The Desk of Death and the Table of Life
Some thoughts on bureaucracy and the Kingdom of God.
My friend, Joshua Skaggs, recently wrote an essay in three parts called “Permit.” The story is based on his experience of navigating the foster care system and its adjacent bureaucracies. Josh is an exceptional writer and the story is deeply moving so I hope you read it.
It makes me happy that I have friends who want to think and write about bureaucracy because it's an important subject and it makes me feel like less of a weirdo for having wanted to write about the theology/philosophy of bureaucracy for some time. I hope that by the end of this essay I know how to spell the word. I also hope that by taking the time to think about the meaning of bureaucracy and by listening to what it says about our design and destiny, about sin and iniquity, about the good and true and beautiful, that we might take a small step toward preserving and expanding our humanity. What follows are some fragmentary thoughts on the philosophy and theopolitics of bureaucracy.
What Even Is Bureaucracy?
The French economist, Jacques Claude Marie Vincent de Gournay, invented the word “bureaucracy” in the mid 18th century. Vincent de Gournay seems to have lived in a particularly bureaucratic time as he said, “We have an illness in France which bids fair to play havoc with us; this illness is called bureaumania." You’re probably familiar with the word and have a good practical knowledge of its use and yet it is likely you haven’t gotten the full thrust of its meaning. When we say “bureaucracy” we should be thinking in the category of “forms of government.” So democracy, kleptocracy, plutocracy, meritocracy, bureaucracy, and so on. The “-cracy” comes from the Greek, kratos (κράτος), meaning power or rule, and the prefix tells you what form of power is in question. So democracy is demos + kratos or rule by the people, autocracy is rule by a single person with absolute power, etc.
So what is a bureau? It’s a desk. In the word “bureaucracy” we have “rule by the desk” where “desk” serves as a metonym for the system of rules and regulations, the system of administration. It is a sad picture in which the desk becomes the space of division, anti-mediation, legal entanglement, and dehumanization between the official and the citizen where both encounter great difficulty in any attempt to relate to each other as an I and a Thou.
The Narrative and the Reality
Bureaucracy rears its expressionless head in many places, in the workplace–especially large corporations, in education, the medical system, in business churches (more on that below), sadly I suspect even some families are infected by it in their own way; but of course bureaucracy is primarily a governmental reality.
All or most of the world’s governments run according to bureaucratic mechanics. In the USA they teach children in school that the US Government looks kind of tripartite like this:
But then, when you grow up, you find out that the USG looks something more like an iceberg:
Agencies! How much they shape our lives! Did you know that no one really knows how many agencies the USG is comprised of? Part of the challenge is in classification but part of the mystery resides in the varying levels of hiddenness and accountability certain agencies are beholden to. There are at least 450-500 departments, agencies, subagencies, bureaus, and such. These organizations touch practically every aspect of society. Is this too much agency? Feels like it but what do I know? Maybe it is good so much iceberg lies beneath the surface.
The Art of Bureaucracy
The best way to grasp the tragic significance of bureaucracy is in art. Indeed art is one of the key antidotes and alternative paths to the crushing forces of bureaucracy and therefore art that critiques bureaucracy is always doubly poignant. Let’s look at a few works worth mentioning.
Catch-22
The art of bureaucracy can be quite challenging. Heller’s novel, Catch-22 is one of the greatest works of art that critiques bureaucracy and yet reading it was easily one of my two least favorite reading experiences out of the thousands of books I have read. Reading that book was pure suffering for me. I think I hated Catch-22 so much because of how well Heller captures the nihilistic and destructive absurdity of bureaucracy which, along with all exertions of power that are arbitrary and dehumanizing and destructive, are all the more painful in their effect given the contradiction between arbitrariness and intensity of suffering they produce. Bureaucracy has always really gotten to me and is one of the chief forms of suffering that makes me pray, “Lord Jesus, come quickly.” We can psychoanalyze this later.
