A CHALLENGE FOR TRUE LIBERTY

I have in several postings indicated that our liberty, as defined by federation theory, is based on a realistic, as opposed to abstract, notion of equality. One can simply argue that liberty simply means people being able to do what they want to do as long as they do not interfere with other people's rights to do likewise. Some would describe this notion as the right that to swing one's hands exists to the point where some other person's nose begins. And yet another way to look at this notion is to believe everyone goes about his/her business and leaves others to theirs. This view of liberty tends to be, in practice, an anti-communal perspective. While advocates of such notions would state that this sense of liberty does not preclude community, in practice it tends to bolster a society with high levels of isolation among its citizens. Proof? Look around. The famous book that documents this trend came out in the eighties. There has not been any sociological study of any note that undermines its original contention.¹ That is, we have become a people that, by our own historical standards, have taken to ourselves when it comes to the socially demanding aspects of life. The book is Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam, and while anyone can cite examples of social cooperation and socially based events, by and large, Americans lead lives that are self-centered and lacking in social interaction. A walk around any average downtown district after dark and you will find deserted streets. We are not known for the healthy cafe life that characterizes many nations.²

I have argued in this blog that enabling this whole sociological shift is a prevailing mental construct that has become dominant – i. e., a view of political realities more influential than any other – and which I have entitled the natural rights construct (also known as liberal political theory³). In terms of macro political thought, the natural rights construct bolsters positions that minimize the authority and influence of government, especially the federal government, to affect the conditions under which citizens go about their business. For example, this construct argues for a neutral government relative to alternative policy choices. Instead of pursuing activist agendas, government is believed to exist in order to promote and protect rights. I have pointed out that such positions, in general, choose the right over the good. I have also pointed out that the courts have provided the jurisprudence that has ushered in this general trend by denigrating efforts by government to promote the good. Particular issues that provide a condensed illustration of this development are the issues surrounding the Bill of Rights.

The first amendment to the Constitution guarantees freedom of religion and freedom from religion. The first of these rights has been the basis of several cases that brings to bear the competition between the right and the good. In the case of Minersville School District v. Gobitis (1940), Jehovah Witness members sued the school district because two of their children refused, on religious grounds, to salute the flag. By refusing to take part in the salute and in accordance with district policy, the children were expelled from school. Claiming that their religious freedom rights were violated by the expulsions, they wanted the courts to overturn the expulsions. In the Gobitis case, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the district. In his opinion, Justice Felix Frankfurter claimed the district policy was in place to further the good by ritually encouraging communal identity of students as members of our national community. This, to the Justice, was determined to be a legitimate function of our public schools. While this might be the case, the Court did not preclude the possibility of a policy change if the change emanated from the district, through democratic procedures, issuing a new policy which accommodated the religious group. In a subsequent decision, the Court ruled the opposite. In West Virginia v. Barnette, again involving Jehovah Witness children, the Court ruled in favor of the religious group, but not based on religious freedom. This latter case based its decision on freedom of speech and claimed the district had no authority to coerce students to make a pledge or salute. To quote Michael Sandel: “With West Virginia v. Barnette, the procedural republic had arrived.”⁴

I believe that this latter case might have ushered in the judicial era of natural rights, but as a nation we would have until the end of World War II for the construct to take on a dominant role in how we view government and politics. But this case surely was instrumental in that development. Of course, such a view is not limited in its effect on issues involving religious and speech freedoms. The effect on economic thinking, predating the Barnette case, has been profound. Natural rights thinking supports laissez- faire assumptions – that the government should have as minimal a role in economic activity as possible. This is a notion that states: those