However, even allowing for the fact that this is an early draft, I think you must bear in mind that you do have a rather relentless and unbending style. To justify itself to the reader, it requires the greatest precision in the use of words.
Where there are in fact “frontiers of knowledge” — that is, where the known and unknown can be delineated, as in the natural sciences (generally) — I do not think your statement is true. Your comment here seems most applicable when the “frontiers” cannot be discerned and “knowledge” is not the goal — but rather wisdom, perception, judgment, conception.
It is repetitive and toward the end it is a little bit “sour grapes.” Good ideas — new ideas — excellence have been fought and misunderstood and overlooked as long as there have been societies. But some people have always recognized them — and I’m confident they will.
It has been argued that one of our problems is that our best people are no longer attracted into government service. It may be equally pertinent to inquire how well-qualified our best people are for the task of policy-making in a revolutionary period. Another proposition often advanced is that intellectuals are not adequately respected by our society. However, a case could be made for the proposition that in some respects the intellectual has never been more sought after. His difficulty is not that he is not in demand but that the criterion within which he is required to operate are often tangential to his true calling.
Any society faces the problem whether the qualities which are encouraged in the rise to eminence are also the qualities required once eminence is achieved. As society becomes elaborated and its internal workings more complicated, maintaining its equilibrium may require so much skill that less and less time is left for the task of adaptation to new conditions or for generating new purposes.
The symptom of any status quo society essentially satisfied with things as they are and striving less to conquer new worlds than to preserve the existing arrangements is that the incentives are increasingly arranged in favor of stabilizing qualities: of individuals who do not make their associates uncomfortable, who fit well into an administrative mechanism, who are described by such adjectives as “safe,” “sound,” “solid.”
Bureaucratization is a penalty paid for success. The original purpose of any administrative mechanism is that the division of labor it makes possible produces a superior overall performance. It permits specialization of functions. In its early stages it even spurs creativity. By establishing a routine response for the most frequent occurrences, it frees energies for exploring new frontiers. The difficulty arises when routine becomes an end in itself, when the internal problems of the bureaucracy become more complicated than the external problems with which it is supposed to deal.
The routine of the operation turns into an obstacle when every problem becomes a special case. Stagnation and defensiveness are almost inevitable.
A world which is revolutionary precisely because traditional forms are rejected, and millions all over the world insistently demand a new way of life. The primary requirement of American foreign policy is to project abroad a sense of purpose with which the worldwide revolution can identify itself. A diplomacy, however skillful technically, which fails in this task, can only postpone the inevitable moment when Africa and Eurasia will be engulfed by Communist movements or by a nationalism which looks to Moscow and Peking for inspiration.
But the qualities by which our leadership groups have achieved eminence rarely produce the inspiration and the dynamism to play this role. To begin with, for most of them the problems of government are novel, to a greater or lesser extent. Even when they have previous government service the interval between positions is usually filled with duties so demanding that they leave little time for consistent reflection about national problems. For one of the characteristics of an increasingly bureaucratized society is the tremendous workload of its top personnel. Such a way of life tends to transform all activities into a series of ad hoc decisions often imposed by the pressure of events. It tends to run counter to spontaneity and creativity. It turns substantive problems into administrative ones.
Transferred on the national scene, the business executive or lawyer suffers several handicaps, however. He is rarely familiar with the problems into which he is projected and requires extensive “briefing” for even elementary acquaintance with his subject matter. This alone causes him to lack the self-assurance to impose a consistent pattern of action. It either makes him a prisoner of the bureaucracy which prepares the alternatives among which he must choose or else when he decides to assert himself, the actions appear to be arbitrary to his subordinates and often they are.
On the other hand the more insecure the top executives the greater becomes their demands on the administrative machine. The committee system of which so much has been written is not only an organizational device; it reflects also spiritual uncertainty. It grows out of the notion that difficulties of policy making reflect above all the unavailability of fact; that by consulting all interested parties all significant viewpoints emerge. Any failure of policy is ascribed to an administrative breakdown and calls ever more committees into being. The multiplication of committees causes coordination to replace judgment as a virtue or at least to become identified with it. Because any point of view to be accepted must be “cleared” by an ever increasing circle of officials or departments, a psychological distortion takes place: the process of arriving at decisions is so arduous that it leads to the confusions of an agreement between the participants with a substantive achievement. Agreement is often attainable precisely because it is formulated so vaguely that it amounts to a truism.
