Going Deep on Institutions
Recently, PACE had the honor of hosting Dr. Yuval Levin, Director of Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies at American Enterprise Institute and author of the 2020 book, A Time to Build: From Family and Community to Congress and the Campus, How Recommitting to Our Institutions Can Revive the American Dream.
Inspired by Dr. Levin’s New York Times piece, How Did Americans Lose Faith in Everything?, PACE’s Faith In/And Democracy Learning Community was interested in exploring the role of institutions, generally, as a way to explore the role of faith institutions, specifically. In a recent Learning Lab hosted by the program, our goal was to understand institutional capacities — strategic, programmatic, tactical — that best enable faith organizations to work successfully within and beyond their own constituencies. But we felt like we could not have that conversation until we first grappled with questions like: What makes strong institutions? What enables an institution to work across difference? What have we learned over the last year about the role institutions play in our lives and the relationship between institutions and individuals?
Faith In/And Democracy Storyteller and Analyst, Michael Wear led a discussion with Dr. Levin to explore these questions and more.
The conversation was rich and inspired a lot of learning. Below are the insights that have stayed with me since our discussion. (Note, quotes are lightly edited and condensed for ease of reading).
- We throw around the word “institutions” a lot, but rarely do we actually sit with what they are and what that means. Dr. Levin helped us understand the fullness of the definition and why we commonly use the word to describe a spectrum of meanings, from organizations, civic associations, and corporations to whole professions, marriage, or even a person with a lot of influence. At their core, institutions are durable forms of our common life that shape what we do together. They sometimes aren’t visible or tangible, and as Dr. Levin noted, “We imagine our society as a big open space filled with individuals and when we find ourselves facing social challenges, we think of that big open space and say we’re having trouble connecting…But that space is not just filled with individuals; it’s also filled with structures of social life, which means they’re filled with institutions. We need to remind ourselves of what institutions are, what they do, and why they matter.”
- We have seen the headlines and reports that trust in social institutions is low, and we wanted to explore that more. Dr. Levin shared his take: “Strong institutions form people who are trustworthy. Americans are losing trust in institutions, and that’s certainly true, but what does it actually mean to trust an institution? To me, that means believing that the institution forms trustworthy people. You would trust a political institution when you have a sense that it’s somehow built to take seriously some obligation to the public good and it shapes men and women to clearly do that. We trust the military not so much because it’s great at doing its job — that’s part of it — but we trust it because it shapes men and women to be people who take certain ideals seriously. When we don’t trust an institution, it’s because we don’t believe it’s doing that work to shape people who are trustworthy. So I think that formative capacity is really crucial to the difference between a functional and dysfunctional institution in our society.”
- That point led facilitator Michael Wear to ask, “Do people want to be formed? Who should tell me how to be me, better than me?” At the core of his question was highlighting the individuality our society has embraced and a question of how institutions fit in. Dr. Levin responded: “That resistance is rooted in concerns we should take seriously. There are ways that institutions can be oppressive. They constrain our freedom, limit our choices sometimes. Institutional racism is a reality in our country. We have to be alert to the ways that institutional weight can be overbearing, but we also have to be alert to the ways that institutional weakness can be debilitating; why we need institutions and why people with the least power in our society need institutions to be heard and effective in society… We have a lot of demolition crews right now in American life who know exactly what they want to destroy. We have to think harder about what kind of construction crews we want to be a part of, what we want to build so that people can have better lives.”
- One point I had not sat with enough was the way institutions empower by constraining, which Dr. Levin says gets back to trust in institutions. As he explains: “Why do you trust the people you trust? You trust professionals and experts, not because they know more than you, but because they are constrained by certain rules. I trust an accountant because there are things that an accountant would never do. I trust a lawyer and journalist and scientist because there is an entire institution built and set up to ensure that what that person says has been checked somewhere. It’s the constraint that allows us to build trust and the social capital for our society to function.”
- The biggest insight I am taking from the discussion is the evolution of whether institutions are acting in formative or performative ways. Dr. Levin believes that strong institutions form trustworthy people, and part of why we trust institutions is because they produce those trustworthy people consistently. He noted that our trust in institutions decreased at the same time that institutions started moving away from formation towards performance: “When we see the presidency or Congress become stages for performative outrage; when a university becomes a venue for virtue-signaling; when a church becomes a political stage; when institutions that are meant to shape us and form our souls instead become another place to express yourself, they become much harder to trust. They aren’t really asking for our trust, they’re asking for our attention.”
- So where does that leave us? Should we build back institutions and trust in them? How do we begin to do that? I thought Dr. Levin’s provocation and recommendation was worth considering: “The problem we have in American life isn’t so much that people don’t trust institutions, but that they’re not trustworthy enough. There are all kinds of ways we could think about how to build back that trust, but it all starts from a simple premise, which is, that to be trustworthy, the people in it have to work at it. That means all of us do. That’s not a substitute for reform, but it’s a prerequisite for it.” He went on to say, simply, that the question everyone should be asking themselves is: “Given my role here, how should I behave?”
We thank Dr. Levin for sharing his research and provocations about institutions and their role in a healthy and free society. We thank Michael Wear for facilitating a fascinating discussion. And we thank the entire Faith In/And Democracy Learning Community for contributing to important learning and working tirelessly at the intersection of faith and democracy. We look forward to continuing our learning journey together.
