Beginning Again With Power: The Problem of Bureaucracy

Power and its abuses have received no shortage of discussion. Unfortunately, for all the conversation, we have missed the problem almost entirely. For the last three decades within Christian circles, “empire” has been the metaphor of choice, with the Kingdom of God and the empires of Rome, Babylon, and Egypt as the counterpoints to the way of Jesus. In this discourse, “empire” serves as a top-down kind of force, an imposing and overt mechanism by which people are constrained. What it obscures is that, the vast majority of the time, humans are not organized by overt force, but by bureaucracy. 

Greg Grandin, in his End of the Myth, writes that, after there were no more lands to conquer, American sensibilities of expansion and empire building turned inward: interior systems of surveillance and categorization multiplied in the 19^th and 20^th century. But before America, consider the examples of Britain, Rome, or Egypt. What made them operate well was not overt repression, but the use of organizational technique to manage vast populations, through taxes, administrators, and labor laws. As David Graeber describes in his Utopia of Rules, the least interesting, but most ubiquitous part of most societies are the forms of organization, or more bluntly, the paperwork. 

Graeber’s contention requires us to reposition how we think about bureaucracies and their place in history: it is not that empires, governments, and institutions use bureaucracies, but that these more overtly forceful institutions exist to perpetuate bureaucracies. Consider professions 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 enacting violence, but maintaining order through paperwork, in duplicates and triplicates, carbon copied to leave paper trails.

Paperwork is not the annoyance, but the thing itself. 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, defining how that action is remembered, classifying 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.

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 Empires had to, in some ways, corral complex beings into the direction they wanted their subjects to go. Within an empire, 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.

But bureaucracy succeeds precisely by breaking down a coherent, complex people into very simple parts. Whereas the mechanics of empires corralled whole but controlled people, a bureaucracy organizes people by dividing them into segments, managed as sets of interests or attributes, in which only certain elements of a person counts. A whole person can revolt, but once a person is divided into parts, we are left frustrated by how to even begin to counter it. Anyone who has had to make an appeal to a bank, a hospital system, a governmental agency knows that what counts about your case is not all of the other extraneous details of time, context, and conditions: what matters is the number on the page, devoid of context and singularly important. 

Within the economy of God’s creation, this kind of fecundity—this kind of unruliness of stories and complex actors—is the rule. And, as we see in Scripture, the fecundity of human life means that you don’t exactly know what it’s going to do. Within God’s economy, as Marilynne Robinson puts it in her commentary on Genesis, there is an acknowledgment of freedom, and that any order which happens in creation happens 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 is no overarching system put in place to dictate it: 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. In our thinking about what it means to be a creature of God, it is 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. With order comes chance, reversal, complexity, and the possibility that things could be otherwise. With bureaucratic management, there is only the breaking down of complexity into its most basic parts, the elimination of contingency in pursuit of regularity.  

Bureaucracy’s Solution to the Problem of People 

To understand how bureaucracies lay hold of us, let us turn to their origin story: salvation from the fecundity of life. The tower of Babel is a story not only of how the people defied God’s instruction to be fruitful and multiply, but a story of how they did so through the invention of a new form of world management. Genesis 10 offers an account of the children of Noah spreading out across the world, from Ethiopia to Lebanon to Iran. In Genesis 11, Babel emerges for two reasons: that the people might make a name for themselves, and to keep from being scattered through the earth. What is significant here is that the family, far from leaning into the flexibility and contingency of God’s preservation in the wild, turns to a new originating power to secure its place in the world. 

The administrative structure of Babel—of organizing the fecundity of families in a way which suppresses any particular family—actually works. For it is only when God confuses the language does the administrative structure come toppling down in a catastrophic manner. As such, the scattered families can flee into the far countries convinced that it wasn’t the bureacuracy that failed, but just the language barrier. Genesis moves on, with human life still enamored by bureaucracy, persuaded that if we can have a common language again, this could still work: the contingency of families and time can be put aside in favor of something more stable. 

