Trust in Civil Service

Last week President Obama nominated Merck Garland, Chief Judge of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, to the Supreme Court of the Unites States. After the President announced the nomination in the White House Rose Garden, Judge Garland was given a few minutes to speak. It was a simple speech. Garland introduced himself, spoke of his family, his personal background, his philosophy of service, his approach to adjudication. It was a very abridged auto-biography delivered by a modest man, a mere whisper in the public discourse against the backdrop of a provocative and spectacular campaign season. And yet many found the speech quite moving. Garland shows marvelous candor. Here we witness a man of great ability reaching his highest professional accomplishment, and there is not a single note of pride or ambition in his reaction. I think achievement must be sweeter to those who have devoted their lives to service. It justifies all of the sacrifice, invalidates all of the doubts with which you wrestled getting to where you are. It is vindication. I think Judge Garland must be an unusual embodiment of the best parts of Plato’s tripartite soul: the merging of logistikon and thymoedes, the logical and spirited soul, which when aligned strengthens one to virtue, making you a creature of duty and higher purpose.
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Putting aside praise for a moment, I would like to examine more closely how Judge Garland characterizes his career in public service. Describing his work on the bar and bench, he repeatedly cites this value of trust-building. He talks about winning the trust of his witnesses as a prosecutor, not in him necessarily but in the rule of law. Of his prosecution of the Oklahoma City bombing, he speaks of the sense of responsibility he felt to restore the trust in the victims that the system will protect them and will respond justly. I think Garland’s statements can be summarized as follows: it is necessary in a just and orderly society that people trust their government, and that those individuals who make up the government do everything in their power to cultivate and sustain the trust of the people. To me, this has to be the driving principle of public service. More than investment in the common good or protection of markets or advancement of national interests, a government must first and foremost produce a stable platform of inextricable law and social order that can support all of the varied and diffusive activities of the nation. And that platform must be firm and consistent and utterly unassailable, and the people must trust that it is so. I think anyone working in civil service or in any other public interest capacity should constantly be asking her or himself, is what I am doing promoting trust among the people in their government and in the social system more broadly? Because this should be the primary concern of any government. Some would argue that this is all government should ever aspire to do. I’ll not go so far as to say that the government cannot be a positive force for change in society, but before it can even begin to be that, it must first create a degree of tranquility which would foster profit, progress, and improvement derived from the people. Not only would I call this the highest purpose of government, I would also suggest that it is what government is best at doing. No other entity in society is better positioned than government to preserve the public trust. In government you have a powerful and ubiquitous force whose only motive is to promote the public good. Now that isn’t to say those who control and carry out the business of government cannot abuse its systems for their own personal profit. But government itself, as a body, does not seek profit. It sets out only to enrich the people whom it serves. This makes it a unique manifestation of human community: an executive organization that is not ruled by profit motive but by the sacred requirement to maintain order and protect civil rights. Now, the fact that the defining principle of democratic government is one of reservation rather than action probably does place limits on what a state can plausibly be expected to accomplish. As we’ve seen time and again, the state falters when it is made to lead the people to social change or when it is compelled to carry out some utopian vision of its leaders. Government is not flexible or nimble. It cannot pivot to adapt to changing circumstances. It will never be an agent of change or disruption. But it shouldn’t have to be. Government is a regular, reliable, policy-driven, rules-based collection of unprofitable but incredibly necessary and useful services. We can look to business, labor, or the academy for the novel or the revolutionary. We turn to government when we need something to be permanent and lasting. And yes, this makes government boring and predicable, but that is why we rest our trust upon it, as the bedrock that underlies everything we do, the ballast the keeps everything upright. Such a government succeeds when it is guided by steady hands and a quite kind of leadership. Judge Garland is a crowning example of what a model civil servant should look like. We should be thankful that there were so many like him who came before, and do everything we can to ensure that there will be more like him in the future.

Frontier Libraries

This past week at work I was reviewing some Colorado territorial laws that we just recently digitized and I found this great one from the 1872 about the establishment of the first public libraries. Apparently what happened was each little mining town would set up a fund where they would put all of the money collected from violators of the place’s the vice laws (it says any penal ordinance, but that was pretty much all there was in the way of municipal law back then), and they would use that fund to purchase books for the town library. So, as you might imagine, a lot of these towns ended up having really nice libraries.

The old jail in Telluride. Built in 1885, it began as the town’s library.

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Reading these old session laws, one gets a sense of how these frontier people were essentially building a civilization from scratch. The Native American tribes in the area certainly had a social order, and I think during the early half of the 19th century when white people, trappers mostly, first began entering Colorado that’s what was used. Trade, war, friendship, and kinship were conducted in the Indian way, because it was a tried and proven system. But when people began doing other things in the region besides hunting and subsistence farming, an entirely new complex of rules and norms had to be devised. As evidenced by the strength of their laws and the prosperous communities they built, those early Coloradans did not fail at what they set out to do.

