If Not Bureaucracy, Then What?

Summing Up the Bureaucracy Chronicles, and Moving Forward

The conclusion of our seven-part series on the nature of bureaucracy, as aided by Genesis through Revelation. You can read the series, in order, here:

1. Why Empire Isn’t Your Problem.

2. Bureaucracy’s Origin Story (Genesis 11) (paid)

3. Bureaucracy as Spectacle (Exodus 1)

4. Bureaucracy against Wisdom (Exodus 2, Judges 4) (paid)

5. Bureaucracy as Maker of Life and Death (Luke 2)

6. Bureaucracy and the Appeal of Untapped Potential (Acts 2, Romans 13, Romans 16)

7. Bureaucracy as Sustaining Resource (Revelation 12 and 22)

   (paid)

Once Again, The Problem is Not Empire

Before I began this series, I wrote a pretty critical review of David Fitch’s Reckoning with Power, which operates with a dual definition of how power works: either “power over” or “power under”, the former being a dominating kind of coercion, and the latter defined by consensus, persuasion, and mutual submission. I didn’t name it as such in the review, but I now see this kind of analysis as symptomatic of seeing “empire” as the primary problem¹.

When you see empire as the main problem, you see “bad power” as that which emerges from domineering figures from above. This creates a kind of misdirection, because—as I have argued here—power works in all kinds of directions, and most powerfully, when it is not noticed, or because synonymous with the very structures we organize our lives with. Empire works well because it doesn’t openly kill people, but rather, divide and subdivide them so that there’s no coherent person left. This doesn’t keep people from writing as if the domination mode of empire was still the fundamental problem².

Fitch’s book reflects the basic problem that the piece linked above has: they name the problems of moral agency, freedom, and power have to do with forms of social organization which help perpetuate domination. Sure—not disputing the fact that empires constrict agency and dominate people. But this is where “empire” as the most problematic form of power falls flat: it presumes that the central problem for freedom and human agency is domination instead of being divided into parts, that human freedom is crushed as opposed to being ground to a halt; it presumes that bureaucracy is a bug to the system, as opposed to understanding that empire works as a really fancy form of bureaucracy.

Bureaucracy was always the engine, and empire its fancy clothes. For bureaucracy, you are a complex entity, and we really need to simplify this down to make sense of the world³. The natural human state is fecundity and complexity, and bureaucracy—to put it bluntly—is just trying to get thing organized simply. As I’ve been arguing, bureaucracy is not, as some have argued, a modern problem. Does bureaucracy in the modern world have a distinctly modern look? Of course. But as Egypt and Rome will tell you, you don’t manage large scale administrative tasks like slave cities or empires without having a really well-oiled bureaucratic plan.

Dividing to Organize: The Problem of Scale

The real attractiveness of this form of organization—an efficiency machine which works to keep diverse populations of people moving in the same direction—is that it promises to do so at scale⁴. This is a good question, and one that is worth asking about as we round out this series, for developing an ethic isn’t simply a matter of having good criticism, or good vision, but offering something in the way of an alternative.

As we saw, beginning in Genesis 11, bureaucracy tells a good story about its origins, and in this case, it’s a salvific one: rescuing us from chaos, time-wasting, and resource scarcity. But Thomas Paine, in his Common Sense, articulates something like this as the origin of a government:

Some convenient tree will afford them a State House, under the branches of which the whole Colony may assemble to deliberate on public matters. It is more than probable that their first laws will have the title only of Regulations and be enforced by no other penalty than public disesteem. In this first parliament every man by natural right will have a seat.

But as the Colony increases, the public concerns will increases likewise, and the distance at which the members may be separated, will render it too inconvenient for all of them to meet on every occasion as at first, when their number was small, their habitations near, and the public concerns few and trifling. This will point out the convenience of their consenting to leave the legislative part to be managed by a select number chosen from the whole body, who are supposed to have the same concerns at stake which those have who appointed them, and who will act in the same manner as the whole body would act were they present.

This argument isn’t particular to Paine, but he puts it pretty succinctly: beyond a certain point, you have to have some sort of organizational structure capable of managing large groups. You can’t have direct democracy beyond a certain point, so representative democracy takes over. Or more to our point, negotiating the wants and needs of a thousand people needs to be streamlined down to some kind of measure capable of accounting for the variances in a way which is most easily repeatable in any time or place.

In light of his argument here, it’s easy for us to zoom forward toward our own world, in which this vision of representative government is just the same as bureaucracy. But we’re not there yet. By this time, America has the rudiments of a postal system, a legislature, and some processes to facilitate the militia: having organizational systems is intrinsic to not just governments, but societies.

What’s peculiar about Paine’s argument about governance, though—and what I want to emphasize—is that there’s nothing about his vision here that presupposes that larger scale organization is anything other than personal. He’s already presupposing a population in the colonies of 2.5 million, and yet argues that the form of human organization which befits the kind of people that are wanting to be free of a monarchy is the kind in which there are personal connections between the governing and governed:

If the colony continue increasing, it will become necessary to augment the number of representatives, and that the interest of every part of the colony may be attended to, it will be found best to divide the whole into convenient parts, each part sending its proper number: and that the elected might never form to themselves an interest separate from the electors, prudence will point out the propriety of having elections often: because as the elected might by that means return and mix again with the general body of the electors in a few months, their fidelity to the public will be secured by the prudent reflection of not making a rod for themselves. And as this frequent interchange will establish a common interest with every part of the community, they will mutually and naturally support each other, and on this, (not on the unmeaning name of king,) depends the strength of government, and the happiness of the governed.

