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Month: March 2009

Making Institutions Work, by Geoffrey Vickers

Excerpt

In an increasingly interdependent world, each of us becomes inescapably a member of many systems, each of which makes its own demands on us, as well as giving its own assurances. These demands conflict. If we acknowledge them all, we have to resolve or contain a mounting load of internal conflict. It we deny any, we disrupt some relation on which we depend. Every human association makes some demand on its members for responsibility, loyalty, and mutual trust. We are unaccustomed to respond to, perhaps incapable of responding to so many and such conflicting demands as are generated by our increasing inter-dependence on each other. The memberships we acknowledge fall increasingly short of those we need to acknowledge, if we are to sustain all the relations on which we in fact depend. The conflicts of our day reflect our failure to meet the demands of our multiple memberships.

So we have either to increase our capacity for resolving or containing conflict or to simplify the world (or allow it to simplify itself) by cutting down what we expect of it, or each other, and of ourselves to the measure of our capacities. War, famine, and pestilence will do the second except in so far as we succeed in doing the first.

Editor’s Comments

Cover of first edition of 'Making Institutions Work'“I have an unpopular answer to an unwelcome question,” Geoffrey Vickers writes at the start of Making Institutions Work:

The question is posed by two familiar but staggering changes of the last hundred years. One is the escalation of our expectations; the other is the escalation of our institutions. The two have combined to make demands on each of us ordinary men and women … which few have begun to notice, still less to accept as valid and inescapable. The question is how, if at all, these demands can be met and at what cost. Since these costs are the price we shall have to pay to maintain the systems which now sustain us or any viable alternative, I describe the theme as the price of membership.

I don’t suppose that I can manage to get too many readers excited about a thirty-six-year-old collection of sociological essays from academic journals with such dry names as Policy Sciences, Human Relations, and The Wharton Quarterly. Yet for me, Making Institutions Work has easily been one of the most stimulating books I’ve read a long time, one whose pages I’ve dog-eared, whose lines I’ve underlined, whose passages I’ve been tempted to grab people and force them to listen to. In many ways, it seems to me to be the closest thing I’ve found to a manual for how we need to operate if we have any hope of avoiding having all our conflicts settled by war, famine, pestilence, and climatic disaster.

Sir Geoffrey VickersSir Geoffrey Vickers led a remarkable life. He joined the British Army in 1914 and spent as much time as perhaps any other officer serving in the trenches on the Western Front, earning the Victoria Cross and numerous other combat medals for his bravery. After the war, he returned to university, took a law degree, and worked as a solicitor. He served again during World War Two and as an administrator and board member in government and industry. In his sixties, he turned to writing, particularly on the topic of social systems analysis, and became a leading contributor to the development of systems analysis and thinking, particularly as they related to human society. Making Institutions Work collects eleven articles and lectures Vickers gave in the late 1960s and early 1970s and focuses on the specific issue of how we can learn to deal effectively in a world where we are at all times members of multiple and overlapping institutions–family, culture, nation, organization, religion, teams, clubs, neighborhoods, and others.

I work in an institution. From the day I stopped mowing lawns for money and went to work part-time in a university library, I have worked in one institution or another. And now I work in an instituion–NATO–where competing and conflicting demands of membership can be seen in every activity. The tensions between commitment to the objectives of this alliance and national loyalty are palpable in every meeting of every committee, working group, panel, board, and forum. In NATO, the fundamental mechanism of decision-making is consensus: if one nation does not agree to a decision, the decision is deferred or redefined or taken off the table.

In a consensus-driven institution, no single member ever wins all or loses all. Everything tends to favor not the most popular solution but the least objectionable one. As a result, all solutions that are supported by consensus tend to be sub-optimal. For anyone with the professionalism and pride to strive for well-crafted plans and efficient designs, the experience of working in NATO is one of constant frustration. Military officers, who comprise a good percentage of NATO’s staff at the headquarters level and below, find it particularly frustrating as they have spent their careers trying to boil things down to clear, simple, and quickly-executed orders: defining the shortest path between today and their mission’s objectives. In a consensus-driven institution, the shortest path is almost always guaranteed to lead nowhere but into a brick wall.

