The Unremarked Days

There is something about how stories are told in the modern world that has, I think, worked against the kind of understanding this book is trying to develop. The stories that get told most often, in the entertainments and the histories and the political mythologies most people grow up with, are stories organised around heroes. Some particular person, of unusual capacity and unusual courage, faces some unusual situation and, by what they do, makes a decisive difference. The story turns on the person. The person becomes the explanation. Without the person, the situation would have unfolded the way bad situations unfold, but with the person, the situation turns. The structure is so deeply embedded in how stories work that it is hard, after a while, to imagine that other structures of explanation are even available.

The structure has its uses. There are situations in which the actions of particular people do make a difference that could not have been made by other people in the same position. There are individuals whose contributions to what humans have built deserve to be remembered as individual contributions. But the structure, taken as the general account of how the world works, is misleading in a way that has practical consequences. It encourages us to look, when something has gone wrong, for the hero who might fix it, or to wait for the hero whose arrival will turn things around. It encourages us, when something is going well, to credit the hero who is currently in the position whose holder is supposed to make the difference. It encourages us to suppose that the basic question, when a place is in trouble, is what hero might emerge.

Certain kings or presidents or prime ministers - we are told - made our countries strong and prosperous. Under the leadership of others, they waned. Growing up in Sri Lanka, this is how I learned history. That is why I want to put a different proposition before you in this chapter, and I want you to test it against everything you have watched in your own life and everything you know from your own reading and study.

A town that depends on a hero to keep its life going is a town that is already in trouble. A town that is in a healthy condition is one that does not need to depend on heroes for the daily continuation of its life. It depends on the ordinary, unspectacular functioning of a great many institutions and relationships in which the people involved are, on the whole, neither heroic nor villainous, and whose work, conducted at the level of competence that those institutions and relationships have been formed to produce, is what keeps the town's life going. The dependence on heroes is, in the strict sense, a symptom of malaise and dysfunction. It is what a town's situation looks like when the ordinary institutions have become unable to do the work the ordinary institutions are supposed to do, and the town has come to look, in its desperation, to whatever individuals can be found who might compensate for the institutional failure.

This is the proposition and I want to develop it carefully, because the proposition has consequences for how you should think about what you can do.

The ordinary institutions I have in mind are the ones this book has been describing in different chapters from different angles. They are the family in its various forms, the school where children acquire not only their formal education but the formation of how to live among others outside the family, the religious community - where present in a person's life - carries the longer accumulated reflection of the traditions and which holds up standards against the daily drift of the wider culture. Now more than ever, they are centred on workplaces where adults spend the largest single share of their waking hours and where the work shapes the worker, and the professional bodies where members of a vocation hold each other to standards that the wider society does not enforce. Ultimately, all institutions and civic associations where people - including those from different formations - belong to and meet for purposes that are neither commercial nor governmental such as the neighbourhood and the small community where the daily reality of common life is conducted at a scale at which people know each other by name. These are not the institutions that produce the visible drama of public life.

They are the institutions that, in their ordinary functioning, produce the conditions under which public life remains tolerable. When they are functioning, you do not notice them. You notice only the absence of the troubles their functioning prevents. When they stop functioning, you begin to notice everything and the troubles their absence permits begin to accumulate at every level above them until eventually the troubles become visible at the level of a national crisis - which is the point at which people begin to look for heroes.

I want you to consider, with the honesty this book has been asking of you throughout, what has happened to each of these institutions in the part of the world you have been living in across the years you have lived long enough to observe and have been grown-up for long enough to understand. The honest answer in most parts of the world, and I do not think I am being cynical here, is that all of them have been weakened by different processes operating at different speeds, and that the weakening of them has been going on for long enough that the consequences are now visible at every scale above them.

The family has been weakened by the economic conditions that have made it harder to sustain a household on one income, that have required both adults in a family to work long hours, that have separated work from home so that the parents are largely absent from the children's daily formation because of ‘work’, the extended family by their remoteness. The geographic mobility of careers is incompatible with the maintenance of the extended family ties that used to do much of the work the nuclear family is now expected to do alone. Similarly, the school has been weakened by the redefinition of education as credentialing, by the loading of social functions onto schools that they were not designed to perform and cannot perform well, by the de-professionalisation of teaching in many places, by the replacement of teacher judgement with standardised metrics that the teachers can game and the children can see through, and by the bending of the curriculum away from formation and toward what can be measured. The religious community has been weakened by the long retreat of religion from public life in some places and by its capture by political projects in other places, or by the internal corruption of its institutions exposed in the form of scandal after scandal and by the contraction of its capacity to hold its members to standards the surrounding culture does not honour.

