Iron law of institutions
Powers, Thomas
themselves acknowledged, as a consequence of "feeling same pattern expressed all across the nation, often in papers of burned" first by an administration deceptive about Vietnam only 20,000 to...
...Where does evil come from, and why...
...Since it is we--in the broadest sense-who create these institutions, why do we find it so difficult to change them...
...Each was founded with a purpose, a line of business, something it is supposed to do--collect taxes, run national parks, guarantee loans for low-income housing, build dams or highways, issue regulations to ensure safety in factories, publish pamphlets on home-canning, count the number of black people in basic industries, keep lists of dangerous radicals, maintain the price of cotton, buy desks and chairs, design bombs and missiles...
...Our own country in fact...
...Other cells of the Pentagon want to build Trident submaxines, new tanks, tactical aircraft, nuclear weapons in a wide range of yields, sophisticated communications gear, and so on...
...One is to take some specific target of reform--the failings of public education in the inner cities, say, as reflected in declining reading scores--and analyze the hell out of it...
...What evidence do We have for a loving God --for that matter, what evidence is there that God is even vaguely decent...
...In The Gnostic Gospels (Vintage, $2.95) Elaine Pagels quotes Tertullian on "the questions that make people heretics": Where does humanity come from, and how...
...The unhappy reformer is now torn by anger, despair, the heartsinking prospect of the long march...
...The individuals passing through these cells are sometimes passionate, sometimes tepid...
...One Congress balloons their funding, While another cuts it back...
...In one sense it is shielded from direct physical interference by the entire armed might of the United States, which in turn is funded by a quarter of the national budget generated from heavy taxes on the world's largest economy...
...Some practical way must be found to lend weight to the words...
...Its job is to purchase weapons and maintain a standing army, navy and air force...
...Barfing a change of heart-and what words could achieve that?--it will go on doing what it does until it meets something bigger than itself...
...The four great themes of reform in America over the last twenty years--civil rights, poverty, peace, and the environment--have been accompanied by loud noise and determined practical struggle...
...Secretaries of Defense pay strict attention one year, ignore them the next...
...If the reformer is not to give up and go away, badly soured, he must turn dogged...
...Once human institutions have a grip on life--once businesses are making money, churches have a congregation, bridges are collecting tolls, apartment towers are filled with tenants, charities are soliciting funds, ports are unloading cargo, government agencies are publishing regulations, armies are in the field--they acquire the momentum of anything alive, a tenacious instinct for survival, and a protective carapace more or less impervious to outside direction...
...the Everett (Wash...
...Some are able, some duffers...
...The great questions are the ones conventional believers and non-believers are often relaxed about...
...The conscious of community attitudes...
...MARY ELLEN LEARY It might be one thing to find such a coinciding pattern of views in the top half-dozen newspapers of widest circulation...
...Its purpose is shared by many large corporations, which are Of several minds: John Gamey I THE GNOSTICS AMONG US WHY IS THIS HERESY SUDDENLY SO INTERESTING...
...Maybe the division should be done differently, between those who are easy in their belief or non-belief, and those who see agony in either place...
...But it is equally well-protected from indirect threats...
...It is not individuals defending their perquisites which frustrate the programs of presidents and cabinet secretaries, but the very organs of government themselves...
...Rights are still denied, people are poor, peace eludes us, the environment is sick and threatened...
...The International Institute for Strategic Studies in London does this every year, not only for the United States...
...The turnover in the uniformed personnel is extraordinary...
...Ideas abound for making things better...
...1 With all the tinkering.it gets the machinery of society is rarely the same from one year to the next...
...Commonweal: 298 The usual explanation of this phenomenon is one word: bureaucracy...
...The reforming instinct, initially scattershot, begins to focus on one thing: This is the problem...
...Much has been accomplished...
...so do Pascal and Camus...
...people better informed than the rest of the nation...
...But the turnover does not interrupt the continuity of BMO's work...
...But for all the undeniable progress, who among us would fail to recognize his country...
...The Pentagon offers a particularly strong example of this single-minded autonomy...
...Gnosticism was a rich system of thought, one finally antithetical to orthodoxy...
...The other approach is to look for some more general explanation, something broadly inherent in human society, a kind of social law of momentum which would do for the world of men what physics does for the game of billiards...
...Little has been settled once and for all...
...Does the fact that we are alive matter...
...It was named for the teaching that one must be initiated into a gnosis, a knowing, in order to share the divine life...
...The final, broadest and deepest line of Pentagon defense is the belief, several thousand years old, that arms provide security...
...A central perception of this esoteric approach to Christianity is that the way most people see things is illusory...
...A large corps of public information officers promotes its point of view...
...The growing clarity of the latter can bring on a sense of euphoria: things don't have to be this way, the alternatives are so obvious, I can help carry the message...
...However powerful and cogent the message, it is soon apparent that words alone are not enough...
...But that only suggests that reality...
