We have no institutions

Every institution of Western Civilization has fallen. The West is next.

Institutions safeguard, preserve, and promote a culture. Without strong institutions, you have no culture. In fact, you could say a culture is the sum of its institutions.

To explain, let us look at a definition of “institution” from Oxford Reference:

2. (social institutions) (social sciences) A term frequently used loosely to refer to established ways of behaving or, more formally to major social systems or structures which organize the primary social practices, roles, and relationships within a culture. Broadly, there are four main types of social institution: political, economic, cultural, and kinship institutions. Most frequently cited as social institutions are the family, the state, and the law, but social constructionists often refer to language as the foremost social institution. In functionalist approaches, social institutions have been seen as social structures serving to maintain society through meeting social ‘needs’ in their organization of essential activities. . . . Although they transcend the lives of individuals, institutions and patterns of behaviour are always in the process of formation, transformation, and decline.

Here’s a list of key words associated with institutions:

• Language

• Family

• State

• Law

While not explicitly mentioned, we must include:

• Academia

• Companies

• Entertainment

And, most important:

• Religion

These explanations of institutions make sense, but they’re somehow unsatisfying. They are technically accurate but emotionally empty. Institutions deserve more.

To fully appreciate how bleak our world is, you must first have a visceral grasp of institutions. Only then will you fully appreciate what loss of trust—or loss of validity—in institutions is.

Institutions Are the Culture

Put another way, culture is the sum of the institutions that emerge from it.

The culture creates and endows institutions with its keys. And it charges those institutions—which, like government, it creates—with preserving, defending, and advancing the culture. In former times, an analogy would be a father handing his daughter to her bridegroom. Every man who has played the father of the bride knows what I’m talking about. He’s not losing his daughter; he is giving her to a man she loves, charging and trusting that man with her care, support, and advancement to motherhood. Further, he’s charging his son-in-law with raising his grandchildren, in union with his daughter.

Culture is the sum of norms and mores of a society. Norms and mores evolve like species—slowly, carefully. Fads and factions constantly emerge in a society, but most die quickly. Some die eventually. Others become institutionalized, either by adoption into an existing institution or by the creation of new institutions to nurture them.

Take sports as an example.

Golf likely began as a way for shepherds to occupy themselves while doing the boring job of walking around with a herd of sheep. This theory is logical because games similar to golf emerged independently and at nearly the same time in two places where herding sheep was a common occupation: Scotland and the Arabian peninsula. And it makes complete sense.

A shepherd—usually a young man—would idly whack rocks with his staff as the sheep grazed on the weeds and grass in the meadow. One time, the rock lands in a notable location—near a well or square in the middle of a mound of sheep dung. The shepherd tries to do it again, but his second shot slices right. (We’ve all been there.) So, he tees up another rock. And another. He notices that slight adjustments to his stance and swing cause the rocks to take particular trajectories.

Soon, the shepherd has mastered the motion. He can put a rock within a few inches of his target. Like all young men, our shepherd boy tries to use his skill to his advantage. While walking with a buddy one day, he says, “I bet I could strike a rock with my staff and make it land on that pile of sheep dung.”

His friend, Shem, says, “yeah right.”

So Zeke (I’ve decided our hero’s name is Zeke) spies a rock with all the right attributes—symetrical, an inch in diameter, smooth—and approaches with his staff in hand. He looks down range at the target, shuffles his feet, stiffens, draws back, and WHAK! strikes the rock with his staff. The rock sails through the air and lands on the corner of the sheep poop.

“Luck,” says Shem. “Lemme try.”

Shem mimics Zeke’s moves, swings violently at his chosen rock, and shanks it hard to the left, hitting Zeke in the shin. Zeke laughs, a little too hard.

“Try to do it again, then,” Shem says in embarrassment.

“Alright,” says Zeke as he walks towards his next rock. Swing, strike, SPLAT! the rock sinks into the middle of the dung pile.

“How’d ya do that?” Shem asks.

Zeke shares his world-leading knowledge of this new game with his friend. Though Zeke quietly prides himself in being the best rock-striker in the world, he looks forward to competing against his friend on more even terms. Zeke still expects to win every contest, but those wins would mean more coming against a worthy opponent.

At this point, golf is nothing more than a oddity, but soon it becomes a fad as Zeke and Shem draw more boys from their village into this glorious way to walk around with sheep without losing one’s mind.

