Rolland E. Kidder

 

 

The Fragility of Human Institutions

By Rolland Kidder

 This is not an uplifting subject to write about. If you are having a bad day, just put it off or forget about reading it.

What it deals with is the reality of how fragile and easily broken can be those institutions which frame our lives. Probably the best example is marriage. It can be easily entered into but its lastingness is not a given. Marriage is a fragile human institution which can easily give way to disharmony, discord and divorce.

Business organizations, partnerships, and professional associations have all been created to promote human activity and cooperation towards a common goal. However, in law school, we were taught as much about how to incorporate protections for those so involved as we were about creating them in the first place. The assumption being that such human institutions were fragile and break-up was always a possibility.

Sadly, our political institutions are also fragile. I was reminded of this recently when reading the book "In the Garden of the Beasts" by Erik Larson. Larson is a gifted writer and is especially good at personalizing, through narrative storytelling, history as it is revealed by people involved.

This was not a "fun" book to read as it dealt with Germany's descent into war and totalitarianism under Adolph Hitler and the Nazis in the 1930's. The observations come through the eyes of American Ambassador William Dodd and his young daughter (and dilettante,) Martha, as they observed the Republic of Germany dissolve into a rogue, violent dictatorship.

Many good-hearted Germans thought that Hitler would just fail, that finally grown-ups would intervene and that the German state would return to its well-organized, historical, rational self. That hope failed and, instead, Germany degenerated into a government of catastrophic war-making and death camps. The Weimar Republic and its elected Reichstag disappeared under the brutal heel of Hitler.

How could that have happened? Somehow, the human, governmental institutions that had been built by Germany over many years with stalwarts in every field of human endeavor--think of names like Bismark, Bach, Beethoven, Immanuel Kant and Martin Luther--disappeared.

The sad truth of Larson's book is that all human institutions are fragile, and the best of them need safeguards and an involved, informed constituency if they are going to survive.

And this, I think, is a truth which we must continually remind ourselves of. We are all captive of the human institutions within which we live. We cannot automatically assume that they will go on forever. It takes work, compromise and dedication to keep them going.

Our governmental institutions, especially, require an involved and informed citizenry. If we try to "pass the buck" and decline our own responsibility--the democracy we have come to know and cherish as a beacon of light to the world, could also pass away.

 

This article was printed in the Jamestown Post-Journal

October 24, 2026