Safe Places
How keep the idyll, hold onto its treasure? A lovely, practical, intelligent mother; a charming, chaotic father. Together they create an ideal home for four boys. But this is a middle class family, where the Garden of Eden is on short-term lease. At eight, the serpent calls, the gates open, and little John Machin goes off to boarding school.
Many are the ways of dealing with this pain. We can recreate that garden, turning friends and tutors into replicas of that lost family; the idea of the Dragon School, which it has been remarkable in realising. And this child was lucky, quarantined in Mrs Vassall’s house - a real surrogate home - before let loose amongst the older boys. Many not so fortunate are left to protect themselves from the cruelties of boy-house and boy-yard. That said, there was little damage at this exemplary school. Hazing for sure, but of a moderate not savage kind; just enough to foster an esprit de corps, it lacks the violence of the Iatmul and their initiation rites, where manhood is cut, literally, into a child’s body.1 Of course there is bullying; but kept within acceptable bounds, it is dealt with expertly; the headmaster quietly telling the victim that he knows what’s going on, and that he, little Machin, to tell the bully so. A safe place where one learns how to cope with the indifference of society, the brutality of a few humans, the smallness of the individual, the necessity of fitting into worlds outside one’s self; and where we learn there can be no return to that original Garden, where life serves our whims. But the shock of sudden growth… This wound of exile healed by kind and expert staff, so that one finds a new home, where friends and tutors are stronger influences than mum and dad. A naturalisation of exile for boys destined to inhabit the foreign land of the public realm, with its alien rituals and odd languages.2 Almost as if God, after showing Adam and Eve the door, arranged that Jesus and his disciples be waiting outside to collect them. Nor must we forget the virtuoso teaching. This a precocious education; the temperate clime of a domestic garden transformed into the hothouses of Kew: intellectual and social growth is rapid. Trained to live in a world of colleagues and acquaintances, of organisations and groups, strangers and fly-by-nights; the character of these young chaps is made pliable but strong. Ideal preparation for a public world where the one-night stand replaces that of the decades-long marriage; it is to get on with people quickly and easily; clearing away the brambles of deep emotion and self-consciousness that naturally grows around self, family and a few intimates.3 A traveller not a hermit. Tourists not locals.
Is barrister the perfect occupation for a public school pupil….4 To look across the sea, when I should we keeping close to the coast.
One scene throws up a stark contrast. It is the Oxford-Bermondsey summer school in Kent. The boys from Bermondsey are nothing like the warm, communal freestylers of myth and public school fantasy. These boys too close to family to relax with strangers and even each other.5 Here is the head-start for the middle class child. By the time of university these children, trained to a social precociousness way beyond working most class kids, are already masters of the rituals and languages of public life.6
Another scene captures the milieu. It is an interview for the bar. A brilliant student fails to get selected. Why? ‘Within two minutes, you know they will never do.’ They lack the social skills, the ability to engage an audience, so essential to a silk’s success. ‘It is the well-known problem of the examinee.’ The ability to pass exams very different from the qualities required to mould and shape human material. It is why disappointment was often the lot of scholarship boys from the poorer classes. Wonderful at passing exams they lacked the social finesse to charm, manipulate and control a room. Thus the tendency to end up in technical or middle-ranking managerial jobs, largely reliant on the skills acquired through mechanical and rote thinking.7 Of course, it is not only the sons of the poor who are victims of this process. The exceptionally talented from public schools can find themselves stuck in dead-end jobs if they’re not savvy enough to select the right career for their talents. And you have to be quick: by thirty it is usually too late to find a place at top table. For these maestros it is the freedom of late adolescence and early adulthood that can be dangerous territory; for the brilliant, but impractical, are apt to lose themselves on the wild margins of society.8 After the freedoms of their early-twenties the virtuoso has only a few years to find their niche. Come our mid-thirties the chance is lost, for now you swim in uncongenial waters, where nought is now easy or effortless. For the first time you have to work even to stay afloat, as you find yourself in places wary of the clever and brilliant. All the talents that once made you attractive, suddenly make you a pariah: few like smart-alecks. Then one’s character: you are not used to struggling to succeed. The slacker, the drop-out, the failed genius…once stuck in an uncongenial waters we are apt to think even the shallowest pond a deep lake. So passive! By forty you are on that slow drift down to the sea’s oblivion. At fifty you should be at the peak of power. But no. At that age no-one sees you shouting amongst the waves.
