TO BE STRICT OR NURTURING

 

To restate a claim that the last posting offered, “Reality is the source of individual man [or woman] transcending to what is self-defined and intuitive: ‘the perspective of knowledge as they radiate from the self.’”[1]  So does George Santayana describe the thrust of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s version of transcendentalism.  The concern that that posting expressed is that this view significantly diminishes the disciplinary effect of Calvinism on Americans during its early history.  The result was that a division emerged in how they saw good and evil, right and wrong.

          This division of perception materializes in what Daniel Elazar[2] describes as two competing views of social relations:  the marketplace view, in which relationships among people are primarily defined in terms of bargaining arrangements when individuals seek self-interest, and a commonweal where all citizens have undivided interests.

          Within this division, Elazar identifies three political subcultures commingling within the American landscape.  They are the individualistic, moralistic, and traditional subcultures.  Overall, the individualistic subculture presently holds the dominant view in the minds of Americans.  It parallels the market mentality central to the nation’s economic system.  But the other perspectives, up until the turn from the last century, were (and still might be) strongly shared by people living within certain, areas of the country. 

This posting zeroes in on a conceptual framework by which to consider these subcultures which will, in turn, be described in the upcoming postings; that is before outlining these subcultures, the reader should keep in mind that the reason for this review is to get a handle on how moralistic beliefs are socialized within the American political culture.  And, in turn, those beliefs provide what civics education more efficiently should encourage, i.e., good citizenship.  After all, that is a moral issue.

In that, George Lakoff offers two models for socializing moral standards:  the strict father morality and the nurturant parent morality.[3]  Lakoff writes of the strict father morality,

 

In short, good parents set standards, good children obey their parents, disobedient children are bad children, good parents punish disobedient children, punishment makes disobedient (bad) children into obedient (good) children, and parents who don’t punish are bad parents because they produce bad children by not punishing them when they disobey.

In general, the concept of moral authority within communities is patterned on parental authority within families.  The general metaphor looks like the following:

·      A Community is a Family.

·      Moral Authority Is Parental Authority.

·      A Person Subject to Moral Authority Is a Child.

·      Moral Behavior by Someone Subject to Authority Is Obedience.

·      Moral Behavior by Someone in Authority Is Setting Standards and Enforcing Them.[4]

 

While one can readily find this view of morality and parenting among various American (and other nations’) institutions – athletic teams, the military, law enforcement, business, religion, and others – the general thrust is to link moral claims, biases, and other forms of thinking to moral authority.  A metaphor of a moral order emerges and in that, there are various forms depending on exactly how it is viewed.  And various forms may appear in each society and there are overarching elements to this model that cover those various forms.

So, in each one there is an instance of dominance that can be stated as “A” has legitimate control over “B.”  “The moral domain, creating a corresponding hierarchy of legitimate moral authority”[5] ensues.  Since it is recurring, the legitimacy of such a view analogizes the following:  God is dominant over the world and humans; humans are dominant over nature; adults over children; and men over women.  In more common language, the following results:  God is morally in authority over humans; humans over nature; adults over children; and men over women.

As offensive as that might sound to readers (hopefully, most of them), one has to recognize that these beliefs still have currency among many within the citizenry.  And one should keep in mind that variations are possible.  So, there might even be a feminist version in which this strict role is shared by both parents.  And of course, such a view can expand outward to include views of one race having legitimate dominance over another. 

Lakoff summarizes, “Race, sex, and religion are, however, very much involved in cultural dominance and so they enter into possible versions of Moral Order.”[6]  His general categorizing of this view strikes true as one looks around and searches for why some portray what otherwise seems unreasonable in a republic. 

It points out that adopted political models – especially to the degree they are not in line with the natural tendencies of people – demand active political socialization.  By doing so, it helps secure a populous being logically in line with its basic, underlying values.  In part, it demands a proactive civics program in its schools if for no other reason than to point out the inconsistencies.

What of the other model, the nurturant parent model?  Lakoff writes,

Nurturance presupposes empathy.  A child is helpless, it cannot care for itself. … We [see] that there are a number of forms of empathy – absolute, egocentric, and affordable. … Empathy is rarely simple or straightforward or pure. … [T]here are complexities of nurturance that mirror the complexities of empathy.

          Nurturance also involves rights and duties; it inherently involves morality.  A child has a right to nurturance and a parent has a responsibility to provide it.  A parent who does not adequately nurture a child is thus metaphorically robbing that child of something it has a right to. … [That would be] immoral.

          In conceiving of morality as nurturance, this notion of family-based morality is projected onto society in general.