Vickers is the first writer I can recall to acknowledge that frustration is part of the price of competing membership demands. He identifies, in fact, “[T]he ability to tolerate greatly increased frustration without lapsing into apathy or escapism or erupting into polarised conflict,” as one of the essential survival skills for life in a world of overlapping and competing memberships. We long ago ran out of frontiers into which we could escape and, psychologically at least, pursue the myth of pure self-sufficience. But relative to the long run of human existence, this situation is still something of a novelty:

This institutions of today carry a far greater load than human institutions have ever carried before. Men are more dependent on them and make greater demands on them than ever before. Their performance is far more exposed to view and is judged by far higher standards than before. They are no longer supported in their task by being regarded as part of a natural order and for the same reason their critics are no longer muted.

Still, Vickers argues, institutions are here to stay: “[A]ny world which generations younger than mine may create or preserve on the other side of the dark decades ahead will include an institutional dimension and will make the same demands on us as players both of institutional and of personal roles.” Since these roles will inevitably create conflicts such as those I see every working day in NATO, there is an increasing need, in Vicker’s view, for what he calls (in a perhaps less than fortunate phrase) “institutionalised persons”:

By an institutionalised person I mean one who accepts the constraints and assurances of membership in all the systems of which he forms part and therefore with the responsibility for managing his share of the conflicts which they involve.

This begins to capture a distinguishing characteristic of many of the people and processes that I encounter working in NATO. Time and time again, when conflicts arise, the value that tends to win out most consistently is that of the importance of preserving the ability to work together again tomorrow. And in this way, this frustrating, multi-national, multi-lingual, bureaucratic, consensus-driven institution seems, like the U.N., the European Union, the U.S. Congress, and many of the other collaborative political institutions we frequently curse, to represent the most realistic approach to dealing with conflict in this hot, flat, and crowded world.

Ironically, the most memorable statement in the whole of Making Institutions Work is not Geoffrey Vickers’, but the epigraph, which comes from an even more obscure paper by Saul Gorn, a pioneer in computer science:

We spend the first year of our lives learning that we end at our skin; and the rest of our lives learning that we don’t.

In Vicker’s view, this task, more than anything else, is a matter of learning to pay our dues:

Those who depend so completely as each of us does on our membership of many human systems cannot afford to withhold the dues which they demand and need from us if they–and consequently we–are to survive and function. These dues are payable not merely in money–though the money dues also will have to rise–but in all the qualities which are needed to resolve or contain human conflict; in responsibility, loyalty and mutual trust; in intellectual effort and informed debate; in extended sympathy and tolerance; in brief, in a dramatic extension of the frontier which divides self from other and present from future.

And to that extent, one can find few better guides to this lifelong task than Geoffrey Vickers.

Find a Copy

Making Institutions Work, by Geoffrey Vickers

New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1973

The Changing Face of New England, by Betty Flanders Thomson

Jack Ayer, professor of law emeritus at the University of California Davis and author of the Underbelly blog, writes to recommend Betty Flanders Thomson’s 1958 book, The Changing Face of New England. In a recent post on cellarholes–the remnants of long-abandoned New England farmhouses–he includes a long quote from Thomson’s book. An even longer excerpt can be found in the online archives of American Heritage magazine.

Nearly twenty years after her New England book, Thomson published a study of the landscapes of the Midwest, Shaping of America’s Heartland. Both titles are now long out of print, unfortunately, as they are highly regarded for their quality of writing and science. Indeed, Connecticut College still remembers Thomson with an annual award for its best student in botany.

