Welcome to Thought Police Britain Kafka predicted our age of petty tyranny

From America, if my most recent visit is anything to go by, Thought Police Britain is now viewed as somewhere between a laughing-stock and tragic cautionary tale. For this is far from the first such incident. In 2021, Harry Miller took the police to court and won, for allegations of “transphobia” based on internet posts. Feminist writer Julie Bindel reports that she was visited by police for her tweets in 2019. And Sex Matters founder Maya Forstater was subjected to a 15-month “hate crime” investigation by Scotland Yard on the basis of a post, and that was only recently dropped. What these surreal incidents illustrate is the gap between bureaucratic promise and reality: one in which, the more impersonal the system, the more effectively it can be weaponised by those who understand it.

One vital function of bureaucracy is as a substitute for social trust, especially at scale. And as “post-liberal” critics such as Patrick Deneen have observed, a liberal social order that declines to embrace a unified moral vision will end up bureaucratising those aspects of life that would elsewhere be governed by morality. Grievance procedures, HR departments, safeguarding, and so on all formalise governance in some aspect of public social and moral life in which we no longer agree on the common good, and hence don’t trust those in power to pursue that good. We view procedures as more neutral than people; hence instead of needing to argue morality, make judgements, or form relationships, we increasingly rely on these purportedly neutral, impersonal mechanisms to do it for us.

The allure of this promise is illustrated by a grim concurrent story: the Makin Report. It is an ugly mirror-image of the Pearson story: where Pearson is the subject of a possibly vexatious allegation of wrongdoing toward a vulnerable group, Makin documents the Church of England’s inaction in the face of genuine wrongdoing towards a different vulnerable group. The historic physical and sexual abuse perpetrated by barrister turned Evangelical lay reader John Smythe were known by senior figures in the Church, who failed in their duty to take Smythe’s wrongdoing seriously, escalate it to police, or meet with victims. The resulting row has precipitated the resignation of Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury.

I won’t mourn Welby. But I also suspect that some of those who called for his resignation were motivated by factors other than his handling of historic abuse — not least a loathing for the managerialist streak his tenure brought to the Church of England, and that has recently galvanised the “Save the Parish” movement. I also suspect that the managerialism disrespecters may find Welby’s scalping a hollow triumph: for despite his resignation, the proceduralising instinct is stronger than ever.

Christian moral language contains abundant vocabulary that would seem to fit the topic at hand — “sin” and “wickedness” remain serviceable, for example. But in the Church’s response to the Makin fiasco, I’ve seen not the language of public moral confidence but the arid one of procedure: statements about disclosures and processes, calls for more resignations, and demands for new independent bodies. This tendency is visible even at the parish level, where you can’t move for safeguarding officers even in local churches with 10 superannuated congregants all of whom have been friends for decades.

A kind of dry rot of bureaucracy is visible everywhere. With it comes the implicit assumption that individual moral judgement and authority are suspect by definition, and the only surefire guarantee of “safety” is their removal from or replacement by systems. Indeed, as Giles Fraser approvingly points out, Welby has contributed greatly to the spread of such bureaucracy. But when we contrast this proliferating moral managerialism in the Church with Pearson’s experience of moral managerialism run sinisterly wild in the police, something unnerving comes into view. If the positive intent of bureaucracy is to protect us from the wickedness that can erupt in the absence of trust, the reality is that it often provides cover for the very wickedness it was supposed to forestall.

In 1979, social scientist Malcolm Feeley published The Process Is The Punishment, a study of the lower court in New Haven, Connecticut. Here, Feeley showed how the cost in time and lost earnings of pursuing formal legal rights and due process often vastly outweighs simply pleading guilty. He argued that in this context, rights are often both formally available, but also in practice out of reach. More recently, “the process is the punishment” has become a byword for a kind of bureaucratic warfare, in a style very similar to the one Feeley describes.

Pearson’s, Forstater’s, and Miller’s experiences are cases in point. In each case, a bureaucratic “hate crime” process whose positive intent was to provide a neutral, procedural replacement for moral norms that roughly correspond to blasphemy has become a weapon used to hurt a perceived enemy. For it turns out that contra the forlorn hopes of those now implementing new processes and procedures and layers of accountability and transparency and so on in the Church of England, replacing moral authority with administration does not in fact cure the human propensity for wickedness. Kafka saw this a century ago.

The central thread in The Trial is the horror evoked by the bureaucratic monster that devours Josef K.; but a key secondary theme is the recurring role of weaponised sexual desire, whether coercive, manipulative, or otherwise corrupted. Josef K. sexually assaults a fellow-lodger; the first hearing is interrupted by a man assaulting a washerwoman in a corner; the washerwoman later tries to seduce Josef K.; other “inappropriate” sexual entanglements abound in the story, poisoning relationships and multiplying suspicion and confusion. The crucial insight Kafka provides, in the aggregate picture, is more than borne out in our modern managerial landscape: the more impersonal the procedures, the darker their moral underbelly — and the more scope they afford for coercion, corruption, and brutality.

We find this abundantly in the Pearson fiasco: pace Welby, wherever managerialism flourishes so too will our darkest urges. What makes Pearson’s predicament so disturbing is its facelessness, and the lack of individual accountability involved. It can almost certainly be assumed of Essex Police, for example, that no one on the force is actively working to persecute Pearson. But according to The Guardian, the individual who made the report is a “public servant”. And for such an individual, their understanding of how the machinery operates, means they can easily weaponise it.

For though procedure is meant to save us from bad actors, in reality it just empowers them — as in, perhaps, a public-sector worker who would prefer a conservative journalist to stop writing. One need only pull the correct lever, and institutional procedures will rumble into gear whose operation is designed to minimise individual judgement and agency. Even if it exonerates Pearson in the end, as Forstater and Miller were exonerated, the process is the punishment.

Kafka understood, more than a century ago, that bureaucracy will never be a cure for sin or cruelty. To the extent that we trust in such systems at the expense of our capacity for moral judgement, we will only produce new sins and cruelties. And this applies well beyond sexual wrongdoing, to every one of the darknesses that lies in human hearts. Far from increasing safety and probity by eliminating moral judgement from the messy business of public life, and saving us from our own wickedness in the process, bureaucratic architecture affords new openings for just that wickedness. And these openings prove difficult to close because the process resists those individuals whose moral sense remains functional enough to see and protest them.

If there’s a crumb of comfort to be gained from this dispiriting episode, it’s in the outcry it has prompted. It had come to seem dispiritingly as though the Covid-era national character was all we had left: a mean-spirited, curtain-twitching, pettifogging snitch Britain. But this mood suggests that neither the Welbyan HR-ification of our souls, nor the hi-vis Stasi of Starmerism, have consumed us yet. We still know wickedness when we see it — even the kind inflicted via procedures that were mean to save us from ourselves.

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Mary Harrington is a contributing editor at UnHerd.

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