By Way of a Filler . . .

A section from part of a discussion document written by me on 10th October 2008, that has, I like to think, a relevance broader than the immediate and obvious circumstances in which it was composed:

‘ . . . By now it has become a truism that the first thing a country long at peace must do when it goes to war is sack the general staff, who, through the times of quiet, tend to have been promoted, not on the basis of their military virtues, but because they play a wicked game of bridge or know someone who counts or else are eminently clubbable. This, of course, is by way of a joke, and is no doubt offensive to the normal run of general staffs. But it is nonetheless indicative, I suggest, of a deeper truth.

People are generally quiescent—when times are good and times are quiet they are prepared to let things sail on without giving them too much thought. But in a crisis, when their interests or safety or livelihoods are threatened, they demand leaders who are capable of cutting straight through to the root of the problem and solving it—rather in the manner of Alexander the Great and the Gordian Knot. But, at the same time, they are never comfortable with such leaders, even the ones that are successful. People desire strong and charismatic leadership—but only in situations that demand it. There is nothing as wearing to the popular consciousness as an adventurous and ambitious leader who continues in power beyond the period of the necessity of his being in power, no matter how capable. The people of France were long sick of Napoleon before his final demise; likewise with Hitler. The fate of Churchill after the Second World War is too familiar to need repeating.

In actual fact, people as a rule prefer mediocrity—and ‘mediocre’ doesn’t refer to the worst; it is a sort of halfway house—neither good nor bad, just average. If the mediocre are capable of rule, then the times must be stable. It is a bit like the canary in the coalmine: if the canary is standing upright on his perch and preening himself, then everything is ok. If he starts swaying on his feet, then watch out! Mediocre leaderships are a natural concomitant of peaceful and prosperous times—people don’t want anyone who is likely to endanger the stability, and, in turn, the stability means that no great ability or initiative is demanded of politicians etc.

A less pejorative term than ‘mediocre’ might be ‘technician.’ One could imagine a factory where successive generations of technicians walk around in overalls with an oiling can, greasing the workings of a machine built long before their time. They themselves possess no great creative mechanical facility—but then they don’t need to. As long as the machine keeps working everything’s fine. And then one day the machine, as it were, starts spitting blood . . .

Most of us in the developed world have lived our lives under the rule of exactly such technical elites, competent in their own way, and able to cope so long as the general backdrop remains relatively unchanged. But the problem is that the backdrop is changing—and changing in such a way as to seem to threaten us with consequences beyond even our worst imaginings. I may be wrong on this—certainly, I hope I’m wrong—but it seems to me that the world is lurching into some fin-de-siecle crisis that is beyond our control and which must work itself out in its own way, whatever that way may be . . .'