The Money Never Dies: Institutions and Economics

Some Provisional Conclusions about Institutions

TLDR: Institutions and their economics are inextricable from one another. Some concluding thoughts on the moral lives of institutions.

In what-I-think-will-be-a-groundbreaking-book (at least in the very small circles of Christian ethics), Jonathan Tran stages an intervention on a lot of the recent discourse surrounding race, by linking together two very obvious dynamics: race and economics. Rather than examine racism by means of its personal intent, or even by reference to the ways racism marginalizes people socially, Tran’s focus is on the ways in which racism functions as what he terms “an aftermarket effect”. In other words, racism originated hand-in-hand with ways of organizing the world economically: we need a certain way of making money, and we need certain people to do certain jobs, and racism makes it easier to justify having certain people do certain kinds of labor. One needn’t have a huge grasp on labor laws in the 19th century to see that racism (and particularly who the targets of racism were) to see the ways in which this works: Asian migration was excluded in the United States until the 1960s because of the ways in which Chinese laborers were dominating the West Coast market in the late 19th century; Africans were enslaved first as a matter of economic justification, with moral justifications for the arrangement following after.

It seems counter-intuitive to work this way when thinking about race, but only because, Tran suggests, we’ve gotten so used to thinking about race in terms of a self-possessed identity as opposed to something which is generated in relation, or particular, as a matter of economic relations. Again, think of how the term “white trash” functions: it doesn’t designate someone who isn’t white, but who lives socio-economically below what is perceived to be the appropriate way for white people.

There’s a lot to commend about the book, but where this book intersects for me with the threads that I’ve been pulling on here are that any attempt to understand the affections of an institution independent of these economic forces is insufficient: the ways in which an institution operates, values, affirms, or shifts, are inseparable from the ways in which it embodies, proliferates, and is shaped by processes of exchange. Put more simply, as a non-profit, for example, advocates for homeless persons, it enters into negotiations with grant agencies, woos donors, communicates with billing agencies and articulates its value to a public looking for reasons to fund it.

This is not to say that at the bottom, that all institutions are about is money: the lesson is more curious than that. It’s to say that institutions do the work of communicating their value both to those who think the institution and its values has intrinsic value (i.e. a value which stands outside modes of exchange) AND to those who see the institution and its mission as being of relative value (i.e. the ends which this institution does could be accomplished by this institution, but not necessarily). Once you see this, you can’t unsee it. In the same way, as Tran argues, that race-as-identity apart from race-as-economic-effect leads us to miss the bigger picture about how racism works, so the inability to see institutions as tied into process of exchange causes us to misunderstand what institutions do. Institutions aren’t about money or exchange, but to ignore that, is unwise in understanding what institutions do to us.

I’m not persuaded that institutions are reducible to their economic drives, but it seems apparent to me—that if institutions operate for their own survival—keen attention to economic production is central to this. Whether one is describing family dynamics and whether or how to feasibly gather for the holidays, or whether a city reduces essential services to its citizens, institutional mission and economic forces are inseparable pairs.

But this is not to say that, once stabilized economically, the institution can turn its attention to its “mission”, in that economics depends on the process not being stabilized, even if it is regular. This is not a stage to get past. By this, I mean that even if an institution comes to a place where it has a reasonably steady income, money circulates by definition: to have it today is not to guarantee its presence tomorrow, meaning that “mission” is always and ever linked to the kinds of preservation it has. Sometimes this is pernicious, but sometimes, I think, this just keeps an institution honest: they can’t simply do whatever they want to do, because their very reason for existing is to perpetuate a value, and you can’t very well do that unless you’re connected to the world (a world which is constantly in different forms of flux.)

It’s an equally great threat to institutions, I think, when an institution is preserved indefinitely, divorced from that ebb and flow of economics and exchange. Notice, for example, that when an institution is self-sufficient, and can maintain distance from economic need, its sense of mission becomes one which is internally determined, detached from its surroundings, with its mission determined by imaginative projection about what people want or need. This kind of security is, in one way, desirable, because it gives an institution (a university, a church, a nonprofit, whatever) breathing room to be able to exercise some long-term vision. But in another way, give an institution a large enough endowment, and it can keep doing the same thing indefinitely, having lost the very thing which gives its vision its vitality: the ebb and flow of people’s needs, desires, and critiques.

We can very easily idealize the precarity of this kind of institutional life: the Franciscans of the medieval period have an over-idealized version painted in history books on this count. Most people know that the Franciscans began as a mendicant order, which means that they disavowed private property, and lived on alms alone—no backstop of institutional largesse to survive on. But it turns out that if you do that long enough, people start to admire you and leave you stuff in their wills: within fifty years of its founding, an order which began as an order dedicated to not having property and goods finds itself being the beneficiary of a lot of real estate. What began as an order without homes or property eventually became associated with one of the largest shrines in the day, dedicated to the tomb of St. Francis himself. In other words, even the Franciscan drive for institutional precarity wound up being a victim of its own success.

I draw attention to the Franciscans because, it seems to me, that open up an interesting way to resolve this problem of institutions and their economic relationships: by continuing to live as if the excess goods which people gave them were not. The Franciscan rationale for begging was not only an opportunity for the ones who gave to be charitable, but the Franciscans distributed everything which was not needed for survival back out: no saving for a rainy day. It’s a radical move, to link the movement so tightly to the ebb and flow of people while at the same time pushing out the money that came as a consequence: it simultaneously keeps them tied to the people and avoids the problem of doing their thing only because they have an institutional largesse keeping them afloat. They have to keep doing the thing, trusting that God will give the money needed to keep doing the thing.

While this may, in most cases, be the recipe for a very short-lived institution, it also seems to me to be the only recipe for an institution capable of both being tethered to the good of the people it proposes to serve. It’s a risk worth taking, I think, insofar as values perpetuated by institutions over time without any stakes seem to be not much different than propaganda producers: propaganda is a form of discourse which is designed to be without competitors, and in creating a situation where it needs not have to entertain competitors, an institution behaves as if its values, goods, and ways of doing things are just self-evident, taken for granted.

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What I’m Reading: As mentioned above, Jonathan Tran’s Asian Americans and the Spirit of Racial Capitalism. It’s not going to be a household name kind of book, but it’s an important intervention, particularly for those invested in all kinds of questions about how racism creates inequality in society….or whether racism just reflect those prior inequalities. I’m halfway into Phil Christman’s How to Be Normal; Christman is one of the best essayists writing today, and worth your time. Joe Posnaski’s The Baseball 100 is pure magic.

Miscellany: The podcasts for A Field Guide to Christian Nonviolence are everywhere: go check them out! And bracing for the release of my other book this Spring, which I’m really psyched about: From Isolation to Community: A Renewed Vision of Christian Life Together. The more I talk with pastors about the thesis, the more heads nodding I see, and that’s why I wrote it. It makes great use of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, but isn’t a “Bonhoeffer book” in the way that Star Wars isn’t really a movie about space travel: Bonhoeffer is the guide, but the focus of the book is the gathered life (or lack thereof) in the church.