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, July 5, 2016

LIMITS ON RELATIVITY

When I began my college education, quite a few years ago, I took a course titled Social Science I.  The course had a strong anthropological bent to it.  One of the organizing concepts of the course was cultural relativism.  Simply stated, the instructive message was for us to view other cultures as equal to ours.  The qualities of a culture are the product of historical happenstance in the sense that cultures are the products of developmental processes and that any one culture, except for the accidents of the past, could have a trait of any other.  A subtext was that one cannot judge one culture as being more morally sound than any other.  Therefore, bolstering one’s culture as superior is dysfunctional in terms of understanding the cultural traits of other people and in terms of justice.  Thinking one’s culture is superior in any sense is what we call ethnocentrism. 

This idea is a bit touchy.  People have a natural bias toward their own culture.  My take was:  okay, I have a bias for my culture, for my way of life, but that bias needs to be set as a preference – more of an aesthetic preference.  But, as the years subsequent to those early college days have taught me, this whole way of viewing culture has some shortcomings.  While the notion of cultural relativism had a profound effect on me – it seemed to make so much sense – as I pursued my interest in civics education, I began to qualify my beliefs concerning this realm of interest.

Let me point out that this blog’s content has been heavily influenced by a cultural concern.  I have addressed our cultural bent on governmental and political beliefs and how they have evolved from our colonial days to the present.  I have argued that our history has been characterized by the dominance of two cultural/political constructs:  traditional federalism and natural rights.  I have further argued that we, in making a cultural decision, should adopt a newer version of federalism – liberated federalism – to guide our selection of content in our civics curriculum.  This argument is based on an assumption; that is, that there is a preferred cultural content when it comes to deciding what content our youngsters should be exposed to in their tax-funded public school classrooms.  Some might argue that such a policy defies the implied principle of cultural relativism.  I would like to address this concern.

To begin, I in no way have recommended that any cultural tradition is less than any other.  What I have implied is that for our national polity, in order to meet certain challenges – low political knowledge, low levels of political engagement, criminality, and relatively high levels of incivility – certain cultural elements should be at least considered by young students.  Those elements would be introduced in the form of issues that civics instruction would have students tackle.  I have dedicated space in this blog to describe this approach, but I want to further explain why I have chosen this strategy and how it is not an example of ethnocentrism.

The term, “We the people,” means something; it means that there is an entity made up of human beings who are tied together.  What ties them together is a set of ideas and ideals.  This phrase is the first words of our compact, the United States Constitution.  Constitutions are the ideals of a political culture meeting the realities of a polity.  It is not a claim that the ideals contained are the best or superior ideals for everyone, but it is what we believe is best for us.  In that spirit, we adopted that constitution and what it contains.  Our collective lives have evaluated its content and we, after 240 years of national existence, still believe it is best.  As for immigrants who come here from other traditions, we don’t expect them to relinquish their beliefs and ideals unless they counter those that are essential to our constitutional structure.  The federalism I promote in this blog takes a step further.  It does not judge beliefs, but it expects behaviors that promote federalist values.  In this blog, I offered a federalist moral code.  But for my purposes here, let me address this whole concern from another perspective.

Inherent in the moral code I proposed is the trump value of societal welfare or the common good.  I have stated that this value is experienced in two domains:  societal survival and societal advancement.  What do I mean by societal advancement?  Is this progress by Western standards?
The idea of “progress” is suspect for those who are committed to cultural relativism, for whom each culture defines its own goals and ethics, which cannot be evaluated against the goals and ethics of another culture.  Some anthropologists view progress as an idea the West is trying to impose on other cultures.  At the extreme, cultural relativists and cultural pluralists may argue that Westerners have no right to criticize institutions such as female genital mutilation, suttee (the Hindu practice of widows joining their dead husbands on the funeral pyre, whether they want to or not), or even slavery.

But after a half century of the communication revolution, progress in the Western sense has become a virtually universal aspiration.  The idea of progress – of a longer, healthier, less burdensome, more fulfilling life – is not confined to the West; it is also explicit in Confucianism and in the creeds of a number of non-Western, non-Confucian high-achieving minorities ….[1]
The author of these words, Lawrence E. Harrison, goes on to point out preferences that he claims and that I agree are universal or near universal.  They are:  life is better than death; health is better than sickness; liberty is better than slavery; prosperity is better than poverty; education is better than ignorance; and justice is better than injustice.  While there might be disagreement about the exact definition of terms (e. g., the term justice) the overall sense is fairly understood and accepted.  The argument can be further extended to state that certain cultural traits advance progress along these concerns and others hinder or defy these concerns.  I would count the values that support these preferred states as operational values (although liberty and justice are identified as instrumental values in the moral code I offered in a previous posting).  As such, one can make value judgments as to the content of cultural traditions.  These judgments are not wholesale denunciations of any particular tradition, but a more specific focus as to particular cultural biases, attitudes, behavior patterns, and values.  Under a liberated federalist approach, they are legitimate areas of inquiry in which students would be asked to pass judgement on counter federalist practices.  So, for example, if there is a cultural bias against females advancing their education – say, seeking a college degree – and the practice of certain cultural biases prohibits such education among certain segments of the population, this would be a legitimate subject for a civics course to address.  It should not be forgotten that federalism invites pluralism, a centered pluralism – “from many, one.”  If this is ethnocentrism, which I believe it is not, then so be it.




[1] Harrison, L. E.  (2000).  Introduction:  Why culture matters.  In L. E. Harrison and S. P. Huntington (Eds), Culture matters:  How values shape human progress (pp. xvii-xxxiv).  New York, NY:  Basic Books, p. xxvi.  Emphasis added.

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