JUDGING PAROCHIAL FEDERALISM, XI

 

An advocate of parochial federalism continues his/her presentation[1] …

So, as the last posting ended, one can generally judge parochial/traditional federalism as the more communal, less individualistic approach when compared to the natural rights view.  To contextualize this debate more broadly, its origin can be traced back to Europe several centuries ago, predating its manifestation in America.  J. G. A. Pocock[2] traces a form of it to the 1600s and 1700s in Britain with the rise of trade, money, and credit displacing the agriculturally based economy. 

That development saw the rise of corruption and it was tied to these newer economic processes and practices.  And corruption included (and might still today) the distorted views one adopts by participating in an economy that no longer deals with the real but with the artificial.  When one makes a living producing or selling products that have little to no intrinsic value but simply cater to whimsical trends and styles, one can ask how honest and true such endeavors are.

How well does such an activity reflect an honorable personage?  Pocock cites the reflective writers of those years who argued that with trade – as opposed to agriculture – they found this baseless pursuit as corrupting.  Here is a taste of Pocock’s reportage of those thinkers who pointed out this form of artificiality:

Man remaining sociable – except when driven lunatic by cupidity and imagination – there are real virtues, real passions of sympathy and honesty, to secure the edifice of government in an actual moral universe.  But the question is always pragmatic: is credit in harmony with confidence, are men’s opinions, hopes, and fears concerning each other operating to stabilize society and increase prosperity? … And if there is no such framework, the individual as zoon politikon cannot be forever formally reasserting his own civic being, or renewing its principles.  His business is to get on with his social life, practice its virtues, and make his contribution to the credit and confidence which men repose in one another …

          [T]he classical theory of corruption was necessitated by an awareness of the growing relations between government, war, and finance, and the mercantilist warfare caused a revival of interest in the external relationships of commonwealths with other commonwealths and with empires.  We have found that it was through the image of the rentier, the officer, and the speculator in public funds, not through that of the merchant or dealer upon a market, that capitalism imparted its first shock and became involved in its first major controversy in the history of English-language political theory.  We have found that a “bourgeois ideology,” a paradigm for capitalist man as zoon politikon, was immensely hampered in its development by the omnipresence of Aristotelian and civic humanist values which virtually defined rentier and entrepreneur as corrupt, and that if indeed capitalist thought ended by privatizing the individual, this may have been because it was unable to find an appropriate way of presenting him as citizen.  “Bourgeois ideology,” … seems to wage a struggle for existence and may never have fully won it.[3]

 

How civic minded can a bourgeois afford to be? 

That question is loaded with assumptions as to what the ultimate values, ambitions, aims, and goals are to which a businessperson aspires.  But then beyond that, what Europe was experiencing with the rise of trade was a formation of competitiveness among nations for resources and markets.  And this further led to the development of empires with their colonies (for raw materials) and markets to conduct their trade. 

Therefore, expansion – usually through exploration and wars – undermined the health of balanced republics where the interests of the one, the few, and the many were kept in check. And in this atmosphere one can ask:  Can that businessperson maintain the federalist commitment for the common good or is that commitment subverted by self-interest? 

Experience tells some that for practical purposes a good deal of “educating” needs to be in place to assure allegiance toward advancing civic humanism and social capital – summarily considered the common good.  Yet it convinces others that corruption is unavoidable.  Why?  Because at the base of all this is a shift toward the advancement of individual interests over that of the communal welfare.

That shift in those earlier days still remains today.  If anything, with the development of industrialization and post industrialization economies, this basic divorce between what those thinkers considered real and unreal has been irreversibly set.  Yet, this sort of concern would be asked in civics classrooms if the general discourse was guided by parochial federalism.  It still seems pertinent in the development of basic political understanding of what is real and what should be real.  Admittedly, this sort of lesson might be limited to the more advanced student.

In turn, parochial federalism as an approach would introduce such political relations not from a neutral position but one that seeks two objectives.  First, it would ask those questions that enquire into these concerns and, second, call on students to form their opinions about the related normative issues these concerns represent. 

Why?  Because federalism represents an understanding of the institution of government from a perspective that respects the collective and enabling character of social institutions.  In addition, the federalist format, both structurally and idealistically, pervades all sorts of American institutions (a product of the nation’s historical foundation) such as churches, corporations, and schools.[4]  And this brings one to the social aspect of all these concerns:  the role and importance of institutions on the lives of citizens, including students.

          Part of this enabling process – that is, enabling a student to see his/her role as a partner in the polity – is to begin to understand that institutions are not merely haphazard, agreed upon methods of behavior, but have developmental histories that have stood the test of time and, as such, have profound influences on all citizens.  Sometimes, behind the bravado of the nation’s individualistic myth, there is a pervading concern that people’s lives are being run by institutions that are less under their control and undermine their liberty.[5]

          Without taking a stand on the recent publication of a Supreme Court draft of a proposed decision regarding abortion rights, there is no mistake that that decision is highly influenced by religious doctrine concerning the human status of a fetus.  Religion, as one of any nation’s basic institutions, does have a legitimate role in influencing behavior, but should it have legal standing in determining public policy? 

