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, September 29, 2015

CONTENTIOUS SOCIAL SCIENTIFIC THINKING

I wish I had a nickel for every time I have written in this blog, “sixty or so years ago.”  The phrase refers to the notion that about sixty or so years ago, the natural rights construct became the prominent mental construct among Americans as to how they thought and felt about government and politics.  That promotion was at the expense of the traditional federalist construct.  I have in this blog shared some of the history that traces the transfer.  I wrote about how since the times of the early republic, our political beliefs and feelings have slowly drifted from the puritanical origins of congregational unions.  That origin led the way to our governmental foundational bias of forming polities through the use of covenantal arrangements.  I will spare you a whole retelling of the story; let it suffice to say that this religiously inspired origin went through secularization and then a shift from a collectivist orientation to a stronger and stronger individualism. 

In the past century, we had the effects of the Great Depression and World War II.  These two tide-changing experiences proved to be the end of the dominance of the federalist – the construct reflecting our covenantal perspective – mindset and the beginning of the dominance of the natural rights mindset.  In my telling of this story, to date, I have left out the effect of the influence our reliance on science has had.  I alluded to it when early on I related how the growth of positivist scientism influenced our views of the social sciences and the reliance on systems theory.  Since this blog is about civics, I emphasized how this influence affected political science.  What I left out was that the adoption of a science bias was not without contentious claims and a bit of a conflict among those who favored a more scientific approach to studying social realities.  That conflict has had consequences and they are of such a nature that they need to be accounted for if we are serious about implementing a newer form of federalism.  Let me explain.

We, as a culture, have adopted science so thoroughly that it is easy to believe that the influence of science has been around for centuries.  Not so.  The effects of science on our culture can be dated back only to the end of the nineteenth century.  The famous early social scientists had their “heydays” back in the late 1800s.  At that time, such pioneers as Vilfred Pareto, Emile Durkheim, and Max Weber began using more scientific methodologies to study social realities.  There began to evolve a general belief that science could study any realm of reality and render such explanations and understandings so that someday one could predict how people would behave under given situations.  After all, the purpose of science is to be able to predict.  One strong spokesperson of this view was Lester F. Ward.  He wrote:
Man’s destiny is in his own hands.  Any law that he can comprehend he can control. … His power over nature is unlimited. … Human institutions are not exempt from this all-pervading spirit of improvement.  They, too, are artificial, conceived in the ingenious brain and wrought with mental skill born of inventive genius.  The passion for their improvement is of a piece with the impulse to improve the plow or the steam engine.[1]
That viewpoint only became stronger as the new century took hold.

Between 1900 and 1950, spurred on by the progressive forces of the Progressive Era, the New Deal, and then the challenges of World War II, there was a very strong bias that undermined the remnants of the federalist view.  That newer bias held that desired social change could be engineered with enough social scientific knowledge.  That change could not only be substantively formulated by the use of such knowledge, but its implementation could also be achieved by the appropriate experts and sufficient resources – usually meaning enough money.  Such efforts entailed large bureaucracies, high levels of central planning, and national efforts.  Of course, this flew in the face of federalist thinking that relied heavily on local community responses to social ills.  Part of the problem was that social problems themselves had become national in scope, mostly pushed by a more national and then international economic system.  Local realities were to ever greater degrees being affected by events farther and farther away.  The Great Depression and a world war brought these realities into sharp focus and could no longer be denied by objective observation.  But not everyone bought into this “engineering” approach.

One of the outspoken critics of this planned change approach was William Graham Summer.  While these critics did not turn their collective backs on the use of science, they did find the ambitious projects these social engineers were conducting as troublesome.  Not only did such critics view Ward’s view a folly – a naïve and presumptive form of arrogance – but sacrilegious:  we study social realities scientifically to gain insight, but “never in the world by reconstruction of society on the plan of some enthusiastic social architect.”[2]  Instead, Sumner saw such knowledge as merely an assistance as one goes about his/her business.  Society, under this view, will balance itself out if the natural human and physical forces are allowed to “do their thing.”  He argued for a laissez faire approach and saw Wardian engineering as meddlesome and even dangerous.  He called for such efforts as affronts and urged all these do-gooders to mind their own business.

Since those days, we have had a heavy dose of both approaches.  The engineers took an early advantage as the nation, as stated above, slogged through the Great Depression and then had to conduct the monumental effort of defeating the Axis Powers of Germany, Italy, and Japan.  But even though overall they met with successes, they were not unqualified successes.  It took an entire ten years to get out of the depression – not until preparation spending for the war did we get to full employment – and the war effort left us with a new enemy, the Soviet Union.  But what finally cost the engineers their favored position was the social upheavals associated with the Vietnam War – the engineers got us into that mistake – and finally the Great Inflation of the 1970s.  Taking its place was the old Sumner view of laissez faire under the guise of Reaganomics.  Of course, not all of the measures instituted by the engineers disappeared.  Remnants of the Progressive Era and the New Deal survived:  Social Security, FDIC, and the FED are examples.  And the older line of thinking also had later successes such as Medicare and Medicaid.  Economically, we, under the regime of the engineers, had an economic policy described as Keynesian from the 1930s to 1980 which relied heavily on expert economic planning.  This was replaced by the supply side economic regime introduced by Reagan’s administration.  With the financial crisis of 2008 and its aftermath, a lot of that economic construct has come under attack.  That’s where we are today.  Things are in flux; perhaps it’s time for a change.

There is more talk of what is known as clinical, as opposed to engineered, approaches to change.  This approach is more reliant on personal narratives, interactions with subjects, partnership building, collaboration, and shared decision-making.  It doesn’t disregard positivist/quantitative based knowledge, but sees such study as verification for what is learned from qualitative study.  It sees politics less as a zero-sum game and more of a win-win game.  Whether a new approach is developed where this more inclusive view becomes dominant, we will see.  There is one arena where this newer approach is being used and the critics are vociferous; that’s in the field of foreign relations.

President Obama has been trying to institute a foreign relations approach that relies more heavily on diplomacy.  His recently negotiated deal with the Iranians is an example.  I will not analyze the whole range of issues involved, but the President’s stance is one of seeking an arrangement with Iran in which both sides win.  The President’s critics accuse him of weakness that will be exploited by our adversaries.  I believe this illustrates the challenges that a more federalist approach will have to overcome.  We’ll see what the outcome will be.

In any event, the stage is set.  Will a newer form of federalism be able to take hold?  If so, will it mean that such a change will cause a ripple effect in other realms of our social life?  Can it affect, for example, what we teach in schools, in our civics classrooms?




[1] Quoted in Benne, K. D., Bennis, W. G., Chin, R.  (1985).  Planned change in America.  In W. G. Bennis, K. D. Benne, and R. Chin (Eds.) Planning of Change (pp. 11-21).  New York, NY:  Holt, Rinehart and Winston.  Quotation on p. 15.

[2] Ibid., p. 15.

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