Friday, June 29, 2007
Opinion
A canker upon us
Almost 40 years ago, Dr. Laurence J. Peter collaborated with Raymond Hull...
| As we approach an election year, we must rouse ourselves out of our torpor of acceptance of this status quo. |
By Bob Zaslavsky
Almost 40 years ago, Dr. Laurence J. Peter collaborated with Raymond Hull to publish the basic axioms of his new science, hierarchiology. The fundamental insight of that science was the Peter Principle: “Given enough time—and assuming the existence of enough ranks
in the hierarchy—each employee rises to, and remains at, his level of incompetence.”
This was supplemented by Peter’s Corollary: “In time, every post tends to be occupied by an employee who is incompetent to carry out its duties.”
Dr. Peter’s penetrating and prescient satire became a pop-culture phenomenon. But instead of stemming the tide of what he presented as the inexorably pervasive structure of all hierarchies (in government, education and the workplace alike), the unexpected consequence of Peter’s analysis was our current acceptance, even legitimizing, of incompetence in all walks of life.
This has culminated in our electing—and re-electing—to the presidency a living vessel of incompetence, George W. Bush. George W.’s ascendancy in the Republican Party is the culmination of the post-Eisenhower decline in that party down from a commitment to principled policy into the primacy of party loyalty over principle and policy. The short-term electoral success of this shift has led too many Democratic Party legislators to follow their lead.
Consequently, in the last seven years, there has been in the nation’s capital a concentration of incompetence that is unparalleled in our history. Never have so many risen to their level of incompetence so quickly. To put it bluntly, anyone who does not see the incompetence of the president and his appointees is seeing neither the forest nor the trees.
Of course, one could say (and this would not be indefensible) that since we live in a democracy, the Bushies are our freely chosen incompetents, and so we must live uncomplainingly with them until we replace them with other incompetents or—a theoretical possibility—competents.
Such a point of view could be argued with some justice if the incompetence (either innate, as with the president, or achieved, as with Dick Cheney, Alberto Gonzales, et al) were not accompanied with venality at all levels. Unfortunately, in the Bush crowd, we find what could almost be called an apotheosis of the yoked pair of incompetence and venality that has led to hollowness of political rhetoric, malfeasance and inept legislation.
The phenomenon of incompetence that has succumbed to the temptation of venality would be bad enough. However, the Bush-Republican crowd goes further. There are, after all, two kinds of incompetence. There is incompetence that is aware of itself as incompetence, and so it exerts efforts to achieve competence. This is productive incompetence.
On the other hand, there is incompetence that is unaware of itself as incompetence because it believes itself to be competent. This is the destructive incompetence that has been inculcated by our schools for at least the last third of a century. Thus, the legacy of contemporary education is a populace of know-nothings who think that they are know-it-alls.
Paradoxically, when the Bushies are caught in their venality, they defend themselves with what they regard as cleverness by assuming an incompetence that they do not believe themselves to possess but that they do believe to be an invulnerable protective shield against the accusation of venality. This is a technique that we find often in children, although in previous generations, they outgrew it and took honest responsibility for their actions, particularly their transgressions. The Bushies have remained children in this regard.
Bush has adopted this ploy with respect to his initiation and conduct of the Iraq invasion: According to him, we simply believed what everyone else believed—his version of “but everyone else is doing it.” Therefore, even if we believed erroneously, we still acted correctly. This is supported by a series of rationalizations that are actually increasingly incredible ad hoc hypotheses.
Remarkably, many citizens believe these rationalizations, and even fervently and zealously believe them.
Gonzales adopted this ploy with respect to his dismissal of federal prosecutors. Margaret Spellings has adopted this ploy with respect to the manifest decline in our educational system under the No Child Left Behind Act. Republican legislators have adopted it with respect to a variety of earmarks that, even on their face, are inane.
The litany is long. What I have emphasized is but the tip of the iceberg. As we approach an election year, we must rouse ourselves out of our torpor of acceptance of this status quo. We must show candidates of both parties no mercy until we eradicate this canker that is eroding the foundations of the democracy that our founders envisioned. SP
Bob Zaslavsky is a retired teacher of our much-neglected humanities.