The rule of anarchy

The most stupendous revolutionary poem ever written in English is Shelley’s Mask of Anarchy (www.artofeurope.com/shelley/she5.htm). Shelly wrote this after hearing of the Peterloo Massacre. The poem describes a vision of an evil masque in which a parade of ghouls (murder, fraud, hypocrisy and anarchy) appear wearing masks resembling the political leaders of the day. The most terrible ghoul is anarchy, who resembles King George IV.

Last came Anarchy: he rode
On a white horse, splashed with blood;
He was pale even to the lips,
Like Death in the Apocalypse.

And he wore a kingly crown;
And in his grasp a sceptre shone;
On his brow this mark I saw -
'I AM GOD, AND KING, AND LAW!'

With a pace stately and fast,
Over English land he passed,
Trampling to a mire of blood
The adoring multitude

Shelley’s association of anarchy with the supreme authority and power of the state differs from most popular uses of the word, in which ‘anarchy’ is used to designate a disorganised powerless multitude in which private appetites are fulfilled by force. Shelley’s view (and mine) is that most people, left to themselves, will organise their lives peacefully. The main causes of violence and hatred are the abuse of power and the love of power respectively. These are more likely to emerge from those who have already accumulated power, seek more, and fear its loss.

The control of the powerful has therefore become the major political and legal enterprise in any society. This takes the form of ensuring decision-making is shared with representatives of those affected by the decisions, that proper deliberative procedures are followed, and that decisions are implemented on the basis of clear rules rather than arbitrary favours to cronies and courtiers. Needless to say, societies which operate in this way tend to make better decisions which command greater consent. They also tend to be more prosperous: people will work to accumulate money if they can be assured it will not be seized from them by some arbitrary decision.

These principles are well-understood when people think of societies and governments, but not when they think of big organisations. Corporations, banks and universities can all experience the rule of anarchy. Rules may exist in the organisation, but they are by-passed by the powerful. Off-the-cuff decisions replace due process and the thorough discussion of options. Arbitrary favours are handed out to cronies and lovers. The central aim of the organisation becomes the accumulation of prestige, wealth and power for the small ruling junta. Such organisations, like some banks recently and many commercial organisations in the past, make increasingly grandiose and inept decisions, and crash to disaster. Commentators are then amazed that such apparently powerful and dominating figures - like Fred Goodwin (formerly of the Royal Bank of Scotland) or Kenneth Lay (formerly of Enron) - should fall so suddenly. To appreciate their achievements, we need to return to Shelley:

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away"

Great crackpot ideas of the past

Some people collect train numbers, some collect beer mats. I collect ideas. The most prized items in my collection are the great crackpot ideas that have inspired men to gleefully slaughter each other over the past decades. We could order these into a top ten, ranking them by millions of deaths through war and starvation, but this would take more research than I have time for at present. So here’s one great crackpot idea to be going on with: The peoples of the world can be arranged into separate states, each of which should comprise a distinct nation.

The ‘nation-state’ is a great crackpot idea because the peoples of Europe and the rest of the World have not distributed themselves into neat geographical clusters. Of course, rulers have tried for centuries to make their subjects more homogeneous, usually by attempting to eliminate inconvenient groups that persisted in adhering to minority religions, languages or customs. The ‘nation-states’ which dominated Europe after 1918 sought even more vigorously to make reality fit the crackpot idea, with mass transfers of population, suppression of minority languages, and exterminations. The creation of the European Union is an admission by all but a few recalcitrant nationalists in Europe that the nation-state has been a catastrophe for the continent, and that a muddled unity is preferable.

There are lesser crackpot ideas too. These cause havoc and dismay but do not usually involve major loss of life. An example is the research assessment exercise (RAE) for allocating funds in British universities. This allocates about £2 billion/year, according to a grading of ‘research excellence’ across all disciplines. These grades are assigned by a series of expert panels based on their assessments of published research papers submitted by universities, and on various intangible fudge factors like ‘research impact’. RAE assessments are completed every few years. The total cost of this exercise has been estimated at £47 million, mainly in the time spent by university staff in preparing submissions for the expert panels.

