An Institutional Malaise

(ht to Hullabaloos, again)

For those concerned with the health of the Canadian polity, particularly at the federal level, James Travers' column in the Saturday Star is a must read. While lamenting the ethical well-being of society has been a staple of commentary since before Socrates, I nevertheless think Travers is on the mark in noting that ethical conduct in government, and particularly in the office of the prime minister, has fallen on uniquely hard times. And drawing on the work of one of Canada's truly great scholars of Westminster democracies, Donald Savoie, immeasurably strengthens his case.

Yet I wonder if he casts his net wide enough. Not only does the federal government not have a monopoly on abuses of executive power, but I am convinced that this is but a symptom of a much broader problem of ethical malaise that permeates the institutional structure of our society. This is clear with the behavior of various financial institutions of late, but it is, I believe, equally true of corporations more broadly, professions, much of civil society, and even, and perhaps especially the institutional church.

Robert Putnam has written extensively on the role of trust as a social glue that makes collective action possible. In Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy, he describes how the erosion of trust affects the capacity for collective action across society. The problem with trust, as Putnam describes it, is that it presents a classic collective action problem; while we benefit from it collectively, we have little incentive to create or strengthen it individually. Where this problem is avoided, or in much rarer instances, resolved, it is most often done through the existence and enforcement of social norms that value ethical behavior. And where these norms break down, no amount of formal enforcement can substitute.

Our dilemma, if Putnam is right, is that trust is a commodity that is extremely fragile and incredibly difficult, if not impossible, to fix once broken. It is therefore in our interest to both hold ourselves to a much higher level of accountability and to do so with those institutions and actors we come in contact with. To paraphrase activist Jennifer Smith at Runesmith, we have to "get off our asses and do something."