It was in reading Catch-22 that I understood that war is the paragon of bureaucracy. How do the gods of war get so many humans to participate in such a foolish, insane, destructive, shameful, evil tradition? There are only answers, rather than an answer to this question and yet it seems certain that, without the technology/ies of bureaucracy, war as we know it would be impossible. We could complicate this idea by thinking about how primitive societies conducted war and describe a progression in which technological advancement, legal innovations including the nation state, the form, the spreadsheet, and other artifacts of modernity, have brought war on its evolutionary path from a few humans clubbing and hacking each other to death in a field to the trench and chemical warfare at scale of the two world wars, to the horrorshow that the powers, satanic elites, bankers, arms dealers, and their army of bureaucrats are cooking up for WWIII, but I think the point stands and is only reified as history progresses: bureaucracy is the lifeblood of war, which is its logical conclusion.
Heller’s primary failure in his great magnum opus is that he fails to acknowledge the Kingdom of God, he fails to acknowledge Christ, and therefore he fails to identify the redemptive, prophetic path as he explores the dehumanization and absurdity of the bureaucracy of war. So how do people respond to this great systemization of death in Catch-22? Some embrace the madness, some try to game the system, some capitulate, some try to maintain their morality and humanity but remain too timid and powerless to know what to do, some just duck their heads and wait it out, some try to attain a mystical stoicism and survive by aloofness. The most active thing Yossarian does at the novel’s conclusion is to escape to Sweden.
What’s left? Thank God there is so much more and the Church will need to be thoroughly grounded in the story of God, in art, in the prophetic imagination; she will need to be truly filled with the Spirit and with spiritual people if she is to thrive in a world at war and be the city on a hill she is called to be.
Ikiru
The 1952 film, now in the Criterion Collection, Ikiru, is notable for its redemptive narrative arc and its positive prophetic challenge to bureaucrats. The name, Ikiru, means “live,” and (I will optimistically use the temporal clause) when you watch it, you will come away feeling that an angel has been whispering intensely but lovingly in your ear, “Live!” Ikiru is one of the greatest films ever made, so there's that.
Ikiru is about a lifelong bureaucrat, Kanji Watanabe, who has lost his soul in the church of the Tokyo public works office. (Weirdly, I just went to order a second drink at the coffee shop I’m at, and when I came back to my laptop, that word “church” was there. I think autocorrect may have turned “churn” into “church.” I decided to leave it as indeed bureaucratic systems operate according to their own anti-liturgies and a beholdeness to a form of anti-transcendence.) Slight spoilers follow though I don’t believe they will harm your viewing experience. Watanabe discovers that he has stomach cancer and not long to live. In this encounter with imminent death, he begins to rethink his life. After exploring different strategies for coping with his proximity to death, Watanabe finally sees a way to redeem himself; he decides to help a group of people that have been begging the various bureaucratic offices in the city to heal their neighborhood where sewage has been creating a public health hazard. Watanabe devotes his remaining life to turning this place of woe into a beautiful park for the children of the area.
The third act of the film portrays a kind of funeral courtroom scene in which Watanabe’s life is litigated by his former bureaucratic coworkers as they discuss the strange behavior he exhibited prior to his death. Their default stance of self-preservation and self-justification is undone as they get more and more drunk and then the truth comes out. They acknowledge Watanabe’s nobility and promise to repent of their inhumane ways and to do good in their positions moving forward. Do they? You’ll have to watch to find out. The conclusion of Ikiru stands as a prophetic challenge to all of us who waste our lives away and fail to be courageous and agentic enough to truly pursue the good in whatever work we’ve been given to do.
