Making up new institutions isn't working

Do you want to worship economics?

Marie Antoinette. Credit: Jean-Baptiste André Gautier-Dagoty

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In my last post, I argued that though we live in a time of resistance to traditional institutions, they serve a function that has not really been filled by anything else. The federal government trying to organize neighborhood potlucks struck me as sad and impractical and a reminder of the value of things like local religious congregations and social organizations.

Then, this week, I was painting when I listened to this NPR interview with botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer. She seems like a lovely person, but her argument was that people need to need to look to the “circular economies of reciprocity and abundance” in nature as a corrective to the ills of capitalism. As an example, she pointed to the way primitive tribes get things done without money or a modern economy, instead using a “gift economy.” In modern society, she suggested that little free libraries are an example of people doing things with an abundance mindset and without capitalistic motivations.

I haven’t read Kimmerer’s book on this topic, but I think there are two ways to read what she proposed in her NPR interview. The first is a kind of maximalist, taken-to-its-logical-conclusion reading. So, we need to abandon modern economics and try to live more “naturally.” I don’t know if Kimmerer actually wants to go this far, though there are many people who do make some variation of that argument. And to that, I would simply ask how you run, say, a city like New York or Tokyo in this paradigm? What does an abundance mindset mean for the guy whose job is collecting garbage at 5 a.m.? Or the grocery store manager who in exchange for a wage ensures shelves remain stocked? How do you run things like power plants and sewage treatment facilities if you want to model your economy on a primitive tribe?

These questions are somewhat tangential to the topic of family that Nuclear Meltdown focuses on. But I’ve just never heard a version of this primitivist argument that wrestles with the scale or complexity of modern society¹. The only way this would work would be to dramatically reduce the population, or if we’re really just talking about an elite group that gets to live simply while enjoying the labor of the surrounding prols. Marie Antoinette actually did this when she played at being a farmer, and well, that didn’t turn out great.

The other way to read Kimmerer’s argument (as articulated on NPR, if not in her book), though, is as a more modest proposal. Essentially, we need less materialism. The impulse that leads people to set up little free libraries is a good one, the argument might go, and so that same impulse should guide more of our day-to-day decision-making.

That makes a lot of sense to me, and I agree. Christmas was just a couple of days ago, after all, and it was once again a reminder to me that there is just way too much stuff. One of the big questions in my mind on Christmas night was how many of my kids’ new things they’d lose forever before the end of the week (probably a lot). And also, how much of our haul I would directly throw into the garbage. I hate that, and so it resonated when Kimmerer criticized the way we talk about people as “consumers.” We should aspire to something better and more communal than just consumption.

But also, is that not religion? Isn’t the message of religion frequently to love your neighbor, avoid greed and envy, serve others, and so on. I come from a Christian background so I can speak primarily to that paradigm, but from what I know of other religious traditions the exhortation to avoid “worldliness” seems like a fairly common theme.

Kimmerer did not use the word “worldliness” or other religious phrases, but it seems like that’s sort of the argument. And I guess I just wonder why we need Kimmerer’s framing, which is a somewhat curious mix of botany and economics. That topic might make for an engaging metaphor in a one-off sermon somewhere, but as a worldview it seems like simply the repackaging of religious ideas for technocratic atheists.

What I’m trying to say here is that this all feels a lot like the U.S. Surgeon General potlucks I discussed in my last post: Perhaps an interesting thought experiment, but also at best an untested variation on an older concept and at worst an inferior copy of that concept.

Put another way, we apparently long for the things institutions have traditionally provided, but we are also doing everything we possibly can to avoid institutions that already exist. And so far making up new institutions doesn’t seem to be working.

I am of course talking about religion here, but I’m not talking about it exclusively. The waning of institutions including social clubs, kids sports leagues, and so on is well documented and often lamented in the press. And I’m skeptical that this can be reversed by either an abandonment of capitalism (which while possibly appealing in theory is impossible in practice), or by looking to the ethos of little free libraries.

I want to keep this post short because it’s a holiday week, but I’ll conclude by pointing out that I understand that many existing institutions feel weak or inadequate. But I do think — and this is basically the thesis of Nuclear Meltdown — that the family’s ability to function as a primary unit of social organization is salvageable, and a more fruitful way to reverse the shortcomings of modernity than government potlucks or worshipping economics. Family, in other words, is the original institution — and it’s probably the institution of the future too².

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1. One thing this primitivist impulse has given us is countless failed utopian experiments, which literally dot the entire U.S. I wrote a series on this topic a year ago. It’s behind a paywall, but the gist is that most of these experiments failed when their participants faced the mundane realities of real life. Brook Farm is among the most famous, and struggled because among other things they were supposed to be running an actual farm when they really just wanted to be writers. Turns out a society of poet-kings doesn’t work. A lesser known example is Llano del Rio, in the desert north of Los Angeles. In that case, they struggled because they couldn’t get a reliable water supply. Living in a world where we can even ponder something like a botanically-influenced economy requires a huge amount of complicated infrastructure. Interestingly, one of the most successful utopian experiments I’m aware of is the one my own people, the Mormons, tried in Utah. The Mormons were not unlike other idealists who set up their own society, and Salt Lake City still exists, so it worked. But along the way they had to give up most of what made them unique (Mormons had their own alphabet, their own version of the family, their own city planning philosophies, their own economic enterprises, etc.) and turn into just ordinary Americans. Salt Lake isn’t a ghost town today, while Llano del Rio is, because the Mormons made a series of critical, non-utopian pivots. And I think that tells us something about the viability of primitivism, and of concocting new institutions out of nothing.

2. My wife, who proof reads all these posts, argued to me this morning that most people don’t have enough family for it to functionally act as an institution. And that’s fair. But the difference between a family that functions as an institution and one that doesn’t is people working and sacrificing to make it cohere as a unit. As an example, if everyone moves away from each other, it doesn’t really work. But if people choose to live near each other, even if that means giving up other things like job opportunities, the benefits of family may increase. The other thing is that big groups of kin and kith have to start somewhere. A person without a big family could marry into one, have many kids, or invest in non-family relationships in a familial way. If you, like most people don’t have a big group, be the change.