culture
politics

Renewing Trust in America’s Institutions

Mercatus Center
National Affairs
Genesis
Response
Penultimate
Finale

Yuval Levin

National Affairs

January 29th, 2021
Martin has masterfully focused our conversation on the need to hold ourselves and others to a standard of integrity that demands self-restraint.
It should not surprise us that an exploration of our civic vices would end up focused on the challenge of self-restraint. For centuries, it has been clear to the deepest students of the liberal society that restraint is the prerequisite for a sustainable liberty, and that it is very difficult. “Self-command," wrote Adam Smith, "is not only itself a great virtue, but from it all the other virtues seem to derive their principal lustre." Other virtues, in the hands of unrestrained practitioners, easily become vices after all.
“Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites,” wrote Edmund Burke. Some degree of temperance struck James Madison, too, as one of those qualities that could make a person worthy of confidence. And he hastened to add that “republican government presupposes the existence of these qualities in a higher degree than any other form.”
A free society’s institutions should instill and reward self-restraint—in powerful people but also in the larger public. And a crucial factor in our society’s loss of confidence in its institutions is a loss of the sense that they now do this effectively. Institutions that become merely platforms for vain performance are in no position to encourage elites to be restrained, or to restrain by refining the passions of the broader society.
And as Martin has shown better than anyone, social media and related technologies have powerfully undermined our capacity for self-restraint too. They encourage fast, short, unconsidered reactions and counter-reactions, and the pleasure we derive from these sours us on the habits of discipline.
In order to become “elites who can stand straight in the digital storm,” as Martin beautifully puts it, our leaders would need to hone the capacity for restraint despite all of these pressures. And the rest of our society would too. In the hands of restrained users, the benefits of social media would surely outweigh the costs. In the hands of restrained citizens, the tools of radical transparency could serve democracy rather than scorch it. In the hands of restrained elites, our institutions would be much easier to trust.
Clarity on this point does not exactly bring encouragement. It suggests the challenge of mistrust runs very deep—indeed, that it is just a form of the challenge of ordered liberty that has bedeviled the West for three centuries, if not of the rapacity that has troubled humanity since the Garden of Eden.
But there is good news in this too. For all that is new and distinct about our digital age, this core challenge is old and familiar, and we are not short of tools—secular and (especially) religious, political and (especially) cultural—for answering it. What we lack is the will, and perhaps an understanding of the nature of our problems that would encourage us to summon it.
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