Institutionalization and Reform

Most innovations probably arise from intuitions; the intuitions are triggered by external observations of reality or changes in society. How did calculus come to be invented at roughly the same time by Newton (b. 1643) and by Leibnitz (b. 1646); the occasion was a desire to predict mathematically points on a geometrical curve. It’s easy to predict the location of a point on a line; but when the damned thing is sloping away from you in an ark, not easy. The desire in both cases was powerful, the need to get good answers pressing. The new math worked! In due time we’ve come to formalize its procedures into calculus. And now it is institutionalized; it is taught in school. The reason why most people frown, their features signaling unease, when calculus is mentioned is because the method has become institutionalized. People taking calculus don’t have the burning need to understand curves in order, say, to understand the orbits of planets. Institutionalization makes it relatively easy to learn an art; no invention is necessary, no repetitive testing, frustration, torn up sheets, and back to the start. At the same time, if the art is a difficult one—and is taught because it’s part of some grand scheme (you want to graduate in some science eventually); it is rarely taught in answer to a burning urge.

Looking around I can at least imagine some time in the future when much of what we now experience as twenty-first century culture may have been largely lost, especially the complicated parts. Then some people in the future may meet the problem of the curve again. Those experiencing the difficulties will once more be powerfully motivated to find the math to help them. Imagine such a group when one of its members bursts into a laboring group; he’s  holding some ancient book. “It’s been done before,” he cries. “And it’s all in here. A little hard to understand, but it’s the answer.” The mood in the room can almost be felt. And it represents what I’d call Reform: the renewal of an art that began as an intuition, got institutionalized, and now will be reformed. The reform will be present because this new group will make additional innovations to the math while trying to understand that ancient text.

This subject is of value in the context of my current ponderings. Everything we live now was once an innovation; many things have become ritualized so they no longer live in us as driving needs. And institutionalization is followed by decay. Reform, however, has no doubt already begun—even if we don’t fully see it yet.

The New Normal

One of the fascinating by-products of world-wide media reporting, particularly TV reporting, is the “institutionalization” of all kinds of changing behaviors. Seeing what others are doing motivates some viewers to do the same things: after all, TV coverage in a way sanctions what it carries: it is reported, therefore important. Those engaged in the behavior achieve visibility. Secondary phenomena, e.g. the formation of activist groups, say, by people who’ve lost children to mass shootings in a school, are also at least temporarily publicized. What advocates say, how they behave, become models for others. Thus unusual events become usual; when the next one arises, patterns of reaction are already present, ready to be imitated.

Riotous public assemblies of the Arab Spring variety, mass killings and their aftermaths, and the appropriate ways to handle celebrity scandals or natural and man-caused disasters (hurricanes, floods, oilspills) are relatively new symptoms of cultural collapse that are now becoming routine, meaning institutionalized. Work teams are formed, procedures are perfected, checklists get prepared. When the next one threatens, everyone is ready—not least the media.

Less noted are broader movements taking place more slowly. But institutionalization is at work in those areas as well. They take the form of naming a phenomenon and repeating the name endlessly until the troubling matter, once unusual, becomes familiar, indeed routine—and the status of those affected solidifies into a kind of “things as they now are.” One example is the single-parent household. In 1980 19.5 percent of all households were single-parent households; in 2008, 29.5 percent were single-parent (source). Or take childbearing by unmarried women. In 1980 18.4 percent of all children were brought into the world by unmarried women; in 2010 it was 40.8 percent (source). Some speak of “life-style choice,” others of “poverty.” Whatever the cause of this very odd slide from traditional arrangements, institutionalization smoothes out the rough edges in an age where the only value system is that of broad public acceptance.

In the coverage of the Supreme Court’s rulings on two gay-marriage cases yesterday, I noted with raised eyebrows the use of a new phrase by pro-gay proponents. It was “The right to marry.” No qualifiers added. The process of institutionalization at work. Aha! I muttered. Here is a change—soon to be on every lip. But it is a curious phrase in a day and age when marriage, at least as it was once defined, is clearly if only slowly heading toward obsolescence—at least as measured by statistics.