Why bureaucracies trend towards evil

A brief McGilchristian thought about Rotherham, the Post Office and the Church of England's problems with safeguarding

What do Rotherham Borough Council, the Post Office, and the present-day Church of England have in common? They have all participated in the maintenance of significant evil. I want to briefly explore why, using some of the language of the hemispheres, after McGilchrist. In sum, all three institutions – and they are not the only ones – have fallen prey to what I call 'left hemisphere capture', and this inevitably trends towards evil.

The Rotherham situation is by now well understood, and was most fully exposed in the Casey report, which concluded that the council was 'not fit for purpose'. In brief, the council had systematically 'not paid attention' to the extent of child sexual abuse going on in the town, and had indeed sought to punish those who were trying to deal with the problem, normally by accusing them of racism. The Post Office scandal is garnering a much higher profile now (PTL) but has the same institutional pattern: a refusal to recognise that something has gone wrong and a desire to punish those who are pointing out that something has gone wrong. With the Church of England the specific issue has been that of safeguarding, and the way in which the Church keeps digging itself ever deeper into a black hole by its refusal to accept the nature of what has gone wrong. Apologies and 'lessons learned' reviews that don't address those roots are just not good enough, and in the meantime the leadership shelters behind dragons – hardly auspicious for a Christian institution! Bring back St George!

The pattern is of a group that seeks to control a situation when an anomaly arises (ie the group is losing control). The anomaly threatens the self-understanding of the group, most especially it threatens the sense of the group that, not only does it have the right understanding of reality but that it is the only group that does so. Worst of all, there is a sense of moral self-righteousness involved, in other words, those that disagree with the group are not just mistaken, they are morally wrong in their mistaken-ness.

These are all the hallmarks of the left hemisphere of the brain, what McGilchrist calls the Emissary. A quick recap (or see the RSA video here) – the left hemisphere is responsible for 'grasping', of both objects and concepts, it is most closely associated with the will and the exercise of influence over the environment; the right hemisphere is responsible for our engagement with reality and with other people, and is most closely associated with our 'creative' side, music and poetry. Most crucially for my purposes here it is the right hemisphere that is responsible for 'theory of mind', our sense of what another person might be experiencing and feeling – and autism is characterised by the non-functioning of the right hemisphere in this sense.

The trouble with the left hemisphere is that it follows rules, and what is not considered in the rules doesn't exist. It's not that the left-hemisphere knows that there are things outside of the rules and doesn't pay attention to them, it's that the left hemisphere doesn't conceive that anything can be outside of the rules. McGilchrist normally uses the metaphor of a 'hall of mirrors' to describe this phenomenon. What this gives rise to, most especially when this approach is institutionalised, is Kafkaesque terror. The systems of power develop in ways that have an increasing detachment from what is humanly important. As 'what gets measured gets done' this approach fosters the development of bureaucracies that become self-sustaining, that generate work for internal purposes without any regard to external effectiveness. Worse, it leads to dependency on models at the expense of empirical data, which the left hemisphere perspective then tries to justify in ways that are 'overconfident and prone to bullshit'. Then, in response to criticism, or simply friction between the left hemisphere perspective and emerging reality, it responds with anger (the only emotion that is mainly located in the left hemisphere). Those who are suffering are not seen, and their existence is repudiated, for their existence is itself existentially threatening.

So in Rotherham the whistle-blowers were denounced as racists and hounded out of their jobs. With the Post Office scandal the sub-Postmasters were decried as dishonest fiddlers and prosecuted. With the Church the abuse victims are regarded as trouble-makers working through their own issues with authority and they have been discarded by the roadside because they are inconvenient.

The only solution to the toxic bureaucracy that results from left hemisphere capture is to cultivate a direct awareness of reality. If that isn't undertaken voluntarily then the consequence is the imposition of reality from outside the bubble, ie the assertion of the Master (right hemisphere). In the Rotherham case that took the form of central government; in the Post Office it takes the form of the judicial process. In the case of the Church? Well, that's God's job – and Hosea 4.1-9 comes to mind.

How can we cultivate a direct awareness of reality voluntarily, so as to avoid disaster? Oh that's simple. It's called prayer. It's such a pity that the Church of England has forgotten how to pray!