UNDISCARDABLE “BAGGAGE”

I guess if one posts regularly on a blog dedicated to a particular topic – like this blog is dedicated to civics – it is probably inevitable that story lines will develop. One story line this blog has developed has been the description of how, in terms of the political thinking of this nation, the prevailing views have evolved. The evolution has been from the original foundational perspective, federalism – what I entitled traditional federalism – to the construct which replaced it, the natural rights construct. The first construct reflected the highly communal view of politics. It was based on the Puritanical, congregational sentiment that held that the greatness of a society is based on the social richness accrued from the interdependence among that society's citizens. As John Winthrop's famous speech, A City on a Hill, from our colonial history pointed out, such a condition allows a healthy society to be established and maintained.¹ Originally based on strong religious convictions – including the belief that this society was the product of an overarching covenant – an array of social forces challenged the acceptability of such a religious based foundation. The society became more diverse in terms of cultures and, in turn, our view of what was legitimate became ever more secular by necessity. The evolution was slow and transpired over 180 years after the founding of our national republic. The final unambiguous acceptance of the newer construct was completed shortly after World War II.

As the decades unfolded, the trend was to weaken its religious grounding along with the accompanying sense that moral living reflected an abiding commitment based on this interdependence among citizens. Individualism became more prominent and with it certain constraining practices aimed at assuring “moral” living were now more readily seen as abusive. Generally, they were considered stifling and integrally associated with the more enforced communal policies of our earlier republic. They were questioned and either challenged or neglected and, finally, they lost their legitimacy.

The historical reasons for this development are varied, but high on the list of those historical conditions pushing us away from religious grounding was modernity. Modernity does not just relate to the time designation of the now as opposed to what was, but is a descriptive notion of how qualitatively societies develop away from traditional thinking. The changes that comprise modernity have encouraged the drift away from religious rationales that underpinned many of the social practices that characterized the earlier period. The eminent sociologist, Phillip Selznick, provides us with a developmental model outlining the forces of modernity which had its effects on the history of advanced western nations and sheds light on the evolutionary ways those forces have affected our particular development.

Let me briefly provide the basic forces Selznick identifies:

Disintegration and dissonance. Modernism is in large part an effort to express the sensed incoherence of contemporary life. … [Characterized as one] living at the edge of a moral and psychological abyss. … Modernity takes this predicament as a starting point.

Revolt and reconstruction. A pervasive theme of modernism is the rejection of received realities. Whatever is given is suspect, for it is a potential obstacle to creative imagination. … Modernists … [display] a nervous self-confidence, they perceive the world as infinitely malleable and exploitable …

Order as emergent, contextual, fragile, and conflict-laden. The modernist is sometimes an enemy of order, an advocate of rage, destruction, and willful inarticulateness. … [O]rder is best when it is emergent rather than imposed; when it respects the context of which it is a part; when it finds principles of governance within that context; and when the disharmonies it holds in tension are plainly revealed. …

Immediacy, spontaneity, and affirmation of impulse. Modernism teaches that the forms and conventions of everyday life – to say nothing of “academic” art and thought – get in the way of clear perception and genuine feeling. Hence the demand for direct, unmediated experience. …

Perspectivism and unmasking. No idea is more characteristic of modernism than that of the multiplicity – and the alleged incommensurability – of human perspectives. Reality is elusive; point of view is all.²

While this review might be a bit choppy – please look up the source for a complete presentation of Selznick's argument – I think you can derive the lack of both certainty and parochialism that modernity presents us. And as such, it made federalism, as that view expressed by the Puritanical Winthrop, too static and confining.

But no matter how modern – and later post modern – we become, we can't seem to leave behind our need for collective arrangements. The more we try to leave our communal necessities behind, the more we seem to fall into nihilistic, baseless dis-orientations. We drift, unable to address the more human requirements for what has meaning in life. We instead fall to beliefs and practices reflecting shallow assumptions such as the belief that statistics can provide the understanding we need to have in order to have meaningful progress. The question remains: progress toward what?

We lack satisfying criteria by which to evaluate the progress we experience. In what directions should our institutions be guided? In what directions should we guide our families, education, governance, economic behaviors, and even our religion. We become more concerned with how much we sell, for example, and less in what we sell. Goodness becomes synonymous with popularity. Happiness becomes synonymous with pleasure. Truth becomes synonymous with shared perspectives. Quality becomes synonymous with popular style.

So, are we left with no hope for the communal vision that Winthrop shared with his fellow citizens? My sense is that recognition of our social needs is becoming more and more obvious as we neglect these essentials to ever higher degrees. We, for example, can observe, in the last several decades, a growing attention to our communal needs in the works of our academic scholars. There is increased attention to these depleted sensibilities. Change theory, administration literature, and other organizational academic works are more frequently placing communal factors as those factors that, by necessity, must be addressed and accommodated. In this spirit I offer the construct, liberated federalism, as a view of civics that I believe, if accepted, will address many of the ills that we are suffering through today and that have resulted from the drifts described above.

The coverage of President Obama and Governor Christie on October 31^st demonstrates what I am talking about. On his show, Chris Matthews described the cooperation demonstrated by the two leaders as reflecting federal values.³ We are fortunate in that when our basic structure of government was formulated, our prevalent mental construct was a form of federalism. Unfortunately, for a variety of historical reasons, that view did not evolve sufficiently to accommodate the onslaught of modernity. That does not mean we cannot revitalize that construct in a form that gets us back to the essentials of community life – a life we cannot successfully leave behind. 

 

1For iconic expression of this sentiment look at John Winthrop's speech, “City on the Hill.” See website: https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/winthrop.htm .

2Selznick, P. (1992). The moral commonwealth: Social theory and the promise of community. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Quotation on pp. 9-11.

3Matthews, C. (2012). Hardball with Chris Matthews. Aired October 31, MSNBC.