High bureaucracy and Low bureaucracy

For the vast majority of people throughout history, life consists of conforming to a set of rules that have been handed down and about which we are never inclined or encouraged to ask ‘why’?

Sometimes, people do ask ‘why?’. These people fall into two categories: truth=seekers (I won’t say ‘philosophers’ since not all truth-seekers are philosophers and not all philosophers are truth-seekers), and people who have had something horrible happen to them.

The latter category - people who have unquestioningly followed the rules in the belief that that was the right thing to do, ask ‘why?’ because something unexpectedly awful has happened and that is the first point at which they surface their tacit assumption that rule-following was the best thing to do and find themselves asking ‘so why did I follow the rules?’.

It should be said that children also, have a tendency to ask ‘why?’ but we found a way to put a stop to that fairly early on.

The entirety of this system I call ‘bureaucracy’, and in essence it consists of doing meaningless stuff because that is what one is expected to do. It is a highly complex system – more like an organism in fact. ‘Education’ for example, is a major organ, a system which ensures the continued survival of bureaucracy by training people to conform to rules and systems unquestioningly.

It is a characteristic of bureaucracies that most people who operate within them have no desire to ask why they do what they do. It is perfectly possible, for example, to be a ‘Chief Learning Officer’ without being able to define what ‘Learning’ is or how it works – this is not a problem since the role is, essentially, a bureaucratic one.

Here, though, I wanted to introduce a distinction between ‘high bureaucracy’ and ‘low bureaucracy’. Low bureaucracy is what is sounds like: people serving a system unquestioningly.

But one will come across another kind of bureaucrat – a ‘high bureaucrat’. These are generally very intelligent people, often those who have excelled within the school system (and who tend to remain academics therefore) and who provide popular intellectual frameworks within which a bureaucracy can flourish. A bureaucracy is, after all, a set of conventional behaviours, and these will sometimes require a corresponding set of conventional beliefs.

What distinguishes a high bureaucrat is their emphasis on conventional thinking rather than conventional doing (though the former rationalises the latter).

If we think back to medieval times, there was no shortage of smart people (smart people are not a recent phenomenon). So what were they doing? Many of them were engaged in providing elaborate justifications for the existing conventions – for example theologians writing extensively on the attributes of God. Descartes, as a specific example, penned an elaborate ‘proof’ of the existence of God. It is very helpful, if the Church is to continue, to know that ‘smart people’ like Descartes have proved the existence of God.

A modern example is the writer Daniel Dennett: an ‘arch-bureaucrat’ characterised by thinking which is popular, sophisticated, but which never escapes (indeed supports) the popular convention. Nietzsche warns us against popular thinkers for precisely this reason – their popularity is owed to their conventionality (even when it arrives in disguise, as inoculation -  i.e. in the guise of ‘unconventionality’).

We see high bureaucrats in all walks of life; philosophy, science, business – they are popular precisely because they provide a framework in which conventional behaviours can be justified – without ever extending the boundaries of the convention itself.

An example of this in education is ‘Cognitive Load’: you will find no shortage of bright people researching ‘cognitive load’, writing about it, discussing how to apply it – but without ever coming close to questions such as ‘what is learning?’ and ‘how does it work?’. The concept provides a framework in which it is acceptable to tinker with the convention in order to prevent more meaningful changes.

A high bureaucrat is therefore trapped in a framework of their own design. These are the guardians of the prevailing order – our modern day “Sanhedrin”. They are there to argue – and win – in defence of the convention. So that no-one should ever ask ‘why?’.

Wittgenstein is the most perplexing case that I know of: a high-bureaucrat at the outset - throughout the Tractatus - but he relents, realising the error of his ways. And though he never succeeds in finding answers, in his latter works he begins to uproot the very conventions that he has earlier described. Such people are extremely rare.

All this is to say: in making progress you will meet with many forms of resistance, some regulatory in nature, some intellectual. A convention defends itself in a myriad of ways.

But I will end on a cautionary note: behind my writing sits a set of implicit values - that progress and truth are good. By progress I mean historical progress, not the popular, limited form of progress one reads about in business books. And here's the thing: probably progress hurts and truth will only get you into trouble and lose you friends. So... bureaucracy is not to be sniffed at. To the extent that we care, we will sometimes look the other way.

Image: Hisham Zayadnh