Much is made of our current competency crisis. As befits a thoroughly commercialised society, we have replaced competency with the veneer of competency. Allen Ginsberg lamented that the best minds of his generation were “destroyed by madness” — not that I would recommend him as an authority on anything. Millennial Jeff Hammerbacher, a techbro you’ve likely never heard of, provided his version: “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads.” Appearances are more important than the thing itself; style over substance is hardly sufficient. Our overarching faith is invested in marketing, which amounts to a belief in the absolute rightness of gentle, innocuous deception.
But truth, like damp, makes itself felt eventually. Anecdotal evidence for the decline in competency is everywhere, from the doors blowing out of Boeing planes, to the Australian Leadership Index’s dismal report on our sense of public trust, to that mechanic who didn’t properly fix your car. Boeing spent $100m US on advertising last year, which to the layman might seem better spent ensuring their planes don’t disintegrate mid-flight. The West begins to feel Third World, because not only have we imported the Third World physically, but we have ourselves forgotten what maintaining civilisation requires. You aren’t supposed to sell everything you inherit immediately at public auction, like the irresponsible recipient of a deceased estate; you aren’t supposed to become a techno-barbarian playing silly games amidst deteriorating ruins.
There are few systems more complex than the multilayered systems of power that dominate our deteriorating Western societies. Love of committee has arisen as much due to fear of Freud’s authoritarian personality as because it is hard to litigate against a room of people who all blame the person to their left. In the United States, we might rightly ask who now is in charge. The answer is thousands of people whose names appear nowhere. The sense that elected representatives, even the competent and well-meaning ones, can’t effect meaningful correction is omnipresent. Millions in the West have no confidence in their managers. Leaders is far from the appropriate term; most sensible people wouldn’t follow our elected leaders into a supermarket, let alone fearlessly into the breach. They aren’t good for much, so we concede they aren’t much good: what starts as a competency crisis ends as a legitimacy crisis.
On the surface this is because uncaptured competency, properly deployed, is the enemy of a system disinterested in the public good. This is true from the perspective of vested interests, NGOs and lobby groups, as much as educational institutions and government bureaucracies largely invested in expanding their own remit. It is of no help that the public mood is thoroughly demotic, not merely disinterested in excellence but actively hostile toward it. Public art, popular culture, what masquerades as literature — all are cases in point.
More precisely, we aimed for competency when we should have aimed for wisdom. This is fabulously spelled out in Alan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, a book that, though nearly forty years old, appears increasingly prescient. The difference is not semantic: we educate and train our young people to believe the highest purpose their lives can serve is as a piece of machinery in an economic apparatus. In part, this was the inevitable outcome of universal education, where some general justification for such an expensive and all-encompassing project must be proffered, beyond freeing mothers to participate in the economy and keeping their progeny off the street and out of the mines. The lofty hopes for education developed by the John Deweys of the world have been smashed to bits against the sheer apathy of young people lacking a proper model of the Good. Socrates, via Plato, would shake his head; it is no good to try to make Men of Bronze — those dominated by their appetites — into Men of Gold, those guided by reason and virtue. But then Plato would never have dreamed of pressganging recruits into his Academy, and his thoughts on Democratic Man were not laudatory.
In The Republic, Plato drew a distinction between those things that are good because they get you shiny things, against those things that are good in and of themselves. One is focused on that which is external; the other that which is internal. Into the latter category he placed justice, which we might understand as virtue, or honour, or conscience. It is better, he said, to be the good man believed by others to be wicked, than the wicked man believed by others to be good. Those who saw mere utility in things that are good in and of themselves earned his greatest ire; the Sophists in general, and Thrasymachus and Glaucon in particular. In an age that denies higher things even exist, it is impossible to make arguments difficult even in Athens’ halcyon days. There is no better way to show the clever money that you are a fool.
Those who snigger at such naivety cannot imagine a world where wisdom is in ascent, because such a world is beyond their experience. To suggest such a time could exist is to open oneself to accusations of selective nostalgia by the same set. Yet there were moments in our history where wise counsel prevailed, where the course was set by something other than a Ship of Fools, where a genuine flowering of the human spirit occurred. Kant might be right that nothing straight was ever built from the crooked timber of humanity, but this does not alleviate us from the responsibility of seeking to straighten the spar wherever we are able. It does not give us leave to indulge caustic cynicism, much less build our systems upon such a base.
By allowing free reign for this caustic cynicism we have taken those with intelligence and aptitude and reduced their horizons considerably. Many believed those who told them that they should aim for whatever has most utility, rather than encouraging them to invest in their only enduring property: their character. We have told them what they can get by being clever. But we have not taught them to be wise.
Wisdom has a moral element; those who are wise are also good. If they are not good, then we do not call them wise. It is not merely the reverse of foolishness, but the reverse of wickedness as well. Competency is measured in linear fashion; it is being good at something, but not being good in the broader sense. One can be a very competent swindler, liar, or adulterer. In too many cases we have made prospective Men of Gold into Men of Bronze. By aiming for competence in lieu of wisdom, it increasingly appears we have gained neither.
We have gained neither because competency — not to mention wisdom — frightens a ruling class who are shrewd without being wise. Those who are competent get along without their largesse, which spells electoral instability; a legion of vote-thralls are more easily managed. To be competent is to be a threat, if not to elite culture directly, then to those they depend upon to maintain their status. Those who are wise must, if they have courage and are true to their principles, oppose what we have become. Our ruling class have declared wisdom an enemy, and because they are competent at retaining their power, if little else, have gone to war with the form of wisdom. The last thing the current milieu desires is an unaffected mind, an upright character, and a head unbowed.
If you want evidence of this, beyond the competency crisis widely covered, look at what is produced by the universities, the ostensible berth of wisdom. Watch the news, or a current affairs program, if you can stomach it. Look at what is trending on X. Ask a graduate of secondary school to write you 500 words on the good life. Email your elected representative and ask them the same.
You will receive a muddle in response. Most will be confused by the question, because not everybody is made to entertain philosophical questions. But those who would rule must. It is the absolute minimum requirement. If they are not competent on that question — the question of wisdom — then they must never wear any sort of crown.
They are not only unwise; they are illegitimate. From this understanding, viewed through a glass darkly and distorted like shapes on the wall of Plato’s cave, comes the surging we begin to feel beneath the cracks of our malformed general mood. This is playing out in civil strife in the UK, playing out in the recent farce in France, playing out in the US presidential election, playing out among an enfeebled ruling set across the West. Waiting for wisdom from those who today have clambered to power is waiting for heirs from castrati. It feels like satire against even living memory. Declaring war on wisdom was not wise, but expecting it from those who have is even greater foolishness. A fool and his money are easily parted; a fool and his civilisation appear no different.
