the responsibilities and privileges cut sharply at that line. Officers are held to much higher legal standards, and stricter punishments for violations. They enjoy the privileges of status, such as entry to the officers’ bar and receiving salutes. Any officer, including doctors and paper-pushers, is presumed to be more fit than veteran non-coms to lead in combat, should something happen to the combat officers.
These practices make historical sense, however, being hold-overs from medieval days when the nobles and knights who led armies were professional soldiers, while the rank and file were just whoever else showed up, willingly or otherwise. This was later ensconced in class structure: officers were drawn from the aristocracy, soldiers and sailors from the commoners, and class distinctions were preserved for broader social purposes, rather than strictly for military effectiveness. The officer-enlistee divide survives in part from inertia; military traditions die hard, even in egalitarian countries. Sometimes traditions continue for a while even if they get people killed—exposure to hardship is often endorsed as a way of hardening the troops, or engendering esprit de corps through common suffering I can understand that, though I may question the principle.
Tradition is not an answer, however, to why factories mark a similarly sharp divide between management and labor, with the foreman playing the role of NCO. Companies very quickly jettison tradition if it’s costing money, or are quickly replaced by those who will. Education may play a part, as in the army, but how much, really? It can’t play any part in the qualitative divide between school administrators and teachers, including professors with advanced degrees, with department heads as NCOs. Nor does it explain why priests can deliver the mass while lay church officials who could repeat the litany without a hiccup can’t.
Something else must be at work to preserve that distinction, and I don’t know what it is.