The Unremarked Days

There is a pattern I want to make sure you are able to see in this chapter that, once you can see it, you will start to see in places you have known and could not previously make sense of. The pattern is one of the hardest things to see while you are inside it, because it is built out of the very materials that are supposed to protect you. It is also one of the most important patterns to learn to recognise, because a great deal of harm in the world is done by it, by people who believe with a clean conscience that they are defending what they are in fact destroying.

The pattern is this. An institution — a household, a school, a workplace, a religious community, a profession, or a country — has, over time, built up a set of mechanisms for defending what it cares about most. The mechanisms exist for good reasons. The household has its discipline; the school has its rules and its disciplinary procedures; the workplace has its policies and its investigations; the religious community has its discipline of members and its disciplining of leaders; the profession has its boards and its ethics committees; the country has its police and its courts and its security services. These mechanisms are not, in themselves, the problem. Every group of people living together needs ways of defending what they have built, because without such ways, what they have built does not survive long. The mechanisms are part of the working equipment of any sustained common life. The question - if there is one that still requires closer examination - is how much of this function can be outsourced to specialised groups with exclusive mandates and how much of it must remain a shared responsibility of all constituents.

Whatever the mechanisms are, they can lose, by long degradation, the capacity to tell the difference between what they were built to defend against and what they were built to defend. When this happens, the mechanisms will still continue to operate — they do not stop functioning; in fact, they continue to function with great energy — but they begin to fire at the wrong things. They fire at the people who are doing the work the institution most needs done and protect what the institution claims to be fighting against. They expend the institution's defensive energies in the wrong direction, and the institution becomes, by the operation of its own protective apparatus, the agent of its own corruption.

This is the pattern I want you to learn to recognise. It does not present itself, from inside the institution, as a corruption. From inside, it presents itself as defence. The people operating the mechanisms believe, in most cases sincerely, that they are protecting what they are charged with protecting. They are doing the work they were appointed to do; in the way they have been trained to do it. They are following procedures and exercising the judgements their predecessors exercised before them. The misfiring is not visible to them as misfiring. The teacher who is being driven out, the priest who is being silenced, the journalist who is being hounded, and the doctor whose career is being ended are, in the institutional perception, threats that the institution's defences are correctly identifying and addressing. The defenders cannot see what is happening, because their seeing has been formed by the same process that has produced the misfiring; they are operating, with full integrity by their own lights, an apparatus whose calibration has come apart in a way the operating cannot detect.

We must give the pattern a name, because naming a pattern is one of the more useful things you can do for yourself when you are trying to see something new. The name I want to use is borrowed from the body's own version of this pattern, which doctors will recognise. There is a class of diseases in which the body's immune system, which exists to defend the body against threats, loses the ability to distinguish the body's own tissues from foreign invaders. It begins to attack the body itself; with the same vigour it would direct at a real invader. The diseases that result from this are debilitating, and they have a particular structural character: the body is being injured not by an external attacker but by its own defensive apparatus, which is doing what it was built to do but doing it against the wrong target. The diseases are called auto-immune diseases, and the name is precise. The body is being immune against itself.

The same pattern operates in institutions. An institution can develop, by a long process of degradation, the institutional equivalent of an auto-immune disease. Its protective apparatus begins to attack the parts of the institution it most needs to protect, while leaving the threats it was built against to operate freely. The institution is then, in the strict sense, being injured by its own defences. The injury is harder to address than ordinary corruption, because ordinary corruption can in principle be exposed by the institution's defences. The auto-immune corruption is being carried out by the defences themselves, and there is, by definition, no internal mechanism for the defences to defend against their own misfiring.

I want to spend some time on how this kind of degradation actually happens, because the explanation will help you recognise it when you encounter it, and the recognition is what will allow you to take an honest measure of which institutions in your life are operating in this condition and which are not.

The degradation begins, usually, in a particular way. The institution, at some earlier point, faced a real threat. The threat was correctly identified by the institution's defences, and the defences responded, and the institution survived. The institution chose what to learn from that episode and what it learned persists as a memory of what the threat looked like, a calibration of the defences to be sensitive to threats of that kind and a set of procedures that had proven effective. The lesson that was learnt becomes an institutional asset; institutions must indeed learn from their own experience, but various parts of the institution can learn different lessons from the same experience and what they learn is often coloured by specific interests and divergent perspectives.

