Bureaucrats Pure as the Driven Snow

A Great Guffaw Moment

The West believes passionately in the sinlessness and perfection of man as an article of faith. At least in an abstract sense. Mocking and sneering at the Bible's declaration of universal human depravity, the West has turned from the worship of God and replaced it with a spurious reverence for man.

This deep and profound religious attachment to man, which is now the established religion of the West, is the ultimate and final expression of idolatry. When Adam and Eve rebelled against God and sinned, the Serpent acutely revealed what was the essence of the matter: in the day they ate of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil man would become like God, knowing good and evil for themselves. (Genesis 3:5)

"Primitive" cultures and civilisations were steeped in idolatry. It was an intrinsic part of the world-view. Men speculated over and created deities; they made representations of them; they bowed down to them and sacrificed to them. The truth of the Serpent's assertion lay hidden beneath the surface. Man bowing down to dumb idols does not much seem like man being as God. Yet it was. It was man who was determining for himself what gods existed, how they acted, what they were like, and how they were to be mollified and won over.

In the West, in the post-Enlightenment age, the veneer disguising the Serpent's proposition has been stripped off and tossed aside. Man has come forth asserting boldly and without shame his prerogatives to determine good and evil for himself. No longer does the modern man feel the need to genuflect to a higher power or entity in pseudo-humility. No longer does he fear retribution if he fails to do obeisance. In the West, man has grown up. There is no truth, right, wrong, or reality higher than the ratiocinations of the Western human rationalist mind.

It has finally emerged--the truth of Satan's observation about man as god. It has taken millennia, but eventually, in the West, the rebellion of man against God has reached its apogee. Man no longer feels the need to "hide" or disguise his assertion of supremacy and autonomy: he is confident enough to assert it outright. There is no entity or being higher than man. There is no god to be worshipped. There is only man. Idolatry has now reached its most consistent expression: it can go no further in terms of its overtness or the consistency of its outworking.

Another way of expressing this is to say that in the West idolatry has taken its most extreme form; the rebellion of man against God has matured to the point of succeeding in building a civilisation that is more or less consistently grounded upon the proposition that man is god. And this is a first in human history.

But just a few pesky problems remain. Whilst in the West man is now definitely in charge (at least in his own mind) Western civilization continues to be beset with a daunting array of problems ranging from disease to crime; poverty to illiteracy; credit crunches to obscene bonuses paid out to, in President Obama's words, "Wall Street fat cats". We could go on with an extensive litany of "sins" that remain part of modern experience. Man may be charge, but the old saw about lunatics running the asylum bites a bit too close to the bone.

Thus, human perfection and sinlessness must be seen as a relative concept. Some are more sinless and perfect than others it would seem. And here we come to one of the great guffaw moments of our age. In this most extreme form of idolatry, the West is forced to cast about for someone, some representation of humanity, that is more godlike who can be trusted to lead the race out of its remaining problems to its final perfect state.

In order for our extreme idolatry to maintain a veneer of credibility there must always be at least one class of human beings which has achieved a greater slice of divinity, which has risen above the petty and the petulant, which has achieved one of the key attributes of deity. This attribute is essential to lead other men in the West to their final perfected state, to an existence where manifold problems are solved once and for all. It is the attribute of absolute disinterest, of pure objectivity, which would lay aside self-interest, and act only in the interests of others, or for the good of man as a whole. Only such men and women are worthy of being trusted and believed in so as to lead all in the West to final perfection. When man is god, it will always turn out that some men are more divine than others. It is this deifying, not just of men in general, but of a specific type of man, or class of man, or individual as being more divine than others, and therefore worthy of our trust to bring man to perfection, which is the guffaw moment. It is the great joke of the age.

This uber-deifying of a certain man or class of men is so common and so intrinsic to the West that it no longer seems remarkable. It has achieved the status of being beyond debate, a truth to all intents and purposes self-evident.

Theodore Dalrymple, writing in City Journal gives us a classic rendition of this psychosis and spiritual blindness. He is writing about John Kenneth Galbraith, about whom he says many interesting things, which we will hopefully get to discuss in another post. Galbraith, of course, is probably the most lauded economist in the US in the twentieth century, and Galbraith has some very definite views about which section of Western society has achieved absolute disinterest and is godlike enough to lead the rest of us.

Dalrymple points out that Galbraith had a deep disdain for private business corporations--a disdain which is coming back into vogue. He held that the bigger and more successful a private business became, the more its management developed a bureaucratic mindset and began to look after its own interests. Clearly business managers, as a class, have not yet achieved the levels of perfection that are required of those whom we can trust. Where, then, does Galbraith place his faith?

In Galbraith's case, he places his faith firmly in government bureaucrats. Dalrymple takes up the narrative:

There remains, however, an astonishingly gaping absence in Galbraith’s worldview. While he is perfectly able to see the defects of businessmen—their inclination to megalomania, greed, hypocrisy, and special pleading—he is quite unable to see the same traits in government bureaucrats. It is as if he has read, and taken to heart, the work of Sinclair Lewis, but never even skimmed the work of Kafka.

For example, the chapter entitled “The Bureaucratic Syndrome” in his book The Culture of Contentment refers only to bureaucracy in corporations (and in the one government department he despises, the military). Galbraith appears to believe in the absurd idea that bureaucrats administer tax revenues to produce socially desirable ends without friction, waste, or mistake. It is clearly beyond the range of his thought that government action can, even with the best intentions, produce harmful effects.

And later:

Galbraith explains resistance to higher taxation thus: “It is the nature of privileged position that it develops its own political justification and often the economic and social doctrine that serves it best.” In other words, men—except for Marx and Galbraith—believe what it is in their interest to believe. It is hardly surprising that Galbraith always writes as if what he says is revealed truth and counterarguments are the desperate, last-ditch efforts of the self-interested and corrupt.

Galbraith never solved, or even appeared to notice, the mystery of how he himself could see through self-interest and arrive at disinterested truth. In general, his self-knowledge was severely limited.

But in believing as he did, Galbraith reflects the most widely held "vote" in the West for the class of men who have achieved higher states of deity and who can be trusted to lead us lesser gods into nirvana. It is the gummint. It is the state bureaucrat who is the ultimate disinterested, self-denying, other-centric human being. All these are attributes of deity. It is this breathtaking folly which makes us split our sides with laughter.

But, we are careful not to make our mirth too public. To question the higher-being-status of government functionaries comes perilously close to blasphemy in our age. Is it not self-evident that some are more human (and thereby more divine) than others? Is it not self-evident that whatever problems remain, government functionaries will deliver us from them? It is not self-evident that the more problems that arise the more functionaries we need? These things are believed by all, and are beyond dispute.

In the West we have made ourselves to be gods, knowing good and evil for ourselves. Government bureaucrats got there first. Human civilization's greatest tragic farce.