Another quality of the committee system is that it puts a premium on safety and not on great conception. A policy dilemma is produce because every course of action seems to involve drawbacks — else there would be no need for discussion. But in assessing the merits of alternative measures, the risks seem always more certain than the opportunities. No one can prove that an opportunity in fact existed, but failure to foresee a danger involves swift retribution.
Of necessity a group finds it easier to discuss individual measures than their relationship to each other. Its thrust is in the direction of adjustment, not in a striving for nuance. The committee system places a premium on presentation and quick grasp of a point of view. For all its time consuming procedure it rarely permits much reflection.
The result is a paradox: the more intense the quest for certainty by means of administrative mechanisms, the greater will be the inward insecurity of the participants in the process. The more they seek “objectivity,” the more diffuse their efforts become. The larger the advisory staffs, the more time is spent on administering them and the less time is left for reflection on the definition of goals. And in the absence of a clear set of purpose, the identification of problems becomes the primary task because each problem will seem a special case. Thus the typical pattern is endless debate about whether a given set of circumstances in fact constitute a problem until a crisis removes all doubts or imposes the imperative of some action, however fitful.
The inward uncertainty of the participants in this process is shown by the fact that the more the bureaucracy multiplies safeguards against error, the more it is distrusted by those at the top. They feel the need for outside — and therefore “unbiased” advice. Memoranda which are produced within the bureaucratic apparatus are taken less seriously than similar papers which are available to the general public. The increase of outside advisors or ad hoc committees is in almost direct proportion to the growth of policy planning mechanisms within the bureaucracy.
More importantly, since the committees must be drawn from a relatively small circle of individuals with experience in a given field, they cause our most qualified people to become so overloaded with current commitments, that they have not time for advancing their own thought.
The process of arriving at decisions is so painful that any policy once adopted with however much doubt creates enormous pressures in its favor. The status quo has at least the advantage of familiarity. Its mere existence is a demonstration that a crisis has been avoided. And beyond existing policy there looms not a superior course of action but intellectual and administrative chaos: the prospect that the whole searing process of arriving at a decision will have to be repeated.
On the other hand when frustration becomes too great or a crisis brooks no further evasion, there arises a demand for innovation almost for its own sake. Because nothing in our government encourages real creativity, novelty is often conceived largely in administrative turns and identified with newness.
It has almost invariably been true that the intellectuals whom society finds most acceptable and who are therefore most in demand are also those who are most comforting. At least they are the ones who are comprehensible. The individual who strikes out on unfamiliar paths is regarded askance and often finds himself under attack. The proverbial difficulty prophets face in being recognized at home is almost inevitable. For their prophetic quality resides precisely in the breaking of the traditional framework, in going beyond the scale of experience of their compatriots.
Similarly, excellence is more often equated with the highest level of what is commonly understood than with real creativity. Those at the frontiers of knowledge almost inevitably must draw their inspiration from their own sense of accomplishment rather than from the approbation of society or even that of their peers. All commonly accepted knowledge has a tendency to become a form of routine and to develop its administrators, a “priesthood” which has the same bias in favor of its status quo as any other bureaucracy. Experts become such not because they challenge prevailing views but because they tend to confirm or at least fail to disturb them. Most crucially, the standards of expertness are established by the organization in need of advice. It frames the question to be answered. It determines the standard of relevancy. It decides who is consulted.
He is rarely given the opportunity to point out that any query delimits the range of possible solutions or to insist that a question may be in the profoundest sense irrelevant.
This is why each contending faction within the bureaucracy has available its own battery of “outside” experts. Therefore, too, articles or books suddenly become tools int he bureaucratic struggle, even though they may be elaborations of reasonably familiar points of view. In short what bureaucracies want all too often from the intellectuals is not ideas but authority.