The resulting calibration that remains within the institution remains, in important ways, specific to the kind of threat the institution faced and how it was perceived and analysed. It will be most effective at helping the institution recognise threats that look similar to the earlier threat. As the years pass and the institution's circumstances change, the threats facing it begin to take different shapes, and the calibration becomes less and less well-matched to the new shapes. The defences are still firing, but they are firing on the basis of patterns drawn from the older threats, and the new threats — which may not look like the older ones at all — are passing under the defences without being detected. Worse, the defences are increasingly detecting, as threats, things that share surface features with the older threats but are not in fact threatening. The calibration has become, in the precise sense, paranoid. It is over-sensitive to a particular pattern and under-sensitive to everything else.

This is one of the structural reasons institutions tend to fight, with great vigour, the last war rather than the current one. The institutional defences were calibrated against the threats of the last era, and they continue to operate on that calibration even after the threats of the current era have changed. The defenders are, by their own measure, doing exactly what they should be doing. They are also, by an outside measure, doing damage to the institution they are charged with protecting.

A particular form of this degradation deserves a closer look, because it is the form that does the most consequential damage. The defenders of an institution can, by long operation of their defensive function, develop a particular vulnerability: they come to perceive any criticism of the institution as an attack on the institution. The vulnerability is understandable. Most criticism of an institution is, in fact, mixed in its intent — some of it comes from people who want the institution to do better, some from people who want the institution to be weakened or destroyed. The defenders, having been trained to identify threats, have a hard time distinguishing the two, and they tend, under pressure, to default to treating all criticism as if it came from the second source. This default is, in some cases, a costly mistake. The criticism that comes from people who want the institution to do better is the institution's most valuable signal — it is, in many cases, the only available indication of where the institution is going wrong. To treat such criticism as an attack is to silence the signal the institution most needed to hear.

What happens then is one of the more reliably destructive sequences in the life of any institution. The critic who wanted the institution to do better is identified as a threat and treated as one. The treatment is generally not subtle: the critic is marginalised, denied resources, denied advancement, removed from positions of influence, and sometimes expelled altogether. Other potential critics watch what has happened and learn, without anyone having to instruct them, that the cost of offering similar criticism is high. So, they fall silent. The institution thus loses its supply of internal critics, who were the people who would have told it where it was going wrong. The institution continues to operate, but it is now operating without the corrective feedback it needs, and the absence of the feedback means it cannot detect the direction in which it is drifting. The defenders, meanwhile, congratulate themselves on the effectiveness of their defence. They have, after all, neutralised the threats they identified. They cannot see that the neutralisation has cut the institution off from precisely the information it needed in order to remain healthy.

You may have watched this sequence unfold somewhere in your own experience. It could be a teacher who kept highlighting problems a school did not want to address, or a priest who was quietly moved to a less prominent position because the priest's preaching was making the members of the congregation uncomfortable, or a journalist who was disappeared or killed because the work was annoying the people whose actions were being exposed and whose decisions were being criticised, or the comedian who got cancelled because he spoke truth to power in a manner that cut through the defences of a government's propaganda machine.

These small institutional cleansings happen all the time, in places of every size. They are mostly invisible from outside, and the invisibility is part of the problem. By the time the cleansings produce externally visible consequences, the institution has often deteriorated past the point where the consequences can be reversed without a much larger effort than would have been required earlier.

I want to introduce one further feature of the pattern that, I think, will help you recognise it even more precisely. Institutions in this condition tend to develop a particular tone in how they speak about their critics. The tone is one of injured incomprehension. The critic is treated as if their criticism is not just wrong but baffling — as if it could come only from a failure to understand what the institution is actually trying to do. The defenders cannot quite credit that the critic is acting in good faith, because if the critic were acting in good faith, they would not be saying what they are saying. The criticism must therefore be coming from some other motive — bad faith, personal grievance, ideological derangement, or the influence of outside forces — and the defenders devote considerable energy to identifying the motive that explains the criticism without requiring the defenders to take its substance seriously.

This is one of the clearest signs of an institution stuck in an autoimmune condition. Watch for it. When an institution responds to a sustained piece of internal criticism not by engaging the substance of what the critic is saying but by speculating about what could have led the critic to say it, the institution has tipped its hand. It has revealed that its defensive apparatus is, in this moment, in the misfiring mode. It is operating against the critic as a threat to be neutralised rather than as a source of information to be considered. The substance of the criticism may be right or wrong; the institution's failure to engage it on the substance is, by itself, evidence about the condition of the institution.

There is something further about how the misfiring reproduces itself across generations that I want to describe, because it explains a great deal about why these institutions are so resistant to correction from within. The people operating the defensive apparatus, in many cases, were most likely themselves once on the receiving end of it. They were the junior members of the institution who watched, in their own early years, what happened to those who raised the questions the institution did not want raised. They absorbed, from that watching, both the lesson that raising such questions was costly and the implicit promise that those who survived the early years without raising them would, in time, become the seniors whose authority the next intake would have to accommodate. The promise was the same bargain that the previous chapter on work described in vocational formation. Institutions operate on the same bargain, but at larger scales. The young members are formed in the substrate-conditions of an institution that punishes the kinds of criticism it cannot tolerate, and the formation includes the implicit expectation that the punishment will, in due course, be administered through their own hands rather than imposed on them.

