THE NECESSITY OF EMPATHY

 

[Note:  From time to time, this blog issues a set of postings that summarize what the blog has been emphasizing in its previous postings.  Of late, the blog has been looking at various obstacles civics educators face in teaching their subject.  It’s time to post a series of such summary accounts.  The advantage of such summaries is to introduce new readers to the blog and to provide a different context by which to review the blog’s various claims and arguments.  This and upcoming summary postings will be preceded by this message.]

 While many people will readily believe that this nation, as any nation, probably has a number of incubating problems, they might question why they should really care.  Afterall, if they are incubating, they probably don’t have much of an effect on the quality of their lives.  But such problems can be, according to the journalist Ezra Klein, social/political explosives just waiting to burst on the scene and their ability to effect people can be extensive. 

Problems of racial relations, opioid use, loss of jobs to foreign producers, laws concerning firearms, tax policies and their effects on equality, abortion rights, etc. are or have been such problems.  Realization of such developments should encourage prudent citizens to know them and address them. 

In that vein, one would be helped to know why incubation of problems occurs.  It turns out and makes sense that a lack of empathy plays an important role.  This posting looks at why this is the case.  According to Klein and backed up by such experts as the American neuro-endocrinologist, Robert Sapolsky, it is difficult to engender empathy for people who do not belong to one’s defining, identity groupings.

          Relevant to this general condition, people view their identity along various domains.  They include the often-cited categories – e.g., race, nationality, ethnicity – but also less thought of classifications – class, careers, social relationships, religion, etc.  And with those categories in mind, when one considers the ever-present realities of life, most prominently the conditions of scarcity, one can see that economic/political conflicts are part of life. 

And often, people cannot resist defining such conflicts in terms of identity.  Both in terms of one’s emotions and what one sees as truth, identity classifications simplify those aspects of life both cognitively and emotionally.  Adding to the relevant mix of factors – factors that cause scarcity and factors that affect how people see scarcity and other social conditions – are ways people are disposed to define their identity.

          In turn, those factors not only determine membership, but also exclusion.  They assist one to identify those who don’t belong to one’s grouping.  The excluded lack some physical, social, economic, aesthetic, or some such quality or condition.  Those other people are seen not as individuals but as reflecting believed – often inaccurately – attributes that somehow “explain” any shortcomings they might be experiencing.  

These shortcomings might include full allocation of civil rights, economic standing, social recognition, or some combination of these types of rights or benefits.  For example, poverty, under such thinking, results from laziness; unjust treatment by authority figures results from criminal tendencies; unfair labor treatment results from illegal status such as is the case for many immigrants.  The point is these problems under the rubric of identity thinking targets groups, not individuals. 

Therefore, two levels of faulty thinking take place:  believing incorrect information and attributing inaccurately supposed group attributes (that might or might not exist) to individuals.  Or stated in more common language, people engage in prejudicial judgements.

Is this natural for people to do?  Yes and no.  It is natural for people to believe well of or empathize with people who belong to one’s perceived identity group; it is natural to not empathize and to hold in suspicion those who do not belong to one’s group.  Yet, to not empathize with other people proves to be inefficient and contrary to the common good. 

It stands in the way – through a variety of dysfunctional social arrangements and processes – of benefiting from the potential these perceived “other” people could contribute.  And given the realities of reciprocity, one can see how unjust treatment emanating from a lack empathy can lead to all sorts of social problems.

So, how can one encourage empathy?  What seems logical is for educators to plan and to implement appropriate civics instruction that at least approaches an important accomplishment.  That is, it identifies and respects what is natural; that is, the instruction recognizes the existence of prejudicial tendencies and does not underestimate the power of their influence.  People are prone to, in part, define their social world in terms of Us vs. Them. 

This suggests that, one, lessons need to point out this tendency and instruct students as to its inaccuracy.  Two, point out that a belief in these inaccuracies leads to inefficiencies not least of which is a less than an optimal economy that can miss providing many potential opportunities.  And three, provide instruction that exposes students firsthand to as many relevant realities as are possible and safe.