Taking a boat for a short sail, I find myself far out beyond the bay….
Some types don’t make it. John’s father, who lacked the discipline and application - the pampering of a single mother - was such a character. Never quite a man. There are many like him.9 But how can this be so, since these boys grow so up quickly (as compared to their working class rivals)? Plenty of male role models here; while the regime is psychologically tough, emotionally bruising. Given such an education why do so many public school boys lack maturity; remain in a permanent adolescence? Can a distinction be made between boarders and day-boys? If only…to have found the Holy Grail of social explanation! No, this is too simple, too pat. The reasons are deeper, more interesting.
John Machin’s profession gives us a clue. The terminology of this traditional craft echoes that of school: pupillage, master, head (of chambers)…. A public school educates boys and girls to belong to an institution, to willingly accept its rules, kowtow to its authority, treat strangers as acquaintances.10 In a wholly human environment adaptation to other humans and their mores is crucial; this is especially true for leaders, who before they can rule must serf themselves to the conventions of time, place and organisational ethos.11 The prefect system a perfect instrument for inculcating such a culture; the child learning both to submit to and govern his peers. Here is the craft of institutional management. Not just attributes are acquired; the emotions are changed, engendering just the right amount of feeling to function effectively in the public realm.12 These early relations between boys not only create networks of friends but the ability to fashion friendships throughout one’s life; those intense moments, which usually last a few days but rarely a lifetime. Useful in the formation of a corporate class, where the ties are typically utilitarian: we use ourselves and others. They also benefit the institution, where such emotions, though directed towards humans, seeps into the institution itself. Obvious with the Dragon School, where most enjoyed their stay; but we suspect the same effects in more severe establishments; the Durkheimian rituals imprinting themselves through osmosis - ‘damn’ goes deeper than ‘bliss’, to call up William Blake. The middle classes are comfortable with the institution; the rest of us are not. I think of myself; never easy at school, I still find organisations alien, oppressive.13 Not conditioned to a simple acceptance, which is as much about a certain kind of relation with the staff as with the place itself. To survive we have to submit to an institution’s culture, but to succeed we must navigate the choppy waters of human relationships - a good public school education grows both qualities.
But to answer my question…I turn that boat back to the shore.
Pupillage, master, head (of chambers)…. A middle class child can spend almost their entire life inside an institution. From bed, board and lessons at school, to the long hours in a corporation or government department.14 Here is what appears infantilism; that same respect for authority, similar obeisance to rules and codes; that need always to be in the group; here is a life that seems never to leave the classroom. In fact the majority are mature adults. Witness John Machin. It is those who fail to be a success, who are not tested by their peers, who do not grow out of their schoolboy personas, who remain adolescents.15 We must not be misled by appearances.
Yet in the modern age many of these characters do seem genuinely immature. An illusion or reality; the false impressions of middle age, the young seen from the wrong side of a television screen? Let us accept this impression is true. Due, perhaps, to a shift in the culture of the public school; from character building to scholarly success to the therapeutic regime of the contemporary scene.16 Then in Britain more generally: we have an educational system that seems designed to stop children growing up….
Shouts from the shore. A warning flare fireworks the sky: my boat is sailing close to the rocks.
A tension exists, for sure, when adults spend so much time in school and its notional equivalent: the corporation.17 Here not the place to develop the argument, but let’s say this: in the older professions there were subtle changes in culture that reflected the transition from boy to man; the latter treated as responsible adults, masters both of others and themselves; thus a head of chambers could use his own judgement to decide quality and appointments. Independence within the profession was a virtue, providing you sustained its values. It is why a young Machin could confidently reject the importuning of an over zealous solicitor, keen to give him bad cases. Such a culture, with its stress on individual responsibility, breeds character. But things are changing. Even within the university, once the home of the free mind, a profession is being turned into a regular job, where we serve not an ethos but a corporation, one unwilling to trust the judgment of individuals, wary of the original and the eccentric.18 The ability to follow the rules, and to the letter, which in turn encourages standardisation - that prelude to the Silicon Valley opera, AI’s takeover - is what is most valued now. No wonder many in the middle class are suffering a crisis.19 Brought up to be adults they are treated as children; so much liberty lost.
A friend with a megaphone is shouting, ‘look out!’