Joseph Epstein on I. J. Singer’s The Brothers Ashkenazi

Cover of first U.S. Edition of 'The Brothers Ashkenazi'The Wall Street Journal published one of the very few, I’m sure, pieces in its history devoted to an out-of-print and neglected book recently. Titled “A Yiddish Novel With Tolstoyan Sweep,” the piece, by Joseph Epstein, describes the novel by the brother of the more famous Isaac Bashevis Singer, as “the best Russian novel ever written in Yiddish.” Epstein, former editor of the American Scholar and one of the best essayists of the last forty years, calls The Brothers Ashkenazi I. J. Singer’s best-known work–which tells you how well the rest of his oeuvre is faring these days. Depicting the contrasting careers of two Jewish brothers attempting to get ahead in the Russian Pale of Settlement before the First World War. It ends with a horrific pogrom that leaves the city of Lodz, in Singer’s words, “like a limb torn from a body that no longer sustained it. It quivered momentarily in its death throes as maggots crawled over it, draining its remaining juices.” Such, he leads us to believe, is the fate of a city that “knew that with money you could buy anything.”

Although Singer’s characters do not find the same solace in religion as many in his brother’s works do, the novel is not all bleakness and despair. Still, Epstein credits I. J. Singer for foregoing “a happy ending to render instead a just one.” One hopes this long-out-of-print novel finds some interest among today’s publishers through this rare mention of a neglected book in such a prominent outlet as the Wall Street Journal.

A much earlier piece from Commentary magazine by Dorothy Rabinowitz, about Singer’s 1943 novel, The Family Carnovsky, can be found on the Featured Books section of this site.

Sideman, by Osborn Duke

Cover of first U.S. edition of 'Sideman' by Osborn DukeI probably would have filed Sideman under “Justly Neglected” if it weren’t for the fact that it’s about a trombone player in a big band. As an occasional trombone player in a big band myself, I had to give this book a couple of bonus stars.

Sideman portrays a few weeks in the life of Bernie Bell, a trombonist who drops out of college in Texas to take a job with Matt MacNeal’s big band. MacNeal’s band is in the midst of an extended gig at a dance hall near the Pacific Park pier in Santa Monica. Bell’s real reason for joining the band is the chance to study with an Arnold Schoenberg-like modernist composer living in L.A..

Even though the novel comes in at close to 450 pages, the world it describes is a microcosm. All the scenes take place in one of a half-dozen or so sites–the dance hall, the hotel where most of the band members stay, the shack Bernie rents so he can compose on an old piano–close to Santa Monica Beach. Aside from a few marginal characters, most of the interaction is among a few of the band members and a couple of their wives. Although Duke doesn’t lay out a clear timeline, from start to finish the story can’t take longer than four to six weeks. That much is a given, since this is the early 1950s and few working big bands had the luxury of staying off the road very long.

The plot is equally slim: Bernie arrives and tries to fit in with the other band members. He starts in on his composition studies. He gets attracted to the free-spirited wife of a fellow trombonist and agrees to write some original dance music for her. She accidentally poisons herself. Everyone starts whispering about a love triangle and the band’s manager fires Bernie. Bernie heads off to New York City to meet up with an old girlfriend. The end.

In hindsight, I’m not quite sure how Duke managed to fill up so many pages. There is a lot of talking, but not much of it is of any substance. There are lots of details about the life of a working sideman in the big band days. Duke was a trombonist himself and played with Bobby Byrne and Sammy Kaye’s bands after serving as an Army musician in World War Two. The details are probably the main reason anyone would want to pick up this book today–I suspect it’s about as accurate an account of what went on before, during, and after a typical big band performance back in their heyday. But it will linger in memory no longer than one of the lesser numbers that these bands relied on to pad out their books.

There are other autobiographical streaks in Sideman. Like his protagonist, Osborn Duke grew up in Texas and attended college in Texas. Sideman was his one and only published novel, and other than a couple of short stories and television scripts, his list of credits is short. It appears from his obituary that he spent most of his working life as a corporate writer and industrial filmmaker for General Dynamics. His papers are kept in the Special Collections of the University of North Texas, which is one of the premier centers of jazz education in the U. S..

Locate a Copy

Sideman, by Osborn Duke
New York City: Criterion Books, 1956