This third goal reflects another factor.  It turns out that empathy occurs more readily by experiences that expose a person to the actual, relevant events or conditions.  In the ideal, teaching a student about how migrant workers are treated would be greatly enhanced by students actually spending some time with these workers.  Short of that, videos of their treatment would be helpful.  Just reading about it would be less helpful.  The fuller the exposure is, the more likely an empathetic response will occur, and the more powerful the instructive impact will be.

So, to remind the reader of the initial question of this posting – why care about incubating problems? – the answer has to do with the practical concerns of what results from mistreated and mis-defined members of the polity.  Those problems are affecting significant numbers within the nation. 

That is, a society that harbors an inability to empathize with all identity groups making up the populous – or more accurately, with the individuals who makeup those groups – leads to dysfunctional conditions.  Those conditions are legal, political, social, and economic in nature.  It happens to be a losing proposition on many fronts.

THE ANGLO-SAXON INFLUENCE

 

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This blog currently is looking at the effect identity, that factor that defines a person (for example, as an Irish American), has had on polarizing the American public.  While this has become particularly virulent, identity always exerts itself in politics.  It is ubiquitous.  And it is not only in politics but in other realms of life.  Take sports.  There, teams count on identities based on localities or educational linkages to sell tickets or paraphernalia to a fan base which results in gobs of money for those teams.

          Usually, such expression does not cause any or much antagonism – yes, there are the occasional fights and strains, but they are usually considered a source of good-natured ribbing or put downs.  One usually speaks of “bragging rights” if one’s team wins.  But of late, the identity factor is being expressed in the political arena seriously and persistently.  And when ethnicity, race, and/or nationality serve as its source, identity, as the historian Schlesinger warns, threatens to debase the nation’s unity.[1]

          Of course, this usually is related to immigration, but it also has to do with race relations, an ongoing source of animosity and violence in the nation’s history.  And it does represent, among unjustly treated people (due to their identity), legitimate protests – e.g., the Black Lives Matter movement. 

But a troubling question is:  to what extent should immigrant, racial, or indigenous groups divorce themselves from the nation’s overarching cultural base?  That is an argument that multi-culturalists pose and its aimed at the adoption of the Anglo-Saxon cultural base – the base upon which the nation’s culture has developed.

That base, it should be remembered, has provided the basic constitutional structures, processes, and legalities upon which the nation rests.  Of course, this reliance has not of necessity staved off influences from other cultures.  And the nation has during the years of its existence entertained and adopted elements of those other traditions. 

Most of them are aesthetics in nature.  Influences in food, music, art, and so on have been a continuous part of the American story.  But in addition, there are other areas – beyond aesthetics – in which varying cultural influences have made their marks.  For example, the whole notion of professional policing originates with the Romans, not with the Anglo-Saxons.

          But today’s expression of heightened allegiance to some political/national/ethnic based identity – an allegiance approaching or expressing a tribalism – does not originate from a communal sense.  It instead stems from an extreme individualism and, as such, reflects a nuanced concern.  David Brooks makes this connection.[2]  He explains how individualism allows for uninhibited natural motivations to go unchecked and part of that package of dispositions is to favor one’s tribe and to degrade other “tribes” – other nationalities, ethnicities, and/or races. 

The classic Us vs. Them mentality is spurred by such thinking.  And consequently, it becomes the fuel that feeds the polarization the nation faces.  One should point out, counterintuitively, and ironically, it serves to undermine the basic individualism that brings it to the fore. 

That is, the individual is subsumed under resulting movements by which this identity is expressed.  Again, the historian Schlesinger warns that the individual is absorbed into a united expression of national, racial, and/or ethnic messaging and his/her personage is subsumed with that process.  The analogy, a silly one, that illustrates the point, might be how people lose their identity when they apply makeup that exhibits team colors to the point one cannot identify who they are.

          But one should not misidentify this allegiance.  It is not an example of commitment.  It instead reflects a type of transaction.  The exchange is this mindless devotion to the source of the identity for an enhanced ego.  “I belong to this group, and it makes me special” is the basic message one projects.  Shouting “USA, USA” when so motivated is basically one that proclaims the shouter’s importance; he/she is an American and, therefore, superior.

