The Professional Blockhead

C. S. Lewis's Attack on Managerialism, part 2

My grandfather once wrecked a car with a boat on the street. Absurdities like that only reinforce prejudice against older drivers. Sometimes, however, the absurdity goes the other way, absurdly excellent rather than absurdly crazy, like Bill Bowe. Bowe is a 73-year-old driver with a 20-year-old Mini, “bone stock” or so he claims. His Mini has exactly half the cylinders and less than half the horsepower of my car. I could beat him in a drag race. A drunken monkey could beat his car in a drag race, but on a sixteen turn two-and-a-half mile track, Bill’s Mini is faster, a lot faster—when he is the one driving it. At the Barber racetrack one weekend, Bill showed me what makes a car truly fast, and it is not the cylinders.

Everything I thought about elderly drivers came untrue, and it brought to mind something C. S. Lewis said. Bill Bowe is a driving instructor but not a professional one. The Urban Blockhead, on the other hand, is a pro.

The Urban Blockhead takes many literary shapes (see "Urban Blockhead, part 1"), but he is not a literary invention. He is a real person, but he is not a naturally occurring one. He is the product of a certain kind of education, which is Lewis’ target in The Abolition of Man. It’s the kind of education instilled by The Green Book, an alias for a real book whose authors’ Lewis’ wishes not to pillory in public. Nevertheless, The Green Book is real, Lewis insists, and it has its students. The Green Book “will be found to hold, with complete uncritical dogmatism, the whole system of values which happened to be in vogue among moderately educated young men of the professional classes during the period between the wars.” That raises the question, who are these professionals? and what do they do?

There were once two kinds of work, the commercial and the professional. Commercial vocations pursue money; professional vocations pursue service, and money was a byproduct. Oliver Wendell Holmes embodied classic professionalism. “‘I should say that one of the good things about the law is that it does not pursue money directly. When you sell goods the price which you get and your interests are what you think about in the affair. When you try a case you think about the ways to win it and the interests of your client’ (A. W. Levi quoting Holmes, “The Professional Man of Today” in The High Road of Humanity, 109).” To be a professional meant to pursue work for the good of the work itself. A doctor who heals for money is not a professional however well-educated he may be; while a baker who “takes pride in his bread, tries to make the best loaf in his city, turns out a loaf that graces his own table, and is less interested in the volume of his yearly profit than in the quality and reputation of his merchandise, he is a professional man (a craftsman) even if he has never graduated from college.” Professionals are defined by the quality of their work not their paycheck.

Besides quality work, classic professionalism also ensured a moral code. That is the nature of the Hippocratic Oath, for example. These moral standards were once so widely revered that the professional became a sort of ethical ideal for Western civilization in the pattern of the Greek aristocrat or the Renaissance gentleman, argues Levi. These kinds of professionals could hardly be the trousered apes that Lewis had in mind. After all, he was one.

Sometime after Oliver Wendell Holmes a revolution occurred in the meaning professionalism. A real revolution, a turning over from top to bottom, professionalism came to mean it’s very opposite. Where once a professional didn’t work for money, after the revolution, he did. In 1968, the revolution had its Bastille. It was not the death of RFK, Mai Lai, Pueblo, the Chicago Democratic convention, or the Columbia University riots, however anarchic those events may have been. It was Wimbledon. In 1968, for the first time ever, Wimbledon was opened to professionals (Digby Baltzell, Sporting Gentlemen: Men’s Tennis from the Age of Honor to the Cult of the Superstar, 7-8). Thus, the designation of tennis tournaments as “Open”, as in The U. S. Open. The gentlemanly amateur code of tennis reached its apex in Arthur Ashe, and then crumbled under John McEnroe. A few years after the open Wimbledon, there occurred,

the most vulgar and most popular media event in the history of tennis. The largest crowd ever to watch a tennis match—30,472—gathered at the Houston Astrodome (courtside seats were $100) to watch Male Chauvinist Pig, Bobby Riggs, do battle with tennis’s leading Female Chauvinist, Billie Jean King. . . . King was borne into the arena on a red and gold litter carried by four husky football players from Rice University; Riggs had a group of female escorts, or Bosom Buddies, carry him on the court in a rickshaw. He gave King a red lollipop; she gave him a little live pig. The crowd loved every vulgar bit of it, as did some fifty million American TV viewers (Baltzell, 10-11).

