Some points on the evolution of bureaucracy

I said in the last mailing that I wanted to deal with the question of bureaucracy.  On second thoughts, I really don’t.  There is nothing much that hasn’t already been said about it, even if only in passing.  To go into it again in specific detail would be simply a matter of tautology.

Yet there are one or two points that need to be made, as way of background.

Bureaucracy is a necessary thing.  It is, for example, the general staff of an army, whose job it is to translate the commands of its leader into effective action, without which otherwise those commands would remain no more than wishful thinking.  Most organisations require a bureaucracy to some degree or other, otherwise they couldn’t work.

The problem is that bureaucracy, left to its own devices, tends to become self-serving to the extent that it often squeezes the life out of the purpose it was meant to serve.  Rather like a parasite taking over its host.

When I speak here about bureaucracy, I have in mind a sort of mutation that, especially in modern times, can occur in organisations and is self-propelling and expansionary.  Whatever its ostensible purpose of existence, its true purpose in the end is self-aggrandisement and keeping itself alive.

The classic example of this, to my mind, is the whole Health and Safety phenomenon.

Now, like a bush taking root way up on the front of a building, bureaucratic off-shoots can seed themselves and flourish in the most unlikely of places.  It is less a matter of planning than of chance.  Individuals of a bureaucratic mindset are constantly scanning for the accidental thing that may promise a shortcut to promotions and the building of their own little empires, provided they are quick enough to identify it and get in first.

There are certain requirements for this to be successful.  Firstly, one must find a seemingly unarguable justification for what one is proposing.  After all, how easy is it going to be in the current environment to resist proposals based on grounds of health and safety, or child protection, or any of the myriad aspects of the equality agenda, no matter how off-the wall such proposals may seem to be?  The degree of public hysteria or concern one can tap into always provides an inestimable source of leverage.

Now I mentioned the matter of Health and Safety as a classic example of this sort of bureaucracy.  One reason I can say this is because I saw the process in its infancy and watched individuals’ eyes light up at the possibility of advantage in it.  After all, as I’ve already said, who’s going to argue against health and safety . . . ?  It was like being handed a blank cheque!

Now don’t get me wrong.  Safety in the workplace is important—and in some workplaces more than others.  And I have no doubt too that the process was, and continues to be, in many circumstances valuable—for I am sure that there were and still are many places with poor safety standards.  But primarily what I felt I was seeing at the time were people anxious to build a nest for themselves and puzzling over how to justify it.  For the fact is that once one has got beyond the commonplace problems, the circumstances requiring a dedicated safety input tend to get rather thin.  In that situation, if you are an ambitious  health and safety bureaucrat, you are left with emphasising and reemphasising what Basil Fawlty once famously described as ‘the bleeding obvious’.

I can remember quite a few years later, back in the early 2000s, being shown the schedule for a health and safety conference that was being held in a well-known regional hotel.  This involved people from various employments from all over Ireland.  It also involved a large fee being levied on the bodies sending attendees.  But what was really startling was the nature of the seminars being presented.  Not the ‘bleeding obvious’ but rather the ‘bleeding, bleeding obvious’.  It was sufficient to make one cringe.

Of course, there was a certain collusion of interests involved.  The people attending were enjoying an all-expenses-paid freebie; while the organisers were getting extremely well rewarded.  No reason for anyone to rock the boat.

Another aspect, of course, is that where even the ‘bleeding obvious’ threatens to peter out, one can still spin the idea of ever new dangers that need protecting against, no matter how far fetched.  The managers of bureaucracies being what they are, the first instinct is always to cover one’s arse, so that the likely reaction is to roll over and go along with it, in case by some chance an asteroid might really hit the earth.  If one is clever enough with words, there is nothing than cannot be spun into a potential danger.