And when this is expressed in terms of a nation, one can discover the main difference between patriotism and nationalism.  Patriotism promotes a sense of commitment that one is willing to sacrifice for the common good within the context of one’s nation.  Nationalism, instead, calls for sacrifice so as to be able to promote an expression of oneself. 

The main difference lies in this ultimate targeting, but one can describe it practically:  with patriotism one can protest what one’s nation does if what it does hurts the common good, where nationalism does not allow such a divergence from national policy or for some leader.

As for the Anglo-Saxon influence, why should one be an adherent to its provisions or basic ideals?  First, it should not be seen as a static entity.  It has a long history of evolving even before arriving on these shores.  It either adopted or developed those ideas and ideals that became this nation’s basic constitutional framework and not all of that originated in Britain.  And, in part, that framework calls for a commitment to a union of volunteers that comprises the American republic and its basic values and norms.

Within its tenets, it establishes a partnered arrangement among those volunteers to work toward the common good – a more perfect union.  And the path toward establishing this partnering was not arrived at smoothly.  Religious tribalism predated the other forms mentioned above.  Intolerance among the different Christian sects was common, not to mention the antagonism toward Jews.[3]  

But through them, usually for practical reasons, the evolving cultural base found itself accepting more variance within the population.  And with that, a level of secularization gained ground.

By doing so, that commitment to a partnered populous eventually became institutionalized.  Its adoption to a meaningful degree did not take hold until well into the nation’s history.  This commitment assumes and holds that any polarization in which the populous is divided into two uncompromising alliances – which religious divisions resembled – serves as an antagonistic expression to those federated ideals. 

It is instead a form of tribalism while the Anglo-Saxon based tradition – the one this nation inherited in a more crude form from the British in the eighteenth century and grew through complex developments – calls for a committed congregational arrangement.[4]  The two, the partnered view vs. the nationalist view,  are basically different.

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[1] Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Disuniting of America:  Reflections on a Multicultural Society (New York, NY:  W. W. Norton and Company, 1992).

[2] David Brooks, The Second Mountain:  The Quest for a Moral Life (New York, NY:  Random House, 2019).

[3] Kenneth C. Davis, “America’s True History of Religious Tolerance,” Smithsonian Magazine, October 2010, accessed November 1, 2020, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/americas-true-history-of-religious-tolerance-61312684/#:~:text=In%20the%20storybook%20version%20most,followed%2C%20for%20the%20same%20reason.

[4] More specifically, this congregational tradition stems from the Puritanical influence that in effect were being encouraged to leave Great Britain in the 1600s.  But one can argue, the established view of formal religion reflected the Roman Catholic Church’s vertical structure while the Puritanical congregation more closely reflected a traditional Anglo-Saxon tradition.  It is their congregational bias that seems to have encouraged the federal structure of the US, with its supporting processes, that this nation implemented.

IT’S A PRACTICALITY THING

 

[Note:  From time to time, this blog issues a set of postings that summarize what the blog has been emphasizing in its previous postings.  Of late, the blog has been looking at various obstacles civics educators face in teaching their subject.  It’s time to post a series of such summary accounts.  The advantage of such summaries is to introduce new readers to the blog and to provide a different context by which to review the blog’s various claims and arguments.  This and upcoming summary postings will be preceded by this message.  And, in addition, by this blogger’s count, this posting is the 1000^th posting of this blog.  Thank you.]

 

In the last posting, this blog shared research pointing out that organizations, including governments and their agencies, are subject to harboring “incubating” problems that can grow and burst upon either their personnel or the people they serve in very impactful ways.  Ezra Klein[1] makes the connection that such problems and their hidden qualities have contributed to formulating the nation’s current polarized landscape.

          The process by which this takes place can be best understood by reviewing case studies of such events but basically what happens is that those who are affected by such problems, in order to gain political advantage, find themselves teaming up with others.  These others are similarly looking for allies in pursuing their claims.  Since governments or political systems are not aware of the aforementioned problems and/or their potential to become virulent, the problems grow. 

