Disabling Professions: Notes for a lecture

Abstract

One way to close an age is to give it a name that sticks. I propose that we name the mid-twentieth century the Age of Disabling Professions, when people had problems, experts had solutions and scientists measured both abilities and needs. This age of self-governing corporate proxies is now over, just as much as the age of energy splurges. The fallacies that made both possible are moving out of the blindspots of social perspective. These fallacies will now either be turned into compulsory political creeds, or they will soon be remembered as ephemeral follies. This is the right time to confront who, thanks to professional dominance, got what and why. To see clearer into the present let us think of the children who will soon play in the ruins of high schools, Hiltons and hospitals. From the ramparts of these professional castles, built to protect us against discomfort, ignorance, pain and death, the children of tomorrow will reconstruct the delusions of our Age of Professions as we, now from cathedrals and from dungeons fancy the crusades that knights led against sin and Turk in the Ages of Faith. These skeletons will serve as memorial of professions that were established in lieu of religion to catch the dropout and to shock the melancholic as the Spanish Inquisition shocked the Moor and the Jew. Children in their games will mingle the sludge from the uniquack which now pollutes our language with the jargon they have inherited from robber barons and cowboys. I see them addressing each other as chairman and secretary rather than as chief and lord. But adults will then blush if they slip into managerial pidgin with terms such as policy-making, social planning and problem-solving. The Age of Professions will be remembered as the time when politics withered, when pretentious voters guided by professors entrusted to technocrats the power to legislate needs, the authori ty to decide who needed what and a monopoly over the means by which needs would be met. It will