...The great themes of reform of the last generation will be the great themes of the next...
...Target and program tend to emerge together...
...Gnosticism compares the ordinary human condition to a state of dreaming or drunkenness...
...If anyone doubts its effect over the long term he need only conduct an inventory...
...One implication of this is that deception must be built into the fabric of the universe itself...
...The heresy which worried Tertullian was gnosticism, which is suddenly of interest again, largely because of the discovery of the Nag Hammadi library, a collection of gnostic writings which has now been translated and is available in English (The Nag Hammadi Library, James M. Robinson, Harper & Row, $16.95...
...Why do I resist...
...What gives the world its great power of resistance...
...In some societies, of course, the reception of reformers is denunciation and arrest...
...III This is not to say nothing is ever accomplished...
...Pfiol" to the Vietnam War it rarely occurred to the press to Does it make a difference...
...Herald said "I am confident that press New no newspaper any longer assumes the government is attention and editorial reaction has surprised the administradisclosing all the truth about a situation and none any longer tion and compelled it to take another look at what it's doing...
...There's much to be said for this point of view, but much to be said on the other side as well, and legions to say it...
...themselves well-seeded with alumni of the Pentagon...
...This is where orthodox Christianity and Judaism most clearly parted ways with gnostic systems of thought, which taught that the god responsible for creation was Commonweal: 300...
...In this sense Madalyn Murray O'Hair and Jerry Falweil have a lot in common...
...A way must be found to bring the message to their very door, but alas, it is met there by expressions of sympathy, the explanation of difficulties, bland promises to consider, polite thanks for concern...
...One thing connects to another and three hundred pages later we see where everything went wrong, starting with the arrival of the first African slave on a Virginia tobacco plantation...
...The Ballistic Missile Office of the Air Force designs missiles at Norton Air Force Base in San Beruardino, California...
...It has been doing this, under one name or another, for twenty-five years...
...Why does everyone accept...
...There are two ways one might answer this question...
...The best do...
...A natural history of the reformer would probably describe a life cycle something as follows: in adolescence a vague sense of unease, a troubled feeling of difference...
...But the targets of reform do not surrender easily...
...a veteran of three years is considered an "old head...
...These are only ripples on the surface...
...Arrayed against the Pentagon is a tiny handful of frail groups, funded on comparative shoestrings, with an alarmed sense that the Pentagon, having prepared for war on such a stupendous scale, is eventually going to get it...
...Much is accomplished...
...Followed by an unfolding conviction it is not I but the times and the things of this world which are out of joint...
...THOMAS POWERS W E ORDINARILY make a sharp distinction between belief and non-belief, perhaps allowing for gray territories in between...
...themselves acknowledged, as a consequence of "feeling same pattern expressed all across the nation, often in papers of burned" first by an administration deceptive about Vietnam only 20,000 to 50,000 circulation, locally owned and highly and then by an administration trapped in Watergate...
...I am not counseling despair...
...The MX missile has been in some stage of design or development since the 1960s...
...But things do not change quickly, and above all they do not change much...
...it is liberal democracies I am talking about here...
...The basic work goes on...
...Is it any wonder that mere words only ping off the carapace...
...A consensus emerges from degree of change this constitutes in the American press was the metropolitan dailies, from rural Massachusetts, Washingemphasized by Frances Fitzgerald, author of Fire in the Lake, ton state lumber towns, mild-mannered Salt Lake City, when she wrote: Caribbean-attuned Miami, and Mexican-alert California...
...they turn a deaf ear to the clamor without, and go their own sweet way...
...BMO, the Air Force, and the Pentagon want to build a new missile, and now, after years of false starts and transient indifferertce in high places, it looks as if they are going to build it...
...it is the stock in trade of a whole class of writers, academics, citizens restless with the humdrum of commerce, aspirants for public office...
...Mary Ellen Leary, a previous contributor, is a West Coast But it is far more revealing of American attitudes to find this journalist and correspondent for Pacific News Service...
...Like the other institutions of society, the organs of government find it difficult to keep more than one idea at a time...
...enlightenment is a process of waking, or sobering up...
...It has well-established relations with Congress which not even the White House can interrupt...
...Deep within the target institution some group of men appears to refuse to listen...
...assumes the government is being led by particularly brilliant What's critical now is for the press to stay with this story...
...Louis Wein, editorial writer of question the government, especially on international relations...
...When one of them suffers a crisis of faith, as sometimes happens, he does not last long...
...The basic work is highly compartmentalized, and each sub-office displays the single-minded autonomy of the whole...
...Consider how well-defended is the Pentagon...
...What they report is a lot of everything...
...At this point the world turns cussed...
...I I I I Of several minds: Thomas Powers II IRON LAW OF INSTITUTIONS THE PENTAGON PROVIDES A STRIKING EXAMPLE W HY IS the world so hard to change...
Vol. 108 • May 1981 • No. 10
