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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
June 26, 2011
The imposture
The ancient Chinese, of the T'ang Dynasty if I am not mistaken, had an interesting test for aspiring bureaucrats. It was a written examination, and it consisted of one question only. One had as much time as one needed to prepare, and yes, everyone knew the question in advance. It went something like: "Please write down, on the available paper, in coherent summary, everything you know."The aspirant was granted occupation of a little room, with a view of a garden, until the examination was completed to his satisfaction. And marks were awarded - disproportionately, no doubt, to our modern way of thinking - for literary style, and the standard of calligraphy. Gentle reader may know that I am not generally well-disposed to "bureaucracy." Indeed, I have difficulty writing down that word, without then invoking the shade of Franz Kafka. But we will pass over this lightly, for the purposes of today's sermon. Instead I want to commend those ancient Chinese. If we must have bureaucrats - and I'm sure that, like the poor, they will always be with us - then the sort we should have are those who would ace that T'ang examination. That is to say, civilized people, of broad reading and culture, of an artistic and philosophical disposition, who do not look at things in small, narrow ways. We want men (and perhaps, women) who do not long to acquire responsibilities, and reciprocally, are inclined to leave others alone. We want decorative bureaucrats, as adornments to the State, settled comfortably into their sinecures and, ideally, investing their time in the production of fine art, poetry, narrative and musical compositions, geological cartography, ornithological speculations, and the design of beautiful irrigation schemes. A few might benefit from special legal training, and be employed as judges and magistrates. Of course, even when they are not welcomed, a government will be visited by various practical problems, and delegations of persons under the impression that these are, in some sense, urgent. Occasionally, something will have to be done, if only to keep up appearances. I would not wish to be thought an impractical person. And that is why, in principle, I am in favour of "studies." By all means, let us appoint some especially learned and elegant servants of the imperium to investigate these problems, to write (and illustrate) beautiful essays upon them. And let them produce such marvellous, enthralling, and insightful studies, that we will all want to create problems, if only to justify more such works. Meanwhile, the problems themselves go away, when the causes of them are progressively withdrawn. This is why I'm in favour of hanging people sometimes, or otherwise removing them from influence or authority. It is why, in addition to being a Roman Catholic, I have great sympathy for both the Taoist and Confucian teachings of ancient China. (These two "philosophies," religions of a kind, being profoundly compatible, even necessary completions of one another.) For the wisdom of the ancient Chinese, as I understand them, was to govern with minimal intervention. The sage, as we read in Lao Tzu (I live and die by Arthur Waley's translation), "relies on actionless activity, carries on wordless teaching." He, "achieves his aim but does not call attention to himself." He is the opposite of one of our "nation-building" politicians. We, in our day, out of our own bureaucratic notions, are inclined to interventions that invariably compound truly simple problems, which we angrily refuse to understand. We gather statistics, and conduct sociological studies of extraordinary fatuity. To my more Sinitic view, the numbers themselves are a form of provocation. They are a way to avoid plain and unavoidable moral judgments; to intrude with the equipage of "science" into fields where knowledge must be of human nature, and where statistics can only mislead and obscure. Usually, there is some political agenda in play, and the grand spray of statistics is intended as cover for what the activists had decided to do all along. The first question to ask, of such an event as, for instance, the recent Vancouver riot, is, "What does this look like?" It is the same question one asks of oneself, when one is sincerely trying to understand one's own behaviour. It is often, if not always, the least comfortable question to ask. Yet it is the question that elicits the most immediately useful answers, and points a way forward through any field of subtleties, paradoxes, and other surprises, that may lurk behind what is obviously in view. Note: everything begins in precise description. Hence our need for skilled poets and draughtsmen. Social "science" has itself been transformed over the last couple of generations, from an essentially journalistic enterprise, in which phenomena were directly observed in the field, intelligibly reported, and logically considered, into an extravagant, jargon-ridden, arithmetical game, aping physics, and attempting to appropriate its prestige. It was, from its beginnings, the softest "science" imaginable; it has hardened now into a ridiculous imposture. But modern bureaucracy utterly depends upon it. Which means, that problem can be solved, by simply taking sociology away. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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