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, November 12, 2019

NATURALLY ANTI-SOCIAL?


The last posting of this blog got into the development of a fetus during gestation.  This posting picks up the idea of development, but after birth.  That posting was concerned with abortion rights, this one is about something else.  It is concerned with the question:  what determines behavior, nature or nurture?  This last question has been the topic of many a discussion or argument.  This posting relies on the reporting of a conservative pundit, Jonah Goldberg.[1]  This blogger finds Goldberg’s take on this matter intriguing.
          Today, the consensus has discredited John Locke’s view that humans are born with a blank slate.  According to Locke, all behaviors, thinking, and even feelings are/were the product of experiences a person, beginning as an infant, experiences.  Those experiences have their effect and either at a conscious or subconscious level they make their mark within one’s thinking.  How one behaves, thinks, and feels reflects the cumulative effect of those experiences.
          Goldberg reports that this view has been discarded by all serious students of human psychology.  Instead, he points out that the consensus is that people through their biology are born with certain internal messaging and dispositions.  He analogizes this by using the image of an app.  A lot of what people encounter can be congruent with the content of that app or it can challenge what the app informs or leads the person to believe or feel.  So, the question becomes:  can a person override what the app leads people to believe or feel?
          While the app can’t be replaced, add-ons can be acquired.  That is, nurture – e.g., how a person is brought up by his/her parents or guardians – can affect the disposition of a person and that can lead to beliefs and feelings that would not be believed or felt without those experiences.  Having made that concession, though, there are limits.  Some built-in programming cannot be replaced.  It might be tweaked, softened, redirected, but it cannot be dismissed or dashed by that parenting or what other “learning” efforts provide.
The content of the app is so enmeshed in what makes people human.  So, what are the attributes of a person’s psychic app?  One, Goldberg reports, is that babies are preprogrammed to have a moral sense.  Six-month-old babies already bestow a character trait on puppets that are shown to be helpful or detrimental to another puppet trying to accomplish a simple task.  They ascribe to those puppets who are helpful as “nice” and those who hamper the other puppet as “mean.”  They further indicate they prefer the nice puppet.
          This finding is further supported by other studies that indicate a person is born with a basic sense to being empathetic, altruistic, cooperative, and other moral predilections.  But how those initial biases develop depends on the experiences the baby and then child encounters. One category of such experiences can be attributed to the culture in which a baby finds him/herself during those early months and years.
          Another programmed indication is shown early on; a baby demonstrates preferences in the language he/she primarily hears – even before he/she knows how to speak or understand what is being said.  That is, he/she is naturally drawn to pick up the sound of the prevailing language minutes after being born.  That is, the fetus, in the womb, already seems to “hear” and “appreciate” the rhythm and pace of the language being spoken by his/her mother and those people with whom she converses.
          In addition to voices and language, the infant demonstrates intense interest in facial appearances.  Surely, being able to identify mother and other relatives can be, under certain dangerous situations, lifesaving.  This sensitivity is more pronounced than the child’s ability to verbalize any differences he/she perceives.  What seems to strongly affect these abilities is familiarity with images that are similar.  “Who out there is like me and my mother and my father,” etc. seems to be important.
          And for Goldberg’s concern, this element of the app – the bias for unity and familiarity – seems central.  Why?  Because, in Goldberg’s conservative bent, it helps bolster conservative assumptions.  It does this in more than one way.  For one, it bolsters the unifying role markets play in a world where people are naturally disposed to avoid or otherwise shun those who are different – the Other. 
Yes, one can be naturally suspicious of unfamiliar, dissimilar people, but one wants to sell or lease him/her something like labor, a car, a service, etc.  A market – by its role in allowing a people to make a living – encourages people to come together and deal with each other despite their natural aversions to the “Other” – those who are different.
But there is another function conservatives seem to accept.  Goldberg writes:
Children and adults are constantly told that one needs to be taught to hate.  This is laudable nonsense.  We are, in a very real sense, born to hate every bit as much as we are born to love.  The task of parents, schools, society, and civilization isn’t to teach us not to hate any more than it is to teach us not to love.  The role of all of these institutions is to teach what we should or should not hate.[2]
He further states that until recently racism has been an accepted belief bias.  It was not considered as evil, but natural.  Goldberg uses this bit of evidence to support the notion that it is natural – not desired – and that one needs to count on society – culture, laws, taught notions of evil – to instill a more prudent view of race – one that proves to be more conducive to societal advancement.  That is, racism is bad and counterproductive to the general good.
          He also points out that all political ideologies – humans seem to naturally devise these belief systems – have their Others.  That goes for capitalism, socialism, communism, conservatism, and even contemporary liberalism – this last group disparages evangelical Christians.  They all hate someone or someone-s to some degree.
          This writer finds Goldberg to offer a set of ideas that a federalist needs to think about seriously.  If federalism is based on humans being able to come together to form a polity under a set of values that support community, collaboration, equality, and even liberty, then he/she cannot ignore any truths, if any, Goldberg points out. 
To begin with, given what Goldberg argues, one can see how early versions of federalism were parochial.  This blog has claimed that that was the case all the way back to the nation’s colonial past.  Truly, while America held federalism as dominant, one can readily see how parochial it was.  And that’s despite the onslaught of varied ethnicities that found their way to American shores.  It further explains slavery, mistreatment of the latest immigrant group, and the inhuman treatment of the indigenous peoples.
          While this treatment of the Other still plagues current American politics and social relations, at least there now exists a language that more honestly reflects those realities.  The polity has enacted meaningful policies to address those biases, but much needs to be done.  A civics program guided by a liberated federalism would be immensely helpful.  But, if one can accept Goldberg’s claims about the Other, such instruction needs consider what those claims indicate.


[1] Jonah Goldberg, Suicide of the West:  How the Rebirth of Tribalism, Populism, Nationalism, and Identity Politics Is Destroying American Democracy (New York, NY:  Crown Forum, 2018).

[2] Ibid., 24 (Kindle edition).

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