Toward Describing the Competent Society

March 1st, 2008 Posted in Competence

Competence. An emphasis on the assured skill and ability to perform a particular action or to engage in a particular craft or profession. Incompetence is the lack of skill to get the job done. But competence is only a baseline. There is also a can-do and want-to-do motivation to engage the task and a satisfaction in the doing.

I first became aware of this slant on life in my childhood from observing a neighbor, Charlie Farrell, who was a master mechanic of great competence and confidence and pride. I don’t know the details of his training but after serving in the U.S. Navy during World War I he worked for a firm that manufactured machinery and he helped install the complex works for a cough medicine factory in Philadelphia. The management at the factory asked him to stay on to tend the new machine and he spent the rest of his career at this task. In his spare time he stripped down and rebuilt an early model Ford automobile. The car was always on blocks and Charlie hardly ever used it. Eventually he bought a second car for transportation but he soon fell to rebuilding that as well—renting a second garage for that purpose. Effectively he had no wheels and for years my father would drive Charlie to work every day. Hands on working on a machine was his forte and his engagement with the machine approached the boundless. When I built a short wave radio, he drilled the very precise holes for me in the metal chassis. When I studied engineering he bought me my first drawing set.

In the film “The Sand Pebbles” Steve McQueen played the dedicated competent mechanic tending the steam engine that ran his ship on China Station. In the scene where the McQueen character meets his machine he caresses her with the same attitude a man would feel toward a beloved woman. Reminded me of Charlie Farrell. (This theme of treating your machine as you would your girlfriend was used in a World War II U.S. Army training poster on caring for your rifle.)

(Richard McKenna wrote “The Sand Pebbles”, 1962. A novel of a U.S. naval gunboat on Yangtze River patrol in revolutionary China in 1926. An adventure story against historical background. Hero is a machinist with great affection for his steam engine. The arc of the story has him attached, with an equal affection, to human friends and lovers. The political setting, the imperial clash with the various local rebels, tragically distorts and limits the free expression of the character’s competence with machine and people. Made into movie in 1966 by director Robert Wise. The movie overshadowed the book. Richard McKenna (1913-1964) the author served in US Navy for 21 years, 10 in the Far East. His other writing was in science fiction.)

But novels on competent mechanics is a genre practically owned by Nevil Shute. The leading character in the works of his that I read is usually a man operating, building, or testing a machine–a dedicated craftsman of engines. The competent way generalizes to, or matches, a philosophical purpose in life. The lover of the machine is also a loving and caring husband, father, friend, comrade. He is an adult provider, armed with technical knowledge. The attitude generalizes to a desire to know and act upon the right and reasonable way in all of life’s sectors. For Nevil Shute work is at the center of life, technical work is carried out in an understated way, his characters do not showboat, no floating like a butterfly here, just a cool, do it right, do it now response to the physical and biological reality. Politics represents the negation of competent work. It is a devilish confusion introduced into the mind of the worker-craftsman-professional to turn him sour and sloppy. Everything else is religion, a sort of pious, feel-good, universal brotherhood to which not even a stiff-necked atheist could object. The emphasis is on the active doing–do it now and do it right. Shute would have found the Garden of Eden a bore. Paradise, and its introductory space, the sabbath, are grand wastes of time. In Eden Shute would have been the snake. Let’s get off this pink cloud and into the real world where a man can work up a sweat doing the right thing well. Introspection, fantasy, the subtleties of relationships are ignored. There are no dreams in Shuteville only the minimal required periods of rest and renewal then grab your socks and at it again. Imagination downgraded. But Shute was a novelist as well as an engineer. He was a dealer in the idea. The work described by Shute is in a fictional space. It might only be another cloud of smoke.

Not according to Commander Edward Ellsberg, who in “Under the Red Sea Sun” stuns us with descriptions of technical competence and ingenuity in a concrete setting saturated with danger and pain. In early 1942 the United States finally at war but with very limited immediate resources sends two men to cover the fronts in the other half (from the western edge of the Pacific Ocean to East Africa) of the world: Stilwell to China-Burma-India and Ellsberg to East Africa. This is Ellsberg’s report on his work at Massawa in Eritrea in 1942. Ellsberg was a specialist in underwater salvage and it was his job to rehabilitate the naval repair yard utterly destroyed by Mussolini’s troops before they surrendered to the British. Also to raise and to bring into service again as many of the ships scuttled in the harbor as possible. Massawa is one of the hottest habitable places on earth with summer temperatures soaring to 148 degrees Fahrenheit. One drinks several gallons of water a day and swallows dozens of salt tablets. There is no respite. Not in the tepid sea. Not in the bath where scalding water flows out of the cold tap. Yet with deep knowledge, attention to detail, and total dedication Ellsberg placed the yard in operation and very quickly began repairing ships from the British Mediterranean fleet. He also began to retrieve sunken freighters and cruise ships from the harbor bottom and put them into Allied service.