Runners Up
There is really an abundance of great art that critiques bureaucracy. It’s interesting just how inspirational this most life-sucking of fallen realities is to so many artists. A few more recommendations: Brazil, the 1985 psychedelic satirical horror film cult classic by Terry Gilliam. The 80s were so very weird. There is the novel by Kafka and the movie by Orson Wells, The Trial. Of course 1984 and Brave New World both capture bureaucratic dystopia. The Tom Hanks movie, The Terminal (not a great movie but one of the few redemptive ones), is a feelgood story about a man whose very existence becomes bureaucratically problematic such that he gets trapped in the liminal space of an airport as he awaits the acknowledgment of his humanity. On a much less serious note, Office Space, while not the most appropriate film, is very funny and offers an insightful alternative to the nihilism of corporate bureaucracy in its decently redemptive conclusion. We could go on.
Caveats
Quick note that should be obvious: there is never really only one form of governance at play in a society. The USA is governed according to democracy, kleptocracy, technocracy, bureaucracy, plutocracy, corporatocracy, to name a few.
Further, I hear the voice of the cold-hearted realists who are saying, “Good luck living without administration,” the well-behaved rule-followers saying, “But chaos scares me and I like having a reliable, predictable system that tells me what to do in order to stay out of trouble,” the good-hearted civil servants saying, “I pour out my life to help people through trying times, even sacrificing my physical and emotional health, all for no praise and a meager paycheck, stop harshing on bureaucrats.” We could go on. To all this I say, touché. I know real life is complicated and I am grateful to live in a country with (more or less) rule of law (Nomocracy?) and relatively low levels of corruption (debatable, I’m sure).
The point in using bureaucracy pejoratively is not that government or government offices shouldn’t exist, but that tyrannical officialdom should be identified and designed against. I’m not advocating for anarchy, at least not in the common sense of the word, but for a society in which the principles of the bureau are governed by the higher order principles of love, dignity of the imago Dei, servanthood, wisdom, common sense, mercy…
Business Church
One of the more traumatic forms of bureaucratic entanglement and dehumanization occurs inside of business churches. By “business church,” I mean churches that operate more as nonprofit businesses (did you know Ikea is a nonprofit?) than as organic/spiritual/familial communities of the holy brethren. I trust God uses business churches for all kinds of good in the world but indeed they have their downsides. I have known many people who have gone through protracted seasons of healing, forgiveness, processing, as they have tried to recover from the profound dysphoria that results when one is injured by living inside of an organization that purports to operate according to the economy of spiritual family but also operates according to the economy of the corporation. What does it mean when your spiritual family, the people who are reflecting Christ to you and praying for you and discipling you and hearing some of the most intimate and personal aspects of your story, the people who are your church, also have to relate to you according to the legal framework of employee/employer? What happens when you get fired? What does it mean when relationships mediated by Christ and the sevenfold unity of the Church are also mediated by HR and the forces of the marketplace?
I am here only nodding to this reality that deserves much more attention and pausing to declare that churches should operate according to the political logic of the Kingdom of God and according to the economy of the family. I’m grateful that at my church, “Family rules, not business rules,” is a thing people say. It is hard to live out and we do it imperfectly and of course some communities abuse and pervert this idea in the most awful ways but, when it’s healthy, church-according-to-family-dynamics is so beautiful I don’t even know where to begin.
The Meeting Place
So if the bureau, the desk (at least in the symbolic framework we’ve been discussing; desks can still be lovely symbols in other systems, my dear writers), is the anti-human form of mediation that results in so much human suffering, so much wanton waste, banal evil, a dysphoric smoke cloud of enchantment that makes us sick to our stomachs, then what is the alternative? I propose the table of Eucharist. What if we lived by koinocracy rather than bureaucracy? Koinonia being communion, shared life. Indeed God invites us to break bread with him, to eat a meal with him; God provides the meal by giving us himself . The table is the cosmic meeting place of the I and the Thou, of the divine with the Divine (the Divine with the Divine?). At the table, our humanity and dignity is renewed and we humanize each other, we even bear witness to God’s divinization of each other in Christ. The table operates according to the principle of love, of self-giving, of sharing, of koinonia.
What other forms of government might we consider?
