AN OVERALL AMERICAN CONSTRUCT, PART II

 

In tracing American theoretical, philosophic thinking, this blog in its last posting describes the lack of such thinking among them.  It reports a general judgement; that is, it pointed out American reputation of being doers, not thinkers.  It ended its reporting by citing Tocqueville on that account. 

One can add many voices to that of the Frenchman all throughout the 1800s and into the 1900s including that of James Fennimore Cooper, Supreme Court justice Joseph Story, psychologist G. Stanley Hall, and philosopher George Santayana among others.  But it is with Santayana that this posting wants to remind long time readers of this blog, what this blogger had to offer some years ago.[1]

          The nation, during the 1800s, drifted away from the communal nature of American politicking that Tocqueville describes.  Why?  One writer who sheds some light on this question is George Santayana.  Santayana was a Spanish American philosopher who is credited with this famous quote: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” In 1911, Santayana published an address, “The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy,”[2] which offered a historical analysis as to why Americans had become less communal.

To begin with, Santayana points out that since the earliest days of the nation there has been a two-sided Christian view which has molded a lot of our social and political thought. On the one side, there is a fire-and-brimstone Calvinist view which bolstered concern for the ravages of sin and expressed itself as an “agonized conscience.” The other side promotes a gentler message, a social transcendentalism, developed more formally in the eighteenth century. Each encouraged its own social philosophy.

Calvinism pushed Americans to be disciplined. Hard work took on a moral status under this view. The discipline it inspired became very necessary as early Americans had to tame a frontier environment. Its harsh conditions with its dangers were met by a people armed with a view of life and morality suited to meet its challenges.

So successful was this mental and emotional framework that it became victimized by the success it allowed these settlers to achieve. Americans soon began to develop a prosperous economy and consequently, with more material security, they began to have available the finer things in life. They found it difficult to maintain their Calvinistic perspective, at least to the levels they endured earlier.

Calvinism did not disappear, but it lost its more stringent character. In the wake of a strong disciplinarian religious outlook, a strong congregational tradition survived.  Here it is useful to highlight a reference to the development of congregations.

From its earliest settlements, this form of social arrangement, the congregational model, characterized how Americans organized themselves. Key to this was organizing agreements among settlers through the utilization of covenants. According to Daniel Elazar, [3] covenants were sets of communal commitments by the settlers which established the basic social and political arrangements of the group.

The agreements were formalized as written agreements in the form of a charter or a constitution. To solidify this important promise to each other, the settlers called on God to witness the agreement. This form of organizing was repeated in the separate and isolated American colonies. The model continued into the development of state governments with the only difference being that the covenants eventually became compacts in which the initial agreements were established without calling on God as witness.

As referred to above, with a diminishing harshness of a stricter Calvinism, the “genteel tradition” or transcendentalism, an imported philosophy from Europe, became prominent. Leading this effort, Ralph Waldo Emerson helped define transcendentalism for Americans.  He, utilizing Kantian tradition of systemic subjectivism, formulated a system of thought that can be credited with initiating Americans' thinking along more individualistic lines.

Emerson strongly promoted self-initiative which was highly valued in a mostly frontier nation. The quality was easily integrated into a romanticized version of Yankee lore.  Two characteristics were emphasized in this vision: emphasis on present needs and the importance of will over intellect.

As opposed to the earlier Calvinist focus on evil, transcendental thought seemed to have a blind eye for it and rhapsodized an “up-beat-ness” and optimism. To Emerson, these dispositions translated themselves into confidence or trust in oneself, in one's ability. Along with confidence came a positive self-definition and a faith in intuition: “the perspective of knowledge as they radiate from the self.”[4] 

At the risk of being too much of a synopsis, one can see the Calvinist influence as stoic and transcendentalism as being epicurean.  The Americans’ version of federalism, if one describes it with the use of a Venn diagram, was situated in the overlap of the two traditions.  However, an imbalance seemed to emerge.

Without the previous prevalent Calvinistic source of humility, there turned out to be no internal check on the exuberance that transcendentalism promoted. Among the turmoil associated with an emerging nation, two competing social perspectives emerge, that of a marketplace and that of a commonweal.

One, the marketplace view takes hold. Two, the commonweal view competes. The marketplace view defines citizens by their role in the bargaining processes of the market. In this view, each person seeks his or her own self-interest.  One can view this development as the first meaningful challenge to a federalist perspective as the nation’s prominent view of governance and politics. 

It initiated and encouraged a transactional view to politics.  Yet, in the commonweal view, which was retained as a viscerally felt, idealistic espoused theory, citizens have undivided interests.  To this day people give it lip service.  This, according to Elazar, led to the evolution of three distinct political subcultures in America.[5]  

They are the moralistic, the individualistic, and the traditional.  While each maintained a federalist base, at least at an idealistic level, one can readily sense the origins of its demise.  But this account still has more to describe before this eventual evolvement took place.  Future postings will seek to do that.

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[1] Robert Gutierrez, “From Brimstone to Gentleness” and “Individualistic Political Subculture,” posting numbered 90 and 91 respectively (n.d.), Gravitas:  A Voice for Civics (a blog), no longer posted.  This rendering is further edited to meet the blog’s current editorial style.

[2]George Santayana, “The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy,” in The Annals of America, Vol. 13 (Chicago, IL: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1968/1911), 277-288.

[3] Daniel J. Elazar, “Federal Models of (Civil)Aauthority,” Journal of Church and State 33 (Spring 1991):  231-254.  Also, for supportive argument see Andrew C. McLaughlin, The Foundations of American Constitutionalism (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1972).

[4] Santayana, “The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy,” 281.

[5]Daniel J. Elazar, American Federalism: A View from the States (New York, NY: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1966).