The workplace has been weakened by the patterns I described in Chapter seven, where credentials have made apprenticeship obsolete. The constant churn of personnel prevents the long relationships through which formation happens and financial pressures corrupt human judgement. The professional bodies have been weakened by the same forces, and by their own internal politics that have, in many cases, made them servants of their members' immediate interests rather than custodians of their members' formation. The civic associations have been weakened by the privatisation of leisure into individual screen time, by the decline of the local community as the primary unit of social organisation, and by the loss of the small organisations that used to do the daily work of bringing people from different formations into contact for purposes other than commerce.

You know all of this from your own experience. I am not telling you anything you have not already, in some form, noticed. The noticing has been part of the disquiet that has been growing in many places across the last decades, and that the people who try to give it a name have given various names that are ultimately inadequate for what they are commissioned to do. Whether we call it “the loss of community”, “the decline of civil society”, “the rise of loneliness”, or “the polarisation of public life” each of them catches a feature of what is going on without quite describing the underlying cause or condition. The underlying condition, in the language of this book, is the weakening of the institutions through which the ordinary work of formation has historically been carried out, and the consequent thinning of the substrate conditions within which the next generation is being formed.

The dependence on heroes follows from this. When the ordinary institutions cannot do their ordinary work, the conditions the ordinary institutions used to produce are no longer being produced reliably. The conditions are still needed but the absence of them is felt as a deepening dysfunction at every level of the society. Society begins to look for compensations in their varied forms. Some of them are political: the rise of charismatic leaders who promise to fix, by force of their personality and their decisions, what the ordinary institutions can no longer fix by their ordinary functioning. Some of them are organisational: the rise of large institutions that claim to take over the functions at a price, which the smaller institutions used to perform for free, and that do those functions, at best, in a much thinner form than the smaller institutions did. Some of them are technological: such as the rise of platforms that claim to substitute for the small daily contact of human beings with each other, and that produce, at most, a degraded version of what the contact used to produce.

All of these compensations have a common structure. They are attempts to do at large scale, by spectacular means, what the small institutions used to do at small scale by unspectacular means. None of them work as well as the small institutions worked when the small institutions were working. The substitutes are, in the end, substitutes, and the society that has come to depend on them is a society whose underlying condition has not been addressed by the substitution.

I want to say something difficult here, because the difficulty is part of what has to be said in any honest account of what the work of repair would require. The repair of the ordinary institutions is not the kind of work that can be done by the political and organisational and technological means that the contemporary moment most readily offers. The ordinary institutions need to be repaired, where they can indeed be repaired, by the patient work of the people in them, doing the daily things that the institutions are supposed to do, at the level of care and attention that the institutions were originally designed to deliver. The family is repaired by parents making the difficult choices to be present for their children at the cost of advancement in their work, by adults choosing to live close enough to their elders that the elders are part of the children's daily lives and by the small daily insistence on the practices of household life that the wider culture has stopped supporting. The school is repaired by teachers choosing to do the formation work even when the metrics do not reward it, by parents supporting the teachers who are doing this work against the pressure to demand only measurable outcomes and by communities defending the schools that are doing the work against the institutional pressures to reduce them to credentialing factories. The religious community is repaired by members showing up week after week and doing the small work of common life, by leaders accepting the personal cost of holding the community to standards the surrounding culture has stopped honouring and by the slow work of internal reform of the institutions that have been corrupted. And so on, through each of the institutions.

This is unglamorous work. It produces no spectacular results. It does not generate headlines. It does not advance the careers of those who do it. It is, however, the only work that addresses the underlying condition. The spectacular alternatives on the other hand — the hero, the new large organisation, and the new platform — do not address it. They only obscure it for a while longer. The work that addresses it is the work in the small institutions, conducted by the people who are in them, at the level of patient daily care that the institutions need from their members in order to function. There is no version of this work that can be performed by someone other than the people who are in the institutions. The work cannot be delegated upward. It cannot be performed by the state on behalf of its citizens. It cannot be performed by the platform on behalf of its users. It cannot be performed by the hero on behalf of the population. It has to be done by the members of each of the small institutions, doing what their membership requires.

Now, I want to come to you. You are, almost certainly, either in some position to be part of this work or you will be soon. The positions are not glamorous. They consist of being a slightly better member of the household you live in than you have been, of being a slightly more present parent or child or sibling, of doing the small daily work of the friendships you have, of being a slightly more thoughtful colleague in your workplace, or of participating in the religious or professional or civic community to which you belong with slightly more attention than you have been giving it. These are not exciting prescriptions. But they are the prescriptions that actually correspond to what the underlying condition requires. The disappointment of finding that the work is so unspectacular is, I think, one of the reasons people resist the diagnosis. The diagnosis directs them to a kind of work that does not satisfy the desire for the dramatic intervention that the surrounding culture has trained them to want.