The Demise of the Productive Classes

In a previous post, I described the European aristocracy’s fading relevance during the 19th century. I characterized this decline as a cultural shift, perpetuated by changing attitudes toward social roles and class following the Age of Enlightenment. I do not disavow this claim, but I must concede that really the more influential factors were economic. The development of industrial production in European cities caused an absolute explosion of capital which propelled the productive classes into a place of sudden prominence. With their fortunes still tied to the land and to agricultural output the aristocracy largely missed out on the industrial boom. Thus their wealth and power were eventually eclipsed by that of a new enterprising class which was more interested in generating new capital rather than protecting old. This was the bourgeois revolution, an age when society ceased to be ordered around obedience to traditional authority and transitioned instead into an organized system in which individuals conformed to capital markets to discover and exploit opportunities for new production. It should sound familiar because it is our own age. It is the dawn of modernity, industrial development and the rise of market capitalism. As for the old order, it was swept aside in the tumult and allowed to burn itself out in quite resignation.

The lesson to be learned is that class systems change, often very rapidly; sometimes in violent revolution, sometimes as a symptom of changing economic conditions. Ostensibly, our modern class system has progressed has not progressed much beyond what it was following the overthrow of the Ancien Régime. Our society is still ordered around property ownership, market exchange and obedience to law. According to Marx this is “the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie,” invented for the growth of capital and freely expressed productivity. And like all systems it follows the same pattern of ascent and decline. Marx predicted that the bourgeois order would be toppled by the proletariat and that the working classes would rise up to supplant the owning classes, in the same way that the owning classes wrested control away from the noble class. It would seem history has not played out that way, not exactly. In fact, one could argue it is the working classes which have been marginalized over the course of modern history and have gradually been rendered irrelevant. The cause of this unexpected turn of events is 1: automation of work processes and 2: globalization of capital. Productivity within the world’s post-industrial economies is derived from mechanized labor; this has been the primary reason productivity has continued increasing in the industrialized world even though population growth has more or less stalled out. Outside of the post-industrial economies, traditional industry and human labor remain relevant and continue to escalate, but the effect this has on core capitalist economies is such that industrial labor vanishes. Slavoj Zizek explains our current economic milieu quite nicely in this article from The New Left Review:

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How else should we conceive the connexion between the two mega-powers, the United States and China, for example? They relate to each other more and more as Capital and Labour. The US is turning into a country of managerial planning, banking, servicing etc., while its ‘disappearing working class’ (except for migrant Chicanos and others who mainly toil in the service economy) is reappearing in China, where a large proportion of American goods, from toys to electronic hardware, are manufactured in ideal conditions for capitalist exploitation: no strikes, little safety, tied labour, miserable wages. Far from being merely antagonistic, the relationship of China and US is actually also symbiotic. The irony of history is that China is coming to deserve the title of a ‘working class state’: it is turning into the state of the working class for American capital. (“Why We All Love to Hate Heider“)

Of course, there are still masses of people in the core economies that require employment and ever greater quantities of capital floating around those economies that require spending. Consequently we see the formation of vast service sectors which emerge out of the market to cater to that thin layer of citizenry who still has money to toss at it. But where does the wealth of the rich originate? Certainly not from the generation of capital. This is wealth derived from a rentier economy. There was a time when people became rich by extracting raw resource from the earth and refining them into manufactured products. The main driving force of the old industrial economy was creation of capital goods (goods used to create more goods). Industry supported industry and the primary aim of industry was to expand productive capacity. Now industry functions to support a sprawling consumer economy which seems to just feed on itself in a recursive fashion: people go to work to buy goods which other people go to work to make so that they themselves can buy goods that still some more people went to work to make and so on and so on. I think we can interpret this state of events as indication that we live in an age of obvious decline. The question then becomes where will we go once this decline has damaged our social fabric so thoroughly that the forces which keep everything together dissolve and change becomes inevitable? So far we’ve witnessed an increasingly exaggerated stratification of wealth—completely to be expected, I think—and lately it seems that mass unemployment will be another manifestation of the transition. But these are not final outcomes; they are transformational occurrences. I think there is something else in store for us. I haven’t a clue what.

Reconfiguration After the Fall

There was never any interregnum in Europe following the fall of Rome in the 5th century. The old provinces were claimed and then fought over by the barbarian warlords who overran the empire and occupied its cities. The Visigoths settled in Spain, the Ostrogoths Italy, and the Franks took Gaul. As I mentioned in my last post, the leaders of these new kingdoms had begun as foederati of Rome. With the sudden withdrawal of imperial power, local chieftains arose and proclaimed themselves guardians of the old order. They legitimized their claim to leadership by associating themselves with the memory of Roman authority. They imitated the Roman manner of governance, partly because it was effective but mostly because it was revered and commonly obeyed. However, it was only an imitation. Men like Clovis and Odoacer were probably not interested in reconstructing the highly developed social order of the Roman Empire. They simply wanted to stay in power and pacify and increasingly volatile populace. From descriptions of the time we know that theft and manslaughter were regular occurrences in almost all echelons of society in 5th century Europe. Gregory of Tours recounts in his Historia Francorum a seemingly unending procession of feuds, skirmishes and crimes of retribution. He describes church officials trying offenders and issuing verdicts, same as the Roman magistrates had done, but with no force with which to execute its will, the church’s decisions were ignored. The fall of the Roman Empire and the ensuing collapse of civic order is typified by two main developments: 1 – People relying far less on centralized authority to settle social matters and instead seeing to their own protection and security by allying with their neighbors; 2 – Hundreds of thousands of people migrating out of the cities to work the land. Without a functioning economy to move commodities around, urban life became impossible. Trade vanished and subsistence farming became the norm. Out of these conditions a new collective order took shape that was wed to the land and relied on personal obligations between individuals and families as a means of determining social roles.
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Threshold of Order in Traffic Systems

