I’ve got some pushback on my idea that the European Commission might be a place where it’s ever possible to exercise ethics or transcend dehumanized institutional logics. The point I was trying to take from Duncan Kennedy is that we cannot know, until we have spent some times engaging with an organization, whether it is so internally inflexible and on balance harmful that it should be resigned to the scrap heap of history.
Now, I have some sympathy for a kind of utopia where people get to keep remaking the institutions in which they work (this is, in particular, Roberto Unger’s utopia). If this is your utopia, you could say that any amount of bureaucracy, stability and institutional authority is a shortcoming that needs to be fought against. That’s fine so far as utopias go, but in the meantime we don’t live in that world and a person’s got to eat. On the other hand, we do live in a world where moments of individual judgment can not only make a difference for some individual or group of individuals, but actually shift the waters of history one way or another, even if in only a tiny way. I agree that people who are soothed into waking sleep may miss those moments, letting the spirit of the machine win out, but working inside an organization doesn’t necessarily end up that way.
The pushback came in the form of the claim that, when it comes to the Commission, we have left the a priori behind and obviously entered a black hole of ethical action and judgment. But this is too easy. Even a preliminary attempt at thinking about the possible scenarios reveals a complex of possibilities.
1. So, for example, maybe the EU is a broken, unquestionably harmful, and irredeemable political project, and the best thing that can happen for Europe, democracy, social justice, all those things we care about, is that the whole edifice crumble into dust: no matter what comes after, it will be better than what we have now.
2. Or maybe the EU is a broken, harmful political project that should have been stopped before it got to where it is, but it is hard to know whether it should be reformed or scrapped, because it’s quite possible that what comes after it will be much worse.
3. Or maybe: the EU is a politically conflicted, conceptually contradictory political project. Its institutional logics improve the lives of some and worsen the lives of others; they empower some democratic wills while suppressing others.
A. The ethical and political valence of the EU project are determined only by the players at the top: the Council, and maybe sometimes/to some degree the ECJ. EC bureaucrats only ever have one choice: to quit their jobs, or to put into practice the logics of the machine determined at the top.
B. Same as A, except EC bureaucrats have a third choice, which is to be obstructionist and slow-moving in the implementation of logics they find distasteful.
4. Or, same as 3 (politically conflicted, conceptually contradictory) but the institutional logics aren’t fully determined at the top. Instead, the contents of those logics or normative structures are so open, so indeterminate, that there are opportunities to choose or at least exercise some judgment all the way down.
5. Same situation as 4 (politically conflicted logics, real opportunities for judgment), but the institutional culture is so bland, the daily practices so thoughtless, that no one who both cares about how the world is organized and who is capable of discerning the existence of ethical and/or political choices in the implementation of the Commission’s multiple logics, actually sticks around long enough to have moments to exercise that judgment.
6. Or, say, the EU’s multiple institutional logics are actually associated with different parts of the EC as an institution. To the degree that you are politically committed to one of those logics–say, gender equality at work–being part of the EC bureaucracy can provide an opportunity to work in a setting driven by a political logic that you care about, but nonetheless provides few opportunities for judgment or ethical action. Of course, by supporting this work, one also lends legitimacy and institutional power to the Commission and to the EU project as a whole.
A. And furthermore, it might be that this is true, but that working in that setting nonetheless provides few opportunities for judgment or ethical action. At best, one is, paradoxically, a cog in a machine that one feels contributes to justice; at worst, a cog in a machine that contributes to someone else’s idea of justice, but not yours.
B. Or, in a slightly different scenario, there are opportunities for judgement and ethical action, but they only come to people with patience, political savvy, the intellectual chops for academia and the charm for sales.
Part of my point when it comes to choosing a job is that I don’t know which one of these situations corresponds to the real world of the Commission. This is just a off-the-top of my head typology of the unknowns one faces when thinking about what it means to work inside one organization. Even in the best-case scenario that the real world is scenario 6A, a person who goes to work there may not find themselves in the particular part of the organization for which their particular skill set and commitments actually empower them to do anything that they care about or which feels like making a difference. The whole “a priori” thing is that I am not sure it’s possible to answer them without spending some real time in the belly of the beast.
There is a whole lot more to be said about both the ‘inside the job’ and ‘outside the job’ practices that can make living in the world compatible with a sense of an ethical self. My key advice for people trying to balance security with their political ideals is to have patience and hedge heavily against the lifestyle that seems to come pre-packaged with a career choice: don’t get used to a level of comfort (a mortgage, private school for the kids, a second property, the annual Caribbean vacation) that you may have to abandon if (when) you discover the job is killing you.