But administrative dreams die hard. Some generations later, Joseph, son of Jacob finds himself enslaved in Egypt, and becomes the right hand of the Pharaoh. In that time, we are told, Egypt prepared itself for a coming famine, and in the process became great in the land, with the nations streaming into Egypt to escape hunger and destitution. As we find in Genesis 41:

⁵⁶ When the famine had spread over the whole country, Joseph opened all the storehouses and sold grain to the Egyptians, for the famine was severe throughout Egypt. ⁵⁷ And all the world came to Egypt to buy grain from Joseph, because the famine was severe everywhere.

The framing here is important, that “all the world” came to Egypt, to participate and be saved by Joseph’s administrative strategy of collecting grain into storehouses. Commentators during the next few centuries—rightly or wrongly—would connect the pyramids to these storehouses, linking Egypt’s prosperity to Joseph’s administrative skill. There’s some question as to whether or not the Pharoah becomes more than just a local chieftain but a figure of international importance because of this effort.

What is important to see is how this administrative structure lives up to the promise of Babel: it saves the world by saving Jacob’s house, but only by once again suppressing the unruly families which made the bureaucracy possible. Having been put in motion in order to provide for the families of the world, it becomes the thing itself, and in the process enslaves the family who signifies the whole world: Israel. In retrospect, these kinds of developments seem like natural movements, inevitable accretions of social order, but it is important to see that Genesis sees them as decidedly unnatural, insofar as these kinds of strong towers are pitted over against the contingencies of trust in God and the bonds of family. 

In Exodus 1, after the death of Joseph, a new Pharoah arises within Egypt, and the Egypt which will become the prototype which all other tyrants will aspire to arises. For in offering itself not just as a mechanism, but as a world-saving system, bureaucracy has now become not only the organizing feature of grain, but of people as well. In Exodus 1:1-7, the emphasis is on the proliferating Israel—mentioned are the family tribes, not known for their work, but for their “filling the land”: one cannot but hear overtones of Genesis’ call to fill the earth, a people fecund and faithful. The contrast of Egypt’s response is all the more telling: people are a problem to be managed (v. 9-10), and specifically, to be categorized according to their labor capacities (v. 11).

The problem for bureaucracy, it seems, is life. In fact, these two competing principles of human organization—labor bureaucracy and birth—are put into contrast with one another, in no small part because people being born is one of the key problems with any bureaucratic system. The naming of the children of Jacob, the celebrating of their families—all of this runs headlong into a very different principle of human organization for the sake of efficiency and accomplishment.

In case we see these two principles as simply ancient competitors, consider, for example, that health insurance is an iron-clad arrangement unless there is a “life-event,” typically consisting of either 1) losing one’s job status, or 2) gaining or losing a family member. Or that altering one’s name due to marital status requires not celebration by the community, but multiple meetings rife with forms, attestations, and different offices. If, in the beginning, bureaucracy provides an origin story of how the world is meant to be, then life itself becomes not the way that bureaucracy persists, but life becomes a problem to be solved. 

Replacing Wisdom with the Rule

Having established itself as essential to ordering humanity, the stage is set for bureaucracy to present its ordering logic as not just a rule, but as wisdom. 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. The exemplar here is not that of the overlord, but of the policy manual, a categorization system set down in endless rules, capturing contingency in its appendices. 

To see this, let us return to Exodus 1 again: 

¹⁵ The king of Egypt said to the Hebrew midwives, whose names were Shiphrah and Puah, ¹⁶ “When you are helping the Hebrew women during childbirth on the delivery stool, if you see that the baby is a boy, kill him; but if it is a girl, let her live.” ¹⁷ The midwives, however, feared God and did not do what the king of Egypt had told them to do; they let the boys live. ¹⁸ Then the king of Egypt summoned the midwives and asked them, “Why have you done this? Why have you let the boys live?”

In the face of the unruly fecundity of life, the administrative structure, heretofore unable to constrain Israel through labor now works more openly: to constrain the life of Israel by death. The prior rule of labor gives way to a further expansive rule, to cover not just their working hours but the beginning of all of their working hours. 

But no sooner has the rule emerged, it encounters difficulties to contain the fecundity of life, for life, while governing by God, is not bound by the ordering rule in the manner bureaucracies proscribe.  Siphrah and Puah appear initially as functionaries of a larger system with one aim—to keep girls alive and to murder boys—but very quickly, these two midwives replace the administrative logic with a different kind of reasoning: wisdom, the reasoning which the fear of the Lord opens up. 

