Why Improving Systems Leads to Justice, and Reforming People Leads to Ruin

There are two approaches to reform. Some people want to reform people. Other people want to reform systems.

There are two approaches to reform. Some people want to reform people. Other people want to reform systems.

We used to be a country interested in improving systems. We cared about creating institutions and rules that created justice, efficiency, fairness, and prosperity—real results that improved lives. Now we’re turning our backs on reforming systems, going back to the politics of reforming people. We obsess over reshaping other people into our version of a good person. We fight to ensure the “good” people rule while the “bad” ones get driven out.

We worry more about forcing others to become just and moral people than whether our society brings just and moral results. It’s a terrible mistake. We should be reforming systems, not other people.

THE HISTORY OF MORAL REFORM

For most of history, the politics of reform was the politics of reforming people. This is because for most of history societies were under the rule of kings and aristocrats. The only way to improve a society under an absolute ruler is to make that ruler more moral and just. The only way to accomplish that is to invoke the one thing stronger than he is—God. Thus, the politics of reforming societies was mostly the politics of personal morality backed by religion.

Then we invented democracy.

Once societies were no longer ruled by monarchs, but ruled by the people, the job of reformers changed. From campaigns to improve nobles and kings, reformers shifted to campaigns to morally improve the people. Naturally, their tools remained the same, personal morality backed by religion. If you wanted to improve society, you led mass revivals among the people to improve their personal morality.

For the first century of America, this was the template for moral reform. Abolition was the classic case, waged as part of the mass religious revival of the Second Great Awakening. Reformers spread religious zeal and religious messages through pulpits and tent revivals, and those messages carried revolutionary ideas like abolition. The same went for temperance and the early fight for women’s suffrage. The path to improving America was through converting souls.

This model had a problem—morally reforming people is hard. People don’t change unless they want to and when you seek to forcibly redeem them, most resist. Some people aspire to goodness, and they’ll be open to your message. Others are selfish, uninterested in the redemption you offer. Others are truly wicked—selfish, judgmental, blinded, or cruel —and are forever unreachable.

Moreover, politics is a crude ally in such moral campaigns. Mixing morality with politics makes a dangerous concoction. You can’t make people find God through a ballot box. When zealous reformers inevitably fail to convert enough citizens to righteousness through raw persuasion, they naturally fall prey to darker methods of advancing the crusade. They might start silencing opponents. They may spread lies. They may employ power, including the institutions of the state, to destroy unrighteous enemies and advance the cause of good. Justified by the logic of holy war, they might become uncompromising and cruel, destroying those standing in the way of their moral mission.

If people won’t willingly convert and justice is thus thwarted, you may see no choice but to put boots on necks to force the recalcitrant to be redeemed. You must become a tyrant, endangering democracy.

This was what moral reform entailed until the late nineteenth century, when we invented social science and everything changed.

THE PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENT, REFORMING SYSTEMS, AND THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

The American republic arose out of the philosophical movement of the Enlightenment, which advanced the idea that human reason should replace dogma and authority as the cornerstone of civilization. Along with the modern republic, the Enlightenment also created the scientific method. The scientific method, popularized by Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica, proposed we could study the natural world using reason, test our hypotheses, and find truth. As this miracle idea spread across the western world, it unleashed technological progress. People naturally began to wonder whether we could use this same approach, which had unlocked the marvels of the natural world, to better understand and engineer the social world of humans. What if we could use reason to engineer human progress?

This created the idea of social science—fields like sociology, economics, psychology, anthropology, business management, and political science. That led to the Progressive Movement.

At the end of the nineteenth century, a loose alliance of reformers sprang up seeking to engineer human progress and to reform the corruption of America’s Gilded Age. This Progressive Movement believed we could employ expertise and planning, using this new tool of social science, to engineer and improve society. Instead of redeeming humans to become more just and moral, we could use social science to reform institutions and systems to create more just and moral results. Essentially, we could create a more prosperous, fair, moral, and just society whether or not the people leading them were themselves just or moral.

This was a stunning revelation.

Morally improving people is difficult. Often, it’s impossible. Designing better institutions is a simple matter of employing enough brainpower, expertise, and rigor. As the Progressives unleashed these ideas across America, they revolutionized politics and won an array of reforms like ending child labor, creating public schools, limiting the power of abusive monopolies, creating an eight-hour workday, creating parks and green spaces, and making business more efficient.

Originally it was Republicans, like Teddy Roosevelt, who pioneered the Progressive Movement’s ideas. Over time, Democrats adopted these ideas as well, where they would eventually become the backbone of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and inspire policies like Social Security and administrative agencies. Under Lyndon Johnson, they would lead to the flurry of reforms of the Great Society, like Medicare, as well as the campaign for Civil Rights. Republicans used these same Progressive insights to challenge and limit Democratic reforms, leading to the Reagan Revolution reengineering laws and regulations. While Republicans had different ideas about the proper balance between industry and the state, they too believed their job was to properly engineer institutions to be more efficient, fair, and just.

For the first time in history, we had a method allowing flawed people to reliably create and administer a society more fair and just than them. Instead of the impossible task of reforming people, we could reform systems and institutions. We could create prosperity, fairness, efficiency, and justice without needing people to suddenly become wise, fair, moral, or just. We could reform and redeem America without the divisive and brutal chaos of waging moral war. This led to the success of America’s twentieth century.

Then something dark happened. A new generation of Americans rose up who wanted to go back to the thing that hadn’t worked. They wanted to go back to reforming people.

THE CHALLENGES OF REFORMING SYSTEMS

I understand why people get frustrated with reforming institutions and systems. I understand why moral war is so seductive.

Improving systems and institutions is difficult. Critics on the left hate that it’s slow and incremental. It can be deferential to institutional power. It puts power in the hands of experts and technocrats, flawed humans too often corrupted, self-interested, or arrogant about their limited base of knowledge. Institutions often serve influence and power, with leaders seeking to ingratiate and impress the powerful instead of serving the people they’re meant to serve. To many on the left, this path to reform seems too moderate, weak, and neoliberal.

To the right, empowering systems and institutions means increasing public power, which they fear may infringe too much on liberty. Such plans are never efficient because experts who design them are never wise enough. Institutional reforms centralize. Too often, they’re utopian. They interfere with and muck up markets, hindering prosperity. They empower out-of-touch experts and put people in skinner boxes, turning people into rats in mazes designed by power. They seek to manage and control things beyond humankind’s ability to manage and control, and they create the illusion of freedom behind the tyranny of the nudge.

What probably offends both sides most, however, is the lack of urgency and aggression. Institutional reform feels bloodless and complacent. It lacks the righteous anger fighting injustice demands. Building institutions is cumbersome. Reforms plod forward, imperfect, over years, leaving injustices in place that could be eliminated now. They allow bad people to exist and thrive, influencing society, spreading their bad ideas and evil ways, allowing them to burrow into power instead of going to war to root them out. A moral crusade to redeem lost souls and save the world makes you feel vigorous and alive. Engineering systems rarely feel like swinging the sword of justice.

What’s more, reforming people does sometimes work. We once accepted that people drove about while drunk, murdering innocents every year. Then a campaign of moral reformers convinced Americans drunk driving was immoral, and it nearly disappeared overnight. Police that once gave out petty warnings to intoxicated drivers were suddenly setting up blockades to catch them. Until recently, we also reluctantly accepted that powerful and predatory figures like Harvey Weinstein would do what they pleased to the vulnerable and young. Then moral reformers convinced the world this behavior was intolerable. Workplaces changed abruptly, and we drove the predatory out. It simply isn’t true that moral crusades to change people always fail. Sometimes reformers fighting to change minds alter the world more spectacularly than we ever dare image.

So why shouldn’t people go on missions to right evils and save the world? Why shouldn’t they fight to remove the immoral from power and society? Why shouldn’t they fight to install the good and weed out the bad? Why should they get bogged down in technocratic half-solutions when they can save the world?

I understand all these arguments, but they’re still wrong.

Backsliding into the politics of reforming people is the source of everything we hate about this moment in America. It’s why our political tribes have become so divisive and hateful. It’s why we obsess over using the proper language instead of getting real things done. It’s why we’re so controlling over what others express or say. It’s why we cancel perceived enemies for daring to express the wrong opinions, driving them from the public square or destroying their lives entirely. We even justify the enlistment of state power in our crusades. Causes like drunk driving or Me Too might have reformed people, but not through laws and elections, but through arguments, hearts, and minds. Only once minds had changed did the laws and rules catch up. When you seek to reform others with the sword, what you win isn’t conversion but compliance. You’re no missionary, just a tyrant.

All these sins are the result of trying to morally reform people instead of reforming systems. They’re what inevitably happens when you try to force millions of strangers to adopt your own morality, to elevate those you believe are good, to punish evil, and to force moral improvement on everyone. To reform America during this moment of disruptive change, we must once again cast away the backwards-looking desire to wage false battles between good and evil. We must instead commit to building systems robust enough to produce a good society even when the flawed humans at the helm are not themselves just, fair, moral, or wise.

What do you think about reforming people vs. systems? Join the community in the comments.