A Lesser Peeve Exposed

Via American Papist we find Diogenes explaining what lurks behind efforts to be effective:

Notre Dame’s Fr. Hesburgh was the rebels’ alpha male who ceremoniously announced that Catholic colleges and universities should be independent of, and no longer submissive to the teaching authority of the Catholic Church in their teaching and research functions, if they wanted to be “effective.”

If you are speaking about being effective, and your work has anything to do with humans, I immediately end up thinking about the Holocaust. If you are working with inanimate objects, great, you probably can determine effectiveness- for example, you can go to a firing range and fire a weapon until you improve your accuracy. With people, you don't have that kind of feedback. In addition, one of the most effective ways of getting rid of a problem is to get rid of all the people with that problem.

This is, at it's root, what revolution is. Let's get rid of the bad/old authorities and everything will be lovely. Remove the man, remove the problem. Sadly, it's precisely the bad/old authorities who were protecting life in the first place.
There isn't any protection under the new scheme. The acolytes of effectiveness fall by their own sword whenever their comrades in arms determine such an action is the most effective.

Love requires focus on the individual human, the drive for effectiveness places the focus on metrics, which is why the two impulses don't play well together.