Idolatry and Bureaucracy

Reflections on the First Commandment, Pt. 3

A Small Bit of Housekeeping

For the last three years, the content of this newsletter has pretended to range, but really and truly, my concerns have remained fairly consistent. These concerns are:

1. Building Blocks of the Christian Moral Life. Whether I’ve been teasing out the Keywords of the Moral Life, or the 23rd Psalm, the Decalogue, or various concepts like empathy, justice, happiness, or scarcity, my concern has been to understand, to get beyond the buzzy or simplistic use of terms like “discernment” or “just”, and explore what it means to have a moral life, theologically.

2. The Dynamics of Community Life. How is it that churches remain together? What, theologically and socially, tie things together for churches and their relationships to their neighbors? Church and world are mutually constituted, and so, the moral life is an integral part of the socio-theological question.

3. The Questions Posed to This Intersection. Whether the material topic is war, immigration, poverty, economics, dumb things in the Discourse—my concern is not just understanding them analytically (#1), but how they affect (#2), and what happens when ordinary topics of moral quandary are viewed through the lens of their effect on our common life.

This isn’t to say that there aren’t (and won’t be in the future) so things a bit off this path: the Springsteen takes will continue. Since the beginning, Christian Ethics in the Wild has been the name of this venture, but, I’m looking for a new name, befitting a future which I think will be a bit more focused around this particular cluster more explicitly. I have a candidate title in mind, but I want to hear others, particularly if you’ve been reading for a while. If your suggestion wins out, I’ll give you a year’s paid subscription.

Ping me with your candidate names below:

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Idolatry as Functional

I have to give

Ryan Clevenger

credit for pushing me to extend what I meant in the last edition with respect to naming idolatry as a refusal of awe, being stultified:

In the previous installment, I turned our attention away from offering a substantive account of idols toward a functional account, mostly because I find idols to be malleable in form, with their malleability having to do with the function. But idols have not only to do with what we give our allegiance, but with what we give credit for sustaining us.

In what we discussed before, idolatry functions as a refusal of awe and an embrace of control, or rather, a refusal of that which would trouble a routinized existence. Hartmut Rosa has argued that modernity is characterized by a lack of resonance¹, that we view the world as discrete objects to be managed and not a relation to exist in harmony with. The reduction of the world to discrete objects goes hand in hand with a less integrated, more dangerous and untamed view of the world², and gives rise to social structures predicated on control and management. One need not get into the roots of management science or see the ways in which religious literature is dominated by the presumption that “cultivating experiences” or “producing outcomes” to see examples of this at work, even if its uncertain that this is something we are even capable of doing.

To be sure, I….resonate….with this description. Rosa’s thesis is brilliant, and for my money, far more compelling that a lot of the disenchantment/re-enchantment/ re-dis-enchantment discourse that we can never seem to escape³. In his more recent, Late Modernity in Crisis, Rosa engages in extended conversation with Andreas Reckwitz, and teases out how the modern West labors in a fragmented place, including how difficult this kind of world makes both religion and democracy difficult. The thesis goes something like this:

1. A managed world is an accelerated world. Once we have conceded that the aim is to neutralize some of the wildness of the world, we have determined that the world must be brought into a more orderly and efficient form. This order and efficiency is one which depends on the unruliness of natural actions being brought into a common language. And once this common language is found, it can be optimized.

2. Religion and democracy are both time-intensive. Can we deliver managed experiences, to make people feel as if they are being connected to one another, to God? Sure. But they’re being connected on a very thin axis, an ideological axis which is less unruly than actual people: we omit all of our motivations, our histories, or extraneous aspects of ourselves which are irrelevant to the decisions and gatherings at hand.

   **

   Church gathering takes time, not just connecting around a particular idea; democratic practice demands attention, unless we really think that our particular votes gather up all that there is to being a person.

