Every institution, private or public, has a tendency to take on a life of its own - to serve itself (the insiders, if you will), rather than society. The marketplace kills private organizations that no longer serve a real pupose: they go broke, or are reorganized. Not true, by and large, for the public sector; bureaucracies, as C. Northcote Parkinson observed, will grow at a predetermined rate regardless of the amount of real work required; they will make their own if need be. Part of that make-work habit, as I’ve seen myself, consists of dreaming up reasons why their jobs are essential, making it very difficult for budgeting politicians to swing the pruning shears.

I have long felt that American academia is going down the road traveled by the Catholic Church in the late Middle Ages: behind a glorious facade, creeping irrelevancy. Without offense to Catholic theology, the Church itself had become a huge, parasitic structure that hoarded society’s wealth for its own benefit, constantly engaged in worldly activities that were not its proper task, employed hordes of greedy charlatans, and nitwits engaged in pointless philosophizing (how many angels on the point of a pin?), while doing very little for the common man. It took a major upheaval - the Reformation - before Church leaders worked up enough steam to address problems that had taken centuries to develop.

“The marketplace kills private organizations that no longer serve a real pupose.”

That is true to the extent that “real purpose” is equated to “actual human desires”. So the marketplace ultimately kills private organizations that fail to embrace rational hedonism as essence. But doesn’t that rather beg the question? If essence precedes existence then rational hedonism is an incoherent metaphysic. There is nothing essential about raw expression of human will, and indeed its very point is that it is unconstrained by essential limitations. Capitalism, while it does have its benefits as an institution subordinated to the traditional moral order, is no bulwark against essential-existential inversion. Indeed taken as ideology capitalism is a concrete expression of existence preceding essence, it seems to me.

I regret that Matt and I seem to be from different universes.

I was talking about real organizational behavior, not metaphysics. Whether or not the marketplace is “no bulwark against essential-existential inversion” is to me, as the Germans like to say, WURST. My only reason for praising the discipline of the market was that it does kill organizations that serve no purpose for the consumer - regardless of whether or not that consumer is acting in good taste, as defined by Matt. In contrast, the public sector provides no automatic sunset for uselessness; and a lot of what goes in in colleges these days looks utterly useless.

C. Northcote Parkinson had observed that during the years between the two World Wars, the British Navy had continually reduced its fleet while the number of staff officers at the Admiralty kept growing, providing, as he put it, “a magnificent Navy on land.” From this he drew lessons about organizational behavior that may come across as tongue-in-cheek, and yet I’m persuaded they are true. Work expands to fill the time available for its completion. Expenses rise to meet income. Bureaucracies will grow at a predetermined rate, regardless of the tasks assigned. Read “Parkinson’s Law” some time; it’s entertaining as well as illuminating.

Returning now to the subject of Academia, after World War II conventional wisdom said that in order to be most useful to American society you needed to go to college; millions did. Confirming the truth of such wisdom, for years afterward a college education guaranteed access to a profitable job. The connection started to unravel around 1970, when certain academic specialties started cranking out an oversupply of “soft science” degrees - sociology, anthropology, psychology, history, English - while curricula were being festooned with courses of no particular utility except for those who would themselves become professors to train yet more students: in Gay Studies, in Black Studies, Women’s Studies, and so on. I’m leaving out a lot of things, such as the steady degree inflation (in the end, everybody had to have a PhD) but this contribution would get too long.

The results have been: an immoral amount of inflation in the cost of education; excessive amounts of political agitation by underemployed academic malcontents; and an incredible amount of time wasted on useless pursuits. We now have colleges - like the one that bulldozed Rachel Corrie attended, Evergreen State - whose first priority is political indoctrination and “social action”. Thus we’ve come full circle. Academia set out to replace the Church, and has now itself become a church, and an irrelevant one at that.

So many causes, so little time. Yet TIME is the stuff life is made of.

Wim writes:
“I regret that Matt and I seem to be from different universes.”

I don’t think so. Wim wants to talk about the details I suppose, which is certainly fine, while I was synthesizing Mr. Kalb’s discussion of existence preceding essence in the academic mind with Wim’s invocation of the market (incidentally, how Wim’s general comment applies to private universities is unclear). My point was, and still is, that whatever its disciplinary virtues the invocation of the market does not solve the problem of inverted precedence — the basic problem that Mr. Kalb discussed in his initial post — and that indeed the market is itself an inverted-precedence institution that treats actual existent desires (hedonism) as preceding essence (value). The market is one significant institutionalization of the principle that existence precedes essence.

I do know a thing or two about real organizational behavior in general and the market in particular, having personally produced substantial actual wealth creating and running organizations for profit in Real Life [tm]. I concede that Parkinson’s book may be more entertaining than anything by Maslow or, for that matter, Tom Peters. I think that is a bit afield of whether or not the market is an institutionalization of the problem raised in the original article — that of existence being treated as preceding essence — though, and it is that issue with which I am specifically concerned here.

Wim writes:
“My only reason for praising the discipline of the market was that it does kill organizations that serve no purpose for the consumer - regardless of whether or not that consumer is acting in good taste, as defined by Matt.”

That is right, it seems to me, except for the implication that THE alternative to rational hedonism is “good taste as defined by Matt”. The market kills any organization subject to it — “private” being the parlance for such things — that does not satisfy the actual desires that actual consumers happen to have. That is, the market kills any organization subject to it that does not treat rational hedonism as essential, which is the same thing as denying the existence of an essence that is independent of the actual wills of actual consumers. That Wim sees the only alternative to the actual desires of consumers to be “good taste as defined by Matt” demonstrates that Wim has already conceded the argument — that existence precedes essence — to liberal modernism.