Institutions can also be the instruments for human liberation and enriched,
Xourishing lives. As several authors have put it, ‘‘we live through institutions’’
(Bellah 1991 , ch. 1 ). For example, without institutions upholding private property,
even the most liberated individual will soonWnd his or her freedom an empty
slogan. But it goes beyond that. By its nature, institutional thinking tends to
cultivate belonging and a common life. It leads to collective action that not only
controls but also expands and liberates individual action. HumansXourish as
creatures of attachments, not unencumbered selves. Growing up detached from
the authoritative communities that social institutions are, children exhibit signs of
deteriorating mental and behavioral health (Commission on Children at Risk
2003 ). Without a similar deep connectedness, individuals also age and die poorly
by the standards of human dignity. What Rousseau depicted as enchaining were in
fact signs of human nurturing. The swaddling clothes and coYn testify that
humans are something more than beasts dropped in theWeld or left dead by the
roadside.
Works of modernWction routinely portray rebellion against institutions as cour-
ageous adventures of liberation. The promise is perfect freedom. The truth found in
any reliable work of non-Wction—whether it is history, biography, or current
events—is that a life without institutions becomes a perfect hell. A life without
institutional thinking tends toward self-destructive excesses, at the center of which is
the ultimate excess, the overweening Self-Life. Without authority for freedom to
play against, the adventure itself is extinguished into existential nothingness.
Obviously, I have emphasized only the positive aspects of institutional thinking.
There is, of course, another side. For example, in terms of criminal activity, the
MaWa is an outstanding example of institutional thinking across the generations.
Depending on the overall goals and the operative conduct of people in a particular
institution, the implications for humanXourishing may be positive, negative, or
indiVerent. To live in a world of nothing but institutional thinking would be a
monstrosity. By the same token, to live in a world where institutional thinking is
absent, or so heavily discounted as to fade into insigniWcance, would also be a
monstrosity.
To me at least, the evidence from the current scene is clear. The great danger is
not too much but too little institutional thinking. To test that proposition, one
might consider the common lamentations about any given realm of contemporary
life—the scandals in accountingWrms and news organizations; the sportsWgures
and businessmen who put short-term gain ahead of the sport and the business; the
loss of stature and trust in legal, medical, and teaching professions; the marriages
deinstitutionalized into contracts of mere mutual convenience; the politicians
who blithely mortgage the future, and the citizens who let them. Amid all the
particular complaints, we do not seem to perceive the larger fact that we are living
amid the rubble produced by an indiVerence and even aversion to thinking
institutionally about our aVairs. In one realm after another, modern mindsWnd
740 hugh heclo