One can cite various elements of US constitutional tradition that stand in opposition to such a role.  After all, the First Amendment prohibits the establishment of a religion.  Can establishment include the codification in law of religious beliefs?  This is the type of question that parochial federalism would find legitimate for instructional purposes.

          This is an example of how institutions affect one’s partnering function under a federalist arrangement.  Again, a parochial federalist view of American government would assist in giving the student a more enabling stance in that a proactive approach to societal institutions would be offered.  It would lead to a more interactive role for citizens – including students – making the institutions – through their more responsive practices – more sensitive to the changes in society and therefore more adaptive to change. 

This active role would be couched in the knowledge of the basic human factors that gave life to those institutions and that a parochial federalist guided civics curriculum would address – reflected in its perennial character.  And with that, this presentation is ready to address the next topic, Student Economic Interest.  The plan was to go into that topic in this posting but that would make it too long.  So, for that entry, the reader needs to revisit this blog next Tuesday.

[Reminder:  The reader is reminded that he/she can have access to the first 100 postings of this blog, under the title, Gravitas:  The Blog Book, Volume I.  To gain access, he/she can click the following URL:  https://docs.google.com/document/d/1zh3nrZVGAhQDu1hB_q5Uvp8J_7rdN57-FQ6ki2zALpE/edit or click onto the “gateway” posting that allows the reader access to a set of supplemental postings by this blogger by merely clicking the URL: http://gravitascivics.blogspot.com/ and then look up the posting for October 23, 2021, entitled “A Digression.”]

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[1] This presentation begins with the posting, “A Parochial Subject Matter” (March 11, 2022).  The reader is reminded that the claims made in this posting do not necessarily reflect the beliefs or knowledge of this blogger.  Instead, the posting is a representation of what an advocate of parochial federalism might present.  This is done to present a dialectic position of that construct.

[2] J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press, 1975).

[3] Ibid., 459-460.  Emphasis added.  The term “zoon politikon” refers to the human attribute of being a political animal.  The term is associated with Aristotle.

[4] Daniel J. Elazar, “How Federal Is the Constitution?  Thoroughly!” Elazar, D. J. (1994). How federal is the Constitution? Thoroughly. In a booklet of readings, Readings for Classes Taught by Professor Elazar (1994), prepared for a National Endowment for the Humanities Institute. Conducted in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, 1-30,

[5] Robert N. Bellah, Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven M. Tipton, The Good Society (New York, NY:  Alfred A. Knopf, 1991).

JUDGING PAROCHIAL FEDERALISM, X

 

An advocate of parochial federalism continues his/her presentation[1] …

Continuing this blog’s review of the “student” as “commonplace” of curricular development, this posting targets the social interests of students. 

Social Student Interest

The social demands of the adolescent years are well documented.  Again, this blogger’s upcoming book[2] will feature the challenges of adolescence and many of those challenges relate to social relationships.  Ian Robertson reviews these demands in his introductory textbook back in 1977.[3] 

He describes adolescents who are physically able to take on the activities of the adult world in industrial societies but must put off these activities until they finish their extended educational requirements.  This state of affairs leads to a confused period of life in which rules are often ambiguous. 

Robertson writes:

 

The American socialization process equips people poorly for the challenges of adolescence, for teenagers are constantly confronted with contradictory demands and pressures.  The media, for example, extol the virtues of sexual satisfaction and the value of material goods, but adolescents are usually forbidden full access to both, even though they have the physical maturity to achieve them.  Having more freedom than children but less than adults, adolescents are constantly tempted to question or test the authority of parents and teachers.  Segregated from other age groups in high school, they tend to form their own subculture, with norms, values, and attitudes that may differ significantly from those of the society that surrounds them.[4]

 

This quote is highlighted since it, early on, indicates the development of a youth culture that has in the ensuing years gained more and more academic interest.  That literature has brought a good deal of attention to how a distinct youth culture has proven to be an incubating atmosphere for anti-social traits such as excessive narcissism and detrimental self-absorption.[5] 

As this blog has reported, this subculture has been described as often being antisocial and significantly dysfunctional to the well-being of the general communities (with ramifications at the national level) as well as to the adolescents themselves.  For example, there is the research of Robert Putnam.[6]  He points out that most Americans are simply not being instructed, especially during adolescence, as to socioeconomic realities of the nation. 

He uses the mental image of two kids who live a few miles apart, one being brought up in an advantaged family, the other in a disadvantaged situation – one can’t even use the term “family” to describe this disadvantaged home setting.  Despite their proximity to each other, there is little or no chance they will ever have any contact.

This is desperately different from the social world where Putnam grew up in the 1950s.  In that earlier world, his high school had kids from differing social and economic classes.  The level of interaction among the differing segments of the student body was healthy and often.  This is not so true today and the level of interaction is becoming more and more infrequent.

