Thurman Arnold: Do institutions exist apart from their manifestations in the real world and shall they be judged by anything less?

In 1937, Thurman Arnold published the brilliant The Folklore of Capitalism. So prescient it could be read today toward many good ends.

In it, he argued that the real life political systems that fail us matter far more than their idealized states. That capitalism had failed us in the 1930s could not be denied, and the resounding defenses of capitalism that argued that the real-world application of capitalism was flawed -- and thus the Great Depression was not to be blamed on the system -- rang hollow in the face of such misery. Arnold was not easier on socialism or communism, arguing that their effects in practice were the best judge of them, and equally partisan defenses that said that communism or socialism in theory were somehow justification enough for their advocates, despite their own abysmal failures in real life, were not useful or credible.

Thurman Arnold argued that policy that should help people was far too heavily constrained by simple-minded ideology (but that's socialism!) and even more primal fears of change.

Judge a system by its impacts on the people it is meant to serve, and work hard to make that system work well with smart policy, unfettered by political ideologies and silly fears about the meaning of feeding hungry people and building badly needed roads. Arnold was teaching at Yale Law at the time but later, because -- or despite? -- the clarity of his vision, was brought into the war time government.

His arguments about judging capitalism, communism or socialism by its real world impacts and not by their idealizations, their sacred texts, reminds us of the discussion of whether religion does us grave harm. Whenever a violent Muslim or Christian, Jew or Hindu (and, shockingly, the occasional Buddhist) does something terrible, the open-minded come out of the woodwork to condemn the individual act and not the system of belief. When a homophobic Muslim or Christian kills people we hear all around us "that is not the nature of Islam!" and "he is not a true Christian!"

But is it fair to judge a religion not by its impacts situated as it is in the real world but on what it says of itself? Is it fair to let capitalists or socialists tell you what kind of a beautiful world it would be if they got to do it all their way? Do we let violent criminals say: "do not judge me by this act, as I say unto you that I am a good and deserving person"?

Or was Arnold right that political-economic systems and, by inference, religious institutions, and other social institutions should be judged by their behavior, by their impacts on the well-being of the people they are meant to serve, and not by their self-serving narratives?