Theology and Bureaucracy

Sound theology is rooted in the Bible.  Because the Bible is theologically front-loaded, sound theology needs to take into account what we know about God, about human beings, and about creation.  We begin there:

The first thing we learn about God in Scripture is that He is a communal and articulate Maker.  His very name, Elohim, is a plural word.  In its opening verse, the Bible combines that plural name with a singular verb (“create”), thus demonstrating that God is a plurality in unity.  He is communal; indeed He is Divine Community, something He Himself indicates a few sentences later when He declares His creative intention regarding us in Genesis 1: 26:  “Let us (plural) make (singular) man in our (plural) image (singular).”

Second, when we say that God is an articulate Maker, we mean that He makes worlds by His powerful and creative Word.  All reality emerges from his Word and relies upon it.

Relatedly then, the first thing we learn about human beings is that we are made in God’s image, implying that we, too, are to be communal and articulate makers.  To be in His image means that we are to be both God’s picture and God’s partner.  Like Him, though on a lower level, we are to exercise dominion over the earth; we are to fill it and to subdue it.

To be like God and to do as He did -- communally to bring order out of chaos by our words and to carry out the dominion mandate -- is a high and serious calling.  The burden of this brief essay is to explain the ways in which bureaucracy hinders that high calling, both in its communal and verbal dimensions.  In short, bureaucracy, as do all things, has a theology, in this case a very bad one.  It is our focus.

         “Bureaucracy” is a portmanteau word combining the French word for desk or office (“bureau”) with the ancient Greek word for government or rule (“kratos”).  Thus, bureaucracy is “government from the desk,” or “rule by office.”

Notice that from this conception of governance all living things have effectively been removed.  It posits no identifiable living being, whether divine or human.  No persons are left to speak, to bring order out of chaos, or to do so in communion with others.  More importantly for the desk dweller, no one is left to answer or to blame.  Instead, government is the function of a nondescript, faceless, nameless office -- a deskocracy.

         No doubt a real human person sits behind that desk, but not a person functioning like God in God’s stead, not a person who, by his or her words, brings wisdom, insight, compassion, creativity, and eloquence to bear upon the task at hand, namely bringing order out of political and social chaos and making the best he or she can of the earth’s potential.  That’s not what happens at the DMV, or in any bureaucracy I can imagine.

         Within the organization, within the ruling deskocracy, humanity has been defaced, removed, and exiled.  Those who operate within it find their essentially human characteristics eliminated:  (1) Conscience is gone.  Officials may no longer exercise compassionate judgment or offer creative solutions to the dazzling array of challenges that interaction with real human beings incessantly brings.  They must follow procedures.  They must follow the manual, which replaces conscience.  (2) Discernment is gone.  Bureaucrats may not bring wisdom, creative compassion, or personal insight to bear upon the infinite variety of human circumstances that confronts them; they must do as directed by the manual, a text written and approved by other nameless and faceless apparatchiks inside the system.  (3) Community is gone.  Bureaucrats no longer are human beings dealing with other human beings; they are caseworkers handling cases -- cases with numbers -- and doing so in the sterile and schematic way prescribed by the approved, unresponsive, bureaucratic procedures aimed at nothing so much as getting quickly to closure and moving on to the next case, the next number.  You’ve heard it over the loudspeaker:  “Number 17, please.”

         In other words, what the deskocracy does to its workers, it does also to those for whom it allegedly works:  It makes them non-persons, or tries.

         Consider this scenario:  If you are a bureaucrat, if you occupy a desk, and if you actually tried to treat human beings as individuals by dealing with them not as numbered cases but in accordance with their infinitely unique and unpredictable circumstances, you could never finish your work, or even a significant portion of it.  That failure tells you how distant from human reality, both political and theological, government by desk truly is:  Good deskocracy is, literally, impossible.  Deskocracy simply cannot accommodate the facts about us.  But rather than despairing of its foolishness, rather than bringing the whole wrong-headed misadventure to a merciful end, rather than adjusting itself to human and theological reality, it doubles down.  It marches boldly forward, undaunted even by reality itself.  It aims to do what cannot be done.  It aims to change human nature, to remake it in its own image, to undo what God Himself has done, and to accomplish what only the redemptive grace of God can accomplish, namely to make human nature anew.

But the new you, the one intended by deskocracy, is not a redeemed and better you.  It is a soulless and faceless number, just like those whom the system sends to deal with you.  Of course, soulless and mindless go together.  Having made the deskocrats sacrifice conscience for procedure, the system now finds reason to sacrifice reason as well, and to the same god -- systemic uniformity -- which devours free intellect the way Moloch devoured children.