  For one thing, poorer kids are stuck in dysfunctional schools while wealthier kids are more apt to attend private schools.  The “indivisibility” of the nation’s schools is becoming a memory.   The nation needs to address this development by, in part, having its economic metrics account for the social cost factors that result from segregation. 

One way it can begin to address this growing dysfunction is by changing what is taught in civics classes:  they can include lessons about how the original values and ideals of the American constitutional tradition – its federalist foundation – have been shunted and point out how what is prevalent – the natural rights perspective – has promoted antisocial attitudes and beliefs.

But beyond adolescent social views, there seems to exist a pervasive problem of individuals misunderstanding or led to hold misgivings about social institutions in general.  Robert Bellah, et al., report:

 

Individualistic Americans fear that institutions impinge on their freedom.  In the case of the handshake this impingement may give rise only to a very occasional qualm.  More powerful institutions seem more directly to threaten our freedom.  For just this reason, the classical liberal view held that institutions ought to be as a possible neutral mechanism for individuals to use to attain their separate ends – a view so persuasive that most Americans take it for granted, sharing with liberalism the fear that institutions that are not properly limited and neutral may be oppressive.  This belief leads us to think of institutions as efficient or inefficient mechanisms … that we learn to use for our own purposes, or as malevolent “bureaucracies” that may crunch us under their impersonal wheels.  It is not that either of these beliefs is wholly mistaken.  In modern society we do indeed need to learn how to manipulate institutions … Yet if this is our only conception of institutions, we have a very impoverished idea of our common life, an idea that cannot effectively help us with our problems but only worsens them.[7]

 

And this view is not lost on the young – it becomes part of the assumed world view that youngsters inherit.

          Institutions are patterns of behavior within societies which have a normative quality.  Usually, institutions are associated with organizations to the point that they are often confused with them.  These elements can combine to give youths the impression that it is organizations, such as schools, corporations, marriages, or families that are the oppressors, where the problem really lies in the norms of a particular institution. 

The faulty perception convinces many adults, as well as youths, that the solution to perceived oppressions is to just abandon one organization – e.g., drop out of school – for a more promising, liberated one.  Often, job-hopping or divorce can be seen in this light.  Of course, this oftentimes reflects or falls conducive to a natural rights view.

The more fundamentally functional perception, one that needs to be socialized to each generation, is to create and re-create a society’s institutional arrangements by working on them directly, as opposed to running away from them.[8]  And while parents are the chief agents situated to do so, schools, especially through their social studies programs, have an essential role.

The individualistic mode characterizes the nation’s cultural bent. 

 

This loss of community [due to excessive individualism] has serious implications.  More specifically, the erosion of social capital – a natural byproduct of communities – has serious implications.[9]

 

Cheyenne Polimedio goes on to point out that this erosion of social capital has brought the viability of America’s oldest organizations such as political parties, organized religions, and other community groups, into question.  That is, it undermines the functional role of institutions. 

Institutions not only constrain behavior, but they also enable one by assisting in the understanding of who one is and who others are as collectively, a people seek a decent society.  But by elevating the virtue of independence as the sole good, advocates of natural rights have become blind to the role institutions play in supporting the eventuality of autonomy in this nation’s society.

Bellah, et al. add, “autonomy, valuable as it is in itself, is only one virtue among others and that without such virtues as responsibility and care, which can be exercised only through institutions, autonomy itself becomes … an empty form without substance.”[10]  A parochial federalist construct, as a guiding view, serves as a more communal, less individualistic approach.  Therefore, it should serve to guide a civics curriculum.

          The next posting will begin by reviewing some of the implications of these social aspects have on the national social health and then move on to the student’s economic interests which were alluded to above.

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[1] This presentation begins with the posting, “A Parochial Subject Matter” (March 11, 2022).  The reader is reminded that the claims made in this posting do not necessarily reflect the beliefs or knowledge of this blogger.  Instead, the posting is a representation of what an advocate of parochial federalism might present.  This is done to present a dialectic position of that construct.

[2] This book is still in manuscript form.  When ready, this blog will announce its availability.

[3] Ian Robertson, Sociology (New York, NY:  Worth Publishing, Inc., 1977).

[4] Ibid., 134.

[5] For example, Jean M. Twenge and W. Keith Campbell, The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement (New York, NY:  Free Press, 2009).

[6] Robert D. Putnam, Our Kids:  The American Dream in Crisis (New York, NY:  Simon and Schuster, 2015).

[7] Robert N. Bellah, Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven M. Tipton, The Good Society (New York, NY:  Alfred A. Knopf, 1991), 10.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Cheyenne Polimedio, “Our Focus-Like Focus on Individualism Is Destroying Our Communities,” New America (October 4, 2018), accessed May 1, 2022, https://www.newamerica.org/weekly/our-laser-focus-individualism-destroying-our-communities/ AND for added thoughts, see Seymour Martin Lipset, American Exceptionalism:  A Double-Edged Sword (New York, NY:  W. W. Norton and Company, 1996).

[10] Bellah, et al., The Good Society, 12.