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Am I talking about Islamofascism? Good guess, but nope. President Bush's reorganization of our domestic-security system? Naah. No, this is something that affects 100 million households every day. I'm referring, of course, to the annoying fact that it's increasingly difficult to tell if the phone-ring is coming from the TV or from your actual phone. Because today's phones use electronic ringers, instead of the big metal clangers used on the rotary phones of yore, it's much more difficult to tell if the phone is actually ringing or if it's Phoebe calling Joey on Friends, oops, I mean it's hard to tell if it's Maurice calling Claudio on whatever Euro-swill they're showing on PBS these days. This is a small and fundamentally inane example of how technology can disrupt our lives in unanticipated ways. Here's
a better example I've used before: The pull of habit, tradition, human nature, and institutional inertia were so powerful it failed to occur to anyone for years to question the fact that there were no longer any horses to hold. There had always been five men to an artillery team and even if two of the men were no longer needed to quiet the horses, no one was prepared to question a system that had served them well for more than a generation. I found this story in Robert Nisbet's amazing Prejudices: A Philosophical Dictionary (one of my absolute favorite books). It appears in the chapter on "Social Change," in which Nisbet observes that "Persistence, fixity, and the clutching gratefully for habit and convention lie in all areas of thought and action." Further on he adds, "Habit and convention are so native to human beings, as to every other organism, because all behavior is purposive and adaptive. It is aimed at the solution of problems which beset the person or organization from the environment or from within." But sometimes a tradition or habit can outlive the necessity it was designed to satisfy, like with the nonexistent horse-holders. And perhaps no institution is a better example of this phenomenon than bureaucracies — as Tom Ridge and George W. Bush are about to discover. Bureaucracies are invariably created to solve real problems and invariably last longer than the problems they were created to solve. And, because bureaucracies were quite literally designed by Germans to take individual human judgment out of the process, they become self-perpetuating. This tendency prompted Nisbet to open his chapter on bureaucracy by writing, "this is the new despotism. In America, bureaucracy has become the fourth branch of government, threatening to emasculate each of the other three — executive, legislative, and judicial… while it lies like a heavy blanket over society, suffocating more and more of the freedoms and rights the constitution was framed to protect." The three most successful, though hardly surefire, means for defeating the dead weight of stifling habit typified by bureaucracies are war, technology, and discovery. War, obviously, is the justification for reshuffling the "Homeland Security" bureaucracies. Whether it will be successful depends on political guile and on whether or not there will be more war. And, of course, on luck. After all, certain libertarians and conservatives are fond of noting that some wars feed the tumor of bureaucratic government rather than shrink it. The Cold War bloated the national security state, again obviously. Indeed, there's something called Parkinson's Law, named after a British historian who stumbled on a depressing observation. As the British navy declined in size, with fewer ships and sailors, the bureaucracy which managed it exploded. In 1914, there were 4,366 officials running the biggest navy in the world. In 1967 there were 33,000 bureaucrats tending to a navy which had reportedly vanished. The second, not-quite-silver bullet is technology. New technologies can be juggernauts, rolling over customs and traditions. This is why, for example, I keep saying that the automobile did more damage to "traditional values" than Nietzsche ever did. But, while we can argue with Nietzsche's ideas, we can't argue with the Buick. Okay, the Left thinks it can, but note how stupid they look when they try. Technology changes society profoundly because it undermines the necessity that sired so many traditions. It's more difficult to keep families together in part because life is too convenient. When children were indispensable laborers, and food took all day to prepare, the tradition of the family dinner hour was easy to maintain. Today — when a kid is a trophy and can microwave his dinner in 30 seconds — it's more difficult to sustain the tradition. The current debate over cloning and genetic engineering is so intense because such technologies threaten to overturn not just human habit, but the human nature from which it is born. But that's a conversation for another time. When it comes to bureaucracy, however, technological innovation isn't always successful. A century from now, someone will