The truth is that the original Health and Safety impetus has morphed into a great and many-tentacled bureaucracy.  It has also carried out the trick of transferring the burden of implementing its regulations on to the shoulders of those compelled to use the system.  And the fact also is that it is has begun to gum up the normal workings of the economy, especially at the lower level, where smaller firms are finding it too expensive and onerous to deal with the paperwork involved in even the smallest of tenders.

I will come back to this again at some stage.

More of the same . . .

Years ago, on the Late Late Show, there was a segment one night where various small enterprises were given an opportunity to sell themselves and what they were doing to the public.  One particular entrepeneur stood up and said: ‘My name is ----- ----- and I am a job creator’.  No doubt true enough as far as it went.  But the fact was that the creation of jobs was ancillary to the main purpose of setting up his business, which was to make money.  Indeed, if he could have made more money by laying workers off, he probably would have done so.  And one couldn’t complain about it, that’s the logic of the system.

As far as whistleblowing is concerned, no doubt there are people of principle involved.  But the problem is that once you start creating a profile of whistleblowing as being something heroic and praiseworthy and glamorous, then, as is often the case with charity or humanitarian work, you run the risk of attracting those for whom the matter of principle is more or less ancillary.

And if you go even further and create some sort of official category of whistleblowing, including safeguards against suffering any negative consequences from one’s informing—indeed, perhaps even gaining from it—then you are really opening a Pandora’s Box. All the old innate evils of the human condition will then come into play: greed, begrudgery, vengeance etc. etc.

How soon before you have people before the employment tribunals or the courts claiming they were denied benefits or promotions because they were whistleblowers?  And, knowing the way companies and organisations tend to run away from such controversies, arguably opening up informing as a potentially royal road to advancement?

There is also the question of opening up another avenue for the growth of the cancer of bureaucracy: something that will be dealt with in the next mailing.

The Art of Blowing the Whistle

We used to have whistleblowers in the place where I worked.  Everywhere has them.  Except that we used call them ‘hangmen’.  But the world seems to have moved on from then and suddenly they are being promoted as moral heroes.

Now let me say I am not speaking of any specific case, for really I don’t know very much about the various examples in the public eye at the moment.  All I know about them is what I read in the newspaper headlines, which is generally all I read of any article.  But I am fascinated by the logic of the situation and where it seems likely to lead.

There will always be situations where there is a compelling need to speak up.  But the first thing to be said is that there are ways of doing this that do not involve one having to step into the spotlight.  Also there are cases that involve the risk of it nonetheless happening.

There is the famous case of Kurt Gerstein, an Obersturmbannführer (equivalent of a Lieutenant-Colonel) in the SS, who sought to inform the world via the Swedish diplomatic service and the Vatican and various other channels about the extermination of the Jews.  He tried to do so privately, because had he been caught he would have been killed.  Nonetheless he felt morally compelled to take that chance.

The heroic essence of his action is that in doing it he was putting his neck on the line, there was no reward or praise or enhanced public profile for him—certainly not in wartime Germany.  And that is the essence of true ‘whistleblowing’—it has to involve a potential cost that one is nonetheless prepared to risk.

If ‘whistleblowing’ is made too easy then every sneak in the country can reinvent himself as a whistleblower, and things that were done formerly behind the secrecy of closed doors can now be done in the full light of day, and one can expect to be rewarded and praised and lionised for it, too.

The idea that people who inform in this way (I hate using the word ‘whistleblower’; I think it is a ridiculous term) should not be negatively affected in the slightest by their actions is to devalue the moral value of ‘whistleblowing’.  The seriousness or otherwise of the matter being reported can be calculated purely to the extent that people are prepared to risk their employment or promotion prospects or the disapproval of their fellow workers, or even of the world, in order to make it known.  If there is no such risk involved then it cannot be a matter of any great importance.

Remove this conditional and the long-term consequence is less likely to be ‘openness’ than chaos.

City on a Hill

What is one to make of the candidates for the American presidency?

