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.

Friday, December 20, 2019

IT’S A “RAINFORREST” OUT THERE


Many determining factors that affect the ability of a society or, more specifically, a polity to meet its challenges need to be balanced.  Some, if not many, of a polity’s elements or attributes are often in conflict.  For example, should citizens support the aims of one neighbor or that of another when those aims are in conflict?  Should the use of one of their properties be used in a way that bothers or more seriously infringes on the aesthetics of another is just one possible conflict.
In a related notion, this blog has reported what are the motivations that lead people to be communal despite these conflicts.  Michael Sandel offers three types or sources of motivations:  reciprocity, sentiment, and personal self-fulfillment.[1] How they function in a landscape of turmoil – at times in the extreme – is worth knowing and worth teaching civics students.
          The question becomes relevant as a polity goes about its business.  Those situations will arise when commitments and other determining conditions will be in contention.  Richard Dagger offers the following:  in one’s concern over reciprocity and sentiment there can be an issue or development when one needs to choose between the interests of neighbors and those of people in some foreign land. 
How should one choose?  Intuitively, one will side with those whom one has an association – such as fellow citizens.  Of course, considerations over the issue in question are important.  For example, is the survival of a foreign population at odds with some convenience or inconvenience of a more local population?  Then perhaps the moral and prudent choice is to side with the foreigner.  One can only ascribe weights to such factors and not look for hard and fast rules of thumb that say, for example, “citizens of my country always come first.”[2]
This posting aims to further Dagger’s analysis.  In his review of Sandel’s “motivations,” Dagger points out some very important practicalities.  Yes, when one joins in a social arrangement, be it a social group, a legal, or a political arrangement, one usually does so to advance personal interests.  This is legitimate if, once joined, one is true to the provisions of the agreement that sets up the arrangement.  If the arrangement reflects the attributes of a true partnership, then the arrangement is an association.
But in general, whether the arrangement is a partnership or not, one has a legitimate bias for parochial relationships.  This is not only wise in pursuing mutual aims, but natural.  One has a natural affinity for the familiar[3] and that strongly pertains to political concerns.  But does that not pose a challenge for the liberated version of federalism?
To remind the reader, this blog has argued against an earlier version of federalism to which this nation ascribed; that being parochial/traditional federalism.  As Andrew Marantz points out, this nation was created by white men for white men.[4]  But even they seemed to think at some idealistic level that this was not right either morally or practically.  In any event, their written covenants and compacts – at least, at the national level – did not proclaim such ownership for that group.
Instead, those documents proclaim the opposite.  They proclaim an equality among the populous.  This blogger has been taught that even the gender discrepancies in law were justified – or more accurately, rationalized – as not being instances of inequality, but of attempts to maintain the cohesion of families. 
That lesson is considered with a jaundiced eye, but the thinking was that the father spoke for the family or household in his voting, in his ownership of property, and in his position in the community.  Of course, this did not satisfy the provisions of federalism unless one defined women as deficient or equivalent to children.  This could not stand, given the overall rationale of federalism and its provisions for equality.
But this goes a bit astray.  The concern here is the function the above motivations play in maintaining and advancing a polity – a society.  Reciprocity – even where there is no sentiment or understanding of the needs of self-fulfillment – calls for one to cooperate and make nice with those close by.  Afterall, one depends on those people most immediately to derive the advantages one enjoys by being a member of an arrangement.  But the concern becomes that when things don’t go swimmingly with these cohorts, what sustains the bonds?
The first basic response to this possibility – occurring from time to time in everyone’s life – is the self-awareness that in one’s modes of behavior the inevitable contention needs a strategy.  “This is how I handle a debate with my neighbor, my partner, my customer, my fellow city dweller, my fellow state resident, my fellow countryperson, or my fellow inhabitant of the planet.”  At each level the bonds vary, and this is no small matter.  It affects what specific strategy is employed.  But when one realizes that a strategy is needed that is a big step.
Short of a strategy – which, by the way, can adjust given the factors involved – one is apt to react without thought and be short-sighted.  Emotions will hold sway and resulting behaviors are apt to be regrettable.  And this can be consequential in furthering relationships; after all, at the reciprocal stage, reciprocities are bound to be aimed back at a person who acts impulsively.
Also, strategies allow one to take into account the nature of a relationship.  Is it with a neighbor or a professional cohort?  Is it with a fellow worker, an anonymous person, or with a known person?  Is it with a superior or an underling?  Is it in person or over the phone or through a letter exchange?  These and other factors might affect what leads to effective intercourse.
And, according to Dagger, each reflects decisions over the priority one places on the issue or on the other party.  And here, still holding to the basic level of reciprocity, one places different levels of priority on who the other party is and what the issue is.  This can become complex and unstable given the elements of not only the other parties and situations, but on what is happening in one’s life.
All of this falls within the assumption that conditions within the polity are sufficiently stable and peaceful.  The next posting will look at the issues Dagger points out when this assumption does not hold.  This is more than an academic concern.  As this blog has mentioned – without taking a position as to who is right or wrong or who is responsible or victimized – the current mood of the nation has, of late, shifted.  Today one cannot make assumptions of stability as to the general political landscape under which such contentions might and do occur.


[1] Richard Dagger, Civic Virtue:  Rights, Citizenship, and Republican Liberalism (New York, NY:  Oxford, 1997).

[2] For a more developed description of this line of thought, see Robert Gutierrez, “Balancing Act over Us/Theming, Gravitas:  A Voice for Civics – a blog, April 10, 2018, accessed December 19, 2019, https://gravitascivics.blogspot.com/2018/04/balancing-act-over-ustheming.html .

[3] Robert M. Sapolsky, Behave:  The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (New York, NY:  Penguin Press, 2017.

[4] Andrew Marantz, Anti-social:  Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation (New York, NY:  Penguin Random House, 2019).

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