The production of so much research often adds simply another burden to already overworked officials. It tends to divert attention from the act of judgment on which policy ultimately depends to the assembly of facts which is relatively the easiest step in policy formation. Few if any of the recent crises of US policy have been caused by the unavailability of data. Our policy makers do not lack advice; they are in many respects overwhelmed by it. They do lack criteria on which to base judgments. In the absence of commonly understood and meaningful standards, all advice tends to become equivalent and every problem turns into a special case.
The dilemma of our policy is not that it cannot implement what it has defined as useful but that their standards of utility are in need of redefinition. The intellectual does not perform his full responsibility if he shies away from this essential task.
It is also important to understand that innovation cannot become an end in itself. A society cannot dispense with a standard of average performance, else it loses its cohesiveness and the impetus provided by a specialization of functions. Its challenge is to strike a balance between the requirements of organization and inspiration. Routine is useful as long as it is confined to ordinary problems. But for its purpose must be that it frees energies for tasks of adaptation and the creation of new goals.
Nevertheless, the basic trends remain. The qualities which a society discovers are usually those it encourages. It is no accident that a religious age like the medieval period should produce great refinements of religious thought while more empirical eras like the 19th and 20th centuries should have made major achievements in the realm of science. Before great achievement can affect a society or perhaps even occur there must be a belief in the possibility of great achievement.
Competence in one specialty is frequently achieved by reducing the attention given to everything else. It is not surprising that the graduates of such a process regard national policy as something tangential to their primary interests, as a duty to be performed in one’s spare time or as a career to cap an eminence achieved elsewhere. High government service is desired by many of our eminent people precisely because it is different from their previous activities and because it offers a new challenge. But a new challenge taken up late in life is bound to produce uncertainty. It means that the official cannot draw strength from his familiar mode of operation or contribute in an original fashion to his new environment.
Most essential — and most difficult — is a new estimation of reflection itself. It is time that we realize that committees of experts are not the most likely vehicle for profound thought. There is no substitute for the painful task of creation.
In a world where millions grope for a new orientation, America has acted almost as if it were a spectator at a play which did not concern it. Major parts of the world are becoming “foreign” in the deepest sense: they find increasingly little in America with which to identify themselves; beyond any disagreement over specific policies exists an ever-growing distrust or at least incomprehension of America’s purposes.
One of the basic problems of a society is whether the qualities which are encouraged in the rise to eminence are also the qualities required once eminence is reached. Paradoxically, this difficulty may be compounded where performance is the chief criteria for advancement. For performance at a lower level may be no gauge of ability at the top. In fact, the more specialized our society becomes, the more the quality at the early stages of a career may be irrelevant to the vision required of leadership. At the lower levels of an organization, the need is for adaptability and skill in operation within a framework which must be treated as given. But the top executives must possess the inspiration and creativity to establish the framework itself. This does not mean that performance at the lower levels of an organization is inconsistent with eventual leadership. It does emphasize that the criteria for advancement may miss the skills most required in high office, so that superior performance when eminence is reached is, despite all personnel procedures, accidental.
Within the private sector of our society an extraordinary and increasing premium is placed on administrative skill. Though administrative ability is very useful in high office, it does not touch the central problem of policy making in a revolutionary period. The essence of good administration is coordination among the specialized functions of a bureaucracy. The task of statesmanship is to impose purpose on routine. A good administrator possesses judgment; a great statesman is distinguished by vision. Administration is concerned with execution; policy making must also address itself to developing a sense of direction.
The greater the specialization of functions the greater the need for “coordination.” Even in the activities which gained them eminence, our executives are the product of a style of life which inhibits reflectiveness. Everything is geared to the act of decision and not to the development of criteria on which a decision is to be based. Issues are reduced to their simplest terms for the executive does not have the time to study all the considerations which go into producing the dilemma. A premium is placed on simplifications and on presentations, which takes least effort to grasp and which in practice usually means oral “briefing.” The executive even in the private sector is dependent to a greater or lesser degree on his subordinates’ conception of the essential elements of a problem.