This growth with the aligning that takes place, is a cycle that gathers steam and as Klein points out, “This sets off a feedback cycle to appeal to a yet more polarized public, institutions must polarize further; when faced with yet more polarized institutions, the public polarizes further, and so on.”[2] 

These cycles develop their own individual character and specifics, but one can find recurring factors that give each case its vibrance.  For example, the actors seek to satisfy the basic motivation to garner the political assets – in these cases, allies – so as to compete successfully over the issue(s) that they are addressing.  This has always been a basic strategy of weaker competitors,[3] but of late, traditionally powerful actors find the necessity to do likewise.

  By seeking allies, these actors have formed two grand alliances – a right of center alliance and a left of center alliance.  In doing so, each has subdued or found compromise within their ranks over their disagreements, have emphasized their commonality, and highlighted their distinction from the other alliance. 

In this, and this blog will address in later postings, the left of center is a more diverse group than the right of center group but each side, due to the collective size of its opponent, cannot afford to go it alone.  The result is a well-entrenched division not seen, possibly, since the days leading up to the Civil War.

This national arena falls woefully short from an ideal federated arena.  In that ideal state, one does have contentions between and among competing entities, but they are over discreet issues and their accompanying rewards and costs.  These distinct episodes are treated separately or in singular fashion and, therefore, allow those who compete one day can and will be allies the next. 

That is, these participants agree one day and disagree another day within the same congregation of fellow participants.  But when the issues of contention are connected as they are today, competitors and allies become the same set of characters over all the issues they confront.  This adds to any motivation an entity might have to vilify those who are not seen to be in his/her camp. 

This level of demarcation undermines any semblance of congregating in legislative bodies such as in Congress.  That legislative body has become two houses of well-defined belligerents divided into ongoing teams of opponents, the liberal/progressive team and the conservative/nationalist team.  This division simply reflects the electorate of today.

All of this did not happen overnight.  Each issue or area of concern has evolved during its respective incubating periods.  This blog outlined one such concern, that of immigration.  The right of center alliance on this issue was easier to form then the left of center alliance.  That is usually the case, but in terms of this issue, the left had to find accommodation between centered pluralist advocates and multi-culturalist advocates – a pair of well-defined rationales or perspectives that disagree on basic policy choices when it comes to immigration. 

Today, those differences lie just below the surface.  It, along with other divisions, will most likely reemerge when the overall polarization is settled to a workable level.  However, this is but one area of concern.  There are others, many others.  There is gun control, gay marriage, science, religion, business regulations, minimum wage, race relations, policing policies, infrastructure, abortion rights, etc.   Some of these seem to bind naturally to each other, some do not. 

And the binding among advocates can be strained at times, but practicalities push the advocates to look over, ignore, or otherwise find some way to get along with allies and to vilify opponents.  That, in a nutshell, is the current political, polarized landscape and the division seems to be growing and be further entrenched. 

One set of events that encapsulates this national scene was the 2020 election.  A great trivial question at some future date will be, which candidate for president received the second highest number of votes for the presidency in the history of the republic.  The answer will be the loser of the 2020 election.  One can divide the electorate as the pro-Trump faction and the anti-Trump faction. 

During the years of Trump’s tenure, an observation made was about how he would stoke up his base by some action or Tweet.  What wasn’t mentioned was that by the same behavior he would also stoke up the anti-Trump faction.  It happened that the anti-Trump faction proved to be larger on election day and hence it resulted in the Joe Biden victory.

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[1] Ezra Klein, Why We’re Polarized (New York, NY:  Avid Reader Press, 2020).

[2] Ibid., xix.

[3] E. E. Schattschneider, The Semi-Sovereign People:  A Realist’s View of Democracy in America (New York, NY:  Hole, Rinehart and Winston, 1960).

WALKING A BEAT?

 

[Note:  From time to time, this blog issues a set of postings that summarize what the blog has been emphasizing in its previous postings.  Of late, the blog has been looking at various obstacles civics educators face in teaching their subject.  It’s time to post a series of such summary accounts.  The advantage of such summaries is to introduce new readers to the blog and to provide a different context by which to review the blog’s various claims and arguments.  This and upcoming summary postings will be preceded by this message.]

