Forget Lady Wisdom: Enter Lady Bureaucracy

Pt. 4 of the Bureaucracy Chronicles

If bureaucracy first tells a compelling origin story, and then distracts us from its nature with spectacle, then next step in its development is to attempt to step into the role of wisdom.

Reminder: our book club for supporting subscribers over Ivan Illich’s Shadow Work is February 19th.

The Rule Is That Rules Rule

Last time, we looked at the first part of Exodus 1 to establish that bureaucracy works best by distracting us from its true nature: the less obvious the organizing feature, the better.¹ The DMV knows it doesn’t stand a chance to be anything but a naked bureaucracy, so why bother? As we saw previously, public spectacles function in a very real sense to obscure the very thing that made them possible by their magnitude. What begins, Exodus 1 shows us, as a boring public works system to store grain culminates in a works project to glorify Egypt: that these two projects exist on a continuum is important here.

Now, having established itself as not just instrumentally important, but aesthetically desirable, the stage is set for bureaucracy to not just be some new cool possibility for getting things done faster, but the very nature of wisdom itself.

The organizing ethos of bureaucracy are of the “if/then” nature, covering all contingencies, creating order from chaos, singularity out of fecundity. And in doing so, they presume to be able to not just organize the world, but offer a comprehensive vision of how to live in the world, covering all the angles in a way which will offer a fulsome vision of what to do and how: an ever-expansive vision of an ordered world.

This is not the only kind of “rule” that exists. As I have written previous, the “rule” of Benedict, for example, is not a written policy first and foremost, but a person, an exemplar that the other monks are to be like. The difference between that kind of rule and that of bureaucracy is that between the policy manual and the arbitrator, between a categorization system set down in immutable words, and a person capable of making subtle judgments based on particulars, on speech, on time and texture.

And yet, bureaucracy continues to aspire to govern through the promulgation of further rules to cover the cracks.

To see this, let us return to Exodus 1 again, with an assist from Judges: