Governmental Mystique

Recently for a class I read an article about public sector bureaucracies that do surprisingly well in developing countries that are otherwise rife with corruption and incompetence. The article, “Divergent Cultures? When Public Organizations Perform Well in Developing Countries” by Merille S. Grindle of Harvard University, argues that these organizations defeat the odds and overcome the norms of their societies through organization culture, or mystique.

According to Grindle, members of these high-performing bureaucracies generally believe that they follow professional norms with universal validity. They believe their organizations are unique—particularly responsive, ethical, or efficient. There is a respected meritocracy, in which good work is rewarded. Finally, these employees feel a sense of service, that their contributions help their organization, which in turn helps their community.

As I read Grindle’s article, I thought about my own experiences in organizations. For example, in high school I was extremely proud to be a marching hawk—a member of the Rio Rico High School Marching Band. I believed our band was unique because of its small size, our loud uniforms, and our commitment to the “fundamentals.” I thought I was an important role model for younger students. I held my horn high and stood up straight in the Arizona sun with many material incentives—social approval, something to do, good for my resume—but also out of reverence for the organization itself.

Likewise, in college my most important extracurricular activity has been AIESEC, a non-profit that helps college students intern in foreign countries. In AIESEC we explain ourselves as unique because we are a campus club with both a passion about global issues and a businessy focus on the bottom-line. Our executive board positions have an internal mythology to give them mystique—AIESEC leaders aren’t necessarily the smartest and most qualified, but the most passionate and eager. Finally, we have a “myth of creation”—students came together from the ashes of World War II to make the world a better place. These narratives collectively give “AIESECers” a purpose worth working to fulfill.

These aspects of organizational mystique pervade every major company. Uniqueness is communicated in mission statements and logos. And it’s increasingly clear that a sense of service, however mythological and transparent, is important for companies in the form of corporate social responsibility. Visit the website of any Fortune 500 Company or sports team and I expect you’ll find a category for the environment, ethics, involvement in the community, etc.

So why is it news when a scholar tells the world that government institutions operate more effectively with organizational mystique? I think it’s because the dominant view of government in the last few decades is of plain, incompetent, and corrupt people wasting time and taxpayer money.

Speaking (too) broadly, the conflict of individual freedom and state power has been constantly renegotiated in the age of liberalism. The “myth of creation” for the United States is that of a free people earning liberation from a foreign and illegitimate regime. The founders of the United States were famously skeptical of human beings in positions of power and protective of individual freedoms. But importantly, the Founders did not disparage government’s usefulness. After all, most of them helped create two federal governments, in addition to their own state and local ones.

This anti-Statism may be more a product of the current (or subsiding) era of Neo-Liberalism. Neo-Liberalism, in reaction to the growth of the welfare state after the Great Depression, essentially prescribes a smaller state and more freedom for individuals in the economy.

Politically, the economic model of Neo-Liberalism was adapted to criticizing the state as the source of evil in society a la Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. President Reagan famously said, “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” And in his first inaugural address, he called 1980 “the time to check and reverse the growth of government.” Politics in the United States have been embedded in this rhetoric for the last several decades. President Bill Clinton assured anti-government skeptics that “The era of big government is over.” Obviously, this same rhetoric and the paranoid fear of big government pervades the Tea Party Movement of today.

My argument is that government has been deprived of its organizational mystique. It has been degraded as boring, incompetent, and wasteful. But government bureaucracies, just like campus organizations and private companies, can be successful and efficient if they have a strong culture. By relentlessly criticizing government—and not just a government, but all government—we unleash a vicious cycle in which talented people eschew the scorned life of public service. Those who do join the government have only low expectations to live up to, and successes will be overlooked as the exception, not the rule. From a citizen’s perspective, a belief that “government is the problem” makes us less able to distinguish between good governance and bad governance because we are uniformly hostile to all governance. That’s quite a problem for a democracy.

During the presidential campaign, Barack Obama said he’d make government cool again. He doesn’t seem to have succeeded. But this week in two commencement speeches to university graduates, he defended the legitimacy of government, saying “When our government is spoken of as some menacing, threatening foreign entity, it ignores the fact that in our democracy, government is us.”

There must be a golden mean in the power of government and the freedom of individuals. Likewise, there must be a balance between our skepticism of the current government and our faith in the larger regime. Rarely in history, circumstances change so quickly and dramatically that a full revolution against the regime is necessary, but now—I would argue—is not that time. My hope is that with the Obama Administration, we can escape the paradigm of bad government and shift state-ward. It would make government institutions more prestigious, more responsive, and better-staffed. That would give my statist inclinations thirty years or so to relax, until those government fat-cats get too big for their britches and it’s time for the mean to be adjusted again.

Three Innocents Abroad

Syria, where I spent about a week of my Spring Break, is the first rogue nation I’ve ever visited. It’s hard to know what exactly a rogue state is, but my past exposure to the term tells me it’s not a desirable descriptor.

