Mulling over what it might mean to be a mandarin — I came out as one yesterday — I grappled first with the problem of arrogance. Mandarins are noted for it. They exude it. Sometimes, they can’t help it: many people of middling intelligence firmly believe that merely being smarter is inherently arrogant. And I can’t fault mandarins for being impatient with fools. But as offensive as mandarin arrogance might be in society, its worst excesses occur in private, when mandarins too blithely assume that they fully understand a given problem, that their understanding already meets the case, that there is nothing for them to learn before proposing a new regulation. Mandarins, steeped in the history of their culture, are too ready to assume that there is nothing new under the sun.

So what today’s mandarin needs is a different style.

Mandarins are supposed to be experts, yes. And they must wear their expertise with reasonable assurance — bumbling mandarins, however ingenious, are not going to be effective. But they ought to be cheerfully frank, with themselves as well as with others, about the limits of their knowledge. And this acknowledgment ought to counsel prudence, discretion, and curiosity. The new mandarin must never, ever, be zealous.

If you want to know what a mandarin ought to look like, consider physicians. Medical doctors are our mandarins par excellence. Surgeons aside, the best doctors are the ones who quite simply make their patients feel better. Sometimes, an illness is cured. At a minimum, though, a good doctor breaks through the terrible isolation that comes with being sick. The good doctor does not walk into the examining room armed with solutions. The good doctor finds solutions, if there are any, by paying close attention to problems. And problems, like patients, are all different, at least potentially.

Like the good doctor, the mandarin must begin with an acknowledgment of ignorance — ignorance of the particulars of the case. If the particulars were known in advance, then  there would be no call for a mandarin’s involvement; the matter could be handled in some automated way. (That’s what clerks do.)

Mandarins ought to strive not to appear to be magicians.

***

Last night, I picked up Aaron James’s theoretical book about a certain class of unpleasant people. I do hope that someone deeply versed in ancient Greek will study the three prongs of James’s test for identifying the members of this class and develop a neutral-sounding synonym for the vernacular label, which, it could be argued, is rankly homophobic.

Although the attempt to pin down a philosophical definition of “asshole” is tedious, there is no doubt that James’s book has enormous practical utility. First of all, there is the test. Second, there is the recognition, which James might have foregrounded more emphatically, that these “gray area” sinners are not the real problem. The real problem is the diviseness that they exploit. In his fifth chapter, James shows how they “often effectively turn cooperative people against one another precisely when agreement in such efforts is most needed.” This is a brilliant point, and without it, James’s theory would be of little interest.  

Aaron James claims to be a follower of John Rawls; perhaps for this very reason, he is not a student of history. He exhibits absolutely no sense that his problem is a historical one — historical in that it arose at a moment in time, a moment that I’d place fairly recently, in 1945, say. I don’t know what good it is to call John D Rockefeller and Napoleon assholes. Rockefeller was a colossal hypocrite, aping an austerely Christian manner while pursuing his commercial interests with ruthless selfishness. Laws were enacted, moreover, to prohibit others from imitating his rapacity. No “gray area” there! Napoleon is a more interesting candidate. He came to power during a very brief collapse of authority; it was the general and permanent collapse of this authority, I would argue, that opened season for assholes after World War II.

Office workers everywhere ought to familiarize themselves with Aaron James’s test. And managers ought to tape it to their mirrors.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Thursday, December 20th, 2012 at 11:10 am.