Tornadoes, Celebrations, and Alasdair MacIntyre

Further reflections on the importance of institutions

The entrance to my neighborhood last week (author photo)

Last week brought an unexpected convergence of events. The most significant was the tornado that hit St. Louis and caused widespread suffering to our city (five lives lost, dozens injured, and over $1.6 billion of damage). Our house was unaffected but our neighborhood was hit pretty hard, and nearby neighborhoods were devastated. My son’s little elementary school took a hard hit.

This week also included end-of-year celebrations at my kids’ schools. On Thursday, a few days after the tornado, my son finished sixth grade. It also marked the end of fourteen years for our family at that school. My oldest, now about to head to college, started at that same elementary school shortly after our family moved to St. Louis.

As I watched my son finish sixth grade, it occurred to me that, aside from my current employer, this elementary school is the institution I have been a part of the longest in my life. While I remain connected to a number of past institutions, I do not have a longer continuous relationship with the same community of people working together toward a common purpose.

Which brings me to Alasdair MacIntyre, the renowned philosopher who died last week. MacIntyre was one of the most formative influences on my thinking—his book, After Virtue, is one of the few truly life-changing books I’ve read. (See here, here, and here for some of the many recent tributes in recent days.)

Among many other significant topics in After Virtue and later works, MacIntyre wrote about the importance of institutions. Central to his account of the virtues (and really, a well-lived life) is that people require practices to habituate them into knowing and acting toward the right ends. By participating in a practice—whether chess, or football, or judging—we come to learn and appreciate the goods internal to that practice and we eventually inhabit and reflect the virtues that correspond to those goods.

Practices, in turn, need institutions to sustain them and carry them forward as part of lived traditions. But as MacIntyre notes, institutions also pose a problem:

Institutions are involved in acquiring money and other material goods; they are structured in terms of power and status, and they distribute money, power, and status as rewards. Nor could they do otherwise if they are to sustain not only themselves, but also the practices of which they are the bearer.

And therein lies the rub. We need institutions to sustain the practices that cultivate virtues. But institutions are flawed and susceptible to corruption—in part because they are filled with imperfect people (like all of us) who are drawn to the power, hierarchies, and resources that institutions produce. So the virtues we need to resist what MacIntyre calls “the corrupting power of institutions” require those very institutions for their cultivation.

Navigating these challenges is no small task, but it is the task that confronts each of us when we participate in institutions and work to resist their corrosive influences. And the more directly we engage in the practices, liturgies, and other formative influences of an institution, the greater both the possibilities and the risks to our own flourishing.

Of course we also need institutions to advance human flourishing and mitigate human suffering on a broader scale. This past week, those of us in the St. Louis region witnessed firsthand the importance of institutions—fire departments, neighborhood associations, power companies, and tree removal services, to name just a few. We also saw the gaps exposed when local, state, and federal institutions fell short in their responses.

It’s not only disaster relief. Most of the activities that sustain our lives depend on some level of social cooperation through institutions. And if MacIntyre is right, then this cooperation will only be possible by people formed with enough virtue to resist the corrosive power of these same institutions.

In recent years, the people controlling or seeking to control many of our most powerful political, religious, and educational institutions have been decidedly lacking in this kind of virtue. It would be easy enough to throw up our hands in despair. But we can choose a different response. As my friend Yuval Levin noted in a 2023 dialogue I moderated:

Think about institutional engagement not as a burden but as an opportunity, as an answer to the question you ask yourself in the moments when you're most worried about the future. That question very often has to do with the sense that things are out of control if you have no part to play. In fact, for all of us there is some set of institutions where we have a role where we play some part or could. Ask yourself where that is. What’s the set of institutions you really want to be identified with? Find ways to devote yourself to their betterment. There are ways to do that. They don’t have to be huge. But find ways to draw happiness and draw meaning out of an institution whose fate you feel like is tied up with yours. Those small commitments really matter. They matter to the institutions, but they also matter in making your everyday life more enjoyable.

Yuval’s comments call to mind not only MacIntyre’s reflections on the importance of institutions but also the dozens of institutions in action I witnessed all around me over the past few days and the smaller number of even more significant institutions that shape our lives over decades not days. This week, tornadoes, celebrations, and Alasdair MacIntyre reminded me that rather than simply shaking our fists at the institutions we don’t control, we have an opportunity to shape some of the ones around us even as they continue to shape us. As Yuval notes, that can begin with small investments of time and trust, but those initial commitments eventually help us see both the flaws and possibilities of the institutions that matter most.