AND ANOTHER THING
Parkinson's Law, the Amis Syndrome and the creation of the Fourth World
PAUL JOHNSON
The isolation of an 'ageing gene', and its neutralisation, will eventually enable most people to live, in reasonable health, to 150. Students of obituary columns, like myself, already note the large number of people who now die in their nineties, or even reach 100. So the curse of superannuation — if it is a curse — is already with us and will be a major factor in determining the philosophy of the new millennium. The difficulty we face is that it is easier to prolong people's lives than it is to create new jobs — or the new appetites which lead to them. Hence there has come into existence, among those who are employed but who fear redundan- cy, a spontaneous job-prolongation pro- gramme, which involves creating phony needs for their services. C. Northcote Parkinson spotted this trend more than a generation ago when he invented the law: `Work expands to fill the time of those available to complete it', with particular application to the civil service. The out- standing example of the phenomenon is India, where there are 40 million func- tionaries. Not only are the vast majority of them unnecessary, the country's economy would actually perform more efficiently if the government service were reduced by 90 per cent.
Do not imagine phony work is confined to the civil service. Another example is academia. Here, you might say, society has indeed created a new appetite: for higher education. In a growing number of coun- tries everyone has a qualified right to attend a university. There is no reason for this benevolence, but it is an easy right for governments to concede, and it keeps the young off the dole queues for a few years. The result is the emergence of huge cara- vanserais (I can think of a no better word) where higher education is doled out rather like gruel in a soup kitchen. Last month I lectured at one in Spain which has 150,000 students. In Italy, where I have also been addressing students, they boasted that their biggest university now caters for 160,000. In the United States there are 3,500 universi- ties, many of them with a student body of 30,000 or more. The dons who supply these masses with pabulum are not allowed to feel job-secure unless they are also engaged on their own 'work'. So there arises a com- plementary axiom to Parkinson's Law, which was first identified by Kingsley Amis as 'pseudo-research into non-problems'.
The deliberate creation of useless aca- demic work is not new. A good example is German 'form-criticism' of biblical texts, now two centuries old. Tradition had it that St Matthew wrote the first of the gospels, some time between the Ascension of Christ and 70 AD. Once German universities began to expand, that was not good enough, and St Matthew's gospel was put later and later — even into the 2nd century AD - as more and more scholars joined in this job-creation scheme. Now a definitive study of the fragments of an early codex of the gospel in Magdalen, Oxford, puts the date where it was in the first place.
Another example is the controversy over a Raphael drawing of two male nudes in the Albertina, Vienna. These studies are of such superlative quality that it is hard to see how anyone could possibly doubt they are by the master. To clinch matters, there is an inscription on the sheet which reads: `1515, Raphael of Urbino, who is so much admired by the Pope, made this nude study and sent it to Albrecht Direr to illustrate his hand to him.' The handwriting is unquestionable Direr's, of which we pos- sess a great deal, and the drawing's prove- nance can be traced back through the Emperor Rudolph II and Willibald Imhoff to Direr himself. So where's the problem? There is none. But such simplicity does not take account of the Amis Syndrome. In 1891, in a frenzy of job-creation, a scholar called G. Morelli 'proved' the inscription was false and reattributed the drawing to Raphael's young pupil Giulio Romano. For the next 70 years, pseudo-research into this non-problem raged furiously as more and more scholars joined in. One of them, 0. Fischel, actually wrote on both sides. Then, from the 1960s to the 1980s, yet more scholars, J. Shearman, K. Oberhuber et al, I'm a pearly royal divorce lawyer.' put the attribution back to Raphael and authenticated the Diirer inscription, to the general satisfaction. Cui bono? Well, it gave large numbers of dons and students, over the best part of a century, something to do.
Certainly, in my own field, history, most re-evaluations and revisions are increasing- ly job-creation. The great row over 'the rise of the gentry', which locked English 17th- century historians in acrimonious combat for years, was mostly hot air. Nine out of ten PhD theses and the books which spring from them serve no purpose other than to advance the careers of those who perpe- trate them. I have an uneasy suspicion that the same percentage of scientific research has the same object.
But at least these job-creation schemes do little harm other than consume public funds. It is a different matter when pseudo- research into non-problems is conducted on real people. This happens increasingly in the social services, the most sinister example being child sexual abuse, which, as a widespread phenomenon, has been virtu- ally created at the international confer- ences where 'experts' in the subject gather and present 'findings'. One by-product has been the work of investigators who rehearse children in giving evidence of abuse. The catastrophic result is that chil- dren are forcibly removed from their fami- lies, where abuse is rare, and placed in pub- lic institutions, where abuse is frequent. But of course the object of this activity is not to safeguard children but to create jobs for social workers.
Increasingly, when I read of demands for changes and reforms, I interpret them as the invention of artificial problems in order to manufacture jobs. I wish someone would conduct an analysis of an entire modern society to discover how widespread is this process. I suspect it is almost universal, in the private as well as the public sector. It is particularly marked in Europe, where unemployment is higher and more intractable than anywhere else, and where the EU itself is an example of the Amis Syndrome: it legislates to abolish problems which had no existence until bureaucrats identified them as potential job-creation schemes for themselves and others. Thus, almost by accident, we have stumbled on a formula for turning Europe into a back- ward continent, a Fourth World whose dynamic is a gigantic confidence trick, a modern ideology of bread and circuses.
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