Only Love Can Do It

Observing my life so far, I'm reminded of raft trips I've taken on large western rivers. We sometimes call these "floats," because that's about all that's going on. The riverbank rolls slowly by -- grasses and trees unchanging for miles. Here and there a little rapid. A bird to admire overhead.

There are other versions of rafting -- more exciting water to run and thrills to be had. But that's not my life. Mine has been a peaceful and fairly steady float -- the scenery pleasing and serene.

But still, there are moments. Jobs are lost. Loved ones get sick. Occasionally on a long float trip you run aground or get spun around, rafting backward for a stretch. When I was 14, rafting with a friend and our dads, I went overboard, half on purpose, mostly out of boredom.

"I'm bored!" used to be the signal cry of childhood. But we've defeated boredom, along with the imagination-workouts necessitated by those long empty hours. Our political hellscape is one result. Where once stood a boring government that largely worked, we now have a carnival. Installed not by children who we might forgive for choosing funnel cakes and fortune tellers, but by adults who should know better and who we might not.

"Knowing better" is the very essence of what it means to be an adult. Unlike children, adults understand that what's experienced as boredom for an individual is actually, for society, order and continuity -- the superstructure whose principal feature is stability. Largely invisible and, until this moment, mostly taken for granted, that superstructure is what allows us to be safe and healthy so we can grow and help others to grow.

To thrive, we need to know that tomorrow is going to be like today. Basically boring.

Imagine your life under the bombardment of constant shock and disruption. All personal energy put on-call just to survive.  Housing insecurity, addiction, abuse, and of course war, are devastating because in addition to being physically dangerous, they exhaust our individual resources. Not so hard to imagine as we're getting a taste of it now, the rapids ahead looking class 3 or 4 and menacing.

The steadiness of my life-float is owed, in part, to my long work in local government, that most obdurate of institutions. Businesses mutate, merge, evolve, and tank, but government rumbles on and on. And not by accident; essential institutions like government are built to be shock-resistant -- to hold firm when disruptions come.

And come they have. This regime is distracting us and exhausting us to subjugate us. To survive, it has to convert citizens into subjects. Institutions do just the opposite. The constitution, elections, courts, public education, universities and museums help would-be subjects understand what it means to be citizens. This is the framework that teaches us how to be moral actors in a complex and sometimes threatening society. It's taken centuries to fabricate this superstructure. Every piece of it helps hold the rest of it together. The very fact of its existence is what keeps us safe. Within this edifice, children become adults.

***

Institutions are built on ideas which cannot be easily erased. But they're run people who can be, if you can make it to the top of that little-examined and ubiquitous sub-structure called Bureaucracy.

Bureaucratization occurs in nearly all organizations because it's the surest route to stability.  Command-and-control structures, they are typically organized as hierarchical pyramids. With their large base, low center of gravity and pinnacle power at the apex, pyramids are very difficult to de-form, as organizational designer Aaron Dignan has observed. "Amid a period of relentless innovation, including the internet, mobile computing, autonomous vehicles, artificial intelligence and rockets to space that can land themselves, the way we come together as human beings to solve problems and invent our future has remained remarkably constant. Almost everything has changed. But not management." If you work in an organization, you may be a boss, but you've surely got a boss. Welcome to forever.

We pay a price for this stability -- a dear one that isn't much recognized but which should be dawning on everyone now.

As complexity increases, bureaucracies grow. But they don't change shape -- the pyramid just gets larger. The authority, power and rewards for those in charge also grows, with more people and functions working beneath them. It's algorithmic. Unintelligent.

At scale, the top loses touch with the purpose of the bureaucracy and to local conditions. Those meant to be served and those committed to service are macerated in the autotelic machinery. Oppression and hubris are baked into the very structure. Oscar Wilde famously said “the bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.” Ezra Klein's new book "Abundance" is a depressing take-down of liberals who've lost all contact with the ground-plane of good government.

But here's the thing: none of this is the fault of bureaucrats who themselves are trapped under layers and layers of rules and rulers. The many below have no choice but to support the fewer above, knowing they're seen as interchangeable and expendable because of anything, really -- market shifts, AI, budget shortfalls, even the petty insecurities of a control-freak boss. Egregiously, the most important information -- visible in its particularity by those doing the work closest to the ground, has no standing higher up. Up there it's only patterns and abstractions, politics and rhetoric, frailty and impulse.

***

Such is the lament of Wendell Berry in his 1989 essay "Word and Flesh," written shortly after the Exxon Valdez spilled 37,000 tons of crude oil into Prince William Sound in three hours.  In that era, the environmental movement was using the term “planetary” -- an abstract idea if there ever was one and utterly useless to a localist like Berry. There is nothing that gores Wendell Berry’s ox more than the problem of abstraction.  