There is a down side visible in Ellsberg’s report. The old politics, represented by corporate profits and trade union protections, both of which limit craft-quality work and actual productivity, are cast aside and with them the social order constructed by democratic class struggle. In the crisis this capitalist-worker way proved faulty. Ellsberg improvised his own work force out of Italian POWs and a rag-tag collection of beached civilians. His best worker was a reformed alcoholic (reformed by Ellsberg on the spot). Health and safety concerns were reduced along with the need for fair pay and time off. People fell ill, some died. Ellsberg himself went sick in 1943. But he had the overpowering rationale of the war, an ever-present background for the story. Competence has a cost. Ellsberg and his crew paid it. (There appears to have been another version of this experience–see the Ellsberg link above).

With Shute and Ellsberg we get the drama and the adventure of competence but in everyday life we find it in the modest Charlie Farrell form. Look around, you’ll know it when you see it.

We can begin to see an outline of the sociology of a competence maximizing society with the accompanying dedication to work and craft. I can not give a completed model. Think of these notes as speculations. Such work is an important sociological contribution: searching out the range of social orders and processes that will maximize or minimize particular qualities. Utopian and speculative but available for critique and revision and a crude metric against which to measure where we as a society actually are.

Competence involves measure and style. There is a task and the actions to complete it. The competent worker-doer has a complete and deep knowledge of the object and is schooled and practiced in the means he has to use. He applies the means quickly, effectively, coolly. Where the task has unexpected elements, he studies, observes, thinks through, experiments until he sees the way through, then he rehearses the means required until he is ready to act. Emphasis is on the correct way using the correct means. Competence can be a measure of a individual, of a group (team, band, crew), as well as a general measure of a society–competence over a series of tests.

The question: we want to highlight the social orders and processes that either advance or retard competent actions.

(1) Competence is associated with talent, training and opportunity. The society that overemphasizes differences in prestige and income among occupations warps the ambitions of its people away from their natural or acquired talents. Simplifying–too many lawyers and not enough linguists and mathematicians. (Also the lawyers can get by with a gentleman’s C, the others can not.) The problem is to discover the talent and place it with skilled competent teachers in all fields. Distinguish ambition from talent.

(2) With competence there is an emphasize on the here and now, the what is, instead of the dialectic and the what isn’t. The two sides of competence and creativity tend to nurtured by separate and distinct qualities. Invention (the startling unexpected and new way) is not encouraged by the methodical, precise, disciplined practice that supports competence. The new is more likely to be found with fantasy, wildness, iconoclastic disruption. Invention is a different kind of adventure. It might be that a society can not maximize both these qualities at the same time. (See our notes on invention in Posts 53, 54, 56, 57)

(3) Competence is a value in itself. Its recognition and encouragement rejects extraneous fences. Formal systems of social class, ethnic and religious difference that set up barriers to access to teachers of craft limit the spread of competence. Political struggles affect on-going work. The people who are competent, the carriers of this way, tend to be apolitical. As we get from Shute, politics is an unwelcome intrusion. Craft separated from ascribed (other social identities) tests would have the best chance to flourish. The ethic and dedication implicit in craft should be socially recognized.

(4) Then there is the issue of the mobilization of the competent for a larger ideological or commercial purpose. Competence is reduced if forced or twisted. The informal norm limiting productivity of the work group as well as the piece-rate system it negates both limit competence. In the lock step of the factory way competence must be constantly bruised. I can not imagine how Charlie bridged this contradiction at the cough medicine factory. His off-time work on cars could have been a psychological compensation.

(5) While money income is necessary for all in our social order this is not the primary urge or motive toward development of competent people. Competence is its own value. The profit in the commodity, I suspect, is balanced by the diminished competent worker.

(6) Craft and competence have their own historical line. At best it has the look and feel of a seamless flow–man, action, material as a single event. In contrast, in the post-modern world we have machines that, except for our turning them off and on, do the doing themselves. Automatic transmission. The broadband computer always connected. Automata. The craft worker, unless he is the engineer running the automated assembly line, tends to be squeezed out. Bur perhaps as long as a human hand is on the switch competence will find a place.

We would expect artists to have craft skills and attitudes but not all of them do. Their emphasis is on the unique perspective. So conceptual artists have no qualms in using skilled workmen to realize their visions. Sculptors have their models rendered by specialist shops. The object you see is not necessarily the product of the artist’s hand. As noted, the craftsman in the opposite direction doesn’t see invention as a requirement. His job is to perfectly use what is.

Fumble, stumble.