The last couple of postings
looked at and critiqued the way the natural rights’ preferred approach to the
study of governance and politics is done.
The postings explained how the construct constrained the way
decision-making in governing and politicking is analyzed by limiting its focus
to transactional factors. By doing so, resulting
studies are steered away from normative concerns.
In turn, this gives,
overall, a certain market orientation to such studies that takes on a cynicism of
republican governance. While the last
posting describes this cynicism, one can look at its causes a bit more closely. Given the construct’s emphasis on
individualism, a contradictory pair of sub views emerges.
One promotes a near zealotry
of individual rights[1]
and yet the other a near mechanistic view of decision making in which
individuals simply go through weighing the values of anticipated rewards and
costs. Earlier in this blog, this was
described as deterministic in that these episodes might be seen as robotic
responses to decision making challenges.
Recall that the perspective
“sanctifies” the right of individuals to pursue their own goals and values in
the political and social arenas and then adopts this fairly deterministic view
of how those choices are exercised. The
adoption of behaviorist strategies in organizations and in marketing deems
human choices highly susceptible to the use of rewards and occasional punishments
to solicit desired responses.
The contradiction reminds one of an entrepreneurial
defense of consumer rights of choice in the marketplace while the use of market
research techniques not only discern consumer preferences, but also discern
methods of manipulating consumer behavior.
The use of behavioristic and other psychological techniques can be readily
cited.
For example, Neil Postman writes, “By the turn
of the century [from nineteenth to the twentieth], advertisers no longer
assumed rationality on the part of their potential customers. Advertising became one part depth psychology,
one part aesthetic theory. Reason had to
move to other arenas.”[2] In similar fashion, advocates of the natural
rights perspective seem to shift easily from their staunch support for
individual rights to analyzing the exercise of those rights as if they were
mechanistic operations.
It does this without any explanation as to the
seeming inconsistency. As close as they
come is to mention that they are not crude behaviorists because they
acknowledge that what are making these decisions are “organisms” and that they
are affected by many factors such as cultural ones.[3] And yet another concern along these lines is
how the systems approach treats aspects of its analyses as separate components
which can be manipulated, albeit with care.
Human problems in decision making are often
seen as situations that either are missing certain components, that a component
needs upgrading, or a component needs to be shifted. Consequently, solutions are aimed not at
fundamental causes, but as symptoms which are addressed by these types of
component manipulations. Again, this
type of approach to decision making lends itself to marginal analysis.
The problem is that true solutions, because of
this incomplete approach, oftentimes elude practitioners. In addition, marginal analysis and
manipulation encourage a “cold” emotional perspective. Problems are seen as technical concerns, not
personal ones. Consequently, when
dealing with others, negotiations and compromises can include, more readily,
any aspect of the problem area without fully appreciating emotional qualities
of those concerns or elements.
This whole approach, therefore, runs the real
danger of compromising any aspect, even those judged to be highly moral ones. If those moral concerns include commitments
in which communal bonds are anchored, then mistrust and cynicism become highly
likely. Recent labor negotiations and
resulting consequential decisions – e.g., downsizing in previous decades come
to mind[4] –
are exemplary of these decisions. To add
to this, long term consequences seem to be either downgraded or ignored completely.
And this leads one to consider the quality of the
grouping or collective one is considering with a given concern. The natural rights view, with its emphasis on
individuals, tends to steer one’s attention only to individuals. Yet, and this is commonsensical, it is group
decisions that have the most effect on any area of concern that has impact on
people. The next posting will take up
this concern for groups (in whichever ways they are organized), but before
ending this posting, here is a quick mention of another concern with the
natural rights view.
In an expanded version of political systems,
one that encompasses the concerns over requisite functions offered by Gabriel
Almond and G. Bingham Powell, there is nothing inherently definitive about the
functions identified in the Almond and Powell’s model.[5] William Flanigan and Edwin Fogelman[6]
point out that there is nothing sacred with that list of functions – those that
political systems need to satisfy so as to maintain a healthy state of being or
to even survive – that Almond and Powell point out. There are other theorists, both the fields of
sociology and political science, who have different lists garnering respect and
interest in those disciplines.[7]
The Almond and Powell
model was chosen in this account because of how smoothly one can utilize it in
terms of David Easton’s political systems model.[8] This is not a fundamental criticism – one can
study governance and politics, especially in the US, with the Almond and Powell
model – but this is a point of contention that should be mentioned in regard to
the construct’s reliability or for its isomorphic quality.
[1] For a recent published concern over a singular
priority of individual rights regarding more communal concerns of obligations
and duties, see Richard Haass, The Bill of Obligations: The Ten Habits of Good Citizens (New
York, NY: Penguin Press, 2023).
[2] Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in
the Age of Show Business (New
York, NY: Penguin Books, 1986), 60.
[3] David Easton, “The Current Meanings of ‘Behavioralism,’”
in Contemporary Political Analysis, edited by James Clyde Charlesworth (New York,
NY: The Free Press, 1967), 11-31.
[4] A SHRM online posting reports the following: “Downsizing
can take a toll on workforce morale; employees may feel betrayed. Long-term
consequences of altering the work environment include increased voluntary
turnover and decreased innovation.” “Managing
Employee in a Downing Environment,” Society for Human Resource Management
(n.d.), accessed February 15, 2023, https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/tools-and-samples/toolkits/pages/managinginadownsizedenvironment.aspx#:~:text=Downsizing%20can%20take%20a%20toll,voluntary%20turnover%20and%20decreased%20innovation.
[5] Gabriel Almond and G. Bingham Powell, Jr., Comparative Politics: A Developmental
Approach (Boston: Little, Brown. 1966).
[6] William Flanigan and Edwin Fogelman, “Functional
Analysis,” in Contemporary Political Analysis, edited by James Clyde
Charlesworth (New York, NY: The Free
Press, 1967), 72-85.
[7] The list of functions Almond and Powell include
are rulemaking, rule-application, rule-adjudication (these first three align
themselves perfectly with the three branches of government), interest
articulation (the main work of organized interest groups), and interest
aggregation (the main work of political parties). Together, these last two functions can be
considered the input functions of the political system. During the time
that Almond and Powell’s work took hold, the social sciences, led by sociology,
were highlighting functions.
Historically, that emphasis was the product of a tradition begun in the
late 1800s. See the works of Emile
Durkheim, Herbert Spencer, Robert Merton and especially, Talcott Parsons. While not all theorists agree on the same
list of functions, overall, such theorizing expressed the fundamental concern
regarding the stability of social arrangements, including governments.
[8] David Easton, The Political System (New York, NY:
Alfred A. Knopf, 1953) AND David Easton, A System Analysis of Political Life (New York, NY: John Wiley and Sons, Inc., 1965).