Eventually, Shem, Zeke, and their friends establish rules of the game. It begins with determining what constitutes a competition and victory. For example, one-dung-draw is mere luck, so, to claim victory, one must place the rock in the dung a majority of 9 piles. This proves boring, though, as it’s really the first to five, which doesn’t last long enough to stave off boredom. So the rule is amended to reward victory to the shepherd who puts a rock into a dung pile using by striking the rock with his staff the fewest number of strokes.

And we have the beginnings of institution.

Next, the boys develop an initiation and acceptance process for rock-and-staff wannabes. They’ve been burned by kids who just, well, suck, and by others who don’t take the competitions seriously. Or those who cheat by kicking their rocks into perfect lies, or those who “forget” to count a few of their own strokes. Shem and Zeke create a “league” to enforce the rules, attract new aficionados, and evangelize this great new pastime for bored shepherds.

At this point, golf has been institutionalized. The league, not just Shem and Zeke, is responsible for preserving the best of the game while adapting innovations for the game’s improvement. The league requires careful and studied examination of innovations proposed. Change is possible, but not at the risk of the game’s tradition and integrity. Like handing one’s daughter over to her bridegroom.

Or like a university to preserve and promote a culture’s religion, as Harvard and Yale were instituted to do. Or philosophy. Or architectural and engineering secrets. Or language.

The more complex the culture, the more institutions it sires. Simple cultures—like a Stone Age Amazonian tribe—have few and simple institutions, like the old men teaching the young men how to hunt. Complex cultures erect myriads of institutions to preserve seemingly minute aspects of their culture. Think of private groups on Facebook or the Knight of Columbus. Or the Royal-anything Societies.

The ancient Greeks institutionalized arts, sports, governments, architecture, language, and pagan religion. The Romans copied these institutions and added their own.

Christianity, after subsuming the Western Roman Empire, institutionalized knowledge in monasteries and care of the vulnerable in hospitals, orphanages, and various “care homes.”

The founders of the United States institutionalized self-government by creating a federal system that embodied its organizing philosophy that man is endowed by God with certain rights, including the right to lend power to a government of his own creation. And with the right to call that loan or power should the government he created misbehave.

--That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

Continuing with the American story, our ancestors, before and after the Revolution, institutionalized knowledge in colleges: Harvard in 1636, Yale in 1701, University of Delaware in 1743. These institutions were charged with preserving Christendom and promoting it in the New World. For centuries, they did their job beautifully.

The basic institution of civilization is, of course, the family. The nuclear family, to be specific. It is the family that preserves and promotes the species and basic knowledge required to continue the species. Without the nuclear family, humans would still live in caves, cowering at the sight of fire with a life expectancy shortly beyond puberty.

While many other institutions sprang up to preserve and promote cultural values, the pattern was always the same:

1. Free men try something.

2. Society evaluates the virtue and utility of the new idea.

3. Society rejects most ideas and embraces a few.

4. Institutions catalog the good and bad, promoting the good and warning against the bad.

Without institutions to preserve and promote good ideas and discourage bad ideas, man would never have advanced beyond the Stone Age.

America built the strongest and most adaptable man-made institutions in human history, and no one would argue. Older institutions exist, but no society produced institutions so robust. Those institutions we copied from other societies were nearly perfected in America. Others institutionalized war-fighting, but America took it to new level, for example. We institutionalized sports, entertainment, and art like no other nation. And we were, perhaps, the first nation dedicated to God from its inception. Christopher Columbus wrote upon sighting the land he would name “San Salvador,” or Holy Savior:

O Lord, Almighty and everlasting God, by Thy holy Word Thou hast created the heaven, and the earth, and the sea; blessed and glorified be Thy Name, and praised be Thy Majesty, which hath designed to use us, Thy humble servants, that Thy holy Names may be proclaimed in this second part of the earth.

His mission was bring Christ to the natives and the natives to Christ “by love:”

So that they might be well-disposed towards us, for I knew that they were a people to be delivered and converted to our holy faith rather by love than by force, I gave to some red caps and to others glass beads, which they hung around their neck, and many other things...I believe that they would easily be made Christians, for it seemed to me that they had no religion of their own.

Thus began the American story.

Yet, now, we suspect her final chapter is being written.

to be continued