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Chapter 5 Institutions and Community I wouldn’t give you two cents for all your fancy rules if behind them they didn’t have a little bit of plain, ordinary kindness and a little looking’ out for the other fella. —Jimmy Stewart, in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington Institutions In any given society, the values embedded in indeterminate social atmospheres take determinate forms of customs, traditions, taboos, and the like.They are also inscribed in social institutions through their procedures, rules, policies, and own traditions and customs. These diverse phenomena can present themselves with varying degrees of kindness or unkindness for reasons analogous to those that make a given social atmosphere in some degree kind or unkind. Furthermore, as the previous chapter suggested, a significant dimension of their kindness is the degree to which they provide an umbrella of protection for humane values. Institutions perform a contextualizing function for kind acts and persons just as do social atmospheres, which themselves condition our perceptions of institutions . Many, if not most, of the acts of kindness and unkindness and kind and unkind people we encounter on a daily basis are to be found in institutions— store clerks, airline gate agents, post office employees, and the like. Some may treat us with insufferable tactlessness and arrogance, care-full kindness, or a certain degree of kindness between these extremes. Furthermore, institutional contexts create ambiguities about the meanings of actions. It is at least sometimes difficult to determine whether an act is a true expression of the person herself, or whether she is simply acting “in an institutional capacity,”“in her role as . . . ,” and so on. One type of this ambiguity occurs when institutional demands, stresses, and frustrations lie behind the particular act that we witness.The surly airline gate agent, for instance, may have had a thoroughly rotten day dealing with flight delays and irascible, contentious passengers before 131 I reach her. Sometimes, of course, there may be no ambiguities, as in racist policies and actions against African Americans at the Denny’s restaurants that refused to serve African-American FBI agents, or at the highest management levels of Texaco. A second type of this ambiguity occurs when the employee may, for whatever reason, feel called upon to represent the institution to the exclusion of all of her personal feelings. Thus Dorothy Day says somewhere that once the highly offensive customs agent took off his uniform and became a human being again, his behavior would perhaps change accordingly. Here the institutional shaping of identity interferes with their members’ abilities to perform acts of kindness and become kind persons.This was the Tsar’s problem in Tolstoy’s “The Forged Coupon,” and it is equally a problem for many contemporary CEOs. Lawrence’s Women in Love dramatically expresses a variant on this same theme. A wealthy mine owner, Thomas Crich, belongs to a group of mine owners called “the Masters’ Federation.” For the sake of the industry, Crich and his fellow owners sought a pay reduction from the miners. When the latter refused , the Federation called for a lockout. Since Mr. Crich belonged to the Federation, he considered himself honor bound to close his pits. But Mr. Crich also desired to be a Christian, equal to all other people. He even wanted to share all of his wealth with the poor. But, Lawrence tells us, he could not do it, because he knew that he had to maintain his power and authority, and he believed that a strong industry was good for society (1985, 255). Torn between the two ideals, Mr. Crich was broken. Conflict between personal and institutional identities manifests itself not just in public or private enterprise but equally in institutions such as families. These institutions also function as forms of social activity that mold individual and collective experience and identities.They shape their members by regulating conduct, both positively and negatively. They form character “by assigning responsibility, demanding accountability, and providing the standards in terms of which each person recognizes the excellence of his or her achievements” (Bellah et al. 1992, 40). Thus parents sometimes have to act as parents rather than in the ways they would wish to, for the good of their children , by imposing rules and discipline and by deciding on punishments.These obligations lead to a large number of mediately presented acts of kindness, as described in Chapter 1. Any mature society possesses the widest variety of institutions. In addition to families—traditional and nontraditional, immediate and extended...

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