Where intellect and conscience go, beauty goes too.  No one, I dare say, ever left a government office with the grateful impression that they’d been standing for hours before Rembrandt’s “Night Watch” or listening to Debussy’s “Clair de Lune.”  Deskocracy is the death of beauty, truth, and goodness; the death of their Divine origin; and, therefore, the death of the truly human as well.  The name on the desk before which you sit, and   the departmental name on the door through which you passed when you entered, are the names on your tombstone. 

         Because one of the things that raises us above the animals and makes us like God is the creative speech that brings order out of chaos, one ought to consider the anti-human, anti-reality language of bureaucratese, which is an endless immersion in the passive voice.  Unlike in active and indicative speech -- speech in which doers do deeds -- in the language of deskocracy, even though no one actually does anything, “mistakes were made.”   It’s not that Mr. Jones did wrong.  That is too personal for bureaucratese.  Mr. Jones could do no wrong because “procedures were followed.”   No deskocrat can say, “I goofed,” because in bureaucratese there is no “I,” just desks and procedures to which no effective appeal can be made and to which no accusation of personal failure can stick unless, of course, there is a Congressional hearing and the system has to offer up one of its own as a scapegoat.  Rather than imitating the speech of God, which brings things like human beings into existence, bureaucratese takes them out of it.

         To be true to yourself and to the God Who made you like Him, you must resist the de-personalization of the cumbrous and mechanistic overlord that occupies all the desks.  You must resist it in eloquent, courageous, purposeful concord with other human beings determined to keep the inestimable gift God gave them.  Either you win or it does.  If it wins, you will be folded, spindled, stapled, and mutilated.  That dire end is your only alternative to the freedom and dignity that are yours as God’s picture and partner.

I cannot tell you precisely, step by step, how that victory is accomplished.  Simply for me to try would be to mimic the deskocracy and its arrogant procedures.

But I do know this:  You are a human being.  You and your allies must insist on being treated as children of the King, as royalty.  If you do not win back that respect for yourself, if you do not carve it out by your own will, cunning, courage, eloquence, and excellence, you will never have it again -- not in this life, and not from this deskocratic tyranny.  The deskocracy is not programmed to deal with children of the King.

Rose Macaulay on Women, Fashion and Money

Ever since I read her The Towers of Trebizond, I have been drawn to Rose Macaulay, whose thoughts on women, fashion, and money I reproduce here without comment:

“Let us . . . consider sartorial problems -- those of them which belong peculiarly to women.  The chief of these is, of course, how to dress well on expenditure insufficient for that purpose.  And it may at once be admitted that this is impossible.  You must either dress badly or spend more money than you wish to -- in most cases more than you have got.  It is a simple alternative, and every woman must make up her own mind which she intends to adopt.  Many women adopt both.  Another sartorial problem has always been how to reconcile a certain conformity to fashion with a certain comfort and grace . . . And it, too, is insoluble.  You cannot be at once graceful, comfortable, and in the mode.  Probably you will be none of these things.  Life is hard for women, as the saying goes.”

Rose Macaulay, A Casual Commentary  (New York:  Boni & Liveright, 1926, p. 237)

Whitney Houston: Piety or Plain Talk?

A friend wondered why, in the wake of Whitney Houston’s death, the news media focused more on her drug abuse than on her music.  I was castigated for defending them.  I was told that such talk was disrespectful.  I was told that there are times to speak and times to be silent, and that this is the time to be silent.

It is not.

Silence in the face of death and the gruesome things that cause it is simply not right.  At such times, we must give voice to death's victims.  In this case, we must give voice to the voice that drug abuse silenced.  If you liked her voice, then speak out against what stopped it.  This is the time when we must "rage against the dying of the light," when we lament "the day the music died," and denounce openly and precisely what killed it.  This is the day when we say the things the dead would say if they could return to say it.

I get enormously weary of the pensive, demurring, eyes-lowered, hands-folded, church mouse piety that, even in the face of death itself, cannot muster an echo, or the echo of an echo, of prophetic denunciation, and that flatters itself as respectful and prudent when all the while it has done nothing more noble than shamefacedly to slough off its obligation to call things by their real names.  I am sick of the passive-aggressive, self-congratulatory posing of pietists who think themselves too holy to enter the fray.

If you respected Whitney Houston, you’ll denounce what killed her.  If you loved her music, you’ll speak out against what brought it to an end.  You won’t wait until the time is right because that time is now.

As pacifists are to tyrants, silence mongers are to pushers -- a dream come true.

Better far to be their worst nightmare.

Edmund Burke and the Statesman's Roots

           During this campaign season, no description is more coveted among Republican candidates than “conservative.”  In order to vest themselves with the mantle of conservatism, they habitually articulate a litany of the ways they are like Ronald Reagan.

