I want to go through _my_ history with institutional trust and distrust and defend Milton Friedman's views on institutions, character & trust versus the Harvey Mansfield view of institutions, character & trust advanced by Levin. Levin gives his view here: ow.ly/LO7x50yCDnL
I grew up in Richland, WA a town run by scientists & engineers who worked at the Hanford site producing plutonium and alternative energy technologies. We implicitly trusted these men and women. The were good people, raised good kids & were imbued with the high ethics of science.
You can read the story of the town and it's people here amazon.com/Plutopia-Famil… and here amazon.com/Made-Hanford-B…
Most of the people in town were religous, Catholic, Jewish, Protestant and Muslim -- engineers and scientists from all over America, but mostly from the West.
A good many of those in the town were military veterans, officers from the nuclear Navy or veterans of WWII and the Korean & Vietnam wars. Others were scientists and executives from DuPont, GE, Rockwell and others giant technology companies.
The town & it's institutions were organized around high purposes -- the defense of the nation & creating cheap, environmental friendly energy. The town had produced the material which ended WWII & stopped the Soviets, and the energy technologies which today power the country.
The town was also organized around secrecy.
How trusting were we? We trusted our lives and health to the moms and dads who worked in the schools, the hospitals & with radioactive materials on the Hanford site. When it was time for vaccinations, we all went to the gym & stood in line.
When it was time for our annual whole-body radiation scan, we lined up to get on a conveyor belt and get passed under a large geiger counter scanner. We did this from the time we were little children.
Leading nuclear physicists from Columbia and Caltech would explain to us the safety of the nuclear industry, one scientist showed us it was safe to drink low-level radioactive waste -- too radioactive to legally pour down the drain -- by drinking it in front of us.
My Little League coach was the town mayor & had been a nuclear chemist on the Manhattan Project, my dad had been a science teacher & had multiple degrees in math & physics. As kids we listened to the speeches of John Kennedy on the record player.
These were trustworthy, educated people working in the country's best institutions, working to high purposes. They were tried and molded to have high virtue and to be utterly trusted with the nation's most powerful and dangerous military weapons and vital national secrets.
In 1986 it was revealed scientists at Hanford had released 12,000 curies of radioactive iodine-131 into the air as part of an experiment requested by the US Air Force, a release 10,000 times larger than 3-Mile Island, which rained down on the people of the region across 200 miles
The story is told here gizmodo.com/the-secret-194… here en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Run… here tri-cityherald.com/news/local/han… here nytimes.com/1986/10/24/us/…
My mother lived downwind from the Hanford site. She was eleven. Local rains spread the radioactive iodine release across the farms of the region, contaminating local milk and vegetables, which my mother consumed. Years later she contracted thyroid cancer, as did others.
No one was informed, no one was warned, no one was advised not to drink local milk or eat local vegetables -- and for 36 years, as residents came down with thyroid cancer, no one was informed.
Levin says when institutions function properly they are molds of virtue & character, they produce durable forms of our shared life that create who we are. And we need the institutional authority & institutional purpose which lend external moral stability & purpose to our doings.
It's hard to imagine institutions with greater institutional and moral authority, stability, purpose, and habit than the institutions of religion, science, nation, military and family which molded the citizens in Richland and at Hanford. And yet.
