A Crucial Element of Democracy

This is a blog by Robert Gutierrez ...
While often taken for granted, civics education plays a crucial role in a democracy like ours. This Blog is dedicated to enticing its readers into taking an active role in the formulation of the civics curriculum found in their local schools. In order to do this, the Blog is offering a newer way to look at civics education, a newer construct - liberated federalism or federation theory. Daniel Elazar defines federalism as "the mode of political organization that unites separate polities within an overarching political system by distributing power among general and constituent governments in a manner designed to protect the existence and authority of both." It depends on its citizens acting in certain ways which Elazar calls federalism's processes. Federation theory, as applied to civics curriculum, has a set of aims. They are:
*Teach a view of government as a supra federated institution of society in which collective interests of the commonwealth are protected and advanced.
*Teach the philosophical basis of government's role as guardian of the grand partnership of citizens at both levels of individuals and associations of political and social intercourse.
*Convey the need of government to engender levels of support promoting a general sense of obligation and duty toward agreed upon goals and processes aimed at advancing the common betterment.
*Establish and justify a political morality which includes a process to assess whether that morality meets the needs of changing times while holding true to federalist values.
*Emphasize the integrity of the individual both in terms of liberty and equity in which each citizen is a member of a compacted arrangement and whose role is legally, politically, and socially congruent with the spirit of the Bill of Rights.
*Find a balance between a respect for national expertise and an encouragement of local, unsophisticated participation in policy decision-making and implementation.
Your input, as to the content of this Blog, is encouraged through this Blog directly or the Blog's email address: gravitascivics@gmail.com .
NOTE: This blog has led to the publication of a book. The title of that book is TOWARD A FEDERATED NATION: IMPLEMENTING NATIONAL CIVICS STANDARDS and it is available through Amazon in both ebook and paperback versions.

Tuesday, April 7, 2015

A NEED FOR A MORAL TIME

As the years go by, the twentieth century is beginning to recede in our collective memories.  Yet the turns we collectively made during that century are still making their effects quite clearly felt every day.  None are more daunting than the attacks cast upon our moral traditions.  From the effects that the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche had to the rise of atheistic, totalitarian regimes to secularization of our political discourse, we no longer hold the Judeo-Christian tradition with the reverence we once ascribed to it.  I am not passing judgement here over any of these effects, events, or transitions, but I want to point out the gravity of this turn.  I would claim that for most of us, when it comes to moral questions, we don’t go first to religious sources to determine what we consider moral and what we consider immoral.  Yes, some of us do, but the majority of us take on a more practical view than a biblical one.  When one asks, for example, should I pay my employees a living wage or should I fluff off a legitimate demand of an employer or should I support public policy that insures health care for all our fellow citizens, these are questions that I see most people respond to from a self-interest point of view.  While for most, God might not be dead, His attributed admonishments about responsibilities concerning the fate of others have become just so much background noise.

I have in this blog argued that we, through most of our national history, transformed from a more theistic foundation – a Puritanical foundation – to a secular perspective.  The transformation was slow, but completed in the years after World War II.  It was in those years that the natural rights construct became our prevalent view of government and politics.  Here, the language of liberty took dominance.  With that bias, the focus became one promoting the notion that everyone was free to determine what beliefs and values one was to hold.  Historically, there was a bit of irony involved.  When one considers what all the twentieth century had already offered up, one would think that certain moral commitments should have taken hold.  Let’s get a sense of this situation; Jonathan Glover[1] writes:
The problems have come from events, the twentieth-century history of large-scale cruelty and killing is only too familiar; the mutual slaughter of the First World War, the terror-famine of the Ukraine, the Gulag, Auschwitz, Dresden, the Burma Railway, the Hiroshima, Vietnam, the Chinese Cultural Revolution, Cambodia, Rwanda, the collapse of Yugoslavia.  These names will conjure up others.  Because of this history, it is (or should be) hard for thinking about ethics to carry on just as before.[2]
Has our rejection of religious based morality, to the degree it has happened, been a reaction to this history of misery and destruction?

I don’t have any great insight.  My only observation is that our civics curriculum that has adopted a natural rights perspective to guide its content and led to an abandonment of any systemic moral education cannot be anymore ill advised.  We cannot go back to the Puritanical days; we are too materialistic, too diverse.  But we can study moral questions.  Unlike Nietzsche, I don’t look at our Judeo-Christian tradition as a sign of weakness or a lack of will; I see it as the height of practicality.  I also see it as very much in sync with the basic moral claims of all the major religious traditions.  I saw an interesting film recently.  Focus is a film that illustrates how con artists work.  The basic technique to steal your money is to divert your attention.  There is a series of scenes in which a small army of pick- pockets and other con men and women make hay during Super Bowl week at the site of the big game.  What I took away was that you cannot beat them by thinking all you need to do is be conscious of where your valuables are.  You need to avoid such places or attend but put an empty wallet in your back pocket – perhaps with a note inside saying, “not here.”  Similarly, morality is a way to avoid the great problems in life, especially in one’s dealings with others.  Moral behavior in our social interactions tempers the motivations of others to do us harm.  One might have something someone else wants to take, but if you treat people right, at least you are providing some discouragement toward others taking advantage of you.  More positively, you can very well encourage conditions of coordination and cooperation.  It can lead to our federating ourselves with others.



[1] Glover, J.  (1999).  Humanity:  A moral history of the twentieth century.  New Haven, CT:  Yale University Press.

[2] Ibid., p. 2.

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