The character of our times

Apart from being Good Things, I suspect Josh Ritter and Theodore Dalrymple have little in common. But both this weekend decry one of the characters of our age - the person who wants to stamp (the mot juste) his character upon the world.
Dalrymple says:

Am I wrong to see in the rise of graffiti as a phenomenon the inflamed egotism of mass self-importance, the desire at all costs to impose oneself upon the world?...Of all the virtues, humility is perhaps the least in fashion.

Ritter says:

The future is rarely more frightening than the man who has the power to make his own prophecies come true.

Which brings me to managerialism. My complaint about this is not just that it rests upon an absurd premise about humans' power of cognition, nor that it legitimates unacceptable inequalities, nor that it damages organizations and costs us billions of pounds, true as all this is. Instead, it's that managerialism elevates a particular character - the big man who does big things, the leader, the change-maker - over others.
In doing this, nobler characters get lost: the man who pursues excellence rather than the trinkets and baubles of mere effectiveness, the craftsman who believes in doing a good job by traditional objective standards, the man who's humble enough to know that he doesn't have the answers, the one who knows, with Pascal, that "all human evil comes from this, man's being unable to sit still in a room."
I like to think that Ritter and Dalrymple are standing up for these characters, against the vacuous egotism that managerialism promotes. And I'll be with them. When I die, I want my epitaph to read:

He made no difference.

* For those unacquainted with Mr Ritter, here's what he does.

Comments

[gaddeswarup]

Lovely post. But no epitaph for me. I do not want to take up unnecessary space.

[reason]

He made difference??? I'll settle for "He tread lightly upon the earth".