It Doesn't Add Up...

New Zealand Listener, Volume 29, Issue 741, 25 September 1953, Page 4

It Doesn't Add Up...

| | CIENTIFIC methods of promoting efficiency, tested during the Second World War, have now come widely into favour. Systems which provide executives with "a quantitative basis for decisions on the operations under their control" are used in industry and commerce, in the Public Service, and in the armed forces. Their results have been so valuable that enthusiasts have sometimes been led too deeply into the scientific mood: they see it as the answer to all problems, or believe that matters beyond its reach are of minor importance. Experience comes to be largely a question of mathematics, and nothing is real which cannot be made statistical. The dangers of this attitude are best illustrated by another method, much older and less scientific than quantitative estimates, but in its way equally effective-the reductio ad absurdum. It has been used successfully » in a small story reprinted on the opposite page from an impeccable source, The unknown author of "Cuts by the Score" could not have found a better way of tilting at his windmill. Music has a mathematical basis, and is therefore one enterprise which should be amenable to control. So it is, if we think of control in terms of skill end training, though Bach can be nlayed with every note in exactly the right place and yet be a lifeless performance. Even if music is not played very well, however, it can arouse emotions in the listener a different from what he feels when he looks at tables of figures. True, some figures can touch our deeper feelings. On an income tax demand they may even give us a sense of fatality and of inexpress‘ble suffering, comnarable with the nood that descends unon us from the music of certain Russian comnosers. The difference is in the intention of those who write, or tnerely add up, the score. The logic of a man who thinks an orchestra should be organised rut of existence is unhssailable if ‘is purpose is simply to make the nost ‘economic use of players and

instruments. It also reveals the mits within which an efficiency expert should be confined if the world is to remain habitable. As soon as he passes from quantity. to value, or makes the two terms interchangeable, he is in need of restraint. The infalliblé sign of the expert is his concentration upon practical ends. Everything "useful" can be measured in units of production or in pounds, shil-, lings and pence. But what is to be said of products which disappear among the thoughts and feelings of a listener? Even when resu!ts are conceded to be more or less practical, methods of reaching them can defy the makers of systems. A man who writes a thousand words a day, wet or fine, is obviously efficient, though his work may be dull or commonplace. Similarly, a man who takes a week to produce the same number of words may seem to be a bad investment; yet his work may live a hundred years. A society in which all effort was streamlined, all waste avoided, and all results nicely calculated on "a quantitative basis" would soon be a machine running down for lack of fuel. The wheels are kept turning by a driving power which comes from the whole of life; and life is untidy, irrational, unpredictable, disturbed by . dreams and ugliness and a glancing splendour. It is in the untidiest and least amenable part of existence that the arts find their materials. Although the results may be clear and precise enough to gladden a statistician, they are often reached by strange and devious ways. Few of us are artists, but we need what they can give us, and all men in some degree must share their indifference to the practical, Even the expert, feeling a creative glow as he bends over his graphs and tables, can be closer to the artist than he would like to admit. Because of that, he: will sometimes be ridiculous in the name of efficiency. Then we laugh at him, and are better able to respect him when he returns to his own place and his true functions.