While I am far from belittling Reagan, conservatism’s roots are much older and go much deeper than his presidency.  Modern conservatism finds its source in the thought and writings of Edmund Burke, especially in his venerable and profound Reflections on the Revolution in France.  In it, Burke assesses the best possible background for producing an authentic statesman, from among which he lists the physician, the businessman, the financier, the lawyer, and the historian.

Reminiscent of Jesus explaining the soils upon which the Word of God fell as a seed, soils that did not permit good rooting or good growth, Burke rejects the first four as typically unsuitable:  (1) Doctors do not make good statesmen because “the sides of sick beds are not academies for forming statesmen and legislators.”  (2) Businessmen, whom he calls traders, know a bit about the order and function of contemporary society, yet they have little in-depth understanding of “anything beyond their counting house.”  (3) Financiers are expert only at dealing in “stocks and funds,” and in moving from one type of commodity to another, as they do when they “change their ideal paper wealth for the more solid substance of land,” none of which is the same as grasping the reins of government and steering it rightly onward.  (4) Lawyers “are habitually meddling, daring, subtle, active, and litigious,” which is poison to political prudence.

 These backgrounds frequently fail to produce great statesmen because skill at these particular functions is not a qualification for leading the affairs of a great nation.  The doctor is not trained to heal what truly ails the polity; the businessman can make profitable deals, but the President or the Prime minister of a great nation is not its CEO, and to think so is grossly myopic; the financier makes profitable investments, but making profitable investments is not interchangeable with steering the ship of state adeptly along the course of greatest prudence; the lawyer might be technically proficient at the subtleties of law and litigation, but the statesman is far more than a legal technician.

Those best suited by background to the demands of statesmanship, Burke says, are the historians because by study and by profession they are more likely have “knowledge of mankind,” and “experience in mixed affairs,” by which Burke means “a comprehensive connected view of the various complicated external and internal interests which go to the formation of that multifarious thing called a state.”

That, in brief compass, is Burke’s assessment of the background of the current crop of Republican candidates, whether they are doctors (Paul), businessmen (Cain), financiers (Romney), lawyers (Santorum and Bachmann), or historians (Gingrich).

As usual, I think Burke is spot on.

The Chrysler Bailout, the Triple Hit, and the Laws of Political Economy

It looks like American taxpayers will lose more than $1.3 billion in the Chrysler bailout.

That bailout and loss demonstrate that we have forgotten the first rule of political economy:  You get more of what you subsidize.  We subsidize failure.  We keep getting it.  This is now the second time we've bailed out Chrysler.

How many more times will we reward their failure?  How many more times will we send the message that, if you are big, you are safe -- no matter what mistakes you make or how much it costs taxpayers?

Why do we do it?

We don’t, unless by “we” you mean the self-serving politicos in DC.

They do it because they want to keep themselves in positions of power and privilege.  They do it because they don’t have to pay the freight; you do.  They do it because it keeps money flowing in their direction, money from big business, from big labor, and from you.

Because big business wants to stay safe, big business keeps pouring money into political coffers.  It wants friends in Washington, so it buys them and keeps them in place.  Because big labor craves privilege and advantage over unattached workers, big labor keeps pouring money into political coffers.   It wants friends in Washington, so it buys them and keeps them in place.  Politicians, of course, want to stay in place, so they take the money offered them and protect those who give it, thereby protecting themselves.

Naturally, those politicians don’t say that’s why they do it.  They say they are doing it for America.  They say they are doing it for you, even though you are the one who pays; even though you are the one who loses.  Corporations are safe; labor is safe; politicians are safe; you are not.

You take a triple hit: (1) When unions take advantage of the privileges that government grants them in order to gain more money and benefits for their members, the cost of labor rises.  When labor costs rise, prices rise.  You lose.  (2) When corporations must pour millions of dollars into lobbying in order to stay safe, the cost of doing business rises.  When costs rise, prices rise.  You lose.  (3) When the whole labor/business/politician scheme falls through and billions of dollars get washed away, the cost of government rises.  When government costs rise, the tax burden rises.  You lose.

Government doesn't trust you and hundreds of millions of other consumers to pick the winners and losers in the marketplace.  Government, business, and labor will do it for you, your marketplace choices notwithstanding.  When government chooses the winners and losers, it's called crony capitalism.  But crony capitalism is phony capitalism.  It's not the real thing.

That brings me to the second law of political economy:  Regardless of who they are intended to help, every pubic policy hurts someone.  In this case, that someone is you.    

Big corporations and big unions have big government by the throat.  Big government has you by the throat.  It's time to break free.  You deserve better.  You won't get it until you vote the profligate lackies in Washington out of office.

That’s the only way big business, big labor, and big government will realize that if you wanted Chrysler to have your money you’d buy their cars.