          The conception of morality as nurturance can be stated as the following conceptual metaphor:

·      The Community Is a Family.

·      Moral Agents Are Nurturing Parents.

·      People Needing Help Are Children Needing Nurturance.

·      Moral Action is Nurturance.

This metaphor has the following entailment, based on what one knows about being nurturant toward children:

·      To nurture children, one must have absolute and regular empathy with them.

·      To act morally toward people needing help to survive, one must have absolute and regular empathy with them.

·      Nurturance may require making sacrifices to care for children.

·      Moral action may require making sacrifices to help truly needy people.

If one’s community is, further, conceptualized as a family, a further entailment follows from this metaphor:

·      Family members have a responsibility to see that children in their family are nurtured.

·      Community members have a responsibility to see that people needing help in their community are helped.[7]

 

And all this empathy presupposes a level of self-nurturance.  One needs to be healthy, well-employed, and sustaining meaningful and positive relationships with other significant friends and family members.  Consequently, a balance needs to be kept with empathy being felt outwardly and inwardly toward the community and toward oneself.  To place in balance these two domains is not selfish; it is just being responsible for what it takes to live out a nurturing role.

          A final concern – in terms of this review – one needs to proactively establish and maintain healthy social ties.  That is, to be moral means to actively sustain social ties, to sacrifice when needed, to honor the duties that such ties demand, and to view those ties as the source of moral duties toward keeping them cogent and vibrant.

          And with these two models, strict father morality model and nurturant parent morality model, one can apply them to the three political subcultures Elazar identifies: the individualistic, the moralistic, and the traditionalistic.  Through these analyses, one can apply Lakoff’s models and derive the social necessities one needs to meet in applying the elements of the various subcultures.  By doing so, one can delve further into each.

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[1] George Santayana, “The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy,” The Annals of America, vol. 13 (Chicago, IL:  Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc, 1968), 277-288, 281.

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

[3] George Lakoff, Moral Politics:  How Liberals and Conservatives Think (Chicago, IL:  The University of Chicago Press, 2002).

[4] Ibid., 77.

[5] Ibid., 104.

[6] Ibid., 106.

[7] Ibid., 116-118.

AWESOME VIEWS

 

With an overall summary distinguishing federalism and natural rights – provided in the last posting of this blog – one is set to consider the historical context in which a dialectic struggle has transpired in America since practically its beginning.  Most of the history of the US has been one bedeviled by the evolution of this struggle about how the federalist perspective had been implemented, changed, and eventually overcome by the natural rights perspective as the nation’s dominant view of governance, politics, and of other cultural concerns.

          By sketching that history regarding this evolution, an understanding emerges about the importance of federalism and the dialectical relation that perspective has had with its antithesis.  And a source that gives one an important historical approach to this struggle is the philosopher, George Santayana.[1]  In the earlier part of the last century, he wrote an insightful overview of the philosophical development of Americans until that time.

          He characterized the early phases of that development as a two-sided Christian view:  one was the harsh fire and brimstone Calvinism that emphasized the dangers of sin and the expression of an “agonized conscience,” and the other, a gentler view, was social transcendentalism (more formally developed during the 18^th century).

          Social transcendentalism, a European based philosophy, was quite sophisticated given the inexperience of the new nation.  But the nation – and this is not part of Santayana’s argument – had already incorporated to a meaningful degree another philosophic import from Europe, that being the ideas of the Enlightenment.  That adoption was not as demanding as this newer one.  Why?  Because the Enlightenment, while questioning the spiritual elements of Calvinism, was an argument for reason, and it simply extolled the reasonableness of communal bonding.

          That bonding, as it so happened, was central to the covenantal arrangements – in setting up their polities – that the early colonists employed.  But transcendentalism was a different message.  Santayana points out that Calvinism provided the necessary discipline to prosper in the frontier environment.  But after more than a century, in the first half of the 1800s, Americans succumbed to the very prosperity that Calvinism helped produce.  But before its diminished status, the Calvinist, Puritanical perspective left a strong congregational tradition.

          In that, that tradition was characterized by communities which were developed through covenants, with God as their witness and consequently, these settlers established strong communal ties among themselves.[2]  As pointed out in a previous posting, this covenantal arrangement repeats itself in the separate English settlements throughout the North American colonies.

That approach was maintained as colonies and then states were formed (the qualifier being the covenantal agreements became secularized as compacts).  Through transcendentalism, though, as the Calvinist influence waned, the “genteel tradition” of transcendentalism remained as a prominent view.  The transcendentalists, especially as defined in the writings and speeches of Ralph Waldo Emerson, became a prevalent American perspective. 