describe the age we live in as a time when the Internet waged war on bureaucracy and tradition. One need look only at the hysteria created whenever someone proposes taxing or regulating the Internet. Sales over the web cannot be taxed, we are told, because the Internet is "different." Public libraries, which didn't arouse constitutional ire for banning or regulating pornographic movies and magazines, we are now informed must be allowed to provide unrestricted access to Internet porn — because the Internet is "different." Consumers bitch and moan about paying for magazines and articles that come through their desktops because, they tell us, the Internet is different. Well, the Internet isn't that different. But it is that new. And its novelty inspires us to question the absurdity or validity of social and governmental habit in much the same way World War II finally made someone ask why those two guys were just standing there next to the artillery guns. Obviously, I think it's staggeringly idiotic that we should not be able to ban porn in libraries if it's manifested in the form of ones and zeroes, but can if it arrives on wood pulp. But, in general, it is hard to dispute that the Internet has helped unclog more than a few legal and bureaucratic arteries. And then there's the last trump card: discovery. We haven't had much discovery lately. Oh, sure, we've had lots of scientific discovery — the sort of stuff that leads to new medicines and gizmos. But that falls under the rubric of technology. I'm talking about real, old-fashioned discovery. During the Age of Exploration we discovered the New World, we discovered rivers and lakes and mountains — and the people who'd discovered them first, truth be told. But the point remains that for a couple of centuries there, the world changed, and changed fast. Especially in the New World, there was plenty of room for tradition but little for bureaucracy. There was room for habit, but also, always, an expectation that habit alone might not be up to the task of solving every problem you confronted. This weird hybrid of tradition and problem-solving manifested itself first and best in America. The colonies were so distant from the Old World, in terms of geography but also in terms of the habits of the heart, that a new nationality was eventually born and given a country. The Founding Fathers created a system that understood the need for both traditional authority and individual freedom. It informed the American character, rooting it simultaneously in moral tradition and a pioneering spirit. The immigrants who came later brought with them a similar attitude, which recognized what was good about the Old World, but also recognized that the Old World was stagnant with bad habits. It is no surprise that in America, bureaucracy and big government exploded after the frontier closed. I'm already deep in oversimplification land, I know, but one reason for this, I think, stemmed from the effect a closed frontier had on the American imagination. Only a fraction of Americans were pioneers, but it was an ideal that informed how many people saw themselves as Americans. Which gets us, finally, to Mars, which was supposed to be the point of this column from the get-go (but this Bush reorganization thing got bureaucracy on my brain, I guess). Yesterday, I wrote a slightly tongue-in-cheek column about why feminists should be in favor of going to Mars. This got me thinking about how much our culture could use some good old-fashioned exploration. How many bad habits — in academia, in government, in society in general — could be pushed aside by exciting news from the Martian colonies? How much more petty and silly would the backward and crapulent regimes of the Middle East appear in the rearview mirrors of our rocket ships? How gloriously dispirited would the hate-sweating oil-peddlers be when they realized how irrelevant they are to the story of humanity? While reading further, I reread the excellent piece by Glenn Reynolds and Dave Kopel on why we must repeal the restrictions created by world bureaucrats who want outer space to be less of a new frontier and more a U.N. conference room, and it occurred to me that the bureaucracy had, in a sense, already identified the threat posed by Mars and taken out an insurance policy against it. And here I am, having ranted too long about something I had no plan to write about at all and too late for a lunch appointment in the process. So, let me sum up for those who've endured this tirade by quoting from Total Recall: "Get your ass to Mars." |
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t's
a big problem few of us anticipated. It sneaked up on us, like something
really quiet on a very soft substance. (Sorry: My metaphor/analogy generator
is making a strange topockata-topackata-fzzzt-sprt sound this morning,
like a coin-operated dialysis machine running on Canadian quarters, woops
there it goes.) It should have been obvious, but it sailed over our heads
like a Frisbee thrown to Robert Reich (now it's humming). 
