IT’S A PRACTICALITY THING

 

[Note:  From time to time, this blog issues a set of postings that summarize what the blog has been emphasizing in its previous postings.  Of late, the blog has been looking at various obstacles civics educators face in teaching their subject.  It’s time to post a series of such summary accounts.  The advantage of such summaries is to introduce new readers to the blog and to provide a different context by which to review the blog’s various claims and arguments.  This and upcoming summary postings will be preceded by this message.  And, in addition, by this blogger’s count, this posting is the 1000^th posting of this blog.  Thank you.]

 

In the last posting, this blog shared research pointing out that organizations, including governments and their agencies, are subject to harboring “incubating” problems that can grow and burst upon either their personnel or the people they serve in very impactful ways.  Ezra Klein[1] makes the connection that such problems and their hidden qualities have contributed to formulating the nation’s current polarized landscape.

          The process by which this takes place can be best understood by reviewing case studies of such events but basically what happens is that those who are affected by such problems, in order to gain political advantage, find themselves teaming up with others.  These others are similarly looking for allies in pursuing their claims.  Since governments or political systems are not aware of the aforementioned problems and/or their potential to become virulent, the problems grow. 

This growth with the aligning that takes place, is a cycle that gathers steam and as Klein points out, “This sets off a feedback cycle to appeal to a yet more polarized public, institutions must polarize further; when faced with yet more polarized institutions, the public polarizes further, and so on.”[2] 

These cycles develop their own individual character and specifics, but one can find recurring factors that give each case its vibrance.  For example, the actors seek to satisfy the basic motivation to garner the political assets – in these cases, allies – so as to compete successfully over the issue(s) that they are addressing.  This has always been a basic strategy of weaker competitors,[3] but of late, traditionally powerful actors find the necessity to do likewise.

  By seeking allies, these actors have formed two grand alliances – a right of center alliance and a left of center alliance.  In doing so, each has subdued or found compromise within their ranks over their disagreements, have emphasized their commonality, and highlighted their distinction from the other alliance. 

In this, and this blog will address in later postings, the left of center is a more diverse group than the right of center group but each side, due to the collective size of its opponent, cannot afford to go it alone.  The result is a well-entrenched division not seen, possibly, since the days leading up to the Civil War.

This national arena falls woefully short from an ideal federated arena.  In that ideal state, one does have contentions between and among competing entities, but they are over discreet issues and their accompanying rewards and costs.  These distinct episodes are treated separately or in singular fashion and, therefore, allow those who compete one day can and will be allies the next. 

That is, these participants agree one day and disagree another day within the same congregation of fellow participants.  But when the issues of contention are connected as they are today, competitors and allies become the same set of characters over all the issues they confront.  This adds to any motivation an entity might have to vilify those who are not seen to be in his/her camp. 

This level of demarcation undermines any semblance of congregating in legislative bodies such as in Congress.  That legislative body has become two houses of well-defined belligerents divided into ongoing teams of opponents, the liberal/progressive team and the conservative/nationalist team.  This division simply reflects the electorate of today.

All of this did not happen overnight.  Each issue or area of concern has evolved during its respective incubating periods.  This blog outlined one such concern, that of immigration.  The right of center alliance on this issue was easier to form then the left of center alliance.  That is usually the case, but in terms of this issue, the left had to find accommodation between centered pluralist advocates and multi-culturalist advocates – a pair of well-defined rationales or perspectives that disagree on basic policy choices when it comes to immigration. 

Today, those differences lie just below the surface.  It, along with other divisions, will most likely reemerge when the overall polarization is settled to a workable level.  However, this is but one area of concern.  There are others, many others.  There is gun control, gay marriage, science, religion, business regulations, minimum wage, race relations, policing policies, infrastructure, abortion rights, etc.   Some of these seem to bind naturally to each other, some do not. 

And the binding among advocates can be strained at times, but practicalities push the advocates to look over, ignore, or otherwise find some way to get along with allies and to vilify opponents.  That, in a nutshell, is the current political, polarized landscape and the division seems to be growing and be further entrenched. 

One set of events that encapsulates this national scene was the 2020 election.  A great trivial question at some future date will be, which candidate for president received the second highest number of votes for the presidency in the history of the republic.  The answer will be the loser of the 2020 election.  One can divide the electorate as the pro-Trump faction and the anti-Trump faction. 

During the years of Trump’s tenure, an observation made was about how he would stoke up his base by some action or Tweet.  What wasn’t mentioned was that by the same behavior he would also stoke up the anti-Trump faction.  It happened that the anti-Trump faction proved to be larger on election day and hence it resulted in the Joe Biden victory.

---

[1] Ezra Klein, Why We’re Polarized (New York, NY:  Avid Reader Press, 2020).

[2] Ibid., xix.

[3] E. E. Schattschneider, The Semi-Sovereign People:  A Realist’s View of Democracy in America (New York, NY:  Hole, Rinehart and Winston, 1960).