Trump reminds me of Colm McCarthy’s reported remark on the Irish Financial Regulator’s television performance at the time of the economic collapse, where he ‘stammered rote answers to questions he had not been asked, and ignored the ones he had been asked’.   Basically a flim-flam man, he’s not out of place in the political arena.

Clinton, by contrast, is not a natural politician.  She is a typical ideologue, convinced she knows what’s best for everyone and intent on giving it to them, irrespective of whether they want it or not.  But she lacks the necessary footwork for the public side of things.

America has since its founding prided itself on being ‘as a City upon a Hill, the eyes of all people upon us’.  In other words, certainly from the point of view of many of the founding fathers, an example to the world of what was possible in a society organised primarily on the basis of reason and secularism.

Some city . . . some hill!

Ostland

Ostland, a book by David Thomas, published in 2013, is a strange amalgam of fact and fiction.  It is at the same time the most penetrating psychological study of the mindset of the hands-on functionaries of the killing squads of the Holocaust that I have ever come across.  There is nothing particularly new in it, yet the way in which it knits together existing evidence and insights into a consistent picture is absolutely fascinating.  It is also a totally harrowing read.

The main and most interesting point it deals with is the way in which the practitioners sought to insulate themselves from the reality and psychological consequences of what they were doing.  They did this by clinging to the idea of duty as being the thing most paramount.  And duty meant obedience to orders.

And there is an element in the German makeup that seems inured to obedience.  Anybody who has stood at a pedestrian crossing in Germany or Austria, with no traffic coming for hundreds of yards in either direction, and watched as the natives wait patiently for the lights to change, would have an inkling of this.  It is an element that predates the Nazis, although they laid a special emphasis on it.

For the officers and men of the killing squads, save where they were by nature sadists and psychopaths, this extreme concept of duty became the justification, both during and after the war, for all they did.  It was the comfort blanket that they used to hide from themselves the knowledge of their personal weakness.

I use the term ‘weakness’ in a selective sense.  It is not a weakness unique to those who became mass murderers, but is common to us all.  The Nazi’s developed several psychological techniques to make possible the killing regime that they desired.  The SS were trained in hardness and duty with a view to carrying out tasks that in general were as yet unexplained to them.  But it was discovered that, despite all the training, when men were informed in advance of what was expected of them many of them demurred.

Gitta Sereny, in her biography of Albert Speer, writes: ‘There was a three-week SS orientation course in Pretzsch near Leipzig in May 1941, at the end of which a number of officers who had been appointed leaders of the Einsatzgruppen destined for Barbarossa, horrified by what they had learned, managed to get themselves transferred.’

The answer to this for the leadership, as least as far as the intermediate ranks were concerned, was often to keep them in ignorance until the last possible moment, when suddenly they found themselves, a bottle of vodka in one hand and a revolver in the other, standing behind a row of naked people in the killing line.

Rather like lobsters poised above a pot of boiling water, they found themselves suddenly confronted by a situation that, no matter how they reacted to it, was certain, even through just the knowledge of it, to change them forever.  All their automatically imbibed assumptions about themselves and their society and human nature and decency and religion and God would in those first few moments be burned away.  Even if they turned their backs and ran away from it, they could not escape, nonetheless, being unutterably changed.  In such a situation, it might be argued, the easiest reaction was to just shoot.  And in the fact of firing that first shot, they were forever caught.

It is no wonder that such men clung so fervently to the idea of duty as a way of justifying themselves and as an attempt to protect themselves against the psychological and spiritual consequences of what they were doing.  Some were deliberately ostentatious in their attempts to underline the fact that they were only doing their duty, a duty that otherwise was personally unpleasant to them, signalling this (and this really is the absurdity of it all) through taking strong exception to any gratuitous extra cruelties being inflicted on those about to be killed.