Like Chernobyl, Bhopal and Love Canal, the Exxon Valdez disaster was seen by Berry as a peacetime act of aggression caused by "experts" who knew too much about the wrong things and cared too little about the right ones. The essay builds a bridge between the spectacular violence of those accidents and the unnoticed but similarly-sourced violence that ruined his rural Kentucky home.  Each place -- Alaska, India, Kentucky -- suffers from too many distantly made policies ("words"), and not enough “flesh" -- local actions necessary to protect the places that support our lives.

Wendell’s vexation is that ideas and words can’t do the real, embodied work of stewardship.  At some point you need to get down and pull the weeds, lend your tools, check on your neighbor. He scoffs at a language that describes our environmental sins as planetary or global.  He admonishes us that abusers are not only faceless corporations and countries -- they are also the millions of us who sustain insatiable markets for cheap energy and guilt-free consumables.  The more we talk about our problems in these abstract ways without changing our lives, the farther behind we fall. What we need, he writes, are real-world examples of better communities and economies.   

Without examples, we are left with theory and bureaucracy and meddling that comes with theory.  We change our principles, our thoughts and our words, but these are changes made in the air.  Our lives go on unchanged. 

What does he mean, exactly? 

In his “dwindling” part of Kentucky, he says there are four institutions of influence: governments, corporations, schools and churches.  The first two aren’t in his town at all, “but we nevertheless feel the indifference or the contempt [they have] for [rural] communities such as ours.”  The town hasn’t had a local school since 1960, and as he’s rued for decades, the schools that educate the local children don’t do it so students can return to improve the town.  Just the opposite -- they are educated for universities that will furnish them with ideas to be applied anywhere at all.  The church is present in Wendell’s town, but only to train ministers to serve elsewhere.  

For a long time then, the minds that have most influenced our town have not been of the town and so have not tried even to perceive, much less to honor, the good possibilities that are there.  They have not wondered on what terms a good and conserving life might be lived there.

Wendell is reporting from a “frontline” community -- a place where inhabitants and landscapes have been abandoned, left to survive corporate colonization, resource extraction and an export economy. But I would argue that the institutions influencing all of our towns have put precious little intelligence toward how we might live good and conserving lives in-place.  The intelligence is there, in the organizations, but it's at the bottom of the pyramids -- in the knowledge of workers and the people they serve, learning together as they try to solve the real problems of daily life.

***

When I left my job last year, I too found myself fed up with words.  So much talk about equity and belonging.  Words that were turned into official proclamations, into plans, into posters because, hey look! they all start with the same letter!! (Excellence, Equity, Environment, Economy…)  But the place was all Word, no Flesh.  I had been bridling against it and seeking a better way for some time. My colleagues and I got out from behind our desks regularly -- into the town where we worked, helping clean up a homeless shelter, giving ice cream to folks who otherwise wouldn’t talk to us, serving dinners and making space for people who really appreciated a free dinner and shared space. 

We were doing it inside the organization as well, trying to raise the voices of those who had very local knowledge about how to build belonging.  I was pretty high up in that pyramid but was nonetheless trying for an inversion -- trying to raise up those below.  I underestimated the geometry though.  The bureaucracy is designed, remember, is to withstand de-formation.  The lower supports the higher, not the other way around.  That is a cardinal rule of institutional might and also its great flaw: command at the top rules not only over the administration, but over the economic security of every person in the administration. Bosses have the ultimate bureaucratic weapon for control and coercion. Get out of line, get shot. That's why it's called getting fired.

What’s the answer then?  How do we get the continuity and stability we need from our bureaucracies, without sacrificing the people and places they are meant to serve, or those who support the whole damn structure?  How can our institutions create the examples that Wendell rightly demands, so we can move beyond abstractions and empty words and get on with the flesh-work of strengthening communities?

There is a way, he says.  And he's the only one courageous enough to say it: Only love can do it.  

I will say again, without overweening hope but with certainty nonetheless, that only love can do it. Only love can bring intelligence out of the institutions and organizations, where it aggrandizes itself, into the presence of the work that must be done. Love is never abstract.  It does not adhere to the universe or the planet or the nation or the institution or the profession, but to the singular sparrows in the street, the lilies of the field, “the least of these my brethren.” Love is not, by its own desire, heroic. It is heroic only when compelled to be. It exists by its willingness to be anonymous, humble and unrewarded.

Which is the irony of all ironies.  Love isn’t heroic, but using love to bring organizational intelligence out of a bureaucracy into the work of service, is dangerous stuff.  It’s subversive, noble, and lonely.  It's doing what's right, consequences be damned. It doesn't always succeed. Possibly it rarely succeeds. It can get you killed, bureaucratically.

But I agree with Wendell. If we're going to save our institutions and relocalize their work, it is our only hope.

Love may not be heroic, but the people doing its work inside the pyramids most surely are.