NOAH'S WINDOW on: THE TRAGEDY OF EFFICIENCY

by Noah benShea (noah@noahswindow.com)

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Copyright 1999 Noah benShea All Rights Reserved

THE TRAGEDY OF EFFICIENCY

"No matter how heartbreaking the funeral is," wrote the esteemed journalist Meg Greenfield, "there comes a time when someone has to ask what's for lunch." As we approach the turn of the century with all the looking forward and all the looking backward, we still have to decide what's for lunch, what's on the plate in front of us, what's staring us in the face? And what are we not seeing? The obvious is often only the obvious after it has been pointed out. The color white hides against a white background. The obvious is often camouflaged by its obviousness.

On a recent trip I found myself at breakfast with two very savvy, forward-seeing young people who had graduated from one of America's premier universities. As the future is more theirs than mine I asked them if they had peeked around the century's corner and what they saw that the social seers weren't seeing. One of them, a fellow named Andy Perkins who is as insightful as he is unassuming, gave it to me short and sweet: "No one's talking about the consequences of efficiency." I shoved my eggs from one side of my plate to the other and returned Mr. Perkins' half-smile. "Do you know what I mean?" he asked. And I answered, "Thank you."

"There are lone figures," wrote Henry Miller in the Air Conditioned Nightmare, "armed only with ideas, sometimes with just one idea, who blast away whole epochs in which we are enwrapped like mummies." Mr. Perkins' comment did just that. Once you begin to pull the wrapping from a mummy it spins like a top until the truth is naked. Surely we, globally, are in an epoch of efficiency. And surely this is an air-conditioned nightmare. Often in life, what comforts us ought to scare us. Woe to those who are so wrapped in their efficiency that they can't see the forest for the gauze.

The consequence of a post-industrial revolution society is that almost all things and almost all of us are sacrificed to the gods of efficiency. And whatever we're sacrificing we better be fast about it. And efficient. The quid pro quo, the this for that, of efficiency is that patience, reflection, and giving pause, though polite to admire, are passe. One can only imagine that efficiency experts shrug at this blip on their screen and call it collateral damage. "Cheaper, faster, better" is the working logo of everything from NASA to national healthcare and much of it isn't working. Or working very well. Efficiency may be a socially sacred cow, but it also may be a lot of bull. E.T. may have called home, but NASA's Mar's Lander hasn't dropped a dime.

Efficiency isn't just worshipped in the workplace it's also worshipped in the home. Parents who are busy being efficient little bees in the corporate beehive have less time for baby bees. The nature of nurturing these days has had a shift in nomenclature. Parents who have less time to give have a new term for limited giving. Parents moving to efficiency's beat rationalize that their child's not getting less time but is instead getting "quality time." Like the tiny designer portions served in trendy expensive restaurants, there is a lot of mind-set selling in this concept of "quality time." Parenting aside for a moment, certainly men have been trying to sell this notion on time to women for long time. "Hurry. Take off your clothes. I only have twenty minutes, but it's quality time baby."

The social commentator Andrew Rooney bemoans the fact that very few of us any longer write letters. I don't just mean send letters, or type letters, I actually mean write letters. The very term for writing, "longhand," is anti-social language for an efficiency measured and managed society. Over the last two years I have sent almost five thousand notes or letters via email. I don't think I've sent fifty letters in longhand. And I'm a writer. The fact is though that most writers are typists. And most of the rest of us using a computer are point and clickers. To write, yes in pen or pencil in script, takes time. And again, well.it's just not efficient. One cannot help but wonder if Roxanne in Cyrano de Bergerac would have been moved in quite the same way if she had received an email. Love isn't efficient and loves that it isn't. Be cautious of folks who are efficient with their emotions. Those who feel prideful about their emotional efficiency are usually taking in pride in controlling what they are afraid to experience.

When I was a kid I used to sell newspapers on a corner - hardly an efficient distribution system - and early on saved my money to buy one of the earliest transistor radios. The first transistor radios were small and inexpensive and, well.efficient. The benchmark on efficiency today is the computer. A computer that is smaller, runs faster, sells for less, and does more is the efficiency profile that the rest of us are up against. If you're company doesn't learn how to run leaner, run faster, and do more you don't have to worry about the next millennium, you're history. Extra, extra, read all about it.

In England when companies down size for efficiency and employees are laid off they are not fired but are made "redundant." In English this term means you're unnecessary or superfluous. Ironically, countless efficient companies are no longer in business. By the late 20th century even the most efficient company manufacturing buggy whips had lost its way. Had become redundant. The giddy-up had got up and gone. Companies, from corporations to the company of one's self, that trade off vision, and imagination, and caring for efficiency will eventually find themselves beating a dead horse. Nay neigh!

In 1779 an English laborer named Ned Ludd was supposed to have destroyed his weaving machinery as a protest against the implications of efficiency. This was followed a group of British workers who between 1811 and 1816 rioted and destroyed efficiency improved textile machinery in the belief that such machinery would diminish employment. To this day, those who oppose technical or technological change are often call Luddites after old Ned. I am not a Luddite. I am in praise of efficiency. I'm just not up for praying to it. And am concerned for a society which appears to be. Even God who could efficiently make the world in six days shoved efficiency aside and declared a day of rest as sacred, as necessary for efficiently holding the world together. Giving efficiency a rest is a sacred notion.

Twenty-five hundred years ago, Jeremiah so loudly warned the children of Israel of their impending doom that thereafter tirades of warning have been called Jeremiads. So here is my Jeremiad on efficiency, my warning to efficiency's warriors, my instant cost benefit analysis. Everything in the instant society from instant coffee, to instant juice, to instant news, to instant fame, to instant judgement, to instant friends, to instant access, to instant solutions, to instant success, to instant love, to instant divorces, to instant excuses, to instant plenary indulgences, to instant weight loss has a cost that costs more than the benefit. Efficiency is often a contradiction in terms. What we can do faster and for less is often just something sooner worth less. Too often efficiency will get you where you didn't want to go, faster.

Novels are not better because novelists can type faster on a computer than Shakespeare wrote with a quill and ink. Scientists aren't smarter because they can sooner add a column of numbers; Einstein wrote his theorems on the back of an envelope. Mothers aren't better mothers because they can sooner hurry home and hurry off. Indeed, there is a shadow side to the efficient society. There is a tragic efficiency to the efficient society. A tragedy of efficiency. And almost all of us are the benefactors.

I know it is a clichi to tell others to take the time to smell the flowers, or to wake up and smell the coffee, or to make the moment linger. But if this is a clichi that offends the senses, how much more does it offend the senses to miss the smell of flowers, the aroma of coffee, the slow peeling of a moment. Who in their right mind would take pride in hurrying through their life? Life isn't a pin-ball game. Unless you're a Hindu believing in endless re-birth there aren't other little silver balls lined up for us to play. This is it. And even if "it" isn't "it" doesn't "it" still deserve to be all that "it" can be rather being more for being over faster.

Much that passes for efficiency is an argument for less waste. And certainly this makes sense. We don't have the planetary resources to be wasteful. But talk about throwing out the baby with the bath water, jeez! Wasting water is different from languishing in a moment. Fuel efficient cars are different from rushing everywhere. The baseball player Yogi Berra was usually a half-hour late to everything. When he once showed up only fifteen minutes late, Yogi said, " This is the earliest I've ever been late." In an efficiency-based and biased society the sooner we begin to measure every thing by its efficiency the later it's going to get for us. I know that there are those who will say that this stance is not realistic or is starry-eyed but to quote Hubert H. Humphrey, the late Vice President and Senator from Minnesota, "To be realistic today is to be visionary. To be realistic is to be starry-eyed."

Giving our kids more time may make us less efficient on the job and more efficient as a human being. It will sooner tell our kids that they matter more than how much more we could be making. And that could make a big difference. It would remind them, and us, that a decision to be inefficient in one area may make us a lot more efficient in another. Kids who spend less time getting efficient with their jump shot and more time studying might jump to the head of their class. Parenting isn't something to be over and done with sooner. Believe me, it is over and done sooner than we ever think it will. Ask any mother or father who moaned about their kids' demands and now wait by the phone for a call. Ironically, get too efficient with your life or your lover and your efficiency rating goes way down.

Okay. Time out. Rich man. Poor man. Beggar man. Chief. Sit down and settle back. Don't think about all you could be doing or should be doing. Or how much more efficiently you could be doing it. As scripture reminds us: "This is the day God gave me and I will glory in it." Rest in the shade of the tree of life. Pluck a moment. Peel the moment. Drink its fruit. Feel the sun on your face and let the moment's juice run down your chin. An eternity is any moment opened with patience.

The only thing that saves us from the bureaucracy is inefficiency. An efficient bureaucracy is the greatest threat to liberty. - Eugene J.McCarthy

Noah benShea Copyright 1999 All Rights Reserved --------- Noah's latest book, JACOB'S LADDER: Wisdom For The Heart's Ascent is now in paperback published by Ballantine Books / Random House. It is a story about life, and love, and fathering and is in book stores NOW. To purchase signed copies of any of Noah's books visit: www.noahswindow.com for information write: noah@noahswindow.com

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-- (First=last@last=.first), December 13, 1999

Answers

"It should be recognized as a truth, that romance and efficiency are hostile to such a degree that they can never dwell together; one survives at the expense of the other, so that a choice between them has to be made." Page 235, The Southern Tradition at Bay, by Richard M. Weaver.

I'll take romance anyday!;-)

-- rumdoodles (rumdoodles@yahoo.com), December 13, 1999.

Whoa, that was good. I really needed that. Thank you.

-- preparing (preparing@home.com), December 13, 1999.

"The conveniences and comforts of humanity in general will be linked up by one mechanism, which will produce comforts and conveniences beyond human imagination. But the smallest mistake will bring the whole mechanism to a certain collapse. In this way the end of the world will be brought about."

Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan Sufi Prophet (1922)

-- a (a@a.a), December 13, 1999.

Whoops! My pager just went off. Bye.

-- A (A@AisA.com), December 14, 1999.