Emerson captured for American taste this Kantian tradition of systematic subjectivism.  Here, one can see the beginnings of extreme individualism taking hold.  Under an honestly expressed self-initiative, romanticized in old Yankee lore, the transcendentalists emphasized present needs and the function of will over intellect.  With that, there was a certain blindness to evil and an upbeat flavor in Emerson’s call for “self-trust.” 

In terms of looking inward, reality is the source of individual man/woman transcending to what is self-defined and intuitive:  “the perspective of knowledge as they radiate from the self.”[3] But without Calvinism – or some self-disciplining line of motivation or rationale – this form of individualism operated minus any internal check and balance. 

But this challenge was not met by a unified view as to what Calvinism should be.  And this gets at why many people are drawn to religious thoughts and experiences.  In this, a Second Great Awakening became prominent among Americans in the time frame these developments took place.  As with the First Great Awakening, a reaction to reason took hold and a call for emotions became front and center.  People simply felt that pure reason and religious belief based on it was simply too shallow.

Picking up on the First Awakening and one of its prominent spokespersons, Jonathan Edwards, his was an early voice of this reaction.  Allen C. Guelzo describes,

 

Jonathan Edwards had hoped to resist the flattening of religious authority by appealing to the “religious affections” as a sufficiently valid justification for Protestant Calvinism.  As did Kant, Edwards would have deplored any connection of his critique of reason with Romanticism’s wholesale revolt against it.  But the ongoing influence of evangelical revivalism, set by the pattern of the Great Awakening, certainly gave instant credit to anyone proposing on religious grounds to criticize or diminish the supremacy of reason in knowledge and giving pride of place to the will.  That old problem comes back amongst us [in the early 1800s].[4]

         

In that time and to the mid nineteenth century, the person to espouse a concern for emotional needs among religious advocates was Emerson.

This blog has highlighted Emerson in the past – e.g., see “An Overall American Construct, Part II” February 9, 2021.  Here, the attempt will be to situate his contribution in historical terms as it relates to the dialectic struggle between federalism and natural rights.  And one particular source, written by Emerson, helps in gaining how he saw this tension between Romantics and the advocates of enlightened reason.  That would be his book, Nature, a short overview of how he approached the criticism Romanticism leveled against the Enlightenment.

A bit of further context: Emerson in this book uses epistemological language instead of ontological language.  Epistemology zeroes in on the ways one knows things while ontology concerns itself with the nature of social reality.  The first, therefore, is more procedural and the second is more into what is.  By adopting Kantian epistemological view, this blogger believes that Emerson left a door open for compromise – see if the reader agrees.

Emerson’s book makes, according to Guelzo, three main arguments.  They are:

·      In distinction to Calvinism – which views nature as a background and source of temptations and in which individuals struggle for redemption – and the Enlightenment’s view – seeing nature as a source of puzzling realities that humans can study for knowledge’s sake or profit – there is transcendentalism.  This third view serves as “the counterpart and mate of the Soul.”  According to this other view, nature offers humans three positive gifts, those being beauty, an environment of virtue, and a form of spiritual, as opposed to corporeal, goodness.

·      Nature provides its benefits and gifts without a word-based language, but more of a spiritual form of communication.  One is well-served to understand this attribute by recalling a time when one is confronted with a beautiful landscape and being profoundly awed.  This blogger can make such a recollection and understands what Emerson is getting at with his “observation.”

·      And Emerson, in reviewing the nature of religion and ethics, determined that religion tends to degrade nature.  How?  First, by claiming goodness depends on grace, and religion separates nature from grace, diminishing the role of nature.  He expresses hostility at that message.  Instead, he feels and promotes an innocent, child-like love for nature.  Through nature, God does not communicate or argue in the form of propositions – His message is holistic and solicits a compatible form of worship.

This posting ends with this summary of Emerson’s three prone argument and points out that the next posting will comment on what these claims mean to the dialectical struggle, that being between communalistic federalism and individualistic natural rights.

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

[2] Daniel J. Elazar, “Federal Models of (Civil) Authority,” Journal of Church and State, 33, (Spring, 1991), 231-254 AND Andrew C. McLaughlin, The Foundations of American Constitutionalism (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1972).

[3] Santayana, “The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy,” The Annals of America, 281.

[4] Allen C. Guelzo, The American Mind, Part 2 of 3 – a transcript book – (Chantilly, VA:  The Teaching Company/The Great Courses, 2005), 24-25.