Our therapeutic regime. A public school trains the personality to act in the public realm, which must in part be indifferent to individual concerns and feelings. Success requires submerging the ego into some collective entity, such as school, an Oxbridge college, a company, party, nation. I take the boat around the headland…. Thus the bias to various forms of liberalism, with its stress on the social, whether it be State, Market or The People. The elite to always think in corporate terms. Most of the population are not so trained. Yet, under the pressure of consumer capitalism and political ideology it is the wishes of the majority that determines the nature of the public realm, which must adapt to personalities not conditioned to carry the psychic weight of public action and public responsibility.
What John Machin describes is a closed community, whose members had a strong sense of security, which comes partly from feeling we are our own man and partly from being in the company of people who understand and trust us. School was safe. The professions were safe. Life generally was…I am boring you with a dull mantra. (Can’t be accused of sending you to sleep, can I now?) Since the 1960s that sense of safety has been going, as the professions, taken over by the bureaucrats, are increasingly proletarianised (AI is only speeding up this process).20 One effect is the hermeneutics of suspicion; a cultish faith inside the academy, which believes that society can be improved by denigrating it.21 This academic defence against the politicians and capitalists has seeped out into the wider community, affecting the media and professions and thus society as a whole. No group or individual is to be trusted. However, we can't blame Foucault for everything. There is the generation wars, each new age cohort, bedazzled by the speed of change, believing itself better than the previous one; thus in today’s university we have young professors preening themselves on their originality (yet much is the peacock feathers of a modish morality used to advertise their rather standard wares).22 The past, almost by definition, is rotten and must be replaced. In the Sixties to be old was a crime.23 A new wave of youth fanaticism is nowadays repeated, as the Internet revolution appears to make the old ways of thinking obsolete. Anything that is established is suspect, a target for criticism, attack.24 An oil spill pollutes the public waters: the population increasingly suspicious of the professions, now believed to prefer the profit motive to their own professional principles.25
This safe world had codes and rituals that protected everyone: members, their clients and the general public. This possible because much of the private self was excluded from the public arena. Perhaps it went too far. Or more likely, in overextending the public realm into wider aspects of life, through the massive expansion of the Welfare State and rise of the media industries, it provoked a reaction. Whatever the cause, during the 1960s this alienation of the private ego came under heavy attack. Bring the self in! Round up the feelings and drive them through the town.… People forgot that carnival should happen only once a year.
There are wild hand movements and impassioned talk by the harbour wall. What, do they think to rescue me?
The Love generation worshipped sex, that interpersonal minefield.26 Sex flooded public consciousness at the same time Feminism was opening the public realm to middle class women. Another source of risk and fragility; relationships becoming ambivalent even tense, as Mr and Mrs Coitus slunk around the offices and slid down its corridors. A safe arena could quickly become dangerous; and needed to be policed by legislation.
In the Sixties sex engulfed the middle class psyche, and relationships were defined by it.27 One explanation for the rise of sexual abuse, as taboos broken, and practices limited to the odd, the outré, the underground and the backward, spread across the society.28 Most are not comfortable with the fantasies of Marquis de Sade, and there’s been the inevitable reaction, as what was once considered experimental and avant-garde is today viewed as morally unacceptable.29 Sex, once corralled by moral codes, has now to be walled in by law, the public realm no longer strong enough to police itself; desire unleashed too powerful to be managed by shame and guilt.30
Threats and constrictions; these exacerbated by a strident media. I signal to my friends: I’m coming in.
