"Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion."
“The chief product of an automated society is a widespread and deepening sense of boredom.”
“Men enter local politics solely as a result of being unhappily married.”
"To the very young, to schoolteachers, as also to those who compile textbooks about constitutional history, politics, and current affairs, the world is a more or less rational place... To those, on the other hand, with any experience of affairs, these assumptions are merely ludicrous."
As applied to bureaucracies, the first quote from Cyril Northcote Parkinson (1909-1993) does not say that bureaucracies are inefficient in the way a reformer means it. It says something colder and stranger: that the work itself is not the point and beneath the official logic of administration runs an absurd, self-feeding mechanism with a life of its own. The Colonial Office expanded when the colonies disappeared, to employ more staff in running zero colonies than it had ever needed when running the entire Empire. The Navy was destined to reach a point where there were going to be more admirals than ships. It is the observation of a man who suspects the world does not add up at all, and finds the fact funny, in a wry sense.
A logical type who builds laws can do so in two spirits. The gnostic spirit — theoretically, the LII's — builds a law because it believes the law is true, the edifice is sincere. Parkinson, on the other hand, erects all the trappings of an exact science of administration — the gravely derived "coefficient of inefficiency," the deadpan numerical proofs — precisely in order to mock the idea that such a science is possible. The apparatus is a parody of confidence in it. That is the ILI's agnostic streak — the point of the Law is to deny that the system-builders have grasped anything real.
In general, ILI and IEE are the two natural satirist profiles because they're the two that stand outside the consensus that the world is sensible — ILI by agnostic and nihilistic detachment, IEE by the gadfly's delight in puncturing pretension and complex system of global rules. You'd expect this combination to be quite rare (like most "mirage" accents), and indeed it is, but quite a few parodists and satirists occupy this slot. Irrationality gives them a sensitivity for the sudden and paradoxical, intuition gives them the imagination often needed in writers, "descending" makes them sensitive to the nuances of people's character and practical experience, and even the very weak dichotomy of "obstinate" (evaluatory/slightly more inert ascending functions) contributes to them perceiving the world more as theater, where nothing is as it seems, rather than as factory, where everything is straightforward. The heavy/cold ones (Swift) sit at the ILI pole, the light/sympathetic ones (like the Soviet film director Eldar Ryazanov) occupy the IEE pole. Parkinson is less dark and more cheery than the typical ILI, but he agrees that folly and absurd mechanism are the reality you discover once you've actually been inside the machine.
He is not outraged, there is neither indignation at the bureaucrats nor passion in the reformer's zeal, as you would more expect from "ascending" characters. Rather, Parkinson views the administrative apparatus with something like the entomologist’s detachment. A good example is the Law of Triviality, when a committee spends several minutes on approving the expenditure on a nuclear reactor since nobody knows anything about it, but wastes an hour arguing about the bicycle shed, since everybody does know how they operate. According to him, the best observer isn't the one with the best framework or the firmest values or the grandest vision — it's the one who's been around, who has "experience of affairs" and has therefore seen through the official account. The wry pessimism is presented as simple realism.
What gives his work its sprawl and its play is a real IEE accent, including the sheer impish genre-hopping. A "pure" ILI isn't necessarily playful at all. Parkinson wrote straight naval history (and won the Julian Corbett Prize for it), the bureaucratic satires that made him famous, and then he wrote a string of romantic seafaring adventure novels, the Richard Delancey series, sending his quick-witted hero across the globe in the Napoleonic age — the Ne love of faraway places and vanished worlds, lived out on the page. Most tellingly, he wrote fake biographies of fictional characters — solemn, fully documented "lives" of Horatio Hornblower and of Jeeves, written so deadpan that bookshops shelved them under Biography and History. This gleeful blurring of the real and the invented is the IEE's playful, boundary-dissolving wit, the delight in the incongruous juxtaposition for its own sake.
A possible incompleteness in my typing is that it's hard to find any sources about what he was personally like. Few information is available to find out how he treated those around him, whether he was warm or remote in person. Whatever else Parkinson was, he was not idle: some sixty books across history, satire and fiction, plus a full academic career — Liverpool, the Raffles chair at Malaya, visiting professorships at Harvard, Illinois, and Berkeley. This does contradict my "irrational" typing of him somewhat, although at least I didn't type him as IEI.
Ultimately, he built laws not because he wanted to construct a novel and original system that debunks the errors of the past ones, but because he distrusted the world's pretense of sense, and he dressed it in ironic "laws" and fake biographies because the absurdity was, to him, the best joke going. An ILI who found the world's machinery delightfully broken, with enough of the IEE's play in him to spend a lifetime taking it apart in public, with a wry smile.
Comments
Post a Comment