The emphasis here on prudence, happiness, and justice—traditional language of virtue—reinforce the basic point I’m making: human organization for people needs to be match what people are for, of how people are meant to flourish. Paine finds monarchy to be effectively an unnatural invention on this count, in which one person is supposed to know all things despite not being with the very people who know the things: it pits managing people and the good of people against one another, by assuming that management has to be done by a one-sized-fits-all rule. The modern analogue here is data-driven managment, in which we assume that real people correspond to the analytics instead of seeing the point of governance is to help guide actual people.

At this point, we should fully acknowledge that Paine’s analysis of Christianity is one which cares mostly about its political implications, and is fairly freethinking by persuasion. But I offer Paine here as a secular analogue saying something that thinks that a society can walk and chew gum at the same time: public relationships can be facilitated in ways which emphasize first and foremost personal attention.

Personalism: Attending to The Whole Person

If bureaucracy functions through division and subtraction, organizing people as categories of labor or as instances of resources, personalism offers an alternate form, which presumes that seeing a person in their particularities and in the fullness of them as a person is inseparable from questions of organization. The variations of personalism assume a common core of attention to the person in their fullness, not just because they are created with dignity, but in attending to the person, we can begin to see something of how people are meant to live together socially.⁵

I’ve written earlier here about the abbot of a monastery as an alternate form of “rule”: in that arrangement, guidance occurs through cultivation of virtue exemplified by the abbot, not by checking a box. Likewise, in that arrangement, decisions about particular persons take place by accounting for the fullness of a person, and what they need to proceed in virtue. Consider also the example of Peter Maurin, who Dorothy Day described in this way:

Man was created with freedom to choose to love God or not to love him, to serve or not to serve, according to divinely inspired Scriptures. Even this statement presupposes faith. He is made in the image and likeness of God and his most precious prerogative is his freedom. It is essentially a religious concept. It is in that he most resembles God.

These are extreme times when man feels helpless against the forces of the State in the problems of poverty and the problems of war, the weapons for which are being forged to a great extent by the fearful genius of our own country. “With our neighbor,” St. Anthony of the desert said, “is life and death,” and we feel a fearful sense of our helplessness as an individual.

Peter Maurin’s teaching was that just as each one of us is responsible for the ills of the world, so too each one of us has freedom to choose to work in “the little way” for our brother. It may seem to take heroic sanctity to do so go against the world, but God’s grace is sufficient, He will provide the means, will show the way if we ask Him. And the Way, of course, is Christ Himself. To follow Him.

Such a way seems antithetical to social organization, but it is, Maurin thought, the beginning: by seeing people in their particularity, you have a slower but more full sense of what a person needs, and thus, how to pair their needs with others’ gifts, all toward their telos of a virtuous flourishing toward God. The question of scale is one in which human contact becomes more intensive, not less. If the aim organization is attention to a person, in context and in context of others, then it is by this means that a person’s love toward God and their neighbor is realized. Human organization and fecundity once again clasp hands.

The question of scale is not, on this count, an insurmountable one, even if it becomes more labor intensive, for the labor undertaken here is a formative one: the one listening learns to pay attention to particulars, and the one listened to is seen as a whole person. Organization takes less the form of forms and mazes of procedures than it does mentoring and counselors. Structure takes the form of personal connection and local knowledge. But in the process, relational knowledge expands and creates possibilities of connection which are inconcievable to bureaucracy, for bureaucracy knows the one thing independent of others by design.

That all of this seems slow is, I think, not a complaint, but a world in which Sabbath exists not as the exception, but the rule. And in this, the Sabbath becomes the measure, anticipated everywhere, and in particular, in the way we relate. It is the difference between a Judge and a ruler, between wisdom and a procedure, and ultimately, the difference between life and its simulation.

1. Chris Smith of the Englewood Review of Books hosted the two of of us on his podcast this past week for a good, but somewhat more pointed, engagement on Fitch’s book. I’ll link to it when it goes up.

2. Writing about the motif of empire is for a different day. Perhaps in a month or so, I’ll take up Nigel Biggar’s Reckoning with Colonialism, a heterodox account of the British empire, and say more. But it’s going to be a busy month ahead. There’s much more to say about the motif of empire directly, but I’ll direct you to the first installment of the series.

3. Sometimes, concepts such as the natural law get lumped in here, that any account of something that’s normative for human behavior—like all people being inclined toward basic precepts like doing good and refraining from evil—is ultimately constraining people. But natural law, Thomas Aquinas argues, is perfectly fine with people differing on how the natural law is put into motion—how societies organize themselves toward justice is diverse. But that societies are meant to be just is simply what human societies try to do.

4. I have had the very good fortune of everywhere I’ve taught of working for exceptionally gifted and lovely deans and assistant deans—literally every single one of them are stellar advocates of their faculties. This next bit came from conversation with one of them, Chris, who wrangles an unruly faculty with grace and humor.

5. There are numerous versions of philosophical personalism which I won’t get into here. If you want to do some exploring, check out this.