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, February 12, 2021

AN OVERALL AMERICAN CONSTRUCT, PART III

 

The last posting gives the reader a ranging view of how Americans have developed in terms of their philosophical ideas.  Just stating that, it sounds pompous to American ears.  And the fact that it does brings one back to Allen C. Guelzo’s[1] claim as to the pragmatic bias this nation has exhibited for being doers not thinkers.  And yet the academic history of the nation stretches back almost to its very beginning.

          And for this, one can cite the founding of Harvard just six years after the settlement of Boston in 1630.  One can further credit the religious enterprise, in this case that of the Puritans, to seek answers to the more metaphysical questions of life.  While this tradition is noted today for its very strict, moralistic theology, it attempted to discover reality that is not readily observable in the material world. 

Now all of this development was a complex mix of views and biases; for example, thrown into this was the common-sense philosophy of Scottish thought in the eighteenth century (more on this below).  But central in the beginning there was Puritanism that along with its fire-and-brimstone sermons was a strong commitment to congregational arrangements and their covenantal origins.

          Puritanism represents the stoic side of American thinking and one name that emerges as one studies these various influences is that of Jonathan Edwards who was a leader of the Great Awakening, a reemergence of Puritanical allegiance that was reestablished in the mid to late 1700s.  That movement was a sincere effort to bolster Puritanical morals after some slippage due to initial successes in the colonial settlements. 

This is not to claim this historical figure was some great thinker, but a thinker he was and was later designated as president of Princeton (he died as he was about to assume that office in 1758).  But even in the midst of the Great Awakening, the practical side of American thought did not go away.

          On the other side of this dual personality, the next contributor, one that overlaps in time with Edwards and his ilk, is Benjamin Franklin who published his Poor Richards Almanac in 1732 and his Autobiography in 1791 (he died in 1790).  Here one finds the practical tradition of Americans being extolled.  Uplifted were qualities of business acumen and common sense.  And in addition, as alluded to above, was the Scottish philosophic bent of Thomas Reid (1710-1796) and others who if not affecting Franklin, did have an effect on Thomas Jefferson.

Reid wrote the following:

Man was destined for society.  His morality, therefore, was to be formed to this object.  He was endowed with a sense of right and wrong, merely relative to this.  This sense is as much a part of his nature as the sense of hearing, seeing, feeling; it is the true foundation of morality, and not the kalon, truth, etc., as fanciful writers have imagined.  The moral sense, or conscience, is as much a part of man as his leg or arm.  It is given to all human beings in a stronger or weaker degree, as force of members is given them in a greater or less degree.  It may be strengthened by exercise, as may any particular limb of the body.  This sense is submitted, indeed, in some degree, to the guidance of reason; but it is a small stock which is required for this; even a less one than what we call common sense.  State a moral case to a ploughman and a professor.  The former will decide it as well and often better than the latter because he has not been led astray by artificial rules.[2]

This statement gives more philosophical language to the very down-to-earth perspective that was common among Americans not only of those days but throughout the nation’s history. 

And this sort of leaning can readily be seen as feeding another movement that would turn out to have a profound influence that this blog highlighted in its last posting.  That is the movement known as Transcendentalism.  And these lesser religious notions or themes are picked up through the 1800s and one can cite the fictional works of Herman Melville (Moby Dick) and Nathanial Hawthorne (The Scarlet Letter).  Their novels directly attack the Puritanical thinking that was judged in these works to be too inhuman in its expectations.

          One can than trace this other tradition to the development, years later, of Pragmaticism and the works of William James and John Dewey.  And that brings a student of this tradition into the twentieth century – Dewey died in 1952.  But how philosophical was this tradition and, for that matter, the Puritanical tradition?  Admittedly, not very.  Even the more well thought out tradition of Pragmaticism could boast of only a relatively few top-notch thinkers such as Dewey and James.[3]  But then again, its emphasis, even as a philosophy, was on doing, not thinking.

          And perhaps this lack of theorizing helped those who opposed these voices influenced by the Enlightenment.  Inspired by the Great Awakening in an around about way, and the work of Edwards, was the influence exerted by the Romantics.  While this Romanticism, as expressed in Transcendentalism, was mostly anti-religious, it was pro sentiment and emotion and reactive against pure reason and objectivism – and as such was a mixture of anti-religious dogma, but pro-religious fervor.

Antagonistic to the ideas emanating from science, from Descartes to Newton, these religiously inspired ideas and emotions became part of the American story.  In more current days, the remnants of the Romantics can be found in Born Again messaging that one can find among Evangelicals of today.  Heavily reliant on the Bible, its literal interpretation of that book provides much of what its adherents consider truthful accounts of the physical world. 

And why are these views taken as truth?  Because it feels true.  Passion, not reason, for Romantics is the essential guide.  And here, even Transcendentalism can be viewed not as a movement toward reason, but toward emotionalism, at least as it is represented by Ralph Waldo Emerson.  All this will be described and explained in later postings.  Links to such characters as John C. Calhoun and his representation of southern agrarianism will be pointed out.  Here, the aim is to give the reader the warning that all of this, while it can be analyzed and of which sense can be made, is not an account of a single-minded people.

One can detect the two traditions, Puritanism and the Enlightenment.  How both affect Transcendentalism and its effects, given Santayana’s overview (see previous posting), all of these combined and co-existed under an organizational and political arrangement defined by federalist principles. 

Organizational principles are not handed down from above.  They instead have to stand free with enough supportive ideals and ideas which have to be thought of, implemented, and defended to survive various challenges such as those facing the Civil War generation, and many think, the present generation.

They are the product of the human mind and are implemented through complex mixtures as those found in this nation’s past.  More will be shared in upcoming postings including a more detailed accounts of what this and the last two postings introduce and describe to the reader. 



[1] Allen C. Guelzo, The American Mind, Part I – a transcript book – (Chantilly, VA:  The Teaching Company/The Great Courses, 2005).  Unless otherwise indicated, factual information found in this posting is derived from this source.

[2] As quoted in Gary Wills, Inventing America:  Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence (New York, NY:  Vintage Books, 1978/2018), 202-203.  This quotation was utilized in a previous posting.

[3] This claim is belied by Louis Menand’s account of Pragmaticism.  See Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club (New York, NY:  Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2001).

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