These are the professionals that Lewis is talking about.

The revolution at Wimbledon was the triumph of the professional over the amateur. “Professional” had come to mean its opposite, something done expressly for money. Until then tennis had been an amateur sport governed by a set of aristocratic values. Values were even more important than winning. That was the point of sport. It was one part of life, not the whole of life, one part of a network of institutions aimed at creating good people, not just good players. Virtue could even be learned from losing. Tennis was not unlike the original Greek games. Amateurs played for love (amo, amas, amat, Latin, to love). Pro’s play for money. The pursuit of money over love and virtue, transforms the character of sport from one part of life, aimed at virtue and play, into the whole of life, pursued for gain, and not just for the players.

Society changes too. When Greek athletes finally became out-and-out professionals,

‘This was the beginning of [the games’] decline, The famous Olympics of Greece, conceived in the spirit of purity, became a victim of professionalism and, after a period of over seven hundred years of existence, came to an end in 293 A.D.’ The inner-barbarians had triumphed, and the Greco-Roman civilization lost its will and was soon be overrun by the outer-barbarians. (Baltzell quoting John Tunis from The New Yorker (1928), 12)

The contrast between the inner and the outer barbarians is notable. Professionalism signals a poverty of spirit, and the want of spirit, not money, makes a civilization vulnerable.

This will chap hardcore capitalists. All but the most cynical will check themselves, however, and remember that there are some things too important to be denominated in dollars. Aristocratic societies foster amateurism; democratic societies promote professionalism, but it doesn’t have to be capitalist democracies. In the modern era professional sports first became widespread in communist societies, and it was from there that the capitalist societies learned and perfected it.

Lewis doesn’t offer many footnotes in Abolition, but he does not want us to misunderstand the new professional men. Of the “system of values” held by the moderately educated professional, Lewis writes in an extended footnote, “It will be seen that comfort and security, as known to a suburban street in peace-time, are the ultimate values: those things which can alone produce or spiritualize comfort and security are mocked. Man lives by bread alone, and the ultimate source of bread is the baker’s van: peace matters more than honor and can be preserved by jeering at colonels and reading newspapers.” Such a man, educated by The Green Book is an immanentist, though not because he has reflected deeply on it. He believes in the world before his eyes. That world is chiefly material, and material production, the “baker’s van”, is its highest good. One gets the impression that Eustace Clarence Scrubb was raised by professionals. Eustace dismissed talking mice as sentimental inventions. Maybe that is the source of his misanthropy, since talking mice are not necessarily more sentimental than talking humans.

When Lewis thinks of the professional class, he does not have in mind an army of TV lawyers bivouacked in the suburbs. Professionalism could happen anywhere, like Mark Studdock, the university professor protagonist in Lewis’ That Hideous Strength. Studdock is a professor in the dubious, pseudo-discipline of sociology, by which Lewis means to cast doubt on his academic integrity. It turns out that Studdock is valued more for his unquestioning support of the bureaucracy than for his academic integrity, and he himself values his salary more than scholarship. The point is not to slander professors. Remember, Lewis is one. Studdock could be a midlevel manager anywhere. If the eclipse of morality by money can happen to lawyers, professors, and tennis players, it makes me wonder if it’s not a flaw but a feature in professionalism.

The pursuit of money is not absolutely necessary though it may be contingently so. There are other kinds of economies than monetary ones, but the pursuit of money is often very practical. Far from being a reason to ignore its perverting effects, that is a reason not to. For my part, I see this as a prophylactic exercise. Further the pursuit of money is not alone in these ill effects. I’ve noticed a similar teleological dysphoria elsewhere, school for example. In my experience teaching, the pursuit of grades has eclipsed the pursuit of education. Any college teacher knows that “what’s my grade?” is ten times more common than “please help me understand?” The pursuit of money and grades over goodness and knowledge partake of the same disordered pragmatism.

At any rate, Bill Bowe is not a professional. Whatever Bowe does for money, it’s not driving. I didn’t know it though, and at the end of the weekend, I offered him a small tip. Tipping is an oppressive regime, and like Mark Studdock, I didn’t want to run afoul of it. Bill is not so servile. “No, I don’t do this for money.” Wait, what?! I was glad to keep my forty bucks, but I was also embarrassed. You see, Bowe is a real amateur. Me, I’m a pro Blockhead.

to be continued . . .