EVOLVING FROM TRADITIONAL TO MODERN

A recurring topic of this blog has been the tension between traditional thought and modern thought. Each has its own reasoning and rationality. Each, in the course of human history, has had enormous influence on how we humans have seen the world, including both the physical and social world.

The traditional has a reasoning scheme that is non-compromising. It is definite in its view of truth and goodness. The modern, on the other hand, is not definite and relies on practitioners, such as scientists, to be open to options, to hold out for the possibility of being wrong. The traditional, in its definite way, claims a whole series of actions as sinful, taboo, or otherwise unacceptable. The modern is more in the mode of let's try it; let's see how it works. Standards for the traditional are received from the past – often from sacred sources. For the modern they are discovered through experience. The modern is scientific in its thinking. The traditional is constructed from general narratives that are finessed to address the specific. The modern delves in subjective analysis of what is with no a priori answers.

In trying to promote a modern version of a traditional construct – that is, promoting liberated federalism to take the place of traditional federalism – I have dealt with making distinctions between what constituted the political set of ideas and ideals that prevailed during an earlier time of our national history and what I see as the more useful version of federalist thought. Let me illustrate the tension that exists as it pertains to these two forms of federalism. Both believe that polities should be formed by parties, be they individual persons or groups, who come together to first agree to form the polity and second to accomplish said formation by the use of a compact. It is a congregational approach. But in the traditional version, the emphasis is on the locality of the separate entities making up the union. In a more liberated version, the emphasis is twofold: the individual person and the overall union. So, in practical terms, take the formation of our national union: almost from its very inception, there was a political battle between those who wanted to sustain an almost unquestioned acquiescence to the whims of the states and those who wanted to empower the newly created central government to be the last authoritative word on the issues of the day. The traditional, in federalist terms, was represented by such luminary founding fathers as Thomas Jefferson¹ and James Madison (who initially favored a powerful central government) and the more modern view, again in federalist terms, which was represented by George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and John Adams. So strong was this clash that it led to the beginnings of our two political party system. In terms of Western history, the traditional has been associated with aristocracy and more local control while the modern has advanced centralized power structures with its alliance with urban centers and the bolstering of individual rights. This trend expressed itself within the American context with the rise of the natural rights construct which first challenged traditional federalism and eventually replaced it as the prominent political construct.

One issue that was contentious for the first eighty or so years of the republic and demonstrated the tension between the traditional and the more modern was that of slavery. The traditional, with its accepted view of truth regarding the institution, rationalized the facts surrounding slavery so as to justify what was becoming more and more questioned. Beliefs about the relative capacities and even humanity of slaves were conjured up so as to support the practices surrounding slavery. And all this was accepted with traditional reasoning. There was no testing of ideas; there was no or very little doubt over what was proposed as being true. And slavery was not the only area in which such an approach was used. These parochially based views, oftentimes incorporating tortured religious tenets, took on the language of the sacred. God's will was often invoked as underpinning what was advocated. Before feeling smug over such foolishness, remember that such reasoning is not totally foreign from present day political discourse. For example, much of the resistance to gay and lesbian rights is couched in such traditional reasoning.

A few weeks after the 9/11 attacks, I stated at a conference that our enemy was the traditional. I can chalk up such a remark to the level of frustration and anger I felt at the time. As I saw it, here was a cadre of men who, motivated by traditional religious beliefs, commandeered the three hijacked planes causing over 3,000 deaths, mass destruction, and a significant negative effect on our national economy. The ratio of perpetrator to the amount of suffering caused by these zealots is one of the highest in history. And as far as I could tell, the bulk of their motivation was caused by traditional religious beliefs. That clash between our modern culture and their traditional beliefs and reasoning is still very prominent on the world stage. But I have reflected on this tension since that horrendous day and have mellowed in my overall view of the traditional.

Philip Selznick is more insightful about the tension than I was at that conference. The modern in Western tradition began with the Enlightenment. It swayed European thinking away from prejudices which serve to obstruct clear reasoning. The first great human development spurred by this new thinking was probably the French Revolution. Selznick quotes Edmund Burke and his view of how traditional reasoning might have served France better than the modern reasoning that characterized the thinking of the revolutionists:

The concrete reason [of traditional thought], because it is not a wisdom merely of the intellect, is not a wisdom only of the few; it is latent and potential in all individuals of the community. The mass of Englishmen, who live according to traditional prejudices and habits, are safe, because customs are “the standing wisdom of the country.”²

Selznick goes on to state that concrete thinking does not align with modern or critical thinking. Here, I think the good professor is appropriately reserved in his support of traditional reasoning. While critical thought is permissible in most traditional constructs, it is usually highly constrained within acceptable parameters and the issues that are analyzed tend to be of peripheral concerns – “how many angels fit on the head of a pin?” type of concerns. But Selznick and Burke do hit upon an important point. By applying Darwinian logic, given the fact that a set of traditional “truths” makes it through all the travels of a people, the surviving cultural beliefs must have some truthfulness or functionality attached to them. In their effort to wipe the intellectual slate clean, the French, as a result of their revolution, witnessed severe levels of atrocities. The moral foundation was set aside and experience with the new social reality had not sufficiently transpired to allow a newer moral regime to take hold. It was reasonable to hold on to those moral precepts of the past that would have restrained the more severe practices that came to characterize the Revolution and its aftermath.

So, in my attempts to present a newer form of federalism, my efforts have not been to demonstrate the baseless-ness of the traditional, but instead to demonstrate a newer reasoning that develops from what has existed before – a more modern version of federalism as “growing” from the traditional. A tension is inevitable; after all, there is a level of rejection. But the rejection is not pell-mell or indiscriminate. Instead, the effort is to identify, address, and choose the options that assist in helping students understand and appreciate the centrality of federalist thought and reasoning as they are introduced to the politics and government of their nation.

1In the case of Jefferson, there is a bit of irony. He was smitten by the French Revolution while he was there in France serving as the US minister. As pointed out elsewhere in this posting, that revolution epitomized modern, unrestrained thought and reasoning. What Jefferson didn't seem to realize was the dedication of the revolution to the ideal of the General Will as espoused by Rousseau which in turn promoted a strong centralization of power.

2Selznick, P. (1992). The moral commonwealth: Social theory and the promise of community. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Quotation on p. 40.