By Jay Stanley
Yesterday I set forth some reflections on our giant national security establishment,
and how we should think about it. I argued that one very useful way of
conceptualizing it is not as a result of politics or personality, but as
an institution, which to the first approximation is best thought of as a
mindless, amoral, and self-perpetuating primitive life form.
And by saying that, I do not mean to disparage any of the individuals
who make up those bureaucracies. I live in Washington and am friends
with many government workers who are excellent, thoughtful human beings.
But when you gather many human beings into an institution, that
institution tends to take on a life of its own. Most of the individuals
who make up the gigantic national security state are reasonably
intelligent, and many of them no doubt are exceptionally so. But when
you aggregate thousands of intelligent human minds together in a
bureaucratic organization, the ironic result is that the collective is
sometimes dumber than its individual parts. By the same token, there is
no particular reason to think that bureaucracies attract a
disproportionate number of amoral or immoral individuals—they surely
form the same bell curve as any other group of humans when it comes to
characteristics such as empathy, sensitivity, and conscience. But the
collective set of such humans can exhibit a marked quality of amorality,
as exhibited for example by the willingness of security bureaucracies
to do horrifying things such as continue to detain people at Guantanamo
who are known to pose no threat to the United States.
Complexity theorists have a concept called emergence, which
refers to the fact that when large numbers of individuals interact,
behaviors can emerge from the collectivity that do not appear to be the
predictable result of any characteristics evident in the individuals in
isolation. A classic example is the V-shaped flocking formation of
birds. A computer programmer trying to create that behavior in a flock
of virtual birds could tie herself in knots, but it turns out that if
each “bird” is programmed with just a few simple rules (“don’t crowd
your neighbors, but steer toward their average heading and position”) a
flock of simulated birds will behave in extremely complex ways
strikingly similar to the movements of real birds. That complex flocking
behavior emerges out of simple rules in ways that are not apparent on the surface.
Perhaps when individually complex and intelligent human beings are
placed together into bureaucratic organizations, they exhibit “emergent
dumbness” and “emergent amorality.”
Why would it be the case that thousands of individuals acting
together in a bureaucracy are dumber and more evil together than most or
all of them probably are individually? No doubt legions of sociologists
and political scientists have written tomes on this subject, but
without having plumbed that literature I suspect the explanations
include such things as:
- The ideology of the bureaucracy. Max Weber observed that a bureaucrat is ultimately “responsible only for the impartial execution of assigned tasks and must sacrifice his personal judgment if it runs counter to his official duties.” Insofar as the vision of a bureaucracy as a machine is embraced by its participants, they will suppress their wide-ranging human intelligences and limit their judgment and discretion accordingly. Indeed as Weber points out, they are expected to do so.
- Groupthink. The well-documented human tendencies toward conformism and “groupthink,” which can cause people to give up their critical faculties when faced with a group consensus.
- Diffusion of responsibility. This is the tendency of people not to tackle a problem when they are surrounded by other people, each of whom assumes somebody else in the crowd will surely address it so they don’t have to.
- Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy. This brilliant “law” has two parts. First, “in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: those who work to further the actual goals of the organization, and those who work for the organization itself.” Second, in every organization, it’s the people in the second category who always end up running things, while “those dedicated to the goals the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely.”
- Abstraction. When we say that most people are “ethical,” what we mean is that they are socialized to behave well to those who surround them—to the concrete human beings they encounter in the flesh. But we humans are generally not good at abstract thought, and it may be that it is the nature of bureaucracies to separate rulers from their victims, so that cruelty and bad policies become remote and abstract, breaking down the ethical training that has been carefully socialized in most modern human beings.
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1 comment:
i do not agree that the emergent state of such an agency is amoral. if immoral motivations have created, or allow to be created, an agency which has effects similar to what an agency would have were it created intentionally immoral, it is an immoral agency. immorality can be lack of action to prevent harm as easily as actively creating harm, particularly when you're acting as an authoritarian unit upon which your constituents rely.
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