In many ways we live in the most institutionally thick environment that humans have yet inhabited. Look inside your wallet: behold the many structures (drivers’ license, Social Security card, credit cards, gym membership card, shopper’s card, etc) to which you are formally accountable in some way (and which are formally accountable to you). And there are also other more “informal” institutions whose norms we continue to respect. Think your behavior at work, on social media, with friends, with family, elsewhere: all have their different standards and expectations about living up to those standards.

And yet, paradoxically, it is also the case that there is a large-scale distrust of institutions, especially among younger members of society. This has been growing for some time, but seems to have accelerated in recent years. There’s lots of theories by grumpy oldsters like myself as to why Millennials are so terrible. I don’t think they’re so terrible, and I don’t at the moment have a well-developed theory as to why institutional trust has declined. But that it has declined seems obvious.

Three things are worth keeping in mind going forward about institutions:

First: institutions cannot be simply legitimated on the backs of their members. They are interestingly (maybe uniquely?) other-needing, requiring recognition from those not centrally affiliated with them. An institution doesn’t only need members who obey and participate; they need outsiders who respect. In situations where institutions lack that outward respect, that’s a problem. Part of our problem is that the tribalism which intensifies our commitment to our own institutions, whatever they are, works actively (and sometimes more primarily) to corrode the legitimacy of many other institutions.

Second: many people think that the problem is not with institutions but with “politics,” by which they mean state politics, and they seek ways to work aroundthe state system. Consider not just NGOs and volunteering, but INGOs like Amnesty International. More importantly, consider the whole anti-political ethos of the “tech sector,” which combines political naiveté and radical utopianism in pretty remarkable fashion.

As an example today, consider this piece about Bitcoin and what terrorists are doing through it. And here’s the rub: The problem is, structures that are designed to "work around the state" and transcend politics can be used by many different forces, not all of them benign.

Third: for someone like me interested in religion, the institutional life of religion seems both essential and essentially problematic.  At least in terms of Christianity, the institutions exist in some kind of inescapable tension with the theological, at times apocalyptic, energies of the tradition itself--indeed I would say the core energies, though others could reasonably disagree.  This is why Kierkegaard, with his "Attack upon Christendom," was the first millennial.  But he was the first millennial for deeply theological reasons.  Or maybe Abraham, smasher of idols (as an old story about him has it), was the first millennial.  Kierkegaard uses Abraham as a paradigm in what I still think is his most successful book, Fear and Trembling.

Well.  Anyway, more to say on that at a later date.