An advocate of parochial federalism continues his/her presentation[1] …
This blog has just presented a rendition of how parochial federalism
views liberty (over the two previous postings).
Now it turns to how that view sees equality and a related concern,
morality. As to liberty, a state in
which people live sans despotism, to maintain it, they also have a responsibility
to be moral and to sustain a moral demeanor in relation to their activities. Practically, liberty would be impossible to
keep if the people collectively sank to corruption and vice.
To illustrate the point,
one need only to look to the lessons of classical antiquity as many 18th
century thinkers, especially Montesquieu, had done. These thinkers connected a relationship
between a moral spirit and a society’s political constitution. So influenced, the founding generation in
America believed that the formula for successful republics was establishing and
keeping a moral spirit that prevails as a great nation rises to prominence due mostly
to industry and valor.
This spirit promoted a
discipline which led to their initial survival and success as they developed
toward greatness. The implied greatness,
as in the case of the earlier Romans, was defined in their ability to not only
become prosperous, but also to exhibit a strong ability to determine their
future. The republican spirit served
them as they became wealthy and eventually were able to enjoy the luxuries
accrued from their successes.
Gordon Wood points out:
“While the Romans [of antiquity], …
maintained their love of virtue, their simplicity of manners, their recognition
of true merit, they raised their state to the heights of glory. But they stretched their conquests too far
and their Asiatic wars brought them luxuries they had never before known. ‘From the moment virtue and public spirit
sunk apace: dissipation vanished
temperance and independence.’”[2]
The latter period of success promoted the temptations of corruption (believed
to be an inevitable development) and bloated conceit led to an ethos of sloth
and anarchy. At least this was the view
of the 18th century thinkers.[3]
The reader should recall from previous postings
that the federalist/republican tradition was and is heavily steeped in a
religious foundation – at least as it was manifested in the nation’s colonial
past. Was the secularization of thought
– initially introduced with the influence of the Enlightenment – in modern
times a danger to the moral base of parochial federalist thought?
One development of such secularization is
consumerism that, according to T. H. Breen, captured American demeanor starting
roughly in 1740. Breen points out there
was a healthy amount of comment among the “pundit” class of that time that such
tendencies threaten to undo what the Americans had been able to establish and
that later, such concern helped them to institute and mostly maintain a boycott
of British goods during the Revolutionary years.[4]
The congregationalist tradition of the American
churches, firmly established by the time of the writings of the Declaration
of Independence and the United States Constitution, insured that
those documents were constructed on a covenant (federal) theology – or a
federal principle. Among those pundits
was fair number of religious personages, such as ministers, but not exclusively
so.
By the
middle of the eighteenth century … the covenant idea had been plucked from its
religious roots and secularized by men like Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau. They transformed it into the concept of the social
compact, the freely-assumed bond between man and man that lifted men out of
an unbearable state of nature and into civilization. In the Lockean view widely admired by
Americans, it was this social compact that made popular government
possible. The availability of the
covenant idea in two forms meant that those Americans who did not acknowledge
the political character of the covenant between man and God inevitably
recognized the political character of the social compact between man and man
and built their constitutions upon that.[5]
For its maintenance, a social compact between man and man had the same
need for moral behavior among its participants as covenants between God and man
and in essence provided a reason for secular morality.
Why?
Because such unions are communal to meaningful levels and, as such, have
low tolerance for self-centered immorality.
Consequently, several social/economic concerns are highlighted by these
concerns. And one is helped by seeing
such unions as partnerships and all that that entails.
The parochial federalist construct would
encourage inquiry into several issues:
how rich and successful has the overall society become, how much of a
separation (financially and socially) exists between the upper classes and the
rest of society, how pervasive have the corrupting ways of the rich enfeebled
the lower strata? These are offered as
legitimate concerns.
Whigs (of Revolutionary vintage) believed that
corruption always began with the top socio-economic classes, as they led the people
to a consumption (as referred to above) as opposed to one in which the
interests of the commonwealth are dominant.