There is a particular kind of person I want to portray, in closing this chapter, because I think this kind of person is more important than the surrounding culture lets on. This is the kind of person who, in some small institution, has been quietly doing the work for years. They are not famous. They are not particularly recognised. They may not, themselves, fully understand the significance of what they are doing. They are the schoolteacher who has been teaching honestly for thirty years, who has formed several thousand young people across a career, and whose former students will tell you, if you ask them, that this one teacher was the reason they grew up to be the kind of adult they grew up to be. They are the small employer who has been running an honest business for forty years, who has trained, by close contact, a succession of younger workers in what good work looks like, and whose business is one of the few places in the neighbourhood where the ordinary patterns of decent commerce can still be observed. They are the priest who has been pastoring the same congregation across a generation, who has held the small community of believers together through the storms of the wider community and the wider culture, and whose presence has been, for many of the people in the congregation, the single most stable element of their formation as adults. They are the local doctor who has been practising in the same town for decades, who knows the medical and family histories of three generations of patients, who has refused the offers to move to more prestigious positions because she knows that what she is doing in her town cannot be done by anyone else.

These people, in the aggregate, are what holds a society up. Every town has some of them. Most of them have done their work without being asked, without being thanked, without being recognised, and without expecting any of these things. They are the figures the surrounding culture has trained you not to notice, because the surrounding culture's stories are organised around figures more spectacular than they are.

You should learn to notice them. You should learn to notice that the people who are most worth admiring in any place you live in are largely not the people the place is currently most paying attention to. You should learn, in addition, that you can become one of them. The becoming is not the becoming of a public figure. It is in fact the becoming of a person who, in some small institution, has done the daily work to a standard the surrounding culture does not require. The becoming is open to you. It is, in fact, what this entire book has been asking you to consider as the actual content of the work the book has been describing.

I want to be precise, before we close this chapter, about what is structurally distinctive about this kind of people, because I think the precision matters and the precision is not what the surrounding culture's stories about them, when it tells any stories about them at all, usually emphasise. What is structurally distinctive about them is not that they have been heroic; mostly they have not. What is structurally distinctive is that, at some point in their lives, they refused the bargain that the institutions they were part of were offering them. The bargain was the one this book has named in different places at different scales: that the cost of compliance with what the institution actually does, as distinct from what it claims to do, is a payment toward a future authority that compliance will eventually confer. The institution offers the bargain. Most of those in it accept the bargain even though their accepting is rarely a deliberate choice. It is the path of least resistance, the route that everyone else is taking and the natural progression that the institution's structures have made into the obvious one.

The people who hold a society up are the people who, at some moment in their service, refused that bargain. They most likely did not refuse it dramatically. They most certainly would not have announced the refusal. They did not, in most cases, leave the institution either, because many of them would have stayed in it for decades after the refusal, doing the work the institution claimed to want done, but declining the small currencies of advancement that the bargain would have paid out to them in exchange for compliance with what the institution actually wanted done. The refusal would have cost them. It cost them the promotions they would otherwise have received, the prominence they would otherwise have enjoyed, and the seniors' approval that the bargain pays to those who accept it. It also, in many cases, would have cost them the easier accounts of their own lives such as the satisfaction of having been understood as having achieved what their colleagues achieved, the simpler narratives by which a life's work is usually reckoned. They paid these costs because they had been formed in such a way that paying them was easier than not paying them. The formation, in their case, had produced a person for whom the bargain was not acceptable, and the unacceptability was the structural condition of who they were.

This is what you would be becoming, if you became one of them. The becoming is not the acquisition of unusual courage, but the formation, across the small daily choices of years, of a person whose formation has made the bargain unbearable to accept. The formation is what the rest of this book has been describing. The choices that produce it are the choices you are making, every day, in the small situations no one is paying attention to. The accumulated effect of those choices is the kind of person who is, by the time the moment comes, the kind of person who refuses the bargain when refusing it costs them everything the bargain would have paid out.

The next chapter is the last chapter before the epilogue. It is the chapter the book has been preparing you to read since the preface. It takes up one question, in detail, and asks you to give your own answer to it, in the only way the answer can be given. I have been preparing the ground for that chapter across the previous thirteen. The ground is as ready as I can make it and it is yours to walk into.