Why (and How) to Save “The Institution”
…But not if you’re an institution
The latest numbers on Americans’ trust in institutions are out and… we don’t. Trust. Anything, really.
Gallup’s been tracking Americans’ “trust” in 16 different institutions annually for the past two decades; in two surveys released in the past two weeks, trust in most institutions is down, again, with many institutions at their lowest levels ever.
Two-thirds of us don’t trust higher education, the medical system or organized religion.
Three-quarters of us don’t trust the US Supreme Court, the presidency, large tech companies and organized labor.
Could it possibly get worse than that? Well, yes. More than four-fifths of us don’t trust the criminal justice system, TV news and big business. And only one egghead out of a dozen trusts Congress.
This is a big deal. As David Brooks wrote in a compelling essay in The Atlantic in late 2020: “When people in a church lose faith or trust in God, the church collapses. When people in a society lose faith or trust in their institutions and in each other, the nation collapses.”
The causes of the decline over the past 50 years are many. Here are a few: Watergate and the Vietnam war in the 1970’s; the Iraq war and financial crisis in the early 2000’s. Then add in church sexual abuse scandals, big tech privacy invasions, news editorialism replacing news coverage, high profile police shootings and, as Brooks puts, it “the cancer of distrust has spread to every vital organ.”
But we need these things we don’t trust.
Yuval Levin, in his book, A Time to Build: From Family and Community to Congress and the Campus, How Recommitting to Our Institutions Can Revive the American Dream (possibly the “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” of long book titles), tells us why: each of these institutions performs a critical task – serving the poor, educating children, enforcing laws, providing some service or meeting some need. And in one way or another, the institution does that by pooling people’s efforts toward accomplishing whatever that task is.
The institutions also form us. When we are members of a church or a college or a company or a union or a political body we learn how to be responsible members. The institution “shapes behavior and character,” Levin says, “fostering an ethic built around some kind of integrity. That’s why we trust the institution and the people who compose it.” When institutions stop holding to standards of behavior and character and quality, we stop trusting them.
How do we turn this around? Or can we? I say maybe we can.
If you work for an institution show it some respect: We live in an age where people value their “brand” more than their responsibility to the institutions they work for. Politicians value their poll numbers more than “the presidency”; increasingly, members of Congress value their Twitter followings more than getting the work of Congress done; televangelists value feeding their egos more than they value the institution that is supposed to be about feeding the least, last and lost; TV “journalists” distort the news to boost their name recognition and income. When these individuals antagonize or fail, they don’t just take themselves down; they take the institutions they work for with them. There is value, Levin suggests, in asking ourselves: “Given my role here, how should I behave?” and then acting on the answer to that question.
If you run an institution, show people it stands for something: With trust in most institutions at historically low levels, a healthy majority of Americans still trust the military (60%). Levin attributes this trust to the military’s clear standards and responsibilities, and the willingness to hold members to those standards. Accountability matters. Send pedophile priests to prison, not to the next unsuspecting parish. Set ethical standards for the Supreme Court and Congress, then enforce them. Fire CEO’s or academics that goose the numbers on quarterly earnings or distort data for scientific studies. Sweeping behavior under the rug to “protect the institution” does the opposite.
Look for ways to build new institutions: In this age of distrust, it may be that some institutions are unsalvageable, at least at the scale we have previously known them. It may be we need to rediscover trust on a hyperlocal level. Perhaps, Brooks suggests, we can rebuild institutional trust on a micro-institutional level, rediscovering trust through jumping in to small organizations and doing “the nitty-gritty work of institutional life: going to meetings, driving people places, planning events, sitting with the ailing, rejoicing with the joyous, showing up for the unfortunate.” We need to look for ways to be part of small, organized, religiously-motivated efforts to feed the poor – even if they aren’t by “churches”; educational efforts taking on COVID-related learning loss – even if they aren’t by “school systems”; working together for public policy change – even if it’s not through a “legislature.”
Rebuilding trust is a precarious process
All these efforts build trust in our power to do something beyond ourselves. And maybe once we realize how much more we could accomplish at a larger scale we will return to our institutions with a new respect. That’s going to take a while. Let’s get started.
Question: Are our institutions in a death spiral, or have you seen evidence that they can regain strength? What have you seen that is restoring your faith in the power of collective action?
References:
Newest Gallup Survey on institutional trust: https://news.gallup.com/poll/508169/historically-low-faith-institutions-continues.aspx
Gallup on trust in higher education: https://news.gallup.com/poll/508352/americans-confidence-higher-education-down-sharply.aspx
In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida’s claim to fame? Longest popular song: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida
David Brooks on decline in institutional trust: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/10/collapsing-levels-trust-are-devastating-america/616581/
Yuval Levin’s A Time to Build: https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/a-time-to-build-from-family-and-community-to-congress-and-the-campus-how-recommitting-to-our-institutions-can-revive-the-american-dream_yuval-levin/22033936/#edition=23546814&idiq=51691817
Solutions for losing trust: