On the Functions of Incompetence

ON THE FUNCTIONS OF INCOMPETENCE* LEE THAYERt The modern sympathy with invalids is morbid. Illness ofany kind is hardly a thing to be encouraged in others.—Oscar Wilde Man is gifted above all at self-deception. To know a thing, he must name it. To name it, he must distinguish it from other things. In distinguishing it from other things, he makes it into something it is not. If one stands high on a bluff overlooking a beach and observes that line along which sand and water meet, is one looking at the shore line or at the water's edge? There could hardly be the one without the other. Yet when we look, we see the one, or the other. Which one we see depends upon who we are and what difference it makes to us. If thoroughgoing landlubbers, we may see the shore line. To a snorkeling buff, the line at which land and water meet may more likely be the water's edge. The difficulty is not so much that we deceive ourselves when we name these things we want to see and talk about. It is that we want to believe that these verbal creations of ours serve always and only to enlighten us. We are not often aware that the ways in which we make things over into words may obscure at least as much as they reveal. The difficulty is that once we have a satisfactory way of talking about a thing, we cease to see it. Alfred North Whitehead once suggested that "it requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious." Publilius Syrus said in 50 b.c., "Familiarity breeds contempt." I think that if he were alive today, he would change that to read, "Familiarity breeds content." The difficulty is that our familiar and customary ways ofseeing a thing may become inadequate. Every unhappy marriage is testimony to what happens when one's persistence in seeing things as they were runs afoul of things as they are. Every modern war has been based on just such misperceptions. *This is a revised version of a Henry Margenau Lecture at Hartwick College, November 197 1 . An earlier printed version will appear in Vistas ofPhysical Reality, ed. E. Laszlo and E. B. Sellon (New York: Plenum Press, 1975). tProfessor of communication studies, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, British Columbia , Canada V5A 1S6. 332 I Lee Thayer · Functions of Incompetence Maybe the time has come. Perhaps our familiar and comfortable ways of seeing the world in which we live are no longer adequate. We in the Western world have long believed that competence is functional and incompetence dysfunctional. It would be, I believe, grossly selfdeceptive to go on seeing the world in that way, because, in the economies ofthe affluent nations ofthe West, incompetence is becoming increasingly more functional than competence. I My argument is simple enough—perhaps deceptively so. In its briefest form, it is this: It seems obvious that the evolution of any complex society requires the development of more and more specialized—"impoverished"—competencies. It seems perhaps less obvious, but no less true, that the machinery of any complex society requires that one man's impoverished competency be complemented by the incompetencies of one or hundreds or thousands of other men—those whom he will serve, or who will depend on his competency. What is not so obvious is that, with increasing numbers and increasing specialization, there comes a point at which incompetence surpasses competence as the indispensable condition of continued social or economic evolution. I believe we are well past that point in the Western world. It is perhaps time that we take a look at how the functions of incompetence came to exceed in importance the functions of competence in the workings of the nations of the Western world. Is it time we stopped treating the jockey's stiff finger for the horse's broken leg? After all, who would pay the piper if the mice were not of major economic significance to someone ? II The continued evolution of any complex society requires the emergence and accommodation of more and more specialized competencies . What could be more obvious...