This blog has made a connection between the natural rights view and scientific research with its methodology.  It’s not that one engages in scientific research naturally.  It took humans a long time to develop science.  Humans are naturally too emotional to readily engage in objectified studies about what they find important.  Even the notion of advancing knowledge for its own sake would seem foreign to people until a few hundred years ago.  At its beginning, science even got people in trouble in that it questioned their more natural tendency to think religiously.

          Probably the most celebrated case of this latter development was the trouble that Galileo di Vincenzo Bonaiuti de’ Galilei had.  He actually claimed that the earth was not the center of the solar system; it, he claimed, revolves around the sun, not vice versa.  And how did he arrive at his “speculation?”  He used scientific methods including utilizing his telescope.  But that view flew in the face of religious dogma prevalent in the Western world.

Up to his time, knowledge or what was taken for knowledge, was primarily arrived at through logic (e.g., the work of Greek philosophers) or inspiration (e.g., the work of those who wrote the books of the Bible).  With the pioneers of science, observation became a third viable way.  Its advent was not met with open arms by those in power.  But because of its payoffs, science came to be seen not only as legitimate but essential.

          But can science be deficient?  A growing number of voices are beginning to question its power especially when it comes to the study of human behavior.  It seems that what is judged to be so efficient in the study of the natural world is insufficient in studying human endeavors.  Investigating many questions relating to humans in what they do and how they think and feel, science proves to be short-sighted especially when it comes to complex social arrangements. 

In political science, reductionism, narrowing a study to a limited set of factors or variables, seems to miss the richness of how and why humans behave the way they do in political and other related situations.  The shortfall occurs when those ways of thinking are applied to conditions that organizations exhibit.

          This blogger has posted online an “appendix chapter”[1] that reviews these shortcomings, but here he questions how scientific approaches affect other concerns.  That is, this problem does not only affect the advancement of political knowledge.  It also affects those professional fields that depend on political and the other social sciences as their personnel formulate policies and the implementations of those policies. 

An example of this, one that had to do with national defense, was the inability of Israeli intelligence to see the impending attacks that initiated the Yom Kippur War in 1973.  Organizations tend these days to rely on scientific, objectified protocols to help them determine policy, while their environs do not lend themselves to the reductionist methods sciences employ. 

They also fund scientific research to conduct organizational studies.  This bias, when combined with other institutional practices (e.g., group thinking or rational analyses of cost/benefits), leads to the inability to recognize growing, “incubated” problems.  They exist within their organizations according to research conducted by Sidney Dekker and Shawn Pruchnicki.[2]

These problems fester, grow, and eventually burst upon the scene like the attacks on Israel back in ’73.  This is not a matter of incompetent practices; those practices are responsible for organizations growing and being successful.  By so growing, these organizations become complex entities, and establish the conditions that potentially make the utilization of purely scientific research insufficient.

As this blog has indicated repeatedly, science is powerful.  Its ability to discover reality is without equal.  But in various ways it leads to false security as this Israeli example illustrates.  Through its reductionism it lacks richness.  The study of humans, especially, calls for holistic studies in which the richness of various environments or environmental elements can be considered and analyzed in their wholeness.  This often includes the emotional richness studied subjects bring to situations but cannot be reduced to measurable sets of finite variables.

This writer, from his own experience, can add another telling example.  He can remember, when he was quite young in New York City, the neighborhood policeman walking his beat.  This policeman, who was generally friendly, would capture his admiration as the man in blue who could expertly swing his baton or truncheon.  Such cops are depicted in old films, for example the film, Singin in the Rain. 

Then came the scientific-inspired systems theory to study large organizations – for example, the New York City Police Department – and that “walking” cop disappeared.  And with his disappearance, police departments, such as New York’s, lost a source of invaluable, holistic information.  This became serious in large cities.  While there is a good deal of rhetoric bemoaning this loss, especially with cases such as the incident with George Floyd, cost/benefit analyses prohibit that source's return.[3]

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[1] URL site for this appendix is https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vSjZxpifP42VVnhFduKujgUDPJMddmcsh1uRY9DvpNicdYUONOHx56r1jRg4lgxK3ckaiQMJc4Gno0J/pub .

