The One In Whom All Things Hang Together: Bureaucracy and the Christian Life

Paperwork, Counting, and the Never-Ending Spreadsheets--Your Modern Horseman of the Apocalypse

The beginnings of a new series on one of the most significant facets of modern life: bureaucracy.

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Your Enemy Isn’t Empire, but Bureaucracy

For the last, eh, thirty years, it’s been the target of choice to write on empire as not just the actual cause of subjugation in the world, but as the motif of choice to explain why freedom has subsided. “Empire” is one of those words which doesn’t actually have much salience in the world now, insofar as there aren’t real political empires any longer, American or otherwise.¹

None of this means that “empire” isn’t an interesting thing to understand historically, insofar as real flesh and blood empires existed for millenia. But the interesting part is whether or not such a thing as an empire actually exists any longer. Greg Grandin, in one of my favorite books from the last several years, writes that, after there were no more lands to conquer, American sensibilities of expansion and empire building turned inward.

As Grandin details, instead of colonizing Hawaii or the Philippines, America started to build out surveillance mechanisms to colonize the habits and minds of its citizens instead, he writes: the consequences both on how the world became techified and how the world became bureaucratized were profound. Now, none of this is to say that bureaucracy didn’t exist prior to the end of American expansionism, but rather that the end point of empire isn’t power or the restriction for its own sake, but order. After all, physical violence is so inefficient and messy when compared with paperwork.

But old habits of analysis die hard: a brief and unscientific survey using “empire ethics” on your favored Internet book provider reveals enough titles to keep you busy for several lifetimes. The ubiquity in titles is neither here nor there, but what is important here is how it has occupied the space—colonized the space, if you will—taken up by other possible terms which mean “something that appears everywhere”. Other quick aggregations reveal that the term “empire” was in high usage during the time when, you know, actual colonial empires existed, but after the 1980s, the term has acquired a new life as a way to try to describe how the world exists in the relative state of unfreedom that it does.²

Except that it doesn’t work that way, even though the rise of talk about empire and the decline of talk about the real culprit coinside almost exactly³. As David Graeber describes in his Utopia of Rules, the least interesting, but most ubiquitous part of most modern societies is paperwork.

It’s not just that whole jobs and industries exist as paperwork generating entities, but that paperwork and the entities which generate it is, Graeber suggests somewhat counterinuitively, the reason other entities exist. Consider a profession typically associated with managing the effects of violence in society: policing, government, insurance agencies, the military. What all of these entities spend the majority of their time doing is not effecting violence, but maintaining order through paperwork, in duplicates and triplicates, carbon copied to leave paper trails. Paperwork is the harbinger of their master: the bureuacracy, entities tasked with managing and organizing behavior, and making sure that everything is documented, justified, and accounted for.

What makes us unfree, thus, is not the projection of power by despotic entities. What makes us unfree, materially speaking, is the creation of whole regimes designed to manage what can be done or not done through endless paperwork, the managing of action and the organizing of how that action is remembered, the defining of complex human behaviors in quantifiable Excel blocks.

If human life is going to grind to a halt, it won’t be because we’re bled to death: we’ll just get tired of filling out forms.

Behold your master.

Bureaucracy: The Kingdoms of Parts

The salient difference here between “empire” and “bureaucracy” isn’t just one of how power happens, but of what it all means for freedom of action.⁴

Where empires were smart is in realizing that they couldn’t constrain any and all acts of will, and consigned themselves to making it so whatever action you did, it benefited the empire: better to corral your outcomes than your actions. One of the best examples here is when the British empire imposed currency on a colony. If you used the currency, you became part of the British economic system, and you benefited the empire. If you didn’t use the currency, however, and tried to go black market, the empire had an excuse to stretch its muscles and enforce its use. Heads, I win; tails, you lose. It was obviously preferable, as we saw with Grandin, to use a bureaucracy than to crack heads—and another example of how bureaucracies are the true heirs of empire.

Empires had to, in some ways, corrall complex beings into the direction they wanted their subjects to go. It’s here that we see the way that empires worked and survived: they allowed subjects to have coherent reasons for acting. Your options might be limited, but they were your actions, organized and chosen: the person remained a whole person with complex reasons for acting, albeit one that empire now had to corral.