Agapocracy or Philocracy, the rule of Love.
Sophocracy, the rule of wisdom that knows what is best when, knows how to apply nuance, knows when a rule should be broken, knows what higher principles are at work in any given situation, knows what Paul means when he says “the letter kills but the Spirit gives life.”
Goneiocracy? Admittedly awkward but having less baggage than patriarchy and matriarchy. Rule by the parents. Or presbyterocracy, rule by the tribe’s elders or servants of the church. Good parenting and eldering is not overbearing but governed by self-sacrificial love and service with the aim of feeding, forming, protecting, liberating, empowering, and celebrating being succeeded by, the members of the household. Pneumocracy, rule of the Holy Spirit. Diakocracy, rule through service and modeling Jesus by becoming a slave. Oikocracy, governance modeled on the principles of the household. Kenarchy, rule by way of self-emptying, or Martyrocracy, rule of the martyrs. Rule by way of the embrace of death for the sake of the hope of new life; giving charge to those who are most willing to die.
You get the idea. What would you add to this list?
Temptations and Transcendence
Despite my extreme experience of disgust in encounters with bureaucracy, I’m grateful to say that I don’t have many dramatic experiences of it to narrate to you. I think my experiences of injustice in many non-official and non-governmental forms are the formative factors for my emotional response. But how little bureaucratic suffering it takes for me to sin against God!
One of my daughters has a French middle name that has an accent mark over the é. PSA: it seems government offices don’t know how to use such characters. I remember receiving her social security card and her birth certificate in the mail and realizing that both offices had added an apostrophe at the end of her name rather than simply converting the é to an e. Having perhaps imbibed too much art that critiques bureaucracy and having consequently become a bit cynical (consider this re:my art recommendations above), I imagined various scenarios in which this apostrophe might cause my daughter all kinds of complications later in life and so I decided to fix it.
I have a distinct memory of standing behind a glass divider, awkwardly tilting my head in an attempt to be heard through the hole meant for passing papers and pens and sound waves, and feeling so much disgust for the woman whose face I can still recall, numb, expressionless, and unresponsive to the absurdity of the problem; uninterested in why I didn’t think I should have to pay money to fix her colleague’s mistake. It wasn’t even that big of a deal, I know! But I kind of wanted to burn the building to the ground (just joking, NSA!).
I have since repented. I pray that God would bless that woman.
Regardless of which side of the bureau you are on, you are commanded by God to treat the Other with dignity. We must reject the temptation to objectify each other. The bureaucrat must repent of becoming hard hearted and numb to the sufferings and needs of the people they serve and be patient with their vices. The bureaucrat must pursue justice, must use honest scales. The person interacting with the bureaucrat must repent of seeing them as mere roadblocks or idiot cogs and must see them according to Christ; they must be grateful for their help and show respect to them.
When I do my taxes I must send my forms to the IRS stamped with an invisible blessing. May the lady at the DMV experience the love of Christ when my number is called.
Maybe this is easy for all of you and I am just writing my confessions.
The point here is that the bureaucracy is harmful to human thriving and its deleterious effects are suffered by all parties involved. Let us have compassion on one another. I don’t know how academically sound this idea is, but where I come from, we use the word “iniquity” to describe sin that is transpersonal. What I mean is, not all sin is you doing a bad thing. Much of the world’s sin or brokenness is larger than you or me. We are born into and embedded in a system of sin that we all suffer from and contribute to. I think bureaucracy is an expression of this. Humans are often unruly, dangerous, impulsive, and we need systems of control and behavior management that help keep our baser nature in check. But these systems that mitigate our viciousness also become egregoric embodiments of the very vice they were designed to restrain. And it hurts to be the hammer or the anvil, here.
So let us pray the Jesus Prayer and repent, repent, repent, and become prophetic misfits who are always finding ways to turn desks into communion tables.
And don’t forget to read Josh’s story, Permit. It’s really good!