[2] Sidney Dekker and Shawn Pruchnicki, Theoretical Issues in Ergonomics Science, 2013, accessed July 8, 2020, https://safetydifferently.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/SDDriftPaper.pdf , 1-11.

[3] Apparently, cops do walk where people congregate but not in neighborhoods.  They are labor intensive and judged to being either inefficient or too costly.

FEDERATION’S REQUISITES

 

[Note:  From time to time, this blog issues a set of postings that summarize what the blog has been emphasizing in its previous postings.  Of late, the blog has been looking at various obstacles civics educators face in teaching their subject.  It’s time to post a series of such summary accounts.  The advantage of such summaries is to introduce new readers to the blog and to provide a different context by which to review the blog’s various claims and arguments.  This and upcoming summary postings will be preceded by this message.]

To this point, this blog has, in its account of the different obstacles facing civics teachers, described in broad strokes a number of deficient conditions.  They are the dysfunctional aspects of the nation’s political culture, the challenge of immaturity among students, and the less than optimal state of civics education.  With this posting, the blog shifts to the landscape of the political culture itself. 

Or in other words, the blog will now look at the social environmental factors that define the nation’s politics of the day.  Rightly so, the nation has cast its main attention – beyond the pandemic – on the divisive nature currently holding sway.  That divisiveness affects just about every aspect of social life – reportedly, it is even affecting family relationships – and definitely poses an obstacle to civics teachers doing their jobs. 

The aim here is to analyze this challenge and provide various insights as to its nature and suggests what teachers and other educators should do in relation to the challenge.  To be clear, what is being addressed is the polarized politics hanging over government in its attempts to issue policies.  And those affected policies seem to include just about all the possible areas in which government has a role. 

That extends to whether masks should be mandated, to what should be taught in schools, to defining who this nation’s antagonistic foes abroad are.  All of these up to the present were not controversial and summoned broad agreement across parties and other social/political divisions.

          And, as with the rest of this blog, commentary or evaluation will be offered against the stated criteria that federation theory holds, what that theory sees as beneficial, functional, and moral.  To reiterate, that would be curricular content that promotes communal, collaborative, and caring dispositions within the citizenry.  As such, the specific challenge for this review is to point out and explain how the dominance of the natural rights construct has found such aims to be misplaced and worthy of being ignored.

          And what is it about the natural rights view that makes it so problematic in terms of federal beliefs?  David Brooks, in his most recent book, provides vivid imagery of what this problematic thinking generates.  In describing the nation’s tribalism, one of the dysfunctional conditions he identifies, he writes,

Psychologists say the hardest thing to cure is the patient’s attempt to self-cure.  People who are left naked [in a self-centered society] and alone by radical individualism do what their genes and the ancient history of their species tell them to do.  They revert to tribe.  Individualism, taken too far, leads to tribalism.[1]

The main point this blog has made in terms of the natural rights view is that it promotes an extreme individualism.   

For advocates of federation theory or views one can associate with it, this is not just a matter of aesthetics or taste.  The dismissal of such concerns for community, collaboration, and care for others – or a lack of it – incorrectly instructs what the US Constitution sets forth.  It, the Constitution, established a republic based on the very communal commitment toward a polity made up of voluntary partnering – through the mechanism of a sacred compact – that unified both the people of the United States and the states of the United States.

The Latin word for this sort of leaguing is foedus – the Latin word from which federalism is derived and meaning covenant (the religious version of a compact).[2]  Now, Brooks writes of this sort of leaguing as the product of a love commitment.  That can be toward another person, as in marriage, an ideal, a place, a country.  Can a nation be based on the assumption its citizens hold to such a love?  In this, this writer questions the level of emotion Brooks ascribes to such a commitment, but the point is made.  Citizenship defined by a compact-al agreement calls for a lot.

