The conversations around this, as I’ve teased this out with Dorothy Day’s help, have been really insightful, and have come in two basic objections:
Institutions is really too broad a brush, and perhaps something like “bureaucracy” is more Day’s (and my own target) here. Aren’t families institutions as well?
Institutions are something which we can’t disavow, but have to live with, and so, the notion of doing without apparatuses which distribute goods to diverse persons seems unrealistic at best, and unadvisable at worst.
These are important questions, and in this installment, I’ll take on the first objection: are all institutions—small and large, families and Wal-Mart—descriptively the same, and subject to the same kinds of critiques?
What follows is a bit of a thought experiment, prompted by the first objection. As with all thought experiments, I could be completely wrong. But what I want to suggest here is that, far from families being a different kind of thing, families are institutions par excellence, and that much of what we experience in our relationships with other institutions is an expectation that other institutions will in fact embody the good institutionality we find in families.
So, first: what does it mean to call a family an institution?
I want to stay with the language of “institutions” for families, flipping the script as it were. “Family” as a broad category—while smaller in scope—bears the marks of institutions as I’ve been describing in the first two installments (designed to persist longitudinally, to facilitate certain goods, with decision making processes ordered toward the values of the institution, etc.), with one major difference: families are small enough to draw together the personalist attention and the processes of perpetuation.
This is important for two reasons. First, like institutions, the family is born out of a “prime value” of love for its members—doesn’t distinguish between the good of its members and the decisions it makes. We can describe a family as pathological, by contrast, when it operates absent personalist attention (treating all children as interchangeable) or when it engages in decision-making processes in ways which lose sight of the prime reason for its existence. When a family orients itself around, say, baseball, it forgets that it exists not to play baseball or to produce a good, but to love.
But do families, as we’ve described earlier, exist for the sake of existing?
Kind of. Except for families, because love is coextensive with the functions of the institution, all of the ordinary mechanisms of institutionality become transformed: the institution wants to keep going, but that “keeping going” is coextensive with being a community which cares for its members. This kind of institutionality, then, becomes one which—unlike other institutions—operates in a way which is utterly inefficient: it sacrifices for one another, puts plans on hold, defers temporary satisfactions, and seeks the cultivation of its members. But in doing so, it produces a love which then wants to “replicate”, as it were: to have an extended family to draw into that love.
In this way, the family becomes the model for an institution: one which is ordered around a prime value, only in the case of the family, because love is the prime value, the mantra of “institutions don’t love you” becomes the very way in which the institution of the family loves you the best: it loves its members in a way which doesn’t equate with their immediate satisfaction. The family becomes that institution which orders the love of its members toward their good, through caring for and raising its own, is one which loves its members in a way which has their future good in view. In this way, the institution succeeding in accomplishing its core value actually contributes to its immediate failure but long-term success: the departure of the children from the home sends forth members who expand the institution in future marriage, another generation, a more widely respected family name, and so forth.
The institution, then, find their model in the smallest one: the family, one which is willing to live up to its core value, through attending intimately to the good of its members, willing to suffer short-term failure for long-term success of its members. And it makes what most institutions do—when they do not attend to their members but solely to the furtherance of their value—all the more painful: we expect that all institutions will function like this one.
In the next installment, we’ll get to the big question: if big institutions are what they are, and if Day’s worries about institutions are correct (which I think they largely are), then what’s the alternative?
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Some brief self-promotional news:
The book which David Cramer and I wrote on the varieties of Christian nonviolence comes out very soon! Like, in less than two weeks! I’ve already got my author copies, and we’ll be talking about it a lot for the next few months, I’m sure. You can see the long interview with Sojourners, which came out yesterday, as well as hear us talk about it on podcasts here and getting some love here. Or come join us for a virtual event here! We did an interview with Preston Sprinkle’s Theology in the Raw, and have a couple of others coming out next month. It’s gratifying to see so many eager to talk about a topic which has occupied a lot of my writing life for over ten years now.
You can pre-order it here. One of the things I love about it the most is that none of the endorsers would identify themselves as pacifists: not one. And they loved the book, because it does what has needed to be done for years: provide a clear introduction to the varieties of forms which Christian nonviolence takes, and give us a better place to begin having an intelligible conversation about the role of violence in the Christian life.