Reading Note:
SOS
7 January 2015
Normal life resumes today, but somewhat shakily. In order to celebrate my birthday at dinner last night, Kathleen had to work on a document until well past two in the morning; it was nearly three when we turned out the lights. Kathleen had had the good idea of ordering a car to take her into work, and she was out of bed at a quarter past eight. She threw herself together somehow and got out the door, leaving me to sink back into another three hours’ sleep. Not that anybody made me stay up late.
My job for the day is to remove the ornaments from the tree. Kathleen has already taken down the old and delicate ones, and she will check tonight to make sure that I didn’t miss anything. Tomorrow, I shall wrap the tree in a dropcloth and carry it down to the service elevator. The foyer will soon be set to rights — but that is tomorrow’s job. There is also a great deal of ironing to do. I sense that I have run out of resistance to this chore — as well as pressed napkins and handkerchiefs. My writing table is in great disorder, and I’ll have plenty of paperwork to attend to between now and Friday.
In the Times, I read that Mark Zuckerberg has launched a sort of book club, with his first title being The End of Power, by Moisés Naím. I haven’t determined whether this book addresses power from a perspective that will illuminate those mysteries of power that interest me most. These unexplained aspects cluster round two very different phenomena. The first is the problem of the powerful leader who, over time, shakes free of advisers who counsel moderation, who warn him (or her — Mrs Thatcher crossed this event horizon) against making shows of strength out of weaknesses of character, such as Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, is doing with his patriarchal comments on the place of women in society. Erdoğan fascinates me even more than he horrifies and disappoints me: he has been positively poisoned by power. He seems to have abandoned his checkered attempts at playing world statesman and taken up the more familiar but also more tiresome role of Tyrant of Turkey. Power has made him cease to care whether he is interesting.
The other locus of power that intrigues me is the much subtler exercise that this virtue gets in the realm of bureaucracy. It’s difficult to imagine this now, but bureaucracy was once upon a time a great improvement over previous arrangements, which tended toward the ad hoc and draconian. There have always been clerks, of course, at least wherever there has been money, but bureaucracy as we understand it is a modern invention with the most high-minded aims. Designed to minimize the impact of human caprice and to assure the realization of stated objectives, it has refashioned executive operations in every field. Unfortunately, it has failed to refashion its primary working material, which is human nature. Humans remain capricious, beset by common vices, and the history of bureaucracy is one of double subversion, first of those stated objectives (not the bridges and canals but the “abstractions,” justice and prosperity), and then of the bureaucracy itself. Like so many modern social reforms, bureaucracy harbors the hope that human beings might be induced to behave more like machines.
Would computers do a better job of running things? I’m not particularly worked up by anxieties over The Singularity, but I’m not keen on handing power over to machines, either, partly because they can be hacked but mostly because they are, after all, designed by human beings. What I think would be helpful is a new kind of Operating System, one that was not designed with somebody’s corporate profits in mind. Instead of offering blandly helpful friendliness, my proposed system would work like the Mirror, Mirror on the Wall, except that it would not wait to be asked how things were going. Programmed to recognize instances of misjudgment, it would intone, perhaps in the voice of the late Alec Guinness, sympathetic but stern admonitions. You must promote the gifted staffer, not the one you’re cheating with. There would be no way to disable these lectures, which might go on for some time, as past, not necessarily related errors were itemized in scrupulous detail. My OS wouldn’t make us better people, but it would provide a corrective to our haphazard, often quite demented memories.
In addition, memoranda of these wisdom sessions would be delivered to all immediate subordinates.
***
For the time being, we must make do with novels. There are precious few good novels about bureaucracy, whether the vast and impersonal ones of Kafka’s nightmares or the intimate, chatty hardball court of Joshua Ferriss’ brilliant first novel, And Now We Come to the End. I just discovered another one the other day, and the most surprising thing about it was that I had never heard of it, even though I’ve read all of its author’s other fiction. I speak of Shirley Hazzard’s 1967 People in Glass Houses, a satire on the United Nations. (I would have been a little too young to read it with pleasure when it appeared, in different form, in The New Yorker.) Most satires exaggerate things that happen, but Hazzard does something else: she exaggerates the precision of normal attentiveness. Rarely have I been so viscerally reminded of a surgical theatre, but instead of blood everywhere, there are human failings of every shape and size and hue, most of them fairly venial.
People in Glass Houses is a sequence of eight self-contained stories, linked by recurring characters and the constant background of the Organization. The UN is never named, nor New York City or the East River, although both are described, at least as seen from the Organization campus. (The Pepsi-Cola sign in Long Island City becomes a plug for “Frosti-Cola.”) Hazzard isn’t being coy, or attempting the stunt of Ian McEwan’s The Comfort of Strangers (set in an unnamed but unmistakable Venice); rather, she’s locating her novel in a land of wishful thinking. The heart of the matter is laid out early in the first story, which, like the last, concerns the “separation” of a staff member.
The Organization had bred, out of a staff recruited from its hundred member nations, a peculiarly anonymous variety of public official, of recognizable aspect and manner. It is a type to be seen to this very day, anxiously carrying a full briefcase or fumbling for a laissez-passer in airports throughout the world. In tribute to the levelling powers of Organization life, it may be said that a staff member wearing a sari or kente was as recognizable as one in a dark suit, and that the face below the fez was as nervously, as conscientiously Organizational as that beneath the Borsalino. The nature … of the Organization was such as to attract people of character; having attracted them, it found it could not afford them, that there was no room for personalities, and that its hope for survival lay, like that of all organizations, in the subordination of individual gifts to general procedures. No new country, no new language or way or life, no marriage or involvement in war could have so effectively altered and unified the way in which these people presented themselves in the world. It was this process of subordination that was to be seen going on beneth the homburg or turban. And it was Algie’s inability to submit to this process that had delivered his dossier into the hands of Mr Bekkus at the Terminations Board.
The Organization, in short, has become preoccupied, like all large organizations, with the problem of operating itself. Its stated goals, the objectives that it was established to implement, necessarily fall to secondary status.
One of my favorite moments in the novel occurs in the sixth story, “Official Life.” Olaf Jaspersen, a moderately senior pooh-bah, encounters a Mr Nagashima, one of his subordinates, in the elevator.
Striking a personal note, Jaspersen inquired, “Your daughter at college now?”
“He’s at the university, yes.”
“I thought —”
“Yes, yes. Just the one son.”
“What’s he studying?”
“Humanities,” Nagashima nodded, smiling.
“Only the one play?” asked Jaspersen, who thought he had said “Eumenides.”
Nagashima beamed. “Yes. Yes.” The elevator stopped…
Moments later, Jaspersen is telling his Chief that Nagashima “was telling me about his daughter — turning into quite a classical scholar it seems.” My Operating System would be waiting for Olaf Jaspersen when he got back to his office.