A main concern Americans had with the British at the time of the Declaration
of Independence was that that society, the British, had become too corrupt
to be able to rejuvenate itself to meet the principles of its constitution.[6]
Commonwealthmen (another name for Whigs) had a
low opinion of the civil habits of those in power. The powerful, made up of elites, are seen as
a scheming group that, through a variety of techniques available to them,
deprive the multitude of their fair share of resources. Beyond that, the many are predisposed to
being duped and exploited. The populous
tend to be rapt in their immediate concerns and inattentive to the shift of
power that the elites are constantly trying to draw away from them.[7]
Despite this predisposition, when the level of
abuse becomes overwhelming, as it was perceived in 1776, it is time for that
multitude to respond. A response not, in
the case of the American Revolution, to overturn the English constitution, but
to reestablish its core principles. This
is even acknowledged by a natural rights historian, Breen. He writes:
It has
become fashionable among some commentators to condemn modern consumer culture,
insisting that it sustains itself on the creation of false wants. Self-indulgence, one hears, erodes the bonds
of civil society. The critics may be
correct. Whatever the truth, they do
sound a lot like those eighteenth-century moralists who fretted that ordinary
people could not handle the temptations of the marketplace. This perspective underestimates the capacity
of men and women to comprehend their own political situation. It is true that goods can corrupt. But in certain circumstances they can be made
to speak to power. The choice is ours to
make.[8]
As a central element of the Whig view, a
citizen of a republic relies on the belief that merit should be the basis of
advancement; it should not be inheritance or other meaningless adornments
bestowed by higher authority. Whigs
highlighted, along with liberty, the core value of equality.
Equality did not mean the eradication of
subordination. The necessities of
maintaining an orderly society demanded that some oversee others. Those with accomplishments deserved their
status and the authority they earned.
But Whig equality simply meant that all, under the ideal, should have an
equal opportunity – not as a “bumper sticker” sentiment, but in reality – to
achieve a higher station in life.
And with that basis, one can further look at
the Whig sense of public virtue. That
will be the concern of the next posting.
It will start with further distinguishing how parochial federalism
defines equality to how they defined a moral demeanor through their view of
public virtue and its role in not only defining equality but also in
identifying the essential social qualities necessary to sustain liberty.
[1] This presentation begins with the posting, “A Parochial Subject Matter” (March 11, 2022).
[2]
Gordon S. Wood, Creation of the American Republic 1776-1787 (Chapel Hill, NC:
University of North Carolina Press, 1969/1968), 35.
[3] Wood, Creation
of the American Republic 1776-1787. For an extended description of one of Rome’s emperors
during these “luxury” years, see Frank McLynn, Marcus Aurelius: A Life (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2009). For a philosophic – well reviewed –
accounting of what polities experience in what its author describes as a
circular, dialectic development, see J. G. A. Pocock, The
Machiavellian Moment: Florentine
Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975).
[4] T. H. Breen, The Marketplace of
Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped
American Independence (New York, NY:
The Oxford University Press, 2004).
[5] Daniel J. Elazar, “How Federal Is the Constitution?
Thoroughly,” in a booklet of readings, Readings
for Classes Taught by Professor Elazar, prepared for a National Endowment
for the Humanities Institute (conducted in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, 1994),
1-30, 23-24. Usual references to Locke’s
contribution use the term, social contract, while Elazar introduces the term,
social compact. This is seen, by this
blogger, to be significant. A compact
can be seen as a secularized version of a covenant. It should not be confused with more recent
application of the term. That is, as
described in “The Social Compact Was a Creation of the Multilateral
Twins, The International Fund and the World Bank,” Kaieteur News (January
7, 2014), accessed March 25, 2022, https://www.kaieteurnewsonline.com/2014/01/07/a-social-contract-or-a-social-compact/
.
[6]
Wood, Creation
of the American Republic 1776-1787.
[7] Ibid.
[8]
Breen,
The Marketplace of Revolution, 330.