The video above captures a typical flow pattern on a typical street in Hyderabad, India. An opening in the median allows vehicles in the top lane to turn across the opposite lane to reach a side street. The seemingly blind intentionality of the turning drivers and the disinclination of oncoming traffic to stop for them is startling. It drives up the blood pressure a little bit to watch it. I’ve heard that there’s a shared, though intermittently observed, system of right-of-way that prevails on dense, chaotic Indian streets like this one. Perhaps its only legend; I think I learned it from the Youtube comments section, but apparently larger vehicles are given precedence over smaller vehicles. This is for the very pragmatic reason that in the instance of an accident a bus or a delivery truck will cause quite a lot more damage than a motorcycle. Essentially, the more dangerous your vehicle the more likely others are to defer to you on the street. So even in the mess of Madrassi traffic, there is a system of public safety in place that it works most of the time, though not as often as the efficient, organized systems found in protestant Christian countries where obedience to the common rule is unquestioned and everyone is willing to respect everyone else’s turn.

This next video is also quite harrowing. It was taken from a helmet-mounted camera worn by someone who is participating in a bike messenger race through the heart of Manhattan. The cyclists thread their way through different lanes of traffic, cutoff pedestrians in crosswalks, and stare down oncoming traffic at every intersection.

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Certainly this journey through New York City very closely resembles the dizzying trajectories of the rickshaw peddlers in the Hyderabad video. There is, however, one important distinction between the two. The people in the India traffic video are continually re-establishing a new set of rules with one another which will allow them all to reach their destinations quickly and safely. As new people arrive in the intersection new demands are placed on the system, and the system then has to adjust itself to accommodate its new constituents. We see constant improvisation exercised by everyone involved. Rules are made and broken and remade again, and this process of rule-making and rule-breaking is collaborative. Contrast this with the example of the Manhattan bike race: cyclists encounter a fixed system of rules (cars remain in their lanes, they stop at stoplights, pedestrians enter the street only in designated areas, motorists wishing to turn left against several lanes of traffic remain out of the intersection until signaled to go). Because of the reliability/rigidity of the urban American traffic system, the cyclists are able to safely predict how everyone they encounter will behave. The predictability allows them to construct a plan of action far ahead of time without having to reconstruct that plan abruptly and all subsequent decision thereafter.

I think this proves that in the consistency of reliable order lies the very key to its own undoing. The better one can calculate an outcome, the easier it is for that outcome to be manipulated or circumvented or, to call it as it is called today, hacked. The Manhattan bike messengers and the Hyderabad rickshaw drivers might share precarious circumstances which closely remember one another, but they are really nothing alike. The bike messengers are exploiting a system of order and trying to operate outside of it, at its margins. The drivers in Hyderabad, on the other hand, convene in the middle of the street and together negotiate a system that accounts for everyone present. There is no subverting such a system. It will accommodate you, even when you actively try to defy it.

Towers of Bologna

The towers of Asinelli and Garisenda are all that remains of the one hundred and eighty spires that crowned the city of Bologna during the Middle Ages. Wealthy Bolognese families built these towers to defend themselves amid the constant strife that characterized central Italian city life some 600 years after the sack of Rome. Bologna was claimed by the Pope and had no king or lord to govern it. In the absence of a state power and any kind of stable social order, the citizens of Bologna feuded with each other for control over the city. The towers probably began as strong stone insulas with battlements at the top where family guards would fling stones and arrows at enemies below. The towers likely grew with each successive generation to reflect the family’s comparative power and stature within the community. The towers of Bologna grew out of extraordinary ground: it was a place of great concentrated wealth but was also almost completely lawless.

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Medieval Bologna must have looked incredible to visitors from abroad. The building of castles was outlawed everywhere else in the Holy Roman Empire, and what construction there was would have been in wood. Italy must have seemed distinctly urban, with stores and workshops and people living in multi-story buildings. Where most medieval Europeans lived beneath thatch roofs made from grasses and mud which they had themselves collected, Italian rain fell on clay shingles manufactured many towns away. The mason and artisan classes survived the fall of the empire and endured through the Dark Ages. Italians continued building cities, even when there were no resources available to reliably do so. Even today, most Italians live in high-rise apartment blocks. Rural farm workers have apartments in town and commute to their fields in the morning. Most of what we think of as urban life is an invention of medieval and renaissance Italy.