When the moment arrives at which the formed members reach positions from which they can either continue the pattern or refuse it, the bargain that was implicit in their formation becomes the standing condition of their senior service. They have spent fifteen or twenty years paying the cost of compliance with an apparatus that they did not, in their early years, have the standing to challenge. The compliance was bearable because it was understood as an investment. To now use the position the investment has secured for them, against the apparatus that produced it, would be to declare that the investment was, in fact, a participation in something the senior has now come to see as wrong. The declaration would invalidate, in the senior's own account of their life, the decades of compliance that brought them to where they are. Most seniors are unwilling to make this declaration. They prefer to continue the pattern. They tell themselves, in the privacy of their own conscience, that they would have wished things were otherwise, but that the institution's needs require what the institution has historically required, and that the cost of disruption would be greater than the cost of continuity. The misfiring continues, not because each senior is independently malicious, but because each senior is independently invested in a pattern of compliance whose justification and meaning depends on the pattern being perpetuated.

This is one of the reasons that institutional reform from within is so much harder than the outside observer expects it to be. The seniors who are in a position to address the misfiring are also the seniors whose entire life within the institution has been a long acceptance of the bargain. Their reproduction of the autoimmune condition is what earned them seniority in the first place. So, they are not, in most cases, willing to expose their own service as a participation in something they would now want to dismantle. The few who do declare it — the seniors who, late in their service, break with the institution they have been part of for decades and name what they have been carrying along with are uncommon, and they pay heavily for breaking that implicit contract. The institution treats them as it treats any other critic, with the additional energy that the institution reserves for the apostate. The treatment is part of why so few seniors break. Those who would have broken have watched what happened to the few who did.

I want to say something here that may be unwelcome but that I think you need to hear. The institution does not have to be wholly corrupt to exhibit the pattern; the pattern can be operating in particular regions of the institution while other regions remain healthy. But most institutions you will deal with in the course of your life will have some degree of this misfiring built into them. The conditions that produce it are very common because it is the most likely result when a group of people collaborate in their default mode.

Few institutions are wholly in this condition and few are wholly free of it. What you have to learn to do is read where, in any given institution, the misfiring is operating and where it is not, and to make your decisions about how to relate to the institution on the basis of an accurate reading.

Reading it accurately is not easy. It requires, in particular, that you not give the institution credit for being healthy just because it says it is healthy - either in its prospectus or in its balance sheet. The institutions in the worst misfiring condition tend to be the loudest about their own integrity. Their explicit story includes elaborate self-descriptions of their commitment to truth-telling, their respect for dissent, and their welcoming of difficult voices. The explicit story is, by itself, evidence of very little. What matters is the actual record: who has been promoted in the institution and who has been quietly pushed out, what kinds of criticism have been engaged on the substance and what kinds have been responded to by speculation about the critic's motives, what happens, in the small daily operations of the institution, to people who say things the institution would prefer not to hear. The actual record is harder to assemble than the explicit story, and the institution will rarely volunteer it to you. You have to put it together yourself, often from fragments, by paying close attention over time.

I want to leave this chapter with one observation about what you can do when you have identified that an institution you depend on is in this condition.

There is a temptation, when you have seen the pattern, to make a kind of total judgement about the institution — to conclude that, since the misfiring is present, the institution as a whole is unsalvageable, and that the right response is to distance oneself from it as fully as possible. The temptation has some force. There are institutions so far gone that staying inside them has costs no honest person should pay. But the temptation is usually wrong in the moderate cases. The misfiring is usually concentrated in particular parts of the institution, while other parts are still doing the work the institution was built for. All the doctors in a corrupted hospital are not necessarily corrupted doctors. All the teachers in a failing school are not failing teachers. All the officials in a captured agency are not captured officials. The work of distinguishing the parts of the institution that are still functioning from the parts that are misfiring is patient work, but it is the work that lets you act intelligently rather than from a generalised disillusion. It also lets you be useful to the people in the still-functioning parts, who are usually the people most under pressure from the misfiring and who could use a colleague who can tell the difference.

The next chapter is about the three different kinds of resistance you will meet as you embark on the work of trying to change a place that has settled into something wrong. It is, more pertinently, also about why treating them as all the same kind of resistance is the error that has undone more honest reformers than perhaps any other.