I guess if one posts regularly on
a blog dedicated to a particular topic – like this blog is
dedicated to civics – it is probably inevitable that story lines
will develop. One story line this blog has developed has been the
description of how, in terms of the political thinking of this
nation, the prevailing views have evolved. The evolution has been
from the original foundational perspective, federalism – what I
entitled traditional federalism – to the construct which replaced
it, the natural rights construct. The first construct reflected the
highly communal view of politics. It was based on the Puritanical,
congregational sentiment that held that the greatness of a society is
based on the social richness accrued from the interdependence among
that society's citizens. As John Winthrop's famous speech, A City
on a Hill, from our colonial history pointed out, such a
condition allows a healthy society to be established and maintained.1
Originally based on strong religious convictions – including the
belief that this society was the product of an overarching covenant –
an array of social forces challenged the acceptability of such a
religious based foundation. The society became more diverse in terms
of cultures and, in turn, our view of what was legitimate became ever
more secular by necessity. The evolution was slow and transpired
over 180 years after the founding of our national republic. The
final unambiguous acceptance of the newer construct was completed
shortly after World War II.
As the decades unfolded, the trend
was to weaken its religious grounding along with the accompanying
sense that moral living reflected an abiding commitment based on this
interdependence among citizens. Individualism became more prominent
and with it certain constraining practices aimed at assuring “moral”
living were now more readily seen as abusive. Generally, they were
considered stifling and integrally associated with the more enforced
communal policies of our earlier republic. They were questioned and
either challenged or neglected and, finally, they lost their
legitimacy.
The historical reasons for this
development are varied, but high on the list of those historical
conditions pushing us away from religious grounding was modernity.
Modernity does not just relate to the time designation of the now as
opposed to what was, but is a descriptive notion of how qualitatively
societies develop away from traditional thinking. The changes that
comprise modernity have encouraged the drift away from religious
rationales that underpinned many of the social practices that
characterized the earlier period. The eminent sociologist, Phillip
Selznick, provides us with a developmental model outlining the forces
of modernity which had its effects on the history of advanced western
nations and sheds light on the evolutionary ways those forces have
affected our particular development.
Let me briefly provide the basic
forces Selznick identifies:
Disintegration and dissonance.
Modernism is in large part an effort to express the sensed
incoherence of contemporary life. … [Characterized as one] living
at the edge of a moral and psychological abyss. … Modernity takes
this predicament as a starting point.
Revolt and reconstruction.
A pervasive theme of modernism is the rejection of received
realities. Whatever is given is suspect, for it is a potential
obstacle to creative imagination. … Modernists … [display] a
nervous self-confidence, they perceive the world as infinitely
malleable and exploitable …
Order as emergent, contextual,
fragile, and conflict-laden.
The modernist is sometimes an enemy of order, an advocate of rage,
destruction, and willful inarticulateness. … [O]rder is best when
it is emergent rather than imposed; when it respects the context of
which it is a part; when it finds principles of governance within
that context; and when the disharmonies it holds in tension are
plainly revealed. …
Immediacy, spontaneity, and
affirmation of impulse.
Modernism teaches that the forms and conventions of everyday life –
to say nothing of “academic” art and thought – get in the way
of clear perception and genuine feeling. Hence the demand for
direct, unmediated experience. …
Perspectivism and unmasking.
No idea is more characteristic of modernism than that of the
multiplicity – and the alleged incommensurability – of human
perspectives. Reality is elusive; point of view is all.2
While this review might be a bit
choppy – please look up the source for a complete presentation of
Selznick's argument – I think you can derive the lack of both
certainty and parochialism that modernity presents us. And as such,
it made federalism, as that view expressed by the Puritanical
Winthrop, too static and confining.
But no matter how modern – and
later post modern – we become, we can't seem to leave behind our
need for collective arrangements. The more we try to leave our
communal necessities behind, the more we seem to fall into
nihilistic, baseless dis-orientations. We drift, unable to address
the more human requirements for what has meaning in life. We instead
fall to beliefs and practices reflecting shallow assumptions such as
the belief that statistics can provide the understanding we need to
have in order to have meaningful progress. The question remains:
progress toward what?
We lack satisfying criteria by
which to evaluate the progress we experience. In what directions
should our institutions be guided? In what directions should we
guide our families, education, governance, economic behaviors, and
even our religion. We become more concerned with how much we sell,
for example, and less in what we sell. Goodness becomes synonymous
with popularity. Happiness becomes synonymous with pleasure. Truth
becomes synonymous with shared perspectives. Quality becomes
synonymous with popular style.
So, are we left with no hope for
the communal vision that Winthrop shared with his fellow citizens?
My sense is that recognition of our social needs is becoming more and
more obvious as we neglect these essentials to ever higher degrees.
We, for example, can observe, in the last several decades, a growing
attention to our communal needs in the works of our academic
scholars. There is increased attention to these depleted
sensibilities. Change theory, administration literature, and other
organizational academic works are more frequently placing communal
factors as those factors that, by necessity, must be addressed and
accommodated. In this spirit I offer the construct, liberated
federalism, as a view of civics that I believe, if accepted, will
address many of the ills that we are suffering through today and that
have resulted from the drifts described above.
The
coverage of President Obama and Governor Christie on October 31st
demonstrates what I am talking about. On his show, Chris Matthews
described the cooperation demonstrated by the two leaders as
reflecting federal values.3
We are fortunate in that when our basic structure of government was
formulated, our prevalent mental construct was a form of federalism.
Unfortunately, for a variety of historical reasons, that view did not
evolve sufficiently to accommodate the onslaught of modernity. That
does not mean we cannot revitalize that construct in a form that gets
us back to the essentials of community life – a life we cannot
successfully leave behind.
1For
iconic expression of this sentiment look at John Winthrop's speech,
“City on the Hill.” See website:
https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/winthrop.htm
.
2Selznick,
P. (1992). The moral
commonwealth: Social theory and the promise of community.
Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Quotation on pp.
9-11.
3Matthews,
C. (2012). Hardball with Chris Matthews.
Aired October 31, MSNBC.