In our sex-saturated age we risk flooding the past under a tidal wave of carnality. Alan makes the interesting point that while homosexuality has become accepted, the emotional relations between older men and younger boys has withered (believed too sex-risky or just sex-suspicious minds?). A shift with many repercussions; not the least a lessening of the authority of age. Fear is not enough to engender respect, which also requires sympathy, understanding, awe, even love (once easy to separate from sex). Remove such relationships and these feelings cannot grow, and the old may lose both their innocence and their magic for the young.31 Another weakening of the past’s hold. In institutions that once inculcated a strong conservatism, when authority and promotion went in lockstep with age, the effect is to wrench the culture towards youthful energy, with the inevitable stress on change.32 The self image of today’s institution is to be up-do-date, even ‘radical’; as it seeks to re-engineer both itself and the society to extract the maximum amount of profit from every aspect of life. One effect is to break the relationship between the senior managers and the institution, which they treat for short-term, instrumental profit. A CEO’s aim not to maintain the company long-term but use it to project an image and collect all the rewards of excessive exploitation: cash, status, celebrity. The effects on middle managers and technical officers - the backbone of the professional middle class - is enormous, as they both lose their autonomy and see there their jobs threatened by the whims of those at the top.33 A paradox is emerging. As society becomes increasing corporate, and all are conditioned to be Organisation Man, at the same time we are alienated from these corporations, because largely indifferent to ourselves. Dependent and depressed.34 Married to the institution, we cannot divorce it….35 No, we can’t blame sex for this! The size and transnational nature of the contemporary corporation encourages authoritarian attitudes, now the model for public institutions; the senior executives running the business on command and control lines; massively aided by the new technologies.36 Yet we remain human; feelings have to be expressed, they must go somewhere…to those old stalwarts, one’s friends and family, of course, but - and suicidal for the public sphere - also to abstract groups, like one’s age cohort, gender, sexual or ethnic group.37 The agora no longer an arena for a rational discussion of distribution of resources but a theatre, where the emotions play out their tragedies; heightened by a growing insecurity, and that all pervading suspicion, spread by a cynical media that prefers the pounds of high drama to the pennies of balanced reporting. But when, after the emoting, we fail to change the system…a sense of helplessness increases, the demands become extreme. Change! Revolution! Scrap it all! Even the most staid bourgeois with a pension and a finance advisor shouting slogans on the streets. Yet each minute the corporations grow stronger. Today the institution is everywhere. It’s why over half the population are expected to remain in some kind of educational establishment until their early twenties.38 Trained to be good employees, they are told the future is in their hands….
High waves flip my boat from side to side.
Can this tension be resolved? For the present the answer is yes: through school, drugs and cultural conditioning most of us come to accept our place in an institution, which itself has been transformed, as it tries to accommodate the psychic stress it produces.39 We might be unhappy with our place in life but we have enough material comfort to sustain our fidelity to the ‘system’.
Something has been lost, and most of us feel it. Educated to follow the rules a degree of spontaneity and independence has disappeared, as the informal practices of yesteryear, when talented individuals - barristers, teachers, civil servants - could be trusted to judge for themselves the skilled and worthy, are weakened if not dismantled.40 Inevitably such a culture had its faults - it will tend to reproduce the old society and its mores, and could be obtuse to those from a different class or from overseas. But is the current regime, where all to go through the sausage machine of testing, better? Certainly the bureaucrats think so; but then bureaucrats regulate not make…. Is it really a good thing to bow down before Mr Process, kiss the feet of Mistress Rule? Should we be in favour of a regime that puts the policy before informed judgement? Dr Rule-o-Crat says yes, as they fill in their application forms and pass the interviews…. You have noticed? We are back to John Machin's examination maestro, but now it is they who are in charge.41
The public realm is divided into two parts, surface and subterranean. Inside the institution, especially on the technical side, it is highly rational and analytical; the purpose in large part to manipulate the general public.42 Other effects are everywhere to see: the rise of rhetoric over analysis; image before competence, with the concomitant popularity of the charismatic with the gift of the fashionable cliché. Success to depend on an ability to project one’s self out into the world rather than knowing the nitty-gritty of the shop floor. Thus easy for employees to become disillusioned with the senior management team, whom seem to inhabit a different culture.43 If judgement is demeaned and expertise ignored we will lose a connection with the company, and the job will be reduced to pure process. Less engaged some of our independence is lost, a psychic disability.44
The English law embodies a tradition which has had remarkable effects on the country; not least that sense of justice and independence, once seen as defining characteristics of the national character. John Machin is an exemplar. I know, I know…but I too have read Bleak House, know that the law can be a closed-shop, more attendant to its own interests than those it is supposed to serve. Nevertheless, a profession that puts such a stress on an abstract concept like justice, and which embeds the notion of equity into its practices, can't be so bad.45 Contrast to an institution where members are only out for themselves. A disaster, surely, as we see in today’s Westminster, where politicians main concern is with self. And this leads to a paradox. Our world is increasingly dominated by the institution, which is colonising our personal space and time. Yet these institutions are run in the interests of a select few.46 If we believe Alan Greenspan, Wall Street’s Nostradamus, our future is that of a few supermen and wonderwomen treating the rest of us like raw material.47 Let’s hope that his prophecies are as bad as his heroine’s fictions.
