The Myth of Management
In its heyday, the European nobility allowed itself a particular conceit: that they were inherently better at the various tasks of government.
In purely practical terms, of course, the nobility was suited to governance, but only because most everyone else was too poor, and therefore too busy trying not to starve to death, to learn the basics of how to govern: rhetoric, writing, history, that sort of thing. In principle, there wasn’t anything in the person of the king and court to make them the proper choice to govern, or to enjoy the many privileges that came with being in charge.
No, to secure these things, the nobility had to create a myth that good governance lied inseparably in the nobility itself. They began with the notion of the divine right of kings: the king was directly anointed by God, the final and unquestionable authority, and the nobility rightfully enjoyed its powers and privileges through delegation. The king’s judgment was presumed sound; if he wasn’t capable of delegating properly, God would not have anointed him. QED. A lifetime of success in a field was okay in that field, but the nod of the king left you able to do anything competently. And people were accepted to positions of power and privilege on no more grounds than the whim of a king.
The progressing Enlightenment forced a radical reformulation of the idea. Every now and then, with the coming of gunpowder, a king would be toppled by an ordinary commoner. Even if the commoner decided to eschew a formal crown, he put the nobility in an uncomfortable position. If God chose the rulers, then he was, every now and then, choosing one of which the nobility did not approve, and with whom the nobility did not identify. So God was jettisoned, to be replaced by the myth of breeding: leaders were not made, but born. Good leadership was passed through blood lines. A specific ruler might be better or worse than another, but the ability to rule was inborn, and heritable, and concentrated in the nobility. The notion reached its peak in 19th Century Britain, when Darwinian theories were abused—as they were by so many others, for their so many purposes—to justify the theory, and the final word on entitlement was good breeding. A lifetime of work at a trade was okay for that trade, but being born a baronet made you able to do anything competently. And people were accepted to positions of power and privilege on no more grounds than having an earl for an uncle.
Aristocrats unfortunate enough to live in the US couldn’t really adopt the good breeding theory; they didn’t have any. The US, having thrown off monarchial rule, committed itself against the very notion of nobility. Visiting nobles were welcomed as celebrities, but immigrating nobles were viewed with a suspicion that left them on equal footing in the bourgeois society. Naturally, our aristocracy grew out of successful merchants, few of whom had blood lines any better than a factory worker. They needed an entitlement myth of their own. Instead of claiming superior birth, they seized upon one small facet of good breeding: the gentleman’s education. In Europe, the gentleman’s education was merely a byproduct of good breeding, something aristocrats did because they could afford it. In America, it was taken as the justification for privilege: only a liberal education, it was reasoned, only an exposure to the great thinkers of history, could train someone effectively to govern. Top marks in a technical subject was okay within that subject, but reciting Ovid trained you to do anything competently. And people were accepted to positions of power and privilege on no more grounds than having completed a liberal education.
Notably, any education would not do. An engineering degree, for example, might be very well in a machinist’s shop, but was presumed not to address the lofty intellectual heights necessary to run a country. Tradesmen could afford an engineering degree, knowing they could make a living from it. To get a proper liberal education, you really had to inherit a bit of wealth, to be free to study without worrying whether writing in Greek would allow you to support yourself after college. So it was the liberal education specifically to which the myth of entitlement was attached, ideally a liberal education from an expensive east coast school.
The meteoric rise of America in the 20th century, and especially after the Second World War, began to undermine even this flimsy preserve of the aristocracy began to crumble. Returning GIs took advantage of educational bills, and families on the rising tide of American wealth could afford to send their children all the way through college. Some of them even got degrees in English, and the fine arts, and rhetoric. And, while the Ivy League still has legacy students, all too many are accepted on merit for the comfort of the aristocrats. How then to justify granting leadership and access only to the sons and daughters—well, okay, sons—of the upper class?
Enter the myth of management. We’ve heard it repeatedly in the past twenty or thirty years: experience in managing a large organization is pretty much the same as managing any other large organization. The nature of the organization—an oil corporation, a cabinet department, a baseball league, even watching lawyers manage a large inherited estate in a pinch—is presumed to be immaterial; all organizations are, according to this theory, interchangeable from the perspective at the top. The success of the organization under a given individual’s leadership is immaterial as well; bankrupting the Texas treasury is an unforeseeable accident of market forces, and investigations into shady loans are written off as the fault of some underling, as long as you qualify as a member of the old boys’ network. How one rose to the top of the organization is immaterial, too; getting plunked in the CEO’s office by Daddy, or catapulted into office by a massive media blitz is every bit as good as working your way up the ladder, and really mastering the organization. Even better—a pure, fungible perspective of the omnicompetent manager should be unsullied by too much time in a single job. (Besides, multiple golden parachutes beat one any day.) A lifetime of public service is all well and good, but a couple years in the corner office prepares you to handle anything.
And so we have accepted people into positions of power and privilege on no more basis than that they have managed something else, possibly quite badly, sometime in their lives. The results have been predictable. Donald Rumsfeld had no background as a military man; he was a business executive. He ran the army like a business, cutting jobs and expenses to look good on the ledgers, while spinning a good power point presentation. Our failure in Iraq is largely a direct product of fighting a war on the cheap. Dick Cheney had no background as a lawyer, much less a writer of laws; he was a profiteer, and runs the White House for maximum personal profit. Our decaying rule of law is a direct product of the conflict between just governance and a fast buck. George Bush had no background in politics before being set upon the Texan throne in his blissful ignorance; he was an heir, and a failed one at that, three times over. Having made a proper mess of Texas in turn, he was judged fit to handle the entire country. His disastrous presidency is a direct product of getting handed jobs for which he was unqualified, because it wouldn’t do to hand the presidency to a mere commoner, or to leave the son of an oil magnate with nothing to do.