Bureaucracy and spiritual progress

A couple of weeks ago I was at an Al Anon meeting, and we were reading from How Al Anon Works, a section which tells the tale of the early days of the fellowship. It was founded by Lois, who was married to Bill W, founder of AA. In the early days, it was just her and a few other wives of alcoholics, but then they started having groups and a small office for the national organization, and soon the small cadre found themselves dealing with massive volumes of correspondence and administrative work to support groups in formation around the country and figure out how to develop some basic reading materials, guidance, etc.

I was reminded of a thread I vaguely remembered from Juan Linz's Sociology of Religion course I took in 1986. This was not a class I did particularly well in or took particularly seriously. But I did take a couple of things from it, namely volumes I and II of Max Weber's monumental Economy and Society. These are dense and daunting tomes, the reading of which did not really match up well with my somewhat indisciplined way of life in college.

But I took certain key things away from the course. Foremost amongst them is the idea that baseline religious worldviews permeate everything we do, and that, in Weber's view, there was something special about Protestantism (and Judaism) that seemed to account for their success in forming societies which generated wealth. And that bureaucracy, to the extent that it facilitated a diffuse, abstract, rational and granular division of labor across an ever more abstract economy, was good, the embodiment of rationalization. And that the monasteries of the Middle Ages played a key role in the preformation of modern bureaucracy.

Some of this I may have imagined. I now just pulled the books off the shelf and pawed through the tables of contents, then looked at the Wikipedia article on Weber. Each is enough to make your eyes glaze over.

In any event, to bring it back home, my point is this: it was the belief in an idea, in the case of Al Anon the idea that alcoholism is primarily a family disease, at first the idea that an alcoholic's behavior fucks up a family and makes family members crazy, later the idea that dysfunctional and destructive behavioral patterns are learned by successive generations of families within which substance abuse dominates and are passed on, it was the belief in this idea that drove Lois W and her early team members to sit down and do a bunch of tedious work that eventually evolved into something that has persisted and done a lot of good. The belief in an idea let them suck it up and grind on through boredom, and this grinding was, in some sense, holy.