The other side of the coin was the necessity to shore up the idea of duty as an iron law, as the iron law which must be obeyed before any other.  This was to be done by a deliberate denial of mercy.  Even the most emotionally debilitating killings had to be endured, for to show mercy, to make exceptions, was to undermine the concept of duty as the law that had to be obeyed above all others, and at the same time rob the perpetrators of the fig-leaf of self-justification that they clung so fiercely to.

In my earlier blogs I quoted from Himmler’s speech to the Gauleiters in Posnan in 1943:

 ‘The hard decision had to be taken to have this people disappear from the face of the earth.  For the organisation which had to carry out this order, it was the most difficult one we were ever given. . . . I think I can say that it has been carried out without damaging the minds or spirits of our men and our leaders.  The danger was great and ever present.  For the difference between the two possibilities . . . to become cruel and heartless and no longer to respect human life, or to become soft and succumb to weakness and nervous breakdowns . . . the way between Scylla and Charybdis is appallingly narrow.’

Yet the fact is that this ideologically contrived version of duty proved inadequate to the purpose of protecting men against the consequences of their actions.  One of the main reasons for the building of the extermination camps was the evidence of the psychological toll that the direct killing of men, women and children was having on the perpetrators.  Indeed, the Nazis sought to describe the creation of the gas chambers as a ‘humanitarian’ measure, except it was a humanitarianism intended to benefit, not the victims, but the killers in the field.

The central character of Thomas’s book is Georg Hauser, a real life perpetrator, who had previously been a decorated police detective.  Hauser, like so many of the others who survived the war—indeed he himself became a policeman again after the war, and ended up a chief of police—clung to the end to the idea that he had only been doing his duty.

And this is understandable.  It was the single fragile wall that stood between him and the certainty of total psychological and moral collapse.  Yet the effort of maintaining it must have been an agony, the reality constantly slopping over and around it in nightmares and in those moments of letting his self-discipline slip.

He had been presented, no matter how difficult the circumstances, with a choice, and rather than strength had found only weakness.  It is a terrible self-judgement to have to live with.

Hell or High Water

Went the other night to see the film Hell or High Water, the very unoriginality of whose title tells you a lot about it in advance.  It is possible to see a lot of influences in it, whether they are actually there or not.  From Hud, The Last Picture Show, Paris, Texas, No Country for Old Men to Killing them Softly (though not nearly as bad as that particular turkey).

The former influences are best seen in its lingering camerawork taking in the Llano Estacado landscape of West Texas, and the small flyblown towns that inhabit the area.  Yet though atmospherically photographed, the cinematography seems less to support the story than the story to support the cinematography.  Unlike the first four movies mentioned earlier, the two aspects don’t appear to seamlessly meld.  In places, it comes perilously close to being a sort of still-life with incidental action, as in the scene where the two brothers act out a bit of redundant horseplay against the main canvas of a huge and horizonless Texas evening sky.

Overall it gives one the impression almost of a painting by numbers effort.  Let’s throw in a bit of the cinematography of The Last Picture Show, Paris Texas, etc.  And while we’re at it, let’s borrow aspects of the character of the sheriff in No Country for Old Men.  Finally, let’s try add a bit of social significance, though not in the embarrassingly clunking manner it was larded into Killing Them Softly.

Here the facts of economic collapse and unemployment and the ruthless predatoriness of banks are central to the story.  Yet in a certain obscure sense it doesn’t really convince—there is a sense almost of observing life from a distance, of rehearsing the liberal stereotypes that in Hollywood tend to take the place of actual lived experience.

It is a film that from its opening scenes gives the impression of throwing shapes—yes, really, that is the best description of it.  Throwing shapes!  There is nothing in it that is not borrowed, consciously or unconsciously, from somewhere else.  It is a film not reflecting life so much as reflecting other films.  It has nothing new to say.

As well, there is what comes across as a totally hamfisted attempt to deal with the matter of racial banter, so untrue to life and so incompetently handled as to make one almost go down on one’s knees to political correctness.

