{Burbs} The Utopia of Rules

Title: The Utopia of Rules
Author: David Graeber
Year First Published: 2015

The biggest problem I had with this book is that I couldn't underline it. Libraries are honestly just about the closest thing that we have to magic (obviously the closest thing is the postal service--an opinion I've held for a long time and one that, coincidentally, Graeber addresses in this book, but more on that later), but the one thing you can't do with non-digital library books is underline them. So at last, it would seem, I have found something useful about ebooks versus physical books: you are actually able to underline or bookmark a borrowed ebook, and nobody will ever give you a nasty look for it.

As with his somewhat better known tome, Debt: The First 5,000 Years, Graeber is tackling social structures that we don't often look at, from a perspective that we don't often think of. Admittedly, most of us aren't anarchist anthropologists (which is a pretty badass-sounding combination of words, btw), so that's hardly surprising. But also, most people don't busy themselves thinking much about bureaucracy, except maybe how much they hate it, and even then, they mostly just resign themselves to the whole thing.

Oh right, so we're three paragraphs in, and I haven't even made this clear yet, because I'm not a very good book reviewer. This book is all about bureaucracy. Why we love it, why it makes us stupid, and how it is fundamentally rooted in violence.

In case you think I'm joking about that last bit, we come to our first quote:

In contemporary industrialized democracies, the legitimate administration of violence is turned over to what is euphemistically referred to as "criminal law enforcement"--particularly, to police officers. I say "euphemistically" because generations of police sociologists have pointed out that only a very small proportion of what police actually do has anything to do with enforcing criminal law--or with criminal matters of any kind. Most of it has to do with regulations, or, to put it slightly more technically, with the scientific application of physical force, or the threat of physical force, to aid in the resolution of administrative problems. In other words they spend most of their time enforcing all those endless rules and regulations about who can buy or smoke or sell or build or eat or drink what where that don't exist in places like small-town or rural Madagascar.

So: Police are bureaucrats with weapons.

A case in point that was possibly too recent to have included in this book when it was submitted for publication: Eric Garner. How do you go from maybe selling individual cigarettes to being choked to death on the sidewalk by a New York police officer? See the above.

Or here's another situation, not to do with race (necessarily--although there's probably a racially disparate impact): police are often called in to deal with people manifesting serious mental health issues. Sometimes they are called in when those people in fact have committed a crime, and if you follow the Southern Poverty Law Center on Facebook, you'll quickly learn what the statistics are on mental illness, prisons, and--surprise, surprise--lack of treatment coupled with institutionalized procedures that may contribute to further deteriorating mental health. Sometimes it's just crazy Michelle in the court yard, building a box tent in the rain, and she's obviously not okay, but they're not really going to do anything either way, and it raises the question: why are the police the people we're calling in that situation? Because we're afraid of "crazy" people and need to be protected from them, just in case? Because Michelle needs to be protected from herself? (I don't know how much this proves Graeber's point, but I figured it was worth bringing up in relation to that, if only to stir some thoughts)

Post offices. I promised, now let me deliver. This book happens to be a collection of three longer essays (at least one appears to have begun life as a lecture, actually, but close enough) and a fourth shorter piece that was an expanded article critiquing The Dark Knight Rises for its clumsy handling of current affairs and developing the relations among superheroes, the far right and the radical left. The third essay, for which the book is named, deals in part with the tension between "play," here understood as a kind of free, chaotic creativity and productivity, and "games," which are transparently rule-bound and can only produce a limited range of results.

[...] Bureaucracy enchants when it can be seen as a species of what I've called poetic technology, that is, one where mechanical forms of organization, usually military in their ultimate inspiration, can be marshaled to the realization of impossible visions: to create cities out of nothing, scale the heavens, make the desert bloom. For most of human history this kind of power was only available to the rulers of empires or commanders of conquering armies, so we might even speak here of a democratization of despotism. Once, the privileged waving of one's hand and having a vast invisible army of cogs and wheels organize themselves in such a way as to bring your whims into being was available only to the very most privileged few; in the modern world, it can be subdivided into millions of tiny portions and made available to everyone able to write a letter, or to flick a switch.

Graeber traces the development of the postal service in both its German and its American incarnations, although primarily the German. As a sort of marvelous tidbit of history, the German postal service was such an astonishingly successful top-down enterprise that it was arguably an inspiration for Lenin. It took a military requisite and turned it into a civilian necessity.

Arguably, the postal service is a bureaucratic sort of institution. But, as suggested by the above quotation, it's the sort of institution that has results which are anything but dull and trivial. We often get irritated when our packages don't arrive on time or get held up or get lost in the mail. And in our frustrations over what doesn't happen, we lose sight of just how wondrous it is that an Etsy seller in Bulgaria or Thailand can ship something to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and 99% of the time (probably/maybe better), it actually arrives just like it's supposed to. We're not quite at the pneumatic tubes shooting letters throughout Berlin in 1873 when it comes to magical delivery methods, but the postal service itself is a bit of wonder that has somehow worked its way into the gray background of our everyday life.

Actually, I say "somehow," but Graeber has an argument about that too, saying that the postal service got its tarnished reputation from a very deliberate conservative smear campaign in the second half of the 20th century, in an attempt to show how governments should not be in charge of such enterprises. Plus, now we have the Internet, 9,000 messaging apps (I personally have four on my phone, and five if you count the messaging feature on Instagram -- WHY??), and email, so sending things at the speed of light by dissolving them into 1s and 0s admittedly may have stolen whatever glamour remained.

There is so much more in this book, but it's almost my bedtime and I have to return said book to the library tomorrow, so that's all you're getting. I found it to be highly accessible and engaging, and I liked the bits about Madagascar (if for some reason David Graeber ever were to read this, I'm apologize to him for damning his PhD research with such faint praise--mea culpa, I know nothing of what I speak). I highly recommend both this book and Debt (which I haven't finished yet, because it's 500 pages long and I have the ebook version -- yet another advantage that real books have over ebooks: I find the long ones much easier to read as a physical copy), at the very least to look at everything from a different angle and to maybe compel you to consider that the world doesn't have to be the way that it is, in spite of all attempts to convince us of its predestinated inevitability. If, like me, you're sympathetic to some of the more political aspects and also loathe the meaninglessness of most labor in the 21st century, then you should definitely read it, because you might weirdly end up with a "smidgen" of hope in the middle of your existential despair.