Perspective: Are we worshipping the false god of transparency?
In 2020, political thinker Yuval Levin blasted an ineffectual Congress over its preference for performance over the work of legislating. In an Atlantic article titled “Transparency is Killing Congress,” Levin charges members with using the institution of Congress as a platform on which to perform for their respective culture war comrades.
The idea that transparency could ever be overdone or cause harm is anathema for many Americans, and particularly journalists, who understand transparency as an unmitigated good. The more transparency, the better, in pretty much anything — a relationship, a job, a community, an institution.
Yet Levin goes on to suggest that once members of Congress “try to gain status and prominence by endlessly scorning the institution they worked so hard to enter,” there is ultimately a “loss of protected spaces for deliberation in Congress in the name of transparency.” All of this ultimately holds the legislative process, and the compromise it requires to function, hostage to public factions. In this way, rather than create accountability, increased public scrutiny incentivizes performance and turns the legislature into a stage.
Sunlight might be the best disinfectant, but perhaps killing the good bacteria can create an environment where pathogens thrive.
Congress is not the only institution in which “deliberative spaces have become performative spaces.” Classrooms and churches are likewise becoming culture war battlegrounds. Students tweet class materials they find offensive, professors publicly criticize administrators, and congregants broadcast incendiary snippets of a talk or private meeting — all of which effectively corrode the trust necessary for the continued life of beneficial institutions.
Social media has made it possible to put every mishap, failure and conflict before condemnatory public mobs — giving every participant, as Jon Haidt puts it, a “dart gun” armed and ready to fire. As a result, any member of any institution can summon partisan outrage with just a few clicks, mobilizing the full might of the culture war army upon those whose views they find threatening.
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This newfound mobocracy is concerning to say the least. Yet this isn’t to say there are no legitimate grievances or failures that need to be addressed. People make mistakes, well-intended policies can have negative consequences, and there are, occasionally, truly bad actors who should be confronted. There needs to be public accountability for these reasons.
But if an institution’s continuance matters to you (and it should), then your social media followers are not always the appropriate audience for processing these problems. Using internet shame campaigns to agitate for reforms sows a cynical and simplistic narrative about the world — buying into the troubling notion that those on the “other side” of every conflict can only be reached through public humiliation or threats to their livelihood.
While public shaming can act as a powerful motivator, it’s a blunt instrument and often fosters change at a great cost. The New York Times found that over half of its readers self-censored in the previous year to avoid retaliation. Forty-six percent of respondents said they felt more restricted in what they could openly share than they did 10 years ago. The Times editorial board warns that “human beings cannot flourish without the confidence to take risks, pursue ideas and express thoughts that others might reject.”
This is intuitive to many of us when it comes to our more intimate relationships — a marriage, a family, a friend group — where such chronic tension would be suffocating. But sometimes we assume that at a larger institutional level, different rules apply. Yet Harvard Business professor Ethan Bernstein found that unlimited transparency within an organization actually decreased openness, accountability and problem-solving. While transparency is important, he found that “privacy is just as essential for performance.”
Why? Because “even when everyone involved had only the best of intentions,” the act of being observed actually “distorted behavior instead of improving it.” In an atmosphere like this, employees ended up being preoccupied by managing others’ judgment and catering to expectations — which diverted energy away from problem-solving and innovation and left them feeling distrustful.
There’s a bigger lesson here on the limits of our tell-all culture. Exposing the inevitable conflicts of life in institutional settings to outrage-hungry outsiders wreaks havoc on trust, internal unity and connectedness. It discourages sincerity and candor and pressures any institution to subordinate its goals to the whims of an often uninvested public.
No institution can survive without the privacy to make decisions consistent with their own goals. Levin adds that “every institution needs an inner life — a sanctum where its work is really done.” Without that privacy, decisions affecting the institution come under scrutiny from public actors with big opinions and little commitment to the institution’s health or purposes.
The truth is that indiscriminate disclosures in the name of transparency are anything but transparent. A photograph yields a more accurate record than the painter’s brush, but the choice of what to capture — and what to exclude — is still subjective.
“What is bad in the candid friend,” suggested G.K. Chesterton, “is simply that he is not candid. He is keeping something back — his own gloomy pleasure in saying unpleasant things.”
Underlying all the candor and uber-transparency is something not being disclosed. And it’s fair to say that tattling on our institutions to our fellow partisans probably reveals more about our own goals and motives than it does about that institution and its members.
As with so many of the best things in life, institutions are much easier to destroy than to create. Notre-Dame de Paris took over 100 years to build; a fire destroyed the roof and spire in three hours. Institutions turn our values into action, they channel diverse talents toward common goals, generate needed social capital, engage individuals in causes bigger than themselves and transmit hard-won knowledge and practices across generations. Perhaps we ought to challenge ourselves to find solutions to conflicts, mistakes and even wrongdoing that preserve and build institutional integrity.
One practical way to protect the inner life of institutions is to resolve problems with the people whom they concern — and only those people. Jesus Christ taught his disciples that “if thy brother shall trespass against thee, go and tell him his fault between thee and him alone: if he shall hear thee, thou hast gained thy brother.”
Real transparency requires trust — an environment and people with whom one can reveal one’s flaws without fear of reprisals. This is not something that can be imposed from the outside by keyboard warriors looking to extract their pound of flesh. Let’s welcome transparency in its place. And appreciate its healthy tension with the other important value of privacy.
Meagan Kohler is a Latter-day Saint convert and writer who studied philosophy, French and Latin at BYU. She lives in Utah with her husband and four sons. She writes on X @TresClare
