My recent reflections about
"saintly institutions" got me recalling some old ideas from my
sociology teaching days.
The intro soc textbooks
typically said that there were three or four lines of theory in sociology:
functionalism, symbolic interactionism, conflict theory (Marxism), and rational
choice theory. I thought that the last two could be considered sub-forms of the
first two, which is not something that I want to go into here. I want to focus
on the first two.
Functionalist theory uses a
living organism as the metaphor for how societies should function. Living
organisms have structures like skeletons and circulatory systems, and each
structure has a function. For example, the skeleton helps the organism hold together, and the circulatory system
nourishes the cells in the organism.
An organism is just a highly
developed machine. It is deterministic. When it is stimulated in a certain way,
it responds in a certain way. If something from outside disrupts one of its
functions, it corrects the disruption (homeostasis).
The organic metaphor sees
society as a set of structures (rules and laws). Each rule has a function. If
we design the rules well, the organism will function well. When things aren’t
going well, we revise the law. Our law library shelves get longer and longer,
and we need more and more lawyers to navigate what we have created. Even behaviors
that are not covered in the law books can lead to lawsuits, which means more
lawyers and more restrictions on what we can do.
The second line of theory is
labeled "symbolic interactionism." Its defining metaphor is the game.
The people playing the game make the rules, and most players obey the rules.
When a lot of them don't obey, the players change the rules or create handicaps.
This theory says that there are no divinely-sanctioned rules for living--all
moral rules are arrived at by group consensus. This goes against my Catholic
tradition, but I point to areas where my Catholic tradition has had to change
what it considered "natural." For centuries the church forbade
"usury," taking interest on loans. Somewhere around the 1500s it
abandoned that moral principle. Somewhat later it quit accepting slavery as a
permissible moral practice. Recently a top church authority (Pope St. John Paul
II) said that capital punishment is immoral, a judgment echoed by most church
authorities these days, in spite of widespread U.S. Catholic belief that it is
still permissible.
In other words, the Catholic
community has changed its rules.
An institution such as "the
economy" is a set of games. When I said that no institution is saintly, I
was saying that no institution operates like a machine. We cannot design an
economy so that it will always operate with justice. When we try to do that, we
can change the rules, and in the back of our mind we can hope that one more
tinkering with the rules will make the machine automatically produce justice.
But it won't. We are in a game, and there will always be some people who will
break the rules. We can punish the rule-breakers (sinners), or we can hold back
on the punishment (forgiveness) and consider modifying the rules to make the
playing field more fair.
In practice, both theories
appear similar, but they differ in how we make moral judgments on their basis.
If we believe that there are divinely authorized rules (natural law), then we
see rule-breakers as worthy of punishment, and if punishment does not work,
worthy of exclusion from society. ("Lock 'em up and throw away the
key.") We tell ourselves that our punishment (prison) is remedial--we want
prisoners to be rehabilitated so they can return to society as
fully-functioning participants, but in most places we cannot find the resources
needed to practice rehabilitation alongside punishment. Prisons in most places are
designed for punishment, period. If there is rehabilitation, somebody is going
beyond what the "correctional" institution is capable of. Such people
are to be applauded, but the correction system cannot do more than punish.
If we see our institutions as
games, we are more open to modifying the rules without excluding rule-breakers
from future play. We punish rule-breakers, but always with the assumption that
the rulebreakers are just like us, and forgiving their violation may be better
than punishing them. They may even be prophets calling us to make the game more
fair. They are part of "us," not a cancer on the body politic.
Our economic rules do need
serious modifying. Most of us admit that the middle class has been shrinking,
and that it is getting harder and harder to find decent housing, and affordable
food and transportation. This is why we elected Donald Trump.
Mr. Trump's backers are not
likely to be open to changing any rules that will make the game more fair for
people below them on the economic scale. They will say that the economy is a
machine, and is working just fine. Rising tides lift all boats. Except that
they don't. They will resist the idea that the game is set up so that more and
more people cannot win. If they do not adjust the rules, the players will take
their marbles and go home. They will abandon the game. They could vote Mr.
Trump and his allies out in the next election, or they might decide that
democracy will never work and turn to violent ways to get what they think is
fairness.
In fairness to Mr. Trump, the
Democrats have been no more likely to welcome changing the rules than backers
of Mr. Trump. Voters have recognized this, and have punished the Democrats.
To recap: our institutions are
not saintly; people keep breaking the rules. There is no perfect structure that
will prevent that. We should look at our institutions as games that require
fair rules if we want people to keep playing them. Rule-breakers are not all
evil, worthy of hell-fire. They are people like us, who want to play in our
games. We should welcome them and listen to them. There will always be some
people who will push the limits and break the rules, but when we decide that there
are too many such people, we will change the rules of the game.