Building on what we looked at last time, then, a world too stultified to be troubled is a world which is increasingly smooth, a world which is increasingly streamlined. It’s a functional idolatry, because it never trades on a managed world which would be terrified if God actually is. And by accelerating the process, keeping us attuned to keeping up with being a part of this spinning cycle⁴, our capacity for imagining the world as something other than this is increasingly ground down: either keep up with that world or lose access to the institutions and goods which this process of delivery of goods possible.

If idolatry is the process by which we are kept from ever asking questions beyond how we manage the world, then we also have to, as Ryan rightly points us to, give credit to the idol for this process working.

The Engine Behind the Curtain

It’s here that the engine keeping this kind of idolatry alive comes into view: a system which keeps us viewing the world as a series of managed objects, of abstract relations, of optimal efficiencies—and one, strangely, which can accomodate a lot of range at the same time⁵! I’ve spent a good bit of time here already talking about bureaucracy, but if the shoe fits…

If an idol is the visible thing which stands in for a value that we have, consider how weak these figures are: they always require a means by which to deliver that desire which becomes almost transparent to us. Case in point: the golden calf does exist apart from a process of deliberation, production, and explanation. In the passage linked above, Aaron provides a means of gathering up materials, explicating what the calf is, organizing worship around it, and routinizing celebration of the calf. If this isn’t the birth of a bureaucracy designed to facilitate an idea—that God is gone and we need safety—I don’t know what is. I take it that part of the reason that the history of Israel with respect to idols is so bloody is that ideas don’t just exist in thin air: there are processes and things which have facilitated the worship, and which may or may not be able to be repurposed. Altars have to be uprooted, Asherah poles have to be cut down, prophets of Ba’al need to be dealt with.

These systems, which operate precisely by managing people as discrete parts, allow for the process of idolatry to remain intact, and they’re essential for two reasons. First, they remain invisible, in service to the visible sign. Second, to maximize our attachment to the sign, they are designed to incorporate as much of what you are into the system as possible. Your preferences, your individuality, your idiosyncracies become increasingly valued data points by which smoother and more encompassing structures of supply can be built. By 2 Kings, the truth is out, and Israel has begun franchising the golden calf to meet greater demand for the security-of-God-when-Jerusalem-is-far-off problem.

As Rosa points out, acceleration of the system also means expansion. For if there is ever a question raised as to whether or not the system can meet the desire that you have, an eyebrow is raised here: either we need a more comprehensive system, or perhaps, the system has obscured something we need to see.

Behold: the machine is only barely hidden from our eyes.

When we think of idolatry, thus, it’s equally essential to think about what makes those signs possible, what kind of operations are in play to make us immune from coming in contact with the God who might make actual demands on us, who might be something other than the world.

And so, as we turn toward the second commandment, I want to keep this before us: idolatry exists within a system, as a functional good difficult to dislodge, because we think of idolatry as things, and not as processes which we live inside. Once the means of facilitating that desire, that value, has made itself invisible, it becomes more difficult to dislodge by anything short of God shaking the walls and burning up the altar.

1. For his most accessible version, see The Uncontrollability of the World.

2. In psychology, this is known as the WEIRD problem: that western, educated, individualistic, rich, and democratic populations view the world largely as discrete objects, not as networks or having intrinsic relations.

3. The dynamics of control and resonance put a much more clear finger on what’s at stake with idolatry than something as nebulous as “enchantment”, mostly because whatever is meant by “enchantment” plays itself out in our practices: one can claim to be living in an enchanted world, to be moved by a sacramental imagination, but if all you’re pointing me toward is another system which makes us immune to awe, I’m dubious.

4. All of the distraction discourse fits neatly inside this process, for focusing on what distracts us, ironically, distracts us from seeing the bigger problem of institutional access and perpetuation. If the institutions which maintain the acceleration can accomodate dumb phones, they’ll happily give you that treat.

5. Consider that, when you go to a pharmacy—the medical epitome of a bureaucratic institution—there are services available for translation via special number. Plurality can easily be accomodated within bureaucracy, as these particularities are just one more data point to make delivery more optimal.