In the Beginning, The World Was Made: Bureaucracy and the Power of a Good Origin Story

How Bureaucracy Gains Traction in Our Lives Depends on Whether We See It as Inevitable

Things Sure Seem Inevitable: Bureaucracy Edition

In tracing out the features of the last installment, we began with the premise that, contrary to most scholarship on power, empire isn’t really the problem so much as bureaucracy. It’s much cooler to think that the problems facing the moral life are those of big, hegemonic, overtly oppressive systems, but the tyranny of the small forms is much more with us than Gestapo. If you want to keep a people under control, give them a line to stand in.

As far as it goes, this thesis isn’t big news: Max Weber was talking about this over a century ago. Weber held that the inevitable rationality of a society means that force would become internalized, and that regulation would become the primary way in which the world is governed.

You don’t have to observe too many historical developments—both positive and negative—Weber thought, to see this in action: the charismatic figure eventually can’t keep things going on pure charisma, and so rules and hierarchy are put in place to keep the spirit of the thing going, long after the leader (and the spirit) are gone. On the negative side, it’s the tyrant who dies but leaves behind a legislative framework which takes the next fifty years to dismantle. On the positive side, consider what happens to the Civil Rights movement after King dies, or America after the Revolution: a legislative body emerges where a charismatic figure had symbolically led the way.

I don’t want to get bogged down into the degree to which Weber’s thesis is correct¹, but as a theological concept, it has a lot of resonance for understanding how bureaucracy seems to be everywhere. Weber, in other words, gets at some of the way in which we learn to see these as not just necessary, but desirable. For once bureaucracy has taken root in the way that we think about living well with others, it becomes the frame within which we begin to develop new things, to think about the future, to imagine what went wrong with the past. It has established the rules, and now, you have to speak in a way the rules can hear, dream in a way that rules make possible. Revolution is a possibility, but then you’re just starting with another charismatic figure and deferring the whole process by twenty years, with a different set of rules.

Photo by Jan Antonin Kolar on Unsplash

So, where does all this come from? Why is it so pervasive? I want to make a very bold-strokes claim and say this impulse toward bureaucracy works because it is a very compelling origin story. As we see with Weber, part of their allure is that they seem almost impossible to avoid, Scylla and Charybdis: whether good, bad, or indifferent, bureaucracy will devour us all. Put differently, bureaucracy is the face of the counter-powers to God.²

To help us see not only how this works, let’s look at two stories in Genesis.