Allow people enough free reign and coherent action, and they’ll figure out a way to take down even the strongest empires. But bureaucracy succeed precisely where empires fail: in the breaking down of coherent, complex people into very simple parts. It no longer matters that you are the son of someone or married to such and such, or that you came to the store out of this complex of reasons. What matters is that you paid this price, and bought this good, and that’s all that needs to be known. Whereas in an empire, you remained a whole but controlled person, in a bureaucracy, you are split up into segments, managed as sets of interests or attributes which have nothing to do with one another.

In this way, bureaucracies are much harder to defeat than empires. Bureaucracies of all manner succeed because they function off of segmenting a person into particular parts, such that when you try to resist that particular bureaucracy, you can only resist it on the very partial terms by which bureaucracy has organized you. Say, for example, that you want to challenge the insurance company on a particular policy: it doesn’t matter your reasons or contingent circumstances for having run your car off the road. What matters is that you belong to a certain demographic, that the accident did this much damage, and irrespective of the reasons you crashed the car, your policy will pay out this amount on that basis.

Your particularities, and the complex reasons that you crashed are useless ammunition. All that matters is the data points and being able to use those data points well. It’s fighting with both arms behind your back, and really, sir, we’re a foot company so who cares if you had arms to begin with?

Order, Ordering, and Management

Within the economy of God’s creation, this kind of fecundity—this kind of unruliness of stories and complex actors—is the rule. Because the thing about fecundity is that you don’t exactly know what it’s going to do. To order something well, there is an acknowledgment of freedom, and that any order will happen in and through the fullness of what people are, not in spite of it. In Genesis, once people start multiplying to cover the earth, there isn’t really an easy way to manage that: there is only the instruction to worship, to love God, and to be the people of God characterized by wisdom, love, and limits.

This kind of order—the “in him all things hang together” version fit for unruly, complex people—befits creation. And thus, it’s significant that, when people-counting of God’s people begins to happen, it happens not on the basis of censuses, but on the basis of family lines. To be a member of a line is to be a complex person, people explainable not by attributes but by stories, allusions, in terms of who represents what line. Moses comes from the tribe of Levi; Joseph, husband of Mary, is from the house of Benjamin: these designations are meant to orient us to something about them, and what kinds of histories their families bear, but not in a way which reduces them to stand-ins.

Things are in different territory, however, when you start to see a different mode of categorization, i.e. how many fighting men there are. For when this kind of thinking enters into the picture, we’re in a very different way of thinking about what it means to be a person: bureaucracies are fit for wartime, because in wartime, all the particularities of flesh and blood melts away and all that matters is whether you can carry a weapon or not. Whenever a census, an accounting for battle, a survey occurs—we are verging on something very different, an order fit for a different kind of world than family lines and stories.

In our thinking about what it means to be a creature of God, it’s good for us to recall that God ordering creation is a different claim, then, than saying that God manages creation. For in order, there is fecundity and play, story and particular. In management, there is counting and interchangeable parts. Perhaps it’s in this way that kingdom-of-God language, as troublesome as it is for some, is far preferable to alternatives built on breaking down complex beings into spreadsheet-ready attributes, because in kingdoms, complex families can be sustained. With order comes chance, reversal, complexity, and the possibility that things could be otherwise. With management, however, you don’t have to trouble your sweet head about things being otherwise.

1. Hold your horses: I see the hands in the back. Yes, not all projections of power are governmental in nature: countries can be subservient to others in more ways than who owns the land or who owns the elections. I’ll get to that. But save your questions until the end. I’m sorry, what? Yes, late papers aren’t accepted—see syllabus page five.

2. I’ll let you in on a secret theologically speaking: we often (most of the time) participate in our own subjection to powers and principalities. Things appear first as a temptation, and then become a desire, such that we like eating the poison, and then come to depend on it.

3. The uptick in “empire” discourse in the 1980s comes at the same time that bureaucracy talk takes a steep nose dive.

4. Yes, you in the back: correct—our actions are never fully autonomous acts of will. We are constrained in all kinds of ways, and being utterly unconstrained is actually a sign that things are going horribly wrong: our bodily organs work when constrained by our skin, but pretty badly when not. The same holds for people, I think: unfettered ability to do precisely as we wish is a sign that our social bonds are so emaciated that it literally doesn’t make a difference what we do, because no one is affected by our action.