Do we actually need institutions?
I used to think people could get by without the creaky old institutions of yore. Now I'm not so certain.
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Years ago while I was growing up, my family started a tradition: On Christmas Eve we would have a family talent show. I don’t know whose idea this was, but I hated it. As a teenager I thought it was awkward and forced. And my family’s talents tend to be more cerebral than visual; I can quickly write an essay, for example, but I can’t juggle or jump really high or speak in a cockney accent.
Over time, there was a lot of grumbling. And then slowly, the tradition petered out1. Victory at last!
But to my great surprise, it turned out to be a pyrrhic victory. As the talent show tradition disappeared, along with various other traditions that waned for a variety of reasons, the holiday season increasingly felt formless and anticlimactic. It was still fun to listen to holiday music or eat sugar cookies. But without formal structures, without rituals, the holidays started losing what made them feel distinctive.
As it turned out, the things that felt most restrictive and annoying were actually the very things that imbued the holidays with any real significance.
I think about this experience a lot, but it particularly came to mind when I read a recent post from my friend Jon Ogden. The piece wrestles with the friction between the great things about a religion (in this case Mormonism) and some of the less comfortable parts (history, politics, etc.).
But what I thought was particularly interesting was the argument that people need a “container” to be a part of:
“The ‘spiritual but not religious’ movement is a dead-end,” he said. “We all need a place to belong, a tradition. We all need a container.”
When he said this, I felt pulled in two directions. First, I agree that we all need a container. My kids need a container, a place they can call home. I’ve felt power and safety in belonging to a community throughout my childhood, and I want that for my kids.
In other words, the idea is that people need something like religion, or in other words some sort of formal or institutional relationship.
This idea also reminded me a lot of the article I highlighted last week that lamented the loss of various feasts and festivals, which were historically components of religious institutions. That piece suggested reintroducing those religious feasts, which strikes me as just a different way to say “we all need a container.”
However, as Jon’s quote about “spiritual but not religious” hints, this idea is definitely at odds with what a lot of us want. Spiritual-but-not-religious is explicitly an argument against this container idea.
(Jon’s post was about religion, and so that’s a recurring theme here too. Churches has traditionally been one of the most significant institutional relationships people have. But of course there are other institutions to which someone can belong. In other words, the winnowing of institutional relationships isn’t just about the decline of religion, but also about a general abandonment of what we might think of as formal “extracurriculars” beyond jobs.)
The problem is that abandoning all of our institutional relationships doesn’t seem to work. An obvious example of this comes from the other article I discussed last week, about how progressive groups can’t get anything done because they’re too busy with infighting. One of the problems (among many) seems to be that people want their jobs to provide not just pay, but also the types of things you’d traditionally get from clubs, support groups, families and churches.
In other cases, there’s pressure to replace old institutions with government support. The Atlantic ran a fascinating piece today contrasting the difference between the way Americans rely on family support for things like childcare, college and housing, while Nordic countries delegate all of those responsibilities to the state. The thesis of the piece was ostensibly to debunk the myth of American individualism, but it really served to show how if you dismantle the roles of one institution (families), you have to create another (the state) that does all the same things2 3. And I’m not totally sure how the state is supposed to be a better theoretical institution than things like family and religion; there are as many examples of problematic governments as there are of abusive faiths.
In still other cases, there are folks who have abandoned one institutional relationship only to replace it with something that is technically similar (albeit with politics and doctrines that work better for the participants).
Which is to say, we can dump the old institutions, but almost immediately there’s pressure on the new ones to do all the same things. It’s reminiscent of George Orwell’s Animal Farm, in which animals overthrow the old hierarchy only to become indistinguishable from it a short time later4. Moreover, many of the new institutions aren’t really set up to do the jobs of the old institutions — a job is not a family etc. — and some things get left out all together (feasts and festivals, for example). And so there’s widespread loneliness and a dearth of support networks. There’s a lack of the “village” lifestyle that allowed people to get by in the past.
The point is that despite living in a decidedly anti-institutional time (“spiritual, but not religious”), we can’t really get rid of institutions5. They are the infrastructure that keeps communities together, like a network of streets knitting together a city6.
I will be the first to admit that I don’t really love this conclusion. I’ve chaffed under institutional restraints as much as anyone, and for many years felt like one of the great benefits of living today was that a person could choose which groups to join or abandon. But as I look out at the world, it just doesn’t seem like everyone trying to build their own little communities is a viable solution. To return to the infrastructure analogy, imagine if every person had to build their own home, their own streets, their own electric grid, their own sewer and water systems, etc.
This would be wildly inefficient. The reason civilization works in the first place is because one generation benefits from what the previous generations built. That’s true with physical infrastructure, and increasingly I think it’s also true with the institutions that prop up communities. And I think that means there’s probably a necessary role for religion, traditional families, clubs, and other organizations in a healthy society.
Which brings me back to the Christmas Eve talent show. After discovering what happened when the tradition ended, my wife and I decided to try to bring it back. That’s not because I suddenly developed a performative talent, but because we discovered that living without ritual is a hollow sort of life.
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Other content to check out this week:
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Part of the tradition’s waning probably had to do with all the kids in the family reaching adulthood and going out on their own. But I have a big family and typically at least some of us get together for the holidays.
In practice I’m all for things like more government support on issues such as childcare, paid leave, housing for lower income families etc. But the The Atlantic piece highlighted a interesting downside to such policies: They break down traditional ties between families, so that there are fewer financial interdependencies. The Nordic countries seem to be happy with this outcome. But I’ve argued before that the capriciousness of purely emotional relationships makes me skeptical that they’re going to be useful for building stable communities over many decades. The Atlantic piece also offers a telling example: What if someone wants to study history but their parents will only pay for their college if they study medicine? The idea here is that this is a terrible example of parental leverage. But as someone who got two humanities degrees, I now think it would have been better if my parents had pushed me into a more financially stable field, and used whatever tools at their disposal to get me to do that. When it comes to my own kids, I’ll respect their wishes and try to support them the best I can whatever they want to do. But I plan to be A LOT more vocal about the decisions that’ll lead to a stable life than the parents of many people in my generation were.
One big problem in the US seems to be that we’ve dismantled old institutions but haven’t managed to successfully replace them with something else.
This process strikes me as very similar to what I described in my post on how “love is overrated”: Once upon a time, people had friends, and spouses, sometimes extramarital lovers, etc. Before the Victorian period, these were different roles and you wouldn’t have been expected to be best friends with, say, your spouse. Then all those roles we collapsed during the Victorian period, and now two people are supposed to fill roles that used to be distributed to a group. It’s more work for everyone.
This is to say nothing of historical precedent.
If you remove the streets and no one can get around, each place in the city has to be self-contained. Your house isn’t just a shelter, it also has to become a workplace, a social club, a chapel, a cafe, etc.