What makes this a crackpot idea is not just the high transaction cost of the exercise, but the impossibility of grading all human knowledge from genetics to philosophy on a simple rating scale. Most academics could probably agree about the leading centres in their discipline, but there would be probably be little reliability in any ratings beyond that. To complicate matters, there is some excellent research in some mediocre university departments and vice-versa. Academics would also struggle to reliably rate research which crosses traditional disciplinary boundaries or which challenges dominant paradigms. Watson and Crick were lucky to have done their research before the RAE existed.

To make matters worse, the RAE grades past research, not current performance. Because of the long intervals between assessments and the delays in academic publishing, some of the research assessed may be based on laboratory or fieldwork almost a decade old. Panel ratings are therefore exercises in the history of knowledge. There is an interesting contrast when academics bid for funds to carry out new research projects. In this case, the research councils and the various charitable research funding agencies assess the academics’ recent performance and the prospect of a useful outcome from their proposed research project. Unfortunately, research funds are limited, and academic staff spend much of their time preparing research bids with limited chance of success.

The obvious solution to all this would be to close down the RAE, and transfer the funds to the research councils. This would also release the high transaction costs of the RAE. Why won’t this happen? The answer is that however crackpot an idea, it generates its winners and losers. The universities which gain most funds from the RAE worry they might lose by an alternative system. Besides funds, the RAE assigns esteem, and esteem counts for a lot in the competitive and hierarchical world of universities. Central government is also a winner: it can enforce regular changes in the formulas used to calculate the allocations of funds following the RAE, and thereby remind those working in higher education of their subordination to the state. There are important lessons of power here: use complicated rules to disguise the exercise of your power and to divide those you rule into squabbling factions. Get clever people to spend all their time in silly competitions, and they will pay less attention to the serious business of challenging your power.

Bullying as a career

Some years ago, the Government tried to improve the recruitment of teachers with the slogan ‘You never forget a good teacher’. That may be true, but you never forget really bad ones either. Most of all, you never forget the school bully. Bullying at school causes absenteeism, illness, and even suicide. Even after leaving school, the pain can live on. I know of friends who have had chance encounters with school bullies years later, and felt the same daggers of pain, anxiety and humiliation.

School bullies are usually portrayed in fiction as thick and cowardly, who inflict cruelty because of psychological abnormalities. In fiction, they are defeated in the end. But this is wishful thinking. An alternative fictional school bully is shown in Michael Palin’s Tomkinson’s Schooldays. Here, the school bully enjoys the exercise of cruelty, but uses it to gain exceptional favours including access to cigars, whisky and the pleasure of attractive young Philippine women. In Tomkinson’s Schooldays, being a school bully is an important career, leading directly to the Cabinet.

Bullying has been a profitable career for many others. Those who enjoy personal power over others and exercise it cruelly will not only succeed in life, but will usually accumulate an adoring circle of cronies. This is because bullying serves many functions. Apart from the obvious gains of encouraging compliance, it can generate solidarity. In mediaeval Japan, the shoguns created a caste called ‘burakumin’, who were assigned the most inferior status in society. All others could share the joyful common task of bullying and humiliating them. The British Conservative Party has a successful history of building support by identifying groups of victims who can not fight back, from immigrants, to single mothers, to the chronic sick on benefits.

In some cases, bullying is a response to specific impediments to management. An example would be in universities, where many staff are on ‘open contracts’ and can not be dismissed except for gross misbehaviour. University leaders wish to enhance the prestige of their institution (and hence themselves) by expanding research. Research is deemed to be an exceptional intellectual skill, not available to people who are committed to lesser forms of scholarship such as teaching. University leaders therefore aspire to recruit researchers in place of teachers, and offload teaching to even lowlier staff. But if teachers are open contract with a full workload, they can not be made redundant. Bullying is therefore employed. This can take the form of denigrating their work and closing the courses they run, excluding them from senior positions, allocating them to inferior work spaces, and threatening disciplinary action for minor (or no) infractions.

Heaven forbid that you might think this true of my own dear university, led as it is by saintly figures thinking only of the welfare of the staff and students in their charge.