Our executives are therefore the product of a style of life which runs counter to real creativity. It transforms substantive problems into administrative ones. It prices fluency above profundity. It sees most issues as a series of ad hoc decisions. It does not consciously discourage creativity but it has increasing difficulty understanding it. The administrative approach to policy subjects innovation to “objective” tests which deprive it of spontaneity and which turn it into projections of the familiar. It confuses momentum with purpose.
The approach works reasonably well in the private sector of our society because the goals of the economic effort are more or less fixed and because most executive can substitute a great deal of experience in their line of endeavor for reflectiveness. But when the same method is applied to policy making on a national scale its limitations become dramatically apparent. The executive soon discovers that he must pay a price for the lack of a conceptual framework for dealing with his new environment. Even when he belongs to the very small groups that have the opportunity to participate in study groups on say foreign policy in one of our large cities, he has engaged in this activity as a strictly extra-curricular effort, usually in a passive manner and at any rate without the intensity which leads to independent thought. Nor is previous government service a guarantee of overcoming this problem. For the interval between governmental position is usually filled with duties so demanding that intellectual development is often kept at the level of the most recent experience.
Since a committee is a forum of negotiation, the requirements of success in it have their own logic which at the least divert energies from other tasks. In many respects the internal problems of policy making grow as complicated as the problems with which the policy making apparatus is supposed to deal. Individual policy papers, since they are never accepted in their entirety, are written with an eye to compromise. Whether they are overstated to permit concessions, or phrased vaguely to allow freedom of interpretation they are rarely oriented to the problem of action. The committee system is more concerned with coordination than with judgment. Its internal processes are so complicated that agreement however vague tends to become an end in itself. Indeed often the only achievement is the fact of agreement and not its content.
Another characteristic of the committee system is that it is geared to the avoidance of risk and not to great conception. A policy dilemma is produced because the advantages and disadvantages of alternative measures appear fairly evenly balanced. Else there would be no need for discussion. But in assessing these alternatives the risks always seem more certain than the opportunities.
It requires a sense of proportion; it thrives on a feeling for style. All these intangibles are negated where problems become isolated cases each of which is disposed on its “merits” by experts in the particular difficulties it involves. It is as if in commissioning a painting, a patron would ask one artist to draw the face, another the body, another the hands and still another the feet simply because each artist is particularly good in this particular category. Such a procedure would be thought ludicrous. In stressing the components it would lose the meaning of the whole. It is not different with policy. To attempt to conduct policy as a science leads to rigidity. It wastes intelligence on non-essentials.
The committee system not only has a tendency to ask the wrong questions, it also puts a premium on the wrong qualities. The committee process is geared to the pace of conversation. Even where the agenda is composed of memoranda these are prepared primarily as a background for discussion and they stand and fall on the skill with which they are presented. Everything therefore depends on the ability to absorb ideas by ear and to present arguments fluently.
For all their cumbersome procedure and their striving for “objectivity” there is something approaching frivolity about many committees. Ideas are accepted because no one can think sufficiently quickly of an objection; or they are rejected because they cannot be grasped very readily. Individuals skillful in marshaling an arguments tend to dominate; others, perhaps more thoughtful, have no impact because their mental processes are not geared to this procedure. The ideal “committee man” is one who does not make his associates uncomfortable. He cannot operate with ideas too far in advance of what is generally accepted. He may prevail occasionally because he is considered an authority — in which case the committee is strictly speaking unnecessary. More typically the thrust is towards a standard of average performance. Since a complicated idea cannot be easily absorbed by ear — particularly when it is new — committees learn towards what fits in with the most familiar experience of their members.
Another result of the lack of criteria on which to base judgments is that work sometimes becomes an end in itself. Their uncertainty leads officials to work to the point of exhaustion as one gauge that they have done all that could be asked. This insecurity is also shown by the fact that almost in direct proportion as advisory staffs multiply they are distrusted by those at the top. The officials increasingly feel the need for “outside” — and therefore unbiased — advice. Memoranda which are produced within the bureaucracy are taken less seriously than similar papers which are available to the general public.