Re: [RC] In Defense of Europe's Technocrats

[David R. Block]

Title: ORourke1 Signature

It's when technocrats become bureaucrats and put forth regulation upon regulation not because of any technological need or laws of physics, but just because THEY CAN, that things usually turn to shit. We've been there for some time now... And it stinketh.... David "Anyone who thinks he has a better idea of what's good for people than people do is a swine."--P. J. O’Rourke On 11/16/2011 2:06 PM, Mike Gonzalez wrote: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/nov/16/europe-technocrats-politics Too long to post the whole thing, but here's a snip: "Yes, there's no harm in saying it: technocracy once used to be a big idea for the international left. In 1930s America, for instance, it wasn't a term of abuse but the programme for a new social utopia. In the middle of the Great Depression, an emergent technocratic movement led by engineers and dissident economists such as Thorstein Veblen and Howard Scott proposed that populist politicians simply weren't capable to fix the system: "The maladministration and chaos imposed upon the industrial mechanism by arbitrary rule of extraneous interest has reached such a point that many technicians feel the urgent need of confederating their forces in a program of industrial co-ordination based, not on belief, but exact knowledge," thundered a pamphlet by the Technical Alliance. The American technocratic movement was short-lived, not least because the flaws in its thinking were so apparent: their belief that anyone could ever be completely apolitical in their decision-making now strikes us as naive. No one remembers the technocrats' "Plan of Plenty", and everybody remembers Roosevelt's New Deal. Over the course of the next few decades, technocracy got a dodgy rep. Veneration of industrial progress and unchecked rule by bureaucrats became a trademark of totalitarian regimes in Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. George Orwell describes technocracy as a precursor to fascism. What was Adolf Eichmann if not a technocrat? Some might say, though, that technocratic ideals and practices never really went away. Henry Elsner's critical account of the movement floats the idea that the New Deal, with its embracing of social engineering, was more of a synthesis of technocratic and democratic ideals than an alternative." My response: I guess this reflects that whole initial gray zone between the precursors to both centrism and fascism. So Europe is relying on technocrats to resolve their gigantic financial problems... I think the author lays in a good point in noting that technocracy led the transition from communist authoritarianism to democracy in eastern Europe, which really weakens any argument that technocracy signals a move toward extreme rightist or leftist governance. But those arguments about moving definitively leftward boil down to the Far Right not wanting anything so large as to require the services of a technocrat, making technocracy a symptom of a larger problem to the hardcore right, naturally causing the lefties to look for the same beacon. It breaks down that, when you have a crisis, you want the most competent people addressing the problem, rather than those with a vested interest in seeing through a result that may not be the most optimal solution. Certainly, as the article states, we remember Roosevelt's New Deal, but don't remember Plan of Plenty. But that's a good thing sometimes. Do great things, solve the problem, don't take credit, and move on. Just call it humble meritocracy. I don't wholesale support or oppose anything here yet, though. There is still the concern that technocrats technically operate without direct consent of the public, but a possible answer to that concern is that technocracy is an important built-in failsafe mechanism in a democracy that protects itself from destruction. Anyway, I need to read into this a little more. -- Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community <RadicalCentrism@googlegroups.com> Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism Radical Centrism website and blog: http://RadicalCentrism.org