Unlike Sarah Palin, however, Syria was often very modestly dressed. That is to say, in the city of Aleppo, about a half-hour from the Turkish border, it was quite common to see women in full burqas. Men’s fashion alternated between long white thobes with ghutras, Western-style suits with thobe-like bottoms, and everyday button-up shirts and jeans.

Syria’s buildings were likewise modestly dressed, mostly in dirt. From a high point in Aleppo, my traveling mates (Ruth and Tyler) and I could see several square miles of two- to four-story brown apartment buildings, camouflaged with the desert except for the soot and car exhaust that dyed the walls.

That high point was the Aleppo Citadel. The Citadel was the first of three castles we’d visit in our week. This particular one earned my vote for outstanding impregnability. To storm the keep we first had to cross a forty meter moat via a narrow bridge. The castle keep required five sharp right-angle turns before one ever had access to the inside of the castle. Now imagine trying to dodge arrows and boiling oil. My bet is that before tanks it was impossible.

A second castle stood outside of the Palmyra ruins, which is the most impressive complex of Roman ruins I’ve ever seen. Ruth, Tyler, and I climbed columns, took pictures, and—actually that’s about all one does with Roman ruins. But the castle on a nearby hilltop provided a worthwhile sunset. In one of those surprising moments of travel happiness, we eavesdropped on the filming of a Syrian music video being shot at the ruins. We were less lucky—or less shameless—than the band of older Italian tourists who actually joined in the music video.

The final castle most deserved that name. The Crac des Chevalliers is a French crusader castle that, as we should have expected from the French, occupies the only green, hilly, and attractive swath of Syrian countryside we could find.

After castle-hopping we returned to Damascus, the oldest continuously inhabited city on Earth. At the city center rests the Souq-al-Hammidya, a covered market that led to anything in the “old city.” Its ceiling had steel panels that were shot up by French planes in the 1920s, today leaving thousands of holes through which the sun illuminates the shoppers. The space was less claustrophobic than Istanbul’s equivalent avenue—Istiklal Caddesi. And the bullet-hole stars provided an atmosphere that made this the best place to take a walk in the whole country.

At the end of the Souq is the Umayyad Mosque, built in 705 on the site of a cathedral, which itself had replaced the Temple of Zeus—that’s one more transformation than even Istanbul’s Aya Sofya. The Umayyad Mosque had two significant qualities: golden mosaics depicting Muhammad’s vision of paradise and a vast courtyard of gallivanting children, clearly oblivious of the history all around them. The mosque itself, where Ruth had to walk separately from Tyler and me, was underwhelming, but we happily spent our time in the courtyard, where we're pretty sure Tyler was hit-on by another man (that's illegal in Syria).

We also visited several museums of Syria’s history, which had collections of pots and figurines that apparently interest some people. Most fascinating was actually the October War Museum, which is Syria’s memorial and propaganda piece commemorating the Yom Kippur War in 1973. The Syrian school children and we learned about the Syrian president’s bravery in ordering an attack on the Zionists, and the attack by which Syria’s land, naval, and air forces successfully wrestled the Golan Heights from Israel’s better-equipped clutches. A painting of a peace treaty being signed around 3000 B.C. “proved” that Muslims were a peaceful people, while another portrait of Christians surrendering Jerusalem to Saladin showed that Muslims and Christians could live in peace.

This actually reflected a common defensiveness in Syrian tourist sites. The surprising and beautiful Azem Palace, where Damascus’ governors once resided, included captions that overtly fought stereotypes of Islamic culture as chauvinist, violent, or simple-minded. It explained the layout of the Azem Palace as having entirely separate quarters for men’s business and private life, which kept the family and the women safe from the corrupt dealings of the outside world. Likewise, another caption explained the metaphor of water motifs in the Palace’s architecture as proof that Muslims have multi-layered thinking. It’s kind of sad that a country feels its culture so under assault that it adorns its proud history this way.

In line with this defensive insistence that Syrian people are intelligent and kind, our guide book singled out Syria as a place where women could feel safe going about alone, and it described Syrians as a particularly welcoming people. A majority of Syrians were glad to meet us, fascinated about where we were from (we occasionally said we were Turkish—and got away with it—just to stay on the safe side). They would smile and welcome us to Syria. Even so, my traveling mates and I agreed that Syria is not somewhere we’d recommend walking alone at night—neither is Tempe.

Our most acerbic encounter came on the bus when two Syrian men inquired about Ruth’s heritage. Through a series of uninvited inquiries they ascertained that Ruth is Turkish. Her mother is Muslim. Her father is Christian. “How is this possible? We don’t give our . . .” he trailed off, but the message was clear—Muslims don’t just hand over their women to infidels. Finally, he asked Ruth where her religious views landed. An answer that she was not religious ended that intrusive conversation, though we enjoyed their stares and whispers for the rest of our bus ride.

Altogether Syria was filled with worthwhile historical attractions, great food, and kind people. But even in Damascus, which trails only Istanbul and Beijing in my list of impressively historical cities, I kept thinking how glad I was to be studying in Turkey and not Syria.