WALKING A BEAT?

 

[Note:  From time to time, this blog issues a set of postings that summarize what the blog has been emphasizing in its previous postings.  Of late, the blog has been looking at various obstacles civics educators face in teaching their subject.  It’s time to post a series of such summary accounts.  The advantage of such summaries is to introduce new readers to the blog and to provide a different context by which to review the blog’s various claims and arguments.  This and upcoming summary postings will be preceded by this message.]

This blog has made a connection between the natural rights view and scientific research with its methodology.  It’s not that one engages in scientific research naturally.  It took humans a long time to develop science.  Humans are naturally too emotional to readily engage in objectified studies about what they find important.  Even the notion of advancing knowledge for its own sake would seem foreign to people until a few hundred years ago.  At its beginning, science even got people in trouble in that it questioned their more natural tendency to think religiously.

          Probably the most celebrated case of this latter development was the trouble that Galileo di Vincenzo Bonaiuti de’ Galilei had.  He actually claimed that the earth was not the center of the solar system; it, he claimed, revolves around the sun, not vice versa.  And how did he arrive at his “speculation?”  He used scientific methods including utilizing his telescope.  But that view flew in the face of religious dogma prevalent in the Western world.

Up to his time, knowledge or what was taken for knowledge, was primarily arrived at through logic (e.g., the work of Greek philosophers) or inspiration (e.g., the work of those who wrote the books of the Bible).  With the pioneers of science, observation became a third viable way.  Its advent was not met with open arms by those in power.  But because of its payoffs, science came to be seen not only as legitimate but essential.

          But can science be deficient?  A growing number of voices are beginning to question its power especially when it comes to the study of human behavior.  It seems that what is judged to be so efficient in the study of the natural world is insufficient in studying human endeavors.  Investigating many questions relating to humans in what they do and how they think and feel, science proves to be short-sighted especially when it comes to complex social arrangements. 

In political science, reductionism, narrowing a study to a limited set of factors or variables, seems to miss the richness of how and why humans behave the way they do in political and other related situations.  The shortfall occurs when those ways of thinking are applied to conditions that organizations exhibit.

          This blogger has posted online an “appendix chapter”[1] that reviews these shortcomings, but here he questions how scientific approaches affect other concerns.  That is, this problem does not only affect the advancement of political knowledge.  It also affects those professional fields that depend on political and the other social sciences as their personnel formulate policies and the implementations of those policies. 

An example of this, one that had to do with national defense, was the inability of Israeli intelligence to see the impending attacks that initiated the Yom Kippur War in 1973.  Organizations tend these days to rely on scientific, objectified protocols to help them determine policy, while their environs do not lend themselves to the reductionist methods sciences employ. 

They also fund scientific research to conduct organizational studies.  This bias, when combined with other institutional practices (e.g., group thinking or rational analyses of cost/benefits), leads to the inability to recognize growing, “incubated” problems.  They exist within their organizations according to research conducted by Sidney Dekker and Shawn Pruchnicki.[2]

These problems fester, grow, and eventually burst upon the scene like the attacks on Israel back in ’73.  This is not a matter of incompetent practices; those practices are responsible for organizations growing and being successful.  By so growing, these organizations become complex entities, and establish the conditions that potentially make the utilization of purely scientific research insufficient.

As this blog has indicated repeatedly, science is powerful.  Its ability to discover reality is without equal.  But in various ways it leads to false security as this Israeli example illustrates.  Through its reductionism it lacks richness.  The study of humans, especially, calls for holistic studies in which the richness of various environments or environmental elements can be considered and analyzed in their wholeness.  This often includes the emotional richness studied subjects bring to situations but cannot be reduced to measurable sets of finite variables.

This writer, from his own experience, can add another telling example.  He can remember, when he was quite young in New York City, the neighborhood policeman walking his beat.  This policeman, who was generally friendly, would capture his admiration as the man in blue who could expertly swing his baton or truncheon.  Such cops are depicted in old films, for example the film, Singin in the Rain. 

Then came the scientific-inspired systems theory to study large organizations – for example, the New York City Police Department – and that “walking” cop disappeared.  And with his disappearance, police departments, such as New York’s, lost a source of invaluable, holistic information.  This became serious in large cities.  While there is a good deal of rhetoric bemoaning this loss, especially with cases such as the incident with George Floyd, cost/benefit analyses prohibit that source's return.[3]

---

[1] URL site for this appendix is https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vSjZxpifP42VVnhFduKujgUDPJMddmcsh1uRY9DvpNicdYUONOHx56r1jRg4lgxK3ckaiQMJc4Gno0J/pub .

[2] Sidney Dekker and Shawn Pruchnicki, Theoretical Issues in Ergonomics Science, 2013, accessed July 8, 2020, https://safetydifferently.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/SDDriftPaper.pdf , 1-11.

[3] Apparently, cops do walk where people congregate but not in neighborhoods.  They are labor intensive and judged to being either inefficient or too costly.