Once upon a time the professions were a means of escaping the Wild West outside Eden’s gates. The public school the decompression chamber that allowed one to slough off the worst effects of familial exile. The reason I suspect for the appearance of middle class innocence: always to be protected from the worst features of human survival. But for over a generation the professions have been under attack. The desert is encroaching on its gates….
I touch land, and friends come aboard to welcome me. I tell of a marvellous trip, around the nicer, sweeter, softer parts of the British landscape. But that sea, those risks you took…. I warble warble about paradox; the itch for adventure that comfort encourages. Typical Sunday sailor! says Sarah, who suggests it’s time for tea.
Interview: John Machin
_______
Notes
1. Gregory Bateson, Naven. Also the initiation into a craft: Sarah Hall’s fictional account, The Electric Michelangelo and Michael Crawford’s Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work.
2. For a brilliant account of the immigrant’s experience: Jonathan Raban, Hunting for Mr Heartbreak. See especially his section on Koreans in Seattle.
3. I can’t help but feel that much social theory, especially on the Left, is a projection of elite schooling, with its collective bias.
4. Elsewhere Alan Macfarlane has many interesting things to say about the centrality of law to English history.
5. The classic account: Michael Young and Peter Willmott, Family and Kinship in East London. It captures just how private is working class life; its greatest insight and true to my own experience.
6. For the lack of precocity in most schooling: Arthur Koestler’s The Reader’s Dilemma in The Yogi and the Commissar. For comment on this piece see my The Working Class Highbrow.
7. Ifor in Alun Richards's, Home to an Empty House. For the tragedy of the scholarship boy when confronted with a more sophisticated middle class milieu: Emyr Humphreys’s A Toy Epic. For the effects of such culture shock even on a highly successful career, Keith Hart’s interview with Alan Macfarlane.
8. See my A Short Sprint, a review of John Wain’s Hurry on Down. A major theme of the famous novels of the 1950s was how the hero could cope with such liberty. Overcome it? Do him in? On the whole the hero survived and prospered. This was not so in Sixties. In this decade freedom became too feral to handle.
9. For a marvellous account of such a character - James Joyce’s father - see Stanislaus Joyce, My Brother’s Keeper.
10. I remember the astonishment of a middle class woman when I suggested that an institution should adapt to myself.
11. It is why leaders, trapped inside current clichés, usually have little of interest to say. And yet these leaders are hyperactive; another feature of a public school training?
12. A classic account: David Newsome, Godliness and Good Learning: Four Studies on a Victorian Ideal.
13. This was reflected in some of the reactions to Brexit. The professional middle class overwhelmingly in favour of Remain because they were voting for an institution - the Union. A lot of the poorer Leavers voting in protest against all public institutions which they (may justifiably) resent and dislike (for example, the local council).
14. Benjamin Markovits, The Meritocracy Trap.
15. For some kids school really is the high point of their lives: so perfectly adapted are they to classroom and playground. Wonderfully captured in Jonathan Coe’s The Rotters’ Club.
16. The shift from scholars to muscular Christians: Godliness and Good Learning. For the shift back to academic success: Michael Sanderson, Education and economic decline in Britain, 1870 to the 1990s. However, there could be a more general explanation: wealth and privilege produce their own innocence, especially in times of peace and prosperity.
17. See The Meritocracy Trap for just how long is today’s elite education: to post-graduate level.
18. Benjamin Ginzburg, The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why it Matters.
19. Though it was the middle classes themselves who wanted that burden of individual responsibility lifted. For interesting discussion on the teaching profession: David Wardle, English Popular Education 1780-1975.
20. A.H. Halsey, The Decline of Donnish Dominion.
21. Its source an academic culture under pressure from the wider society: David Bromwich, Politics By Other Means.
22. For the social mechanics behind this attitude: Michael Billig, Learn to Write Badly: How to Succeed in the Social Sciences.
23. See Keith Hart interview. Miraculously portrayed in Donald Cammell's and Nicholas Roeg’s Performance.
24. A marvellous history of the rise of the professions: Harold Perkin, The Rise of Professional Society: England Since 1880. He describes how the increase in the overall number of professions could undermine each individual one, as experts in one field now had the capacity to criticise those in others. The closed-shop had become exposed to outsiders.
