As I was going up the stair –

Somewhere, somehow, in my wanderings around the web, I followed a link to this New Yorker News Desk post from Jane Mayer.

There is also a less famous observation by [Hannah] Arendt, made in The New York Review of Books in the wake of the protests of 1968 and shared with me by Georgetown Law professor David Luban, that captures the problem faced by the Obama Administration in its attempt to hold the right officials accountable. She calls it the “rule by Nobody.” Attorney General Eric Holder is stuck trying to investigate an entire bureaucracy. Those on the top can claim to have clean hands, while those on the bottom can claim they were following ostensibly legal orders. What’s left, Arendt suggests, is an all-powerful government that is beyond accountability.

The Arendt article in question, Reflections on Violence, was published in the New York Review of Books in 1968, and the quotation Mayer had in mind was this:

These definitions coincide with the terms which, since Greek antiquity, have been used to define the forms of government as the rule of man over man—of one or the few in monarchy and oligarchy, of the best or the many in aristocracy and democracy, to which today we ought to add the latest and perhaps most formidable form of such dominion, bureaucracy, or the rule by an intricate system of bureaux in which no men, neither one nor the best, neither the few nor the many, can be held responsible, and which could be properly called the rule by Nobody. Indeed, if we identify tyranny as the government that is not held to give account of itself, rule by Nobody is clearly the most tyrannical of all, since there is no one left who could even be asked to answer for what is being done. It is this state of affairs which is among the most potent causes for the current world-wide rebellious unrest.

Intrigued, I went to read the whole article and discovered further disturbing thoughts on bureaucracy:

Finally, the greater the bureaucratization of public life, the greater will be the attraction of violence. In a fully developed bureaucracy there is nobody left with whom one could argue, to whom one could present grievances, on whom the pressures of power could be exerted. Bureaucracy is the form of government in which everybody is deprived of political freedom, of the power to act; for the rule by Nobody is not no-rule, and where all are equally powerless we have a tyranny without a tyrant. . . . Huge party machines have succeeded everywhere to overrule the voice of the citizens, even in countries where freedom of speech and association is still intact.

What it seems to me we have in this country this summer, with our town “hell” meetings and our tea party demonstrations, is a great frustration at government where nobody is, finally, responsible. What we have is institutions too big to fail, but faceless, so that no one can be held accountable to the ordinary citizen who loses his/her job or home. We have a healthcare system so complicated nobody understands it and plans to fix it that are so amorphous and ill-defined that tales of death-panels can thrive. We have a shadowy external enemy nobody can find, let alone fight, and a national security apparatus that, when it is not looking like a pack of Keystone Cops, has committed atrocities for which they claim there are no perpetrators. The buck stops nowhere.

For more on the out-of-control security apparatus, see Garry Wills “Entangled Giant.”

To continue Arendt:

What makes man a political being is his faculty to act. It enables him to get together with his peers, to act in concert, and to reach out for goals and enterprises which would never enter his mind, let alone the desires of his heart, had he not been given this gift—to embark upon something new. All the properties of creativity ascribed to life in manifestations of violence and power actually belong to the faculty of action. And I think it can be shown that no other human ability has suffered to such an extent by the Progress of the modern age.

For progress, as we have come to understand it, means growth, the relentless process of more and more, of bigger and bigger. The bigger a country becomes in population, in objects, and in possessions, the greater will be the need for administration and with it, the anonymous power of the administrators.

Sounds a lot like where we are now.

Possibly related posts:

I met a man who wasn’t there

“I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality.”

National Healthcare

Katrina + 4

Metric integration

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