The Egyptian dictate, to constrain life, is airtight: keep A and do not keep B, universally murder one and universally let the other live. Does it matter that a particular boy might be strong and a particular girl sickly? Does it matter that, in a generation, you will now have no workers to build? The rule is clear, and is immune to prudence, foresight, or exceptions. But in attempting to corral life—to establish rules to govern all life—the rule has thus become irrational, lacking prudence, justice, and as we shall see soon, unable to inspire fortitude in others: no one will persevere in obeying an irrational rule for long. In bureaucracy, the human faces are not allowed exhaustive judgment but only able to repeat the rule itself, and frequently, this repetition of the rule is mistaken for sage-like wisdom: there must be a method to the madness. The repetitive command of the rule is mistaken for the slow-speaking simplicity of the wise; it must be us who are mistaken, and we must simply sit with such a rule as “kill all the boys” in order to one day see its logic.

In offering guidance to life in the form of rule, but not wisdom, bureaucracies produce living but not reproducible lives: they offer a vision of life which one can conform to, but which will never bear any further fruit. For a bureaucracy to continue, further rules—but not further living people—are necessary. In order to unmask the rule for what it is, all the midwives have to do is turn the categorizing rule back on itself. Making use of a categorizing trope—racism—the midwives assure the rule makers that the rule is being followed, and that these Israelite women are just too strong. The rule, they tell them, still works—it’s just not quite clear enough to accomplish its aim. The reward of the midwives is in keeping with their commitments: they too become part of the problem of life (v. 20-21), given families of their own. Fecundity once again triumphs over order. Wisdom, in contrast to the impotent rule, has many children. 

These themes continue to haunt us well through the New Testament as well. Bureaucratic order continues to manage the unruliness of family lines, by compelling Joseph’s line to travel to Bethlehem. It continues to organize life in order to determine the conditions under which life may happen, killing infants in Bethlehem to prevent the rise of a different order. Its order is backed up by the potential use of force which it will use if the order is disturbed, in Acts, Romans, and Revelation. And each time, the power and the preservation of the Lord for humanity offers a counterpoint.

The holy family escapes into Egypt makes use of new networks of stargazers and Egyptians which fall outside the bureaucratic power of Rome; the Holy Spirit makes use of Roman bureaucratic prowess to spread Gospel to the ends of the earth; the threat of death by bureaucratic order in Romans 13 is countered by a vibrant network of missionaries in Romans 16 who exhibit true life-giving power. 

In drawing out these themes, let us remember what is at stake: the manner in which bureaucracies manage human life—through counting in censuses, through reduction of humans to workers, through taking the complexity of a family and shrinking it down to its city of origin.

That this form became known as bureaucracy by Weber in the 19^th century does not negate that bureaucracy has always been the engine of whatever empires have existed. As we see here, humanity is organized not as full humans, but according to aspects of humanity, with decisions about human futures made accordingly. The modern inheritors of Rome, thus, are not some new superpower, but proliferated insurance agencies, educational systems, banking systems, and political surveys. The genius of empires was always that a show of force was not needed once you could divide a person into subsets of attributes which could be put into a spreadsheet. 

If Not Bureaucracies, Then What? The Return of the Person

Recovering some other vision of the world requires letting go, first of all, of the vanishing point that is bureaucratic efficiency. To recover something else requires us to ask whether or not bureaucracy’s appeal to a common measure which can be scalable is the best measure for Christians to judge such things by. If bureaucracy functions through division and subtraction, organizing people as categories of labor or as instances of resources, personalism offers an alternate form, one 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

In contrast to the bureaucratic rule of Pharaoh, let us consider the example of personalism, which 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.

This “little way” is the way of attention, of thinking first of interpersonal connections as the heart of human relations as opposed to thinking first of what might fit all possible contingencies. 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. For if the aim of organization is for the flourishing of people, it begins not with reduction to a manageable attribute but attention to a person, in their particularity and in their relation to others. 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 to administer a people 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 less of forms than it does of personal connection and local knowledge. And in the process, relational knowledge expands and creates possibilities of connection which are inconceivable to bureaucracy, for bureaucracy knows how to manage the one aspect of a person independent of other considerations, by design.

That this alternative 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.