25. Such suspicions are often well-founded: David Marquand, Decline of the Public.
26. For an early recognition of the dangers: Margaret Atwood’s masterpiece, Surfacing.
27. Elizabeth Taylor, the exquisite novelist of middle class manners, registers this change In a Summer Season. The heroine second marriage is one of sexual attraction.
28. For the sexual underground of the 1950s, Keiron Pim, Jumpin’ Jack Flash: David Litvinoff and the Rock n’ Roll Underground.
29. Doris Lessing, The Four-Gated City or Caryl Churchill’s Cloud 9.
30. For the similar effects of consumption: Avner Offer, The Challenge of Affluence: Self-Control and Well-Being in the United States and Britain Since 1950.
31. For the incomprehension of European doctors when Afghanistan villagers wanted old people saved before the young: Olivier Roy, In Search of The Lost Orient; An Interview. An extraordinary account of age worship is in the second volume of Elias Canetti’s autobiography, The Torch in My Ear.
32. But as Richard Sennett writes, the equation of youth with independence and innovation is a fallacy: The Craftsman. On the whole the young are passive, modish, malleable, submissive. And most important for companies: cheap.
33. A good account of how this works in Westminster and Whitehall: Anthony King and Ivor Crew, The Blunders of Our Governments.
34. A brilliant study: Richard Sennett, Authority.
35. Perhaps we should apply Durkheim’s insights into marriage (in Suicide) to employment.
36. The great study, which links impersonal bureaucracy to sexual freedom, is Rex Warner’s The Aerodrome. For a case study of a new kind of corporation, which came out of the Sixties: Anthony Sampson, The Sovereign State: The Secret History of ITT. Such companies are run from the accounts department; finance the easiest way to control a corporation from the top. Our dictators are accountants and finance executives…. For lots of insights into the new economy: Richard Sennett’s The Culture of the New Capitalism. For the paradoxical effects of the new technologies, which can encourage slackerism in the workplace: David Graeber, Bullsh*t Jobs. Raymond Geuss has some scary things to say about the future of work in A Philosopher Looks at Work.
37. The nation-state is becoming balkanised on the pattern of the old empires. For an original analysis of the breakdown of the Austro-Hungarian empire: Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism.
38. For the elite this rises to one’s late twenties and early thirties: The Meritocracy Trap. For Markovits, the meritocrats earn they wealth and power because they put the educational hours in. What he doesn’t notice is that this is not merit but simple conditioning: these characters are trained to be institutional drudges. Merit has been redefined: once it meant a virtuoso, today it is the ability to submit one's self to an institution.
39. However, these accommodations are often more form than reality. A curious effect of the opening up of the public realm to everyone is that image replaces substance as the measure of public success. This, of course, was the key insight of the sophists, the media advisors in Plato’s day.
40. Wonderfully recounted in Alan’s interview with Wynne Godley.
41. The Meritocracy Trap. Markovits thinks this morally lamentable, but believes they are the best and the brightest…. Oh dear! He has mistaken application for talent and intelligence.
42. Colin Crouch, The Knowledge Corrupters: Hidden Consequences of the Financial Takeover of Public Life. Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. The rise of conspiracy theory is due to the world portrayed in these two books: people rightly feel they are being manipulated and are losing control of their lives. The feeling is correct, but the thinking is weak and poor; such theories based on little knowledge or understanding of either Capitalism or institutions.
43. For what Richard Sennett calls the Golden Silo: The Decline of the Skills Society.
44. This may account for some of the rise in mental illness. Though from personal experience, much sickness in work is an equivalent of higher management’s excessive salaries: if we can’t have the money we’ll steal the time.
45. A good example are the father’s judicial decisions in Adam Mars-Jones, Kid Gloves, A Voyage Round My Father.
46. Benjamin Markovits, The Meritocracy Trap.
47. How the World Works: Stephen Holmes review of Alan Greenspan’s The Map and the Territory, London Review of Book, 22/05/2014. If the review is an accurate account of the book, then Greenspan is a fool. Preening himself as an Ayn Rand super-mind what is shown is an incoherent intellect, that lacks insight, style, penetration and depth. Like many of the characters portrayed in The Meritocracy Trap he is simply a technician who has the ability follow and manipulate the rules of the game. A mechanical mind, who mistakes its speed and competence for cleverness and insight. No profundity here! This is a bureaucrat who mistakes an office memo for a philosophical treatise.
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