Why Everyone Seems to Hate Technocrats
I call it technocratophobia.
I was in Toulouse the other week for a friend’s birthday. In need of some time away from the crowd, I slipped off to a food market. Here, sipping a seize at one of the stalls, I had the following exchange.
‘I do not like Macron.’
‘No?’
‘No. We should put him in the — how you say it? Poubelle?’
‘Bin.’
‘Bin. We should put Macron in the bin.’
‘Right.’
‘We should put him in the bin. And we should sit on the bin. We do not need to cut off his head. But he should get the flies.’
A peculiar image, perhaps. But a familiar sentiment à l’Héxegone. Emmanuel Macron, after all, is almost universally loathed in France, but benefits from being everyone’s second favourite. Though one slice of French society likes Le Pen, another likes Zemmour, and another still likes Mélénchon or Pécresse or whomever, almost everyone puts Macron as their number two, and so he stays in office. But the opprobrium is real: ‘There’s a sort of hatred that he concentrates that we’d never encountered before,’ mused the journalist Nicolas Domenach. ‘It’s something that has been present throughout his term in office and comes to the surface quite brutally.’
So has Macron done to merit such opprobrium? It cannot merely be down to the fact the French have a deeply regicidal streak. They may habitually elect a kinglike président and spend the next five years slagging him off every chance they get, but not since Charles de Gaulle have they directed so much venom at their leader. Clearly Macron’s background — excellent schooling, a stint at the über-bank Rothschild’s — does not help things: he is seen as a member of the élite, a group that has not had the best standing among the public these last few years. But he is also a certain kind of élite, one that rubs people up the wrong way. He is a member of the technical élite. He is, in other words, a technocrat.
Clearly Macron’s background — excellent schooling, a stint at the über-bank Rothschild’s — does not help things: he is seen as a member of the élite, a group that has not had the best standing among the public these last few years.
A technocrat is a technically skilled person (often someone with a financial background) who, in the eyes of many, is assumed to believe that by virtue of his technical knowledge he has the authority to impose abstract ideas on the populace in a top-down fashion. When Michael Gove said the British people had had ‘quite enough of experts’, he was widely ridiculed, and justifiably so. But if we were to be generous, we might say he was invoking the distinction between technical knowledge and practical experience. To laud the former and sneer at the latter is to annoy quite a lot of people quite a lot—for one thing, many do not have the chance to enjoy a sophisticated technical education.
The difference between technical knowledge and practical experience is the difference between the food critic and the chef, or the book reviewer and the novelist. One is a ‘knowing that’; the other, a ‘knowing how’. There are many people who have not had the good fortune to get a great technical education but are excellent at what they do because they have practical expertise. And frankly, if you want a job done, you would be mad to choose a theorist over a practitioner, however well put-together the former might be. Ideally, however, you would hire someone with complete knowledge: both practical experience and technical understanding, and the good judgement to know how to apply them.
Technical knowledge is downstream from practical experience. The doing comes before the thinking about the doing; indeed the doing is the source of the thinking about the doing. Ideas are abstractions, and abstractions are, by definition, plucked from the context in which they emerged. When ideas are imposed, in a top-down fashion, they are necessarily imposed on a different context to the one out of which they came, and that alone may be sufficient to turn what seems like a sound idea into the raw material of a disaster. The classics of the genre are, of course, the collections of ideas that constitute systematic ideologies. We could also mention (just for the irony) the ideas on which the French Revolution was based. Liberté, egalité, fraternité came at quite a cost to begin with.
The classics of the genre are, of course, the collection of ideas that constitute systematic ideologies. We could also mention (just for the irony) the ideas on which the French Revolution was based. Liberté, egalité, fraternité came at quite a cost.
Throughout our lives we move between the domains of the practical and the technical all the time. We do it naturally: combining instincts drawn from experience with knowledge already written down. Say you are planning a car journey to see some old university friends who have inexplicably moved to the middle of nowhere. You might use an app to plot the route, but you might use your own experience of this or that road, or the journey itself, to decide when exactly to leave. You might rely mostly on practical experience when making a dish, but you may just use a cookbook to fill in the gaps. The person who thinks that a dish made by following a recipe will be as good as a dish made by someone who has simply made it a thousand times is someone who does not understand these two types of knowledge. And it would be very unfair on poor old Macron to think that because he is well educated and used to work in a bank he has no practical experience and is thus a ‘mere’ technocrat, even if he says he wants to rule France ‘like Jupiter’ — that is, free from the messiness of reality.
But some seem almost to get a sense that someone who principally deals in abstractions — numbers, let us say — must be a kind of abstraction themselves, someone not rooted in our world. This is one of the things most commonly said about academics: that they do not live in the ‘real world’ but reside in an isolated setting, on the outside of things, like an island off the coast of the mainland, unaffected by the storms that batter the rest of us. Sat snugly in their ‘ivory tower’, runs the thinking, this lot have no need to make compromises or engage in the kinds of conflicts that are unavoidable for the rest of us. This, it goes without saying, is a caricature.
The ‘technocrat’ is also a caricature, of course, but there may be just a ghost of truth to the criticism. There is a difference between understanding the world by living it and understanding it by reading books. In any event, whether or not you believe that Macron is a technocrat, or simply a loathsome individual, or quite lovely, or that he should see if he can fit himself into a bin on which you will presently sit, plenty of people do. And his chorus of critics will only grow louder as he grapples with looming strikes and blackouts this winter.
