FUNCTIONAL INTERACTION

If I were to be given the task of developing a civics curriculum, my first series of units or lessons or modules (units of content) would have students looking at what I have called the “entity.” If you have been reading my last several postings, you know that I have dedicated them to describing what entities of federated unions are and what the attributes are that make up the meaning of the term. If you haven't, an entity is a member of an arrangement – a collective of people and/or groups. Our nation's political arrangement is a federation and its people and states are its entities. An arrangement that meets the attributes of a federation is an association. So, entities are the basic element of a federation. Most of the time in our discourses of politics or governance, entities are individual persons. If you live in the US legally – and in some cases even if you are here illegally – you are federated with all other citizens and legal residents. You are here by choice and as such, you are agreeing to live by the provisions of our compact, the US Constitution.¹ As my last set of postings has indicated, an entity has status, conscience, and practical attributes. If you care to read more, look at this last set of postings. But as for this posting, I want to address the next area of concern that logically follows what has been described to date: how entities tend to interact and how they should interact.

How entities interact, naturally, depends on the arrangement under consideration. Of course, one can study such cases and formulate general understanding of how they operate and what promotes their efficiencies. A lot of organizational theory is about such concerns. What follows will focus more on how entities should behave, but in so doing I will reflect on some of the general factors affecting their behavior.

To begin with, entities in a federation are equal. We have, by and large, come to accept this idea as natural. I recently had the pleasure of seeing again the 1935 film version of Charles Dickens' Tale of Two Cities with Ronald Coleman. The film is a good version of Dickens' story. In the film, the corrupt aristocratic view of human nature that characterized those of the advantaged class in pre-Revolutionary France is portrayed. By viewing the film, one is exposed to what are now anachronistic beliefs about those who populate the lower classes. I write anachronistic, but I have had the experience of hearing advantaged individuals from countries with high degrees of wealth disparity voicing the same message. That is, the message is usually couched with the notion that “you don't understand the people of our country,” in thinly subtle language, that “those” people are not equal to us, the rich or the more advantaged; they just don't have what it takes. At best, this is said in paternalistic language; at worst, it is stated in oppressive language. Whatever the language, the result is oppressive relations between the classes. So, this message should not be considered as just something from the past. It, unfortunately, is alive and well and we in our nation should be on guard about any ideology or political or social movement that expresses any form of this ideal.

It can take the form of depreciating the poor or of those with origins from other lands. Perhaps it can express itself against those who lack expertise in given areas of human endeavors. Maybe the victims can be those who lack what are considered social graces of one sort or another or perhaps those who suffer from physical handicaps. Sexual preferences or gender have also been the sources of such unequal sentiments. All of these sources of discrimination and/or segregation should be anathemas to those who claim to be federated with their fellow citizens. In real terms, to the extent a society is free from such inequality – especially in the ways its people interact – is in large part a way to measure how federated the reputed federation is.

But behavior that respects the above concerns can be merely a reflection of tolerance. Tolerance is a minimal quality of a federated union. A federation strives to be more than a society that tolerates what is different or lacking, as in the case of lower income groups. A federation seeks communal links between its peoples. The context of this concern is that an arrangement – and more appropriately, an association – is formed to achieve aims and goals. The relation between entities will finally be judged according to how efficacious they are in relation to those aims and goals. No matter what the aims and goals are – be they licit or illicit – certain qualities need to be incorporated and felt by those who are federated. To the degree they are not present or felt sufficiently, the arrangement or association suffers from dysfunctional realities. Enough of this dysfunction and the collective is in danger of not only failing to meet its aims and goals, but its very existence can come into question. Of course, all of this is very general. The nature and extent to which such concerns exist depend on a host of factors and one would need to be an expert on a given association to pass judgment on the health of any given union. But generally one can identify certain types of factors involved.

Here, I am advised by the work of Philip Selznick.² He utilizes the concept, reciprocal advantage. Reciprocal advantage relates to those relational qualities that bolster a communal sense between entities. It reflects an understanding that certain prevailing values or an underlying ethos provides the intellectual and emotional foundation by which that society can go about performing the necessary actions that lead to success. The sinew of such links is the acceptability of the provisions of the compact that forms the union, emotional ties between the members, shared interests and resources, and mutual respect. Each of these, to the extent it exists, reflects a great deal of past accommodations, compromises, sacrifices, and shared experiences. It also depends on past successes. For example, beyond the political necessity in securing our independence, our ability to defeat in the Revolutionary War the greatest power on earth at that time surely gave this young nation a sense of inevitability that it would reach great heights. Success breeds success.

After a curriculum addresses what an entity is and how entities figure into the structural make up of federations, it should look at how and why entities interact with each other. This concern understands that a communal sense between the members of an arrangement or association increases the chances of success; it is sensitive to the whimsical nature of fortune and fate and it avoids the disruption that a lack of dignity and integrity can cause to any collective effort.

1As constitutional scholar Donald Lutz argues, our compact includes our national constitution and the state constitutions. So here in Florida where I live, I am federated with my fellow citizens under the provisions of the US Constitution and the Florida constitution. See, for example, Lutz, D. S. (1992). A preface to American political theory. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas.

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