I'm an institutionalist

"New generations don’t invent institutional practices. These practices are passed down and evolve. So the institutionalist has a deep reverence for those who came before and built up the rules that he has temporarily taken delivery of. “In taking delivery,” Heclo writes, “institutionalists see themselves as debtors who owe something, not creditors to whom something is owed,” writes David Brooks in his column, "What Life Asks of Us".

This is a more old-fashioned view of the world. I also think it is ultimately a more satisfying way of living one's life.

This is an aspect of Barack Obama's campaign, rhetoric, persona and reputation that really resonates with me. I think he understands the value of our institutions, and also holds to this view that we are debtors who owe something, not the other way around.

You know that marvelous way that ideas come together when you read more than one thing at a time or in a short space of time - synthesis? I've been synthesizing Little Heathens with a wonderful book by Mary Pipher, The Shelter of Each Other, plus listening to Little House in the Big Woodswith my kids. There is so much that is wonderful about the world we live in now, and I am very cognizant of advances, developments, progress, the whole lot of it!, i.e. women's rights, civil rights, bottled insulin. But as Pipher repeatedly discusses, we need to find a way to balance what is open and accepting in our world today with the duty and responsibilities of previous generations. As Laura Ingalls Wilder records, she and her sisters received mittens and an orange for Christmas, and they were thrilled for hours by the peppermint stick in the stocking. This stopped my children in their tracks a bit, but in a good way.

Pipher shares in her book a conversation with her elderly grandmother; a brash young Pipher, then a student at UC Berkeley, kept asking her grandmother if she had had a happy life. Finally, Pipher's grandmother said that she did not think of life that way. Instead, she had always tried to be useful. Pipher was struck by the difference in perception, and concludes that we need more of that 'useful' approach in our communities.

I suppose most active members of the church are institutionalists too, to some degree. I've never heard the label before, but I like what David Brooks (one of the 'conservative' op-ed columnists for the New York Times has to say about it), in this smaller snippet from the larger piece:

I thought it worth devoting a column to institutional thinking because I try to keep a list of the people in public life I admire most. Invariably, the people who make that list have subjugated themselves to their profession, social function or institution.

Second, institutional thinking is eroding. Faith in all institutions, including charities, has declined precipitously over the past generation, not only in the U.S. but around the world. Lack of institutional awareness has bred cynicism and undermined habits of behavior. Bankers, for example, used to have a code that made them a bit stodgy and which held them up for ridicule in movies like “Mary Poppins.” But the banker’s code has eroded, and the result was not liberation but self-destruction.

Institutions do all the things that are supposed to be bad. They impede personal exploration. They enforce conformity.

But they often save us from our weaknesses and give meaning to life.