[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
derived from being the Chosen People. Shinto, which teaches
that Japan was created earlier than the rest of the world, is not
intended or likely to appeal to those who are not Japanese.
Everyone knows the story of the Auld Lichts arriving in heaven,
and being prevented from discovering that there were other
people there, for fear of spoiling their enjoyment of celestial
bliss. The same kind of sentiment may take a more sinister form:
persecution may be so pleasant to the persecutor that he would
find a world without heretics intolerably dull. Similarly Hitler
and Mussolini, since they teach that war is the noblest of human
activities, could not be happy if they had conquered the world
and had no enemies left to fight. In like manner, party politics
become uninteresting as soon as one party has unquestionable
supremacy.
the biology of organisations 143
Thus an organisation which derives its appeal to the indi-
vidual from such motives as pride, envy, hate, contempt, or
pleasure in contest,4 cannot fulfil its purpose if it is world-wide.
In a world where such passions are strong, an organisation
which becomes world-wide is pretty sure to break up, since it
will have lost its motive force.
It will be seen that, in what has just been said, we have been
considering rather the sentiments of ordinary members of organ-
isations than those of their governments. Whatever the purpose
of an organisation, its government derives satisfaction from
power, and has, in consequence, an interest not identical with
that of the members. The desire for universal conquest is there-
fore likely to be stronger in the government than in the members.
Nevertheless, there is an important difference between the
dynamics of organisations embodying sentiments to be realised
by cooperation and that of those whose purposes essentially
involve conflict. This is a large subject, and for the present I
am merely concerned to point out the limitations to the study of
organisations without regard to their purposes.
I have spoken of the growth of an organisation, and of its
competition with rivals. To complete the Darwinian analogy,
something should be said about decay and old age. The fact that
men are mortal is not, in itself, a reason for expecting organisa-
tions to die, and yet most of them do. Sometimes they suffer a
violent death from without, but this is not what, at the moment,
I wish to consider. What I wish to consider is the feebleness and
slowness of movement, analogous to that of old men, which is
often seen in old organisations. One of the best examples is the
Chinese Empire before the revolution of 1911. It was by far the
most ancient government in the world; it had shown military
prowess at the time of the rise of Rome, and during the great
4
I am excluding merely sporting contests, which can be organised within a
single governing authority such as the MCC.
144 the biology of organisations
days of the Caliphate; it had a continuous tradition of high civil-
isation, and a long-established practice of government by able
men chosen through the medium of competitive examination.
The strength of the tradition, the tyranny of centuries of habit,
was the cause of collapse. It was impossible for the literati to
understand that other knowledge than that of the Confucian
classics was needed for coping with the nations of the West, or
that the maxims which had been adequate against semi-
barbarian frontier races were of no avail against Europeans. What
makes an organisation grow old is habit based upon success;
when new circumstances arise, the habit is too strong to be
shaken off. In revolutionary times, those who have the habit of
command never realise soon enough that they can no longer
count upon the correlative habit of obedience. Moreover the
respect exacted by exalted persons, originally with a view to
confirming their authority, in time develops into a stiff etiquette
that hampers them in action and prevents them from acquiring
the knowledge needed for success. Kings can no longer lead in
battle because they are too sacred; they cannot be told unpalat-
able truths, because they would execute the teller. In time they
become mere symbols, and some day people wake up to the fact
that they symbolise nothing of any value.
There is, however, no reason why all organisations should be
mortal. The American Constitution, for example, does not invest
any man or body of men with the kind of reverence that leads to
ignorance and impotence, nor does it readily lend itself, except
to some extent in relation to the Supreme Court, to the accumu-
lation of habits and maxims which prevent adaptation to new
circumstances. There is no obvious reason why an organisation
of this sort should not persist indefinitely. I think, therefore, that,
while most organisations perish sooner or later, either from
rigidity or from external causes, there is no inherent reason
which makes this unavoidable. At this point, the biological
analogy, if pressed, becomes misleading.
12
POWERS AND FORMS
OF GOVERNMENTS
Apart from the purpose of an organisation, its most important
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
zanotowane.pldoc.pisz.plpdf.pisz.plalternate.pev.pl
|