That being said, it is not a bad film.  What’s done in it tends to be well done.  But it is not a film deserving of the four of five stars that have been awarded to it by so many critics.

Two, maybe two and a half.

Well, that’s my opinion.

'I can't get no satisfaction . . .'

Harald Boehmer, a chemical specialist in the field of natural dyes, once wrote: ‘Synthetic dyes contain just one colour.  But in madder [a natural, root-based, red dye] there is red, of course, but also blue and yellow are in there as well.  It makes it softer and at the same time more interesting’.

What actually he is saying is that natural dyes have a different sensory (and arguably psychological) effect than artificial dyes.  Both appear similar to the naked eye, but one, for want of a better term, leaves a more lingering aftertaste.

A case can be made to extend the conclusion beyond merely dyes and colours.  Junk food, for example, which while fulfilling the primary role of filling our stomachs is supposedly lacking in so many other ways.

Indeed, an argument can be advanced that we are creatures who are designed to be fed, stimulated, informed, developed, fulfilled etc. on different levels, both conscious and unconscious, in every facet of our lives.  Something can truly satisfy us only to the extent that it meets these various needs.  If it doesn’t then various mouths of our nature go unsatisfied.

In a somewhat ‘more is less’ analogy, we can also argue that the modern world, while snowing us under with new products and technologies and sensations, is at the same time starving us of real satisfactions.  How else to explain the relentless popular drive to consume?

The thing is, we know when something satisfies us or otherwise.  We don’t have to mull over it, we give it an automatic thumbs-up or thumbs-down.

The increasingly rare experience of, say, seeing a good film in the cinema can have the same physical effect as if we had enjoyed a good meal.  A feeling of being sated, of not being driven in pursuit of some new sensation, of being comfortable taking time out to mentally chew over what we have seen.

Unlike most modern art—indeed, most modern anything—we don’t have to interrogate ourselves as to whether we enjoyed it or not, we just know.  If you have to rationalise something to arrive at how you think you should feel about it, then you are just kidding yourself.

People are increasingly being trained to have no confidence in their own judgements.  We have spin-doctors in every element of our existence, not just in politics.  They are often called ‘critics’ and ‘experts’.  Their technique is generally to patronise and sneer at those who do not share their elevated world view, all as a way of beating them into submission.  Yet the truth is that if you dig down into their philosophies, then you generally find very little.  At root, they are what the Americans call ‘snake-oil salesmen’.

And the snake oil that they are selling is the same old snake oil dressed up in different bottles that has been around for hundreds of years.  Its modern guise is that of the half-baked liberal agenda—or as Hillary Clinton calls it, the ‘new decency’—of constantly evolving rights and empowerments and categories of victimhood.  It claims to be building a new society, but really what it is engaged in is the destruction of the old, whose roots lie unbroken back to times immemorial.

‘The peasantry is the repository of the culture of a nation,

not the tired nonsense of festivals and plays,

but a bridal chest in which is gathered what is worthwhile

down the ages,

the sole surviving land-line running back to base

beneath the creeping barrage of history . . .’

 

Or something like that.

Bringing things up to date

My last mailing was on March 30^th 2010.

It was not really intended as a blog, but rather part of a series of, for want of a better term, essays.  I simply used the blog platform for convenience.  I wasn’t interested in getting replies or comments or entering into correspondence.  As far as I was concerned, I was simply speaking, if you like, ex-cathedra.

At the time of ceasing, I felt that I had said all that need saying, though not all that could be said.  Several times over the intervening years I have been tempted to revive the postings—something that up to now I have resisted.

It is now the end of September 2016, and I have finally decided to surrender to the temptation and restore the mailings, at least for the time being.  They are aimed at a very small number of people, who know who they are, but anyone else who might happen to come across them is welcome to read them.  Beyond this particular mailing, they are not otherwise being advertised.

The mailings will probably be more sporadic that previously, and will cover a wider range of topics.

The new blog is called New Lamps for Old