The defence, “I was only following orders,” didn’t work well at Nuremberg, and hasn’t worked well in courts where the rule of law is more securely grounded. And yet, every large bureaucratic system depends on this defence, as a kind of “unspoken mantra.”
Can a mantra be unspoken? For the purposes of this column I will argue, Yes. But the argument may strike any post-Christian reader as arcane.
It is my earnest belief that the human being is endowed with a conscience, an innate understanding of right and wrong, and the ability, when that conscience is cultivated, to detect his own hypocrisies. In doing evil things, he must suppress a natural revulsion for his own acts. He must, in effect, “talk over” the angel of his better self, and keep inwardly repeating some absurd justification for the way in which he is actually behaving. This is the “unspoken mantra,” and it is a source of spiritual pain.
With me so far? Possibly not, for I have just invoked the “s” word (“spiritual”). Indeed, one of the most effective ways to shut down conscientious activity is to adopt an atheist, materialist and morally relativist worldview, in which all “spiritual” considerations may be marked as illusory, together with any such absolute concepts as “good” and “evil.” In Friedrich Nietzsche’s brilliant analysis, we have gone “beyond good and evil,” now that “God is dead.”
Already I am up against a wall. How does one argue from conscience with people who don’t think conscience exists? Or, who will allow that the word has some “psychological” meaning, but obfuscate on what it might be? For I have observed that very few of my post-Christian contemporaries are full-bore Nietzscheans, or consistent antinomians. Most people today are slovenly ones—resorting to the explicit rejection of God and any absolute non-material standards only when it is convenient to themselves, but still willing to invoke the standards when judging the behaviour of others.
So let me return to my point about bureaucracy, since it will surely make the whole point clearer. Bureaucracies operate on things called “policies,” which are settled at the top and passed down as directions. (Sometimes, however, they create themselves, or are inserted somewhere in the food chain by a con artist, or other evil genie.)
It does not matter how nice, kind, kitten-loving, democratically elected and wonderfully well-informed the policy-maker is. Or, how many beneficiaries the policy will reward. For what he designs is by definition one-size-fits-all. And like the bed of Procrustes, the machinery of state stretches or mangles every human creature whose case does not fit precisely.
Quite apart from the question of unimaginably massive waste of resources—inevitable when people are spending huge quantities of money that is not their own—there is a far more damning moral objection to bureaucratic systems. The establishment of each policy frees every member of the bureaucracy from moral responsibility for his acts.
Hence you get what I have directly experienced in countless encounters with the tax, family law, drug, hospital, veterans, pension, disability, nursing home, “human rights” and other bureaucracies, both on my own behalf and on behalf of others, over the last many years. (And never, not even once, demanding financial assistance.) It is the stone-faced functionary—nay, moral zombie—who knows perfectly well what the unjust consequences will be, to some innocent person, of following the policy of his department. And then does it anyway.
On the day of judgment, and in the presence of his accumulated victims, he will be able to say: “I was only following orders.”
Time and again we have heard politicians arguing for better policies. “Think tanks” (aptly named) are created to review them from this side or that. And it is probably true that some policies are more ruinous than others. Indeed, new policies are usually introduced to mitigate the evils of old policies, after those have been publicized. And having failed to mitigate them, the new policies then introduce evils of their own.
Inevitably. For the idea of a “humane policy” is like the old idea of “humane ammunition,” that led to the development of everything from the Dum-Dum bullet to the Taser gun. It is a contradiction of terms.
“But you can’t have a bureaucracy without policies,” I can hear a reader objecting. That reader will be on the threshold of grasping my point. Bureaucracy is the body, policy is its soul, and the whole thing is the very devil.
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