          Should such an alignment rely on people’s natural tendencies?  Unlike with natural rights, as just indicated, which does rely heavily on natural proclivities, federation theory relies on them in part, but not totally.  Yes, humans naturally want community, but are easily convinced to seek other goals and/or to define community in a highly parochial manner.[3] 

Hence, to maintain what the founding fathers established, subsequent generations have needed to proactively promote that compact of unity.  And to do so, they have needed to socialize the populous to instill those values, attitudes, beliefs, and civic modes of behavior that promote this sense of partnership – it just doesn’t happen naturally. 

And it has become somewhat obvious, that the more recent generations have not sufficiently socialized the incoming generations so that they are disposed to meet this obligation or commitment – not to the degree the Constitution proscribes.  Instead, by adopting the natural rights view, they find policies aimed at furthering this sort of commitment as encroachments on individual prerogatives.

To be further clear, what is being referred to here, by using derivatives of the word federalism, is not the structural arrangement of the states and central government of the US.  Yes, federalism calls for a non-central arrangement of government.  That, by its nature, does include, some central entity and more local entities while withholding complete sovereignty from anyone level of governance.  But what is of more importance, is the necessary rationales for such an arrangement.   

As stated earlier in this blog, “… those processes [refer] to modes of political behavior that furthers a federated citizenry which include[s] healthy doses of social capital and civic humanism.”[4]  And such qualities presuppose a viable communal society in which its members are disposed to collaborate and cooperate in their pursuits of common endeavors broadly defined.  This is what Elazar calls a federal union’s processes.

And however one defines the terms, one can readily see that current levels of polarized politics – or tribalism, as some refer to what is going on – stands smack in the way of a people holding the necessary binding values and attitudes to pull off this active level of engagement.  To what extent is that?  Just visualize one holding a partnership in any aggregate effort such as in a marriage or a business.  It would not be based on some transaction or set of transactions, but on commitments.  How much indifference or nonchalance would such an endeavor sustain?  Not much. 

And that can go for a national unions as well.  Look around; is this nation on a dangerous path to disunity?  It almost happened before – admittedly for other reasons – and was saved by a bloody civil war.  And this writer believes that part of this current story – one mostly ignored – is how the nation’s civics education program is failing to instill – or more inoffensively stated, to encourage – the necessary disposed emotions and beliefs. 

He cannot see how true solutions to this polarization – in the long term – can be achieved without addressing the shortcomings of the nation’s civics education program.  One should remember that one cannot count on natural tendencies or rational calculations; it has to depend on its citizens learning how to be committed to others and on its people holding the necessary values, attitudes, skills, and knowledge to pull it off.  And according to Brooks, such unions depend on love.

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[1] David Brooks, The Second Mountain:  The Quest for a Moral Life (New York, NY:  Random House), 34.

[2] Daniel J. Elazar, “Federal Models of (Civil) Authority,” Journal of Church and State, 33, 2 (March 1, 1991), 231-254.

[3] Cognitive psychologist, Steven Pinker writes of this and entails the practical realities resource scarcities have on this evolutionary trait.  See Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works (New York, NY:  W. W. Norton and Company, 1997).

[4] A political landscape that first promotes social capital, a la Robert D. Putnam, does so by encouraging an active, public-spirited citizenry, egalitarian political relations, and a social environment of trust and cooperation.  It promotes civic humanism, as described by Isaac Kramnick, by encouraging among the citizenry that each citizen be a political actor who realizes his/her fulfilment is attained through participation in public life and a concern with public good above selfish ends.

A DEFICIENT CURRICULUM

 

[Note:  From time to time, this blog issues a set of postings that summarize what the blog has been emphasizing in its previous postings.  Of late, the blog has been looking at various obstacles civics educators face in teaching their subject.  It’s time to post a series of such summary accounts.  The advantage of such summaries is to introduce new readers to the blog and to provide a different context by which to review the blog’s various claims and arguments.  This and upcoming summary postings will be preceded by this message.]

By way of reviewing many of the postings of the past year, this blog of late has recounted what they have to say over the dysfunctional state of civics education.  Dysfunctionality here is defined as how distant, conceptually, the civics curriculum of the nation has veered away from federalist aims and goals.  The focus in this blog has been on the textbooks that most American government teachers employ at the high school level.  The shortcomings that those books exhibit can also be found in the middle school civics textbooks as well.

