“PLEASE PLEASE ME”

Does the title of this posting sound familiar? It has a special place in my memory; it was the title of the first Beatles song I ever heard. My limited research indicates that the song was released in the UK in 1963 – a year before Beatlemania hit the US – and reached number one there. In the US, the song was also released but did not do very well, but I remember hearing it and liking it. A friend of mine really liked it. I invoke the title not to go down memory lane – although there is nothing wrong with that – but to point out that its message succinctly summarizes how many of us feel about government policy. Most of us just want the governmental action to please us, individually, and we care little for what the effect has on the country. Some of us, myself included, think this is unfortunate, but that is the way it is. This self-centered sentiment is behind the famous quote of Ronald Reagan's when he was running for president against President Jimmy Carter: “[a]sk yourself, are you better off now than you were four years ago?” This is a far cry from asking: “are we, as a nation, better off than we were four years ago?” This latter question is just too collectivist for some; it is just too ethereal for many.

Which leads me to think: is all this talk about patriotism on the part of so many just so much hot air? Is it more accurate, when it comes down to brass tacks, to see our fellow citizens' views as mainly concerned with “us and ours.” Okay, this might just reflect human nature and one should not get high and mighty about it. Historically, Americans have sacrificed plenty – for whatever reason – and that sacrifice has resulted in great rewards for all of us. The sacrifices of the “Greatest Generation” come easily to mind. But in practical terms, when creating public policy, one needs to be very conscious of the limits and context in which we expect a public, and that includes the American public, to be willing to sustain sacrifice in order to arrive at the common good. Heck; we even have currently a public philosophy, stated proudly and boldly, that it is a virtue to be self-centered.

Much of this blog has been dedicated to this apparent reality. I have never stated that the purpose of this blog has been to promote a belief in which people can be expected to or actually sacrifice their self interests in order to advance societal welfare. As Tocqueville pointed out, citizens should pursue their self interest, but it should be a self interest better understood. People should have an understanding that takes into account such factors as to how our social realities will in the short term or, more likely in the long term, affect how well we can live. It helps to have an active and robust ideal sense of what should be and that sense should take into account the welfare of others – both locally and nationally, if not globally. The ability to feel this way requires, if one gives credence to psychologist Lawrence Kholberg's theory on moral development, ever higher levels of maturity.

I have in the past indicated a dual mental approach to this tension between selfish tendencies and selfless needs. I have written about having a “real” perspective in which one acknowledges the need to be protective against the selfishness of others while maintaining an ideal disposition to seek out and promote a more communal reality around us. The first is an expectation; the second, when one is comfortable enough, is a hoped for – and willing to work toward – potential. Unfortunately, prevailing political perspective promotes the first and sees the second as merely sweet sentiments in which only young children can believe – such as believing in Mr. Roger's Neighborhood.

Of course, I am referring to the natural rights perspective and I want to particularly focus in this posting on that perspective's reliance on positivism as its main method in seeking the truth. In regard to this link, Philip Selznick¹ provides us with an important insight. To approach it, let me start with a question: what is the general welfare? I think this is an important question in that our constitution identifies promoting it as one of our purposes in forming a national government. So it seems that getting a handle on what that means is a fundamental civic responsibility. I will note that however you define it, the inclusion of this aim indicates that we are instructed by our founding fathers to think idealistically and not to limit our political pursuits to self interest – ill understood. But how are we to discuss this question? What language should we use? I am not asking whether we should use the English language. But each view of politics promotes a certain use of words, symbols, and phraseology – its own language. And the prevailing view, the natural rights perspective, is no exception. The language it utilizes is the language of positivism. So when we ask what general welfare is, we, without reflecting, tend to employ positivist language. When we do, we are, according to Selznick, limited. That is, that positivist language strives to be definitive and to exclusively see political and other social elements that are amenable to being measurable. “In the ethos of positivism, all the great moral ideals – love, justice, the common good – are remorselessly subjected to a nominalist solvent. No such idea has meaning, none has practical worth, save as it is reduced to some definite indicator.”² For example, Selznick provides the following progression: well-being becomes happiness which in turn becomes pleasure. The aim is to identify some associated factor that can be observed and measured – pleasure can be measured by asking people how pleasurable something is or whether it is more or less pleasurable than something else. And all of this leads to a further development in that the language of positivism blends nicely with utilitarian views of morality.

Of course, utilitarian views are grounded in self interest. Things are considered good or evil in terms of how people view those things: do they like them or not? And on that basis, morality is defined as being that state in which the most “good” for the most number is achieved. I have defended, in this blog, some elements of this line of thinking, but overall, its reliance on self interest ultimately dooms this view of morality, especially as it pertains to judging the individual actions of people. Governments, by necessity, have significantly more leeway when it comes to this type of moralizing – in the tradition of “render unto Caesar …” – but there are limits and one limit is the example government extends to citizens. So, for example, the practice of the death penalty, even if it can be proven that executing murderers does overall reduce the incidence of murder – which has not been proven – what of the example the state provides in killing some of its citizens? But I digress a bit; the issue here is that positivist language steers clear from the qualitative and that in order to reach a truer understanding of reality, in order to avoid approximations (well-being vs. pleasure) of the truth, our language has to discuss, describe, and analyze in the realm of the vague and speculative. Why? Because reality is that complex and “resists” the definitive. Perhaps when it comes to government, our mantra should not be “please, please me,” but instead be “do right by us.”

1Selznick, P. (1992). The moral commonwealth: Social theory and the promise of community. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

2Ibid., p. 51.