Of Dinosaurs, Byzantines, and Bureaucrats

The above words are pejoratives, words used to describe something with disdain or contempt. We might refer to people who can't change as dinosaurs, or complex systems as Byzantine, or processes we think are pointless as bureaucratic. The problem is, that when we use pejoratives like this, we can disclose conscious and unconscious bias at best, prejudice at worst.

Take dinosaurs - unable to change, right? Completely wrong. Dinosaurs came onto the scene about 240 million years ago, and they've never really gone away, birds are essentially avian dinosaurs - they are the therapods that survived the extinction event at the end of the cretaceous. Dinosaurs are then far from being unable to change, they are one of the most successful groups that has ever walked the earth. When you call someone a dinosaur, all you're really doing is paying them a compliment, an incredibly weird compliment, but a compliment none the less.

Byzantine, often used to describe a system that is overly complicated. I can see why people might think that of what we call the Byzantines, but this is really a reflection of the incredibly complex environs in which the empire found itself. In reality the capital of the Roman territories that didn't fall in the 5th century, and which lasted until the 15th century. The continuation of best part of 2,000 years of cultural identity. What western Europe calls the rediscovering, the renaissance, is kicked off when Constantinople falls in the 15th century, and scholars flee west. Western Europe didn't rediscover anything, it merely learned from what others conserved.

This geopolitical entity survived through a complex network of alliances and militaristic interventions. Was it complex? Yes. Was it more complex than any other geopolitical entity of it's time? Not really, it was larger, and with it go scales of complexity. So what defines Byzantines? Excellent diplomacy, brilliant geopolitical management, incredible architecture, the conservation of culture, and a knack for survival. Not shabby.

Bureaucrats. Administrators. They do more or less the same thing. They both do the leg work to make the system work, to ensure that the right input is processed to create the right output. Administrators are hard-working, diligent, efficient, and streamlined. Bureaucrats are prim and proper sticklers for the rules, regardless of the human cost. Remember the one from Mulan? Sums it up really.

Bureaucracy is (apart from being the hardest thing to spell) a form of government that is all about consistent administrative systems. Anyone that's worked with ancient languages will tell you that a significant portion of surviving records are administrative in nature. Writing wasn't invented to tell stories, it wasn't invented to write Mills and Boon, it was invented to keep records. We find bureaucracy in pretty much every successful literate society, because as x geopolitical unit expands, there's only so much a single ruler, or even a ruling council, can do - administration was key. The history of China is not one of dynasty quietly surrendering to the next, it is a history of struggle and warfare, as well as culture and prosperity. Throughout all of this, it is the bureaucracy that holds things together. When Commodus (yes, that one) took the reigns of the Roman empire in 180 and drove it into the ground, kicking off an entire storm of idiocy, and, well to be honest we don't get many particularly great emperors after that. Yet something holds the empire together for a few more centuries - [mostly] capable administration.

It's really easy to poke fun at bureaucracy, and frequently I think it's easy to brand things as bureaucratic because we don't understand the 'why' behind a process, or perhaps because we don't want to understand, or even try to understand. That's not to say bureaucracy is the best thing ever, we should question it - but with open minds.

What does history tell us? Things must be both adaptable and dependable. The geopolitical units that have relied wholly on the top leadership at the expense of administration have failed fast, when the leadership changes, or when the leadership weakens, the entity dies. Conversely those geopolitical units that have relied too heavily on inflexible administration dwindle, and they too will die without leadership to revitalise them.