          In addition to the textbooks, the reader can check out other evidential documents in a report this writer offers online.[1]  That evidence portrays what civics educators, particularly those holding powerful positions at the district, state, or national levels, want to accomplish in civics classrooms.  This posting reports what this writer judges those aims and goals are and their consequences.

          Their overall bias is to continue a curricular thrust that began in the mid twentieth century mark.  That is to promote a language and tone in instruction that relies on a “scientific,” objectified approach.  Despite various promises such an approach claims – an unbiased view and methodology by which to approach the subject matter – the overall content derived from such language does have detrimental consequences. 

A term that captures these consequences is anti-federalist messaging.  Or stated more descriptively, this messaging communicates lessons that work to degrade the partnership qualities that the US Constitution establishes.  Instead of promoting a more communal, inter relying nature of citizenship, what is communicated is a consumerist role for each citizen – one in which he/she participates, to various degrees, in a competitive process for favorable public policy. 

As such, each citizen’s attention focuses on advancing personal interests, much as one does in the various economic markets in which one participates.  And as such, the approach exhibits a natural rights view of governance and politics in which each member of the populous defines his/her personal values, goals, and, therefore, interests. 

To do so, the curriculum pursues a set of goals.  To begin, it limits its descriptions and explanations to the structural, procedural, and functional accounts of the various elements of the political system.  Some of those elements exist outside government (interest groups, political parties, etc.) and some within government (the various branches of government, various departments, agencies of the bureaucracy, etc.).  These elements are presented as the necessary, objectified elements which allow the grand system of competition to exist. 

They also provide an overall view of government as having this refereeing role as the various competitors go about their efforts to gain favorable results.  That is, the curriculum presents government as agent, but does not really give students a realistic explanation as to how power among the competitors outside or within government works to determine winners and losers.

          This curriculum does reasonably cover the “waterfront” of the various elements that do exist and play the various roles entailed in this grand competitive arena.  And one can attribute to the curriculum a sincere effort to communicate that information that a knowledgeable citizen needs to at least get started in his/her seeking favorable public policy. 

As continually pointed out, the information is primarily structural in nature.  It lacks, though, the human qualities one associates with influence and, therefore, what it takes to win.  While it almost totally ignores feedback or reaction to issued policies (no small omission), this writer has little to complain about with what is offered.  He views that the curriculum and its offerings, textbooks and other materials, as great information sources that could be employed in a more comprehensive approach. 

Yes, a curriculum and its materials can be more federalist in nature, but a realistic expectation of changing what is to what should be is overwhelming and the needs for a more useful civics program cannot wait.  The answer, therefore, needs to be in changing the mindset of teachers in how they see the content, as opposed to the teaching styles they employ in the classroom.

          One should keep in mind Daniel Elazar’s reasons[2] for studying governance and politics.  One reason is to understand why politics manifests itself as it does.  At least, what exists in classrooms provides students with a good sense of who is involved and where they are involved in making governmental and political decisions.  It gives students a sense of how things get done.  But this coverage, at best, is simply too superficial even if the materials – specifically textbooks – are bulky and heavy.

And in terms of Elazar’s concerns for justice and civility, this curriculum, as it is currently practiced, is seriously deficient.  A curriculum that reflects a natural rights view cannot meet the challenges the current political environment presents to the nation.  That view simply ignores, to a serious degree, the communal, collaborative, and mutuality qualities this polity needs to enhance.  It is too self-centered to encourage the national partnership to function as such and be able to advance itself in a healthy fashion.

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[1] As a reminder, the online site referred to can be found at the URL, https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vSQxMfz-ILTNUq-qUXwCK-VjkQ55HWCY7lj6tCmAaaH53Z2B8jQfmhb_cfvaSbXr-4U6nQb1p4wdLJB/pub .

[2] Daniel J. Elazar, Exploring Federalism (Tuscaloosa, AL:  The University of Alabama Press, 1987).