In 1964, Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart—asked how he determines whether a given piece of media is obscene—explained curtly, “I know it when I see it.”
Today’s sociologists employ a similar tactic when defining institutions. After much discourse, they will invariably throw up their hands and admit that institutions are everything and nothing—sort of. This confusion is compounded by the fact that institutions (whatever they are) haven’t been having such a great time lately, so no one’s especially keen to work on the definition. As you’ve likely heard, Americans’ faith in institutions has been hovering at historic lows since the turn of the century and fared particularly badly during the pandemic.
Gallup perennially tracks our trust in sixteen different societal institutions, confidence in four of which—the police, public schools, large tech companies, and big business—is as bad as it’s ever been. Of the whole list, Congress (as in, the people we choose to make our laws for us) is pretty much always at the very bottom. The trend is bad and getting worse, which leaves a lot of people asking whether it’s time to ditch institutions altogether.
Our souring sentiment toward institutions doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It is both a cause and symptom of the widespread slump into a bored sort of nihilism throughout our culture. If you listen, you will hear its pernicious mantras whispered just about everywhere: Everything is rigged. Do whatever you want. Get what you can. Life is short. Make yourself feel good.
Our political life too often reflects an odious choice between an elitist-flavored and populist-flavored nihilism. It can feel as if the only thing on which we all agree is that none of this really matters.
“Cynicism is not a neutral position—and although it asks almost nothing of us, it is highly infectious and unbelievably destructive. In my view, it is the most common and easy of evils.”
In his latest book, our local social philosopher James Davison Hunter declares, “Ordinary Americans of all backgrounds and convictions recognize that the entire political ecosystem—not only its leadership and its governing institutions, but also its leading ideas and ideals—is failing.”
But it’s not just politics. Even the most primal mission of our species seems to be faltering in our most “civilized” places. Whatever your faith or hometown, occupation or political philosophy, wealth or stature, there was a time when we uniformly thought it was a good idea to make more humans. Increasingly, though, I find myself in conversation with non-insane friends rationalizing their way into questioning the ethics of our very existence. Whether from climate, artificial intelligence, civil war, plague, or a plethora of other curtain-droppers, we’ve become pretty gloomy about the tomorrow we’ve been tasked with populating. This sort of thinking is, as Nick Cave so poetically frames it, “highly infectious and unbelievably destructive.”
Here’s why: Within our various civilizational projects, institutions have conventionally served as the molds we build and leave behind to form our progeny according to the many lessons we have thus far learned. Schools and temples and governments are repositories for hard-won knowledge. But to design them requires belief that other lifetimes are yet to come and that they are worth sacrificing for. When we love the world we have and make babies to inhabit it after us, we devote our collective energies to leaving our places better than we found them.
Back when we still thought making new humans was a worthwhile project, economist Adam Smith suggested the best way to understand the sociological phenomena known as institutions was as a system of structures that mediate between two unavoidable, powerful, and overlapping spheres: the sphere of markets and the sphere of morals. Wealth and esteem were—and still are—the two currencies that matter most.
In Smith’s formulation, we can easily construct social instruments optimized for one of these currencies—let’s call them Robinhood and TikTok—but left to their own devices, they will eventually become cancerous. We need an institution—perhaps the wildly unpopular United States Congress—to mediate, which is to say obstruct and encumber, our insatiable appetites to become rich and well-liked through our own designs.
It makes sense then, that as individualism and self-esteem began displacing mutuality and common virtue in the waning decades of the 20th century, we felt our need for institutions less and less. So we stopped investing in them and they became weak and listless.
Which pretty much brings us up to now. Much like a local coffee shop or an ambitious tomato plant, proper support is essential for ongoing productivity.
Founded in the midst of all this wanton divestment, Journey Group is pushing back the other way. We’re a small design company, and we’ve obstinately devoted ourselves to designing institutions, which sounds like a pretty bad plan given the general confusion and disillusionment surrounding them.
Why would dozens of seemingly rational designers pour their collective energies into bailing the proverbial seawater off the decks of a fleet of sinking ships? Why not get into products or marketing? Why not help Nike sell sneakers? Anything but institutions! The answer is simply this: We know of no better medium for hope.
“Hopefulness is not a neutral position either. It is adversarial. It is the warrior emotion that can lay waste to cynicism. It says the world and its inhabitants have value and are worth defending.”
In thirty-plus years of pursuing our mission to influence a skeptical world, inform a questioning world, and invigorate an apathetic world, we’ve consistently found time-worn institutions—with all their problematic histories and bureaucratic idiosyncrasies—to be the most stable medium for narratives that endure.
If we were furniture makers, we’d prefer oak. If we were architects, we’d favor stone. Tailors, wool. Timeless media are not quite so exciting as the newest synthetics, but they do tend to last. Our partners—schools, museums, governments, aid organizations, and the like—are not typically known for being on the cusp of innovation. On the whole, they tend to resist sweeping new strategies and the design du jour. In our view, this is a feature, not a bug.
Around the office, we frequently reference G.K. Chesterton’s metaphor from The Thing (1929):
“In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, ‘I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.’ To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: ‘If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.’”
It’s safe to say we aspire to be the more intelligent type of reformer.
We seek to engage critically with our past, apply lessons to the active pursuit of wholeness in the present. And—in a posture of tireless optimism—we endeavor to cultivate that rare and furtive emotion: hope. We believe that story matters. We believe in flourishing. And we believe that if we’re going to spend half our waking hours designing systems and communication and artifacts and experiences, they ought to contribute to the most enduring projects of civilization.
Fundamentally, institutions exist to expand and defend ideas our ancestors thought worthy of expanding and defending: the many gates across our various roads. Does that mean they are all intrinsically good? Of course not. But to conserve what is true and beautiful while still making progress toward something better requires the sort of stability that institutions are uniquely capable of. Hope requires a technology that’s been around long enough to engender confidence that it will remain long after we’re gone.
Here at Journey Group, we’re practitioners of an adversarial sort of hope. Our studios believe institutions deserve better design, and we expend a great deal of energy fighting for them to have it.
Whether they’ve lost the essence of their own story, been crippled by the fear of obsolescence, or pillaged by the sort of reformer who destroys something simply because they don’t understand why it existed in the first place, institutions are ripe for good design. More specifically, we’re working to develop fluency in three underlying—though often unnoticed—principles common among institutions worth serving.
Institutions insist that life has purpose.
Here, we enter into the realm of narrative. We feel some urgency to communicate vital truths on behalf of our partners. The message that institutions have for the individual is this: Your life is important, and we can help you in your purpose.
Institutions have a power to evoke a sense of pride and duty few other entities possess. They operate at all scales and timeframes to capsize cynical claims of despair and desolation. “We are doing this because it matters,” they tirelessly declare.
Institutions emit stories of overcoming, building, healing, and restoring like staccato beams from a lighthouse flashing across a stormy sea of cynicism. This is a safe place; come join us. And here’s a happy thought: the darker the night, the brighter the light.
Institutions assert that we’re better together.
They also attack and undermine the excesses of unconstrained individualism. The best institutions reconnect us to the core projects of civilization: protecting the weak and vulnerable, expanding access to flourishing, learning more about our world, and pursuing wholeness—together. So many of our current maladies are alleviated when individuals are knitted back into groups. We join the chorus of Aristotle, Tocqueville, and Burke in advancing a vision of the good life rooted in “little platoons.”
At Journey Group, we wholeheartedly endorse societal norms that compel us to co-labor with people very different from us—ideally in person over long periods of time. The sort of norms that reorient us toward mutual accountability and create forms for being marked by empathy and selflessness. Thriving institutions work to convene, connect, and commission otherwise isolated individuals who become less like themselves and more alike in their shared aspirations.
Institutions promise that tomorrow will be better.
I’m certainly not the first to observe that faith is a precondition for hope. Faith can look like putting your trust in an external entity. In this case, it looks more like allegiance to a greater good.
The veracity of your hope has everything to do with the potential source of your desired future. The warrior emotion finds its root in a future worthy of sacrifice. Honor for the dead. Dignity for the dying. Restoration for the broken. Resilience for the fragile. Recovery of the lost. A better world for those just born. Love stories last forever.
At Journey Group, we believe great institutions are the guardians of an anthropology of hope. And it’s no surprise that our hope has diminished alongside our faith in them.
Know an institution that wears its heart on its sleeve? The Internal Revenue Service. To wit, I can arrive at a decent sense of the future that policymakers desire simply by observing the money they let me keep. Certain sacrifices and decisions—which perhaps in some abstract way reduce my reliance on the government services supported by taxing me in the first place—are directly incentivized.
It’s plain to see that, by the numbers, I ought to stay married, have and raise children, save for old age, install solar panels, use my land productively, and give to the poor. Whatever cynical nihilism the culture seems to be promoting, this clunky, old, unpopular institution is quietly and slowly forming me away from myself and toward the future. The simple fact that we financially reward me for doing so is some evidence that we the people—broadly speaking—believe those are markers of a life well spent. A nod to molds worth building and leaving for babies as yet unborn. Small investments in a future as yet undesigned.
And that gives me hope.