Bureaucracy and the Power of Life and Death
Bureaucracy and the Power of Life and Death
The Unintended Effects of Organizing the World
What happens when bureaucracy’s grasp on life and death comes out in the open?
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Counting All the Bodies: Census Edition
In the beginning, as we saw, bureaucracy tells a good origin story: you can read the fecundity of the world as a problem or a promise. Bureaucracy offers a tempting option, one less obvious than an empire—the promise of ordinary order, dividing complex humans into simple parts which can be managed, repositioned, and ultimately, managed. That power is hidden by spectacle, then masquerades as wisdom, and when all else fails, resorts to threatening to make the subjects alive and dead.
But again, the threats are never the first order of business: order and the promise of an orderly world—the coordination of life—is always paramount. And, as we saw, this order comes with not just coordinating lives, but aspects of lives. For any single life is too complex to be cleanly accounted for, and so, bureaucracy offers us the chance to just account for the whole thing by looking at specific portions: baptisms performed, test results, examination outcomes of toddlers.
It is no wonder that industrial farming occurs through the production of animals according to their parts, or that industrial medicine accounts for itself in terms of specific systems, body parts, or procedures. In this way, the maintenance of life can be accounted for as a series of interventions which increase certain hormone levels or which lead to increased growth of specific body parts.
The smaller version of this is commercial traffic in specific aspects of a person: their tastes, their desires, their loves. But the larger version of this process is moving the whole person, that the whole person might be reduced to a number, a means to an economic end or a political pawn.
In the modern world, we see this in the form of “economic migration”, or descriptions of voting habits in terms of their economic preferences. We see it when demographic data reduces complex choices to single factors, like race or education.
But in this edition, we see it tucked away within the folds of the Christmas story: the census.
Bodies Made to Move, Made to Live, Made to Die
That the census is historically suspect is beside the point here: the contrast Luke is drawing is between Rome and Jerusalem, between the power of Caesar Augustus and Jesus Christ. The census, issued in Luke 2, catches up the whole of the world in an organizational task, and the contest we have seen already in Scripture begins again—as it did in Genesis and Exodus—between family and organizational principles:
In those days Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be taken of the entire Roman world. (This was the first census that took place while Quirinius was governor of Syria.) And everyone went to their own town to register. So Joseph also went up from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Judea, to Bethlehem the town of David, because he belonged to the house and line of David.
Rome is known here not by its culture, nor its personalities, but by its administrative work, and is described in contrast to Joseph, named according to a family line which predated Rome and will outlast it.
Rue task at hand seems preposterous: given that families were given to spread out over the earth, how would one count them? How do you wrangle a family which has lived in Egypt, Palestine, Iran, and across the Mediteranean? You do it like a bureaucracy does: by shrinking the panoply of a history down to where it came from—reduce the richness of a family’s longitudinal expanse down to its starting point.
This bureaucratic ingathering of bodies is for the sake of naming what kinds of lives are in the purview of Rome: taxable bodies. Little matters about narratives or family trees: for Rome, the aim here is to name people according to their hometowns, for in that, taxation might be accurate. Complex lives reduced to dollars.
But the lives being gathered in to be categorized are not just so that they might be accurately brought to life. Their gathering and organization becomes the occasion for them to be subject to death, as well. As Matthew adds:
16 When Herod realized that he had been outwitted by the Magi, he was furious, and he gave orders to kill all the boys in Bethlehem and its vicinity who were two years old and under, in accordance with the time he had learned from the Magi. 17 Then what was said through the prophet Jeremiah was fulfilled:
18 “A voice is heard in Ramah,
weeping and great mourning,
Rachel weeping for her children
and refusing to be comforted,
because they are no more.”[d]
If being gathered in as partial persons is bureaucracy inhaling, putting the gathered to death is bureaucracy exhaling. Bodies are born, as it were, in being numbered, and now their gathering by bureaucracy is why they are subject to death by it as well. This description of bureaucracy may seem like an exaggeration, until we ask what must be done today in most modern societies to bury, be born, or marry.
This description—this power to make live or make die—does not negate the underlying goods which large scale bureaucracy makes possible: the desire to forge a path for medical care for all is born of good intent. But there is a difference between medical care which attends to the whole of the person, to the patient as a person, and the kind of care which bureaucracies can give. In the former, a person goes at another, seeing the complex interplay of history and person, and in the latter, a person appears who is a nexus of medical procedures which happen to intersect within particular flesh: you are either a person or a serviceable object.
Bureaucracy and the Birth of Motion
If the story of Jesus’ birth is one more instance of bureaucracy providing order by defining what it is that is being ordered, the end is ironic. The addendum to the Christmas story is that the motion which bureaucracy initiates cannot be controlled.
Thomas Nail, in his book on the border, describes how borders not only create internal polities but external ones as well. What is expelled from the border now exists in a newly named way, defined by its movement away from the border. This movement he says is meant in one way, but has the effect of creating a new power, one which may have begun in one new ah but now boomerangs back in another.
The holy family’s exodus into Egypt is one among many instances of life breaking free of its constraints, of Babel falling apart in the face of God’s command to fecundity. And the holy family’s return becomes the occasion for a new valuation of death and life to begin:
21 So he got up, took the child and his mother and went to the land of Israel. 22 But when he heard that Archelaus was reigning in Judea in place of his father Herod, he was afraid to go there. Having been warned in a dream, he withdrew to the district of Galilee, 23 and he went and lived in a town called Nazareth. So was fulfilled what was said through the prophets, that he would be called a Nazarene.
Bureaucracies create life, create death and now, flush out that which cannot be ordered into exile. And in this creation of motion, forgotten places outside of order become new sites of meaning and power.
Foe not ot only does the motion of the holy family initiate a new start for Nazareth, with Nazareth becoming no longer a byword but the home of the Lord, but the motion which bureaucracy creates effects an unintended retrieval of Israel’s historic enemy, Egypt. The movement of Rome is one which shrinks life down to its origins, while the movement of God makes use of this against itself, making new, starting new stories, and opening up new life where there was only failure.
What we take from this is that, insofar as the bureaucracy makes itself nakedly apparent, in the conscription of both life and death, it only makes possible unconstrained life despite itself. To attribute bureaucracy totalitarian power is to overestimate its ability, and underplay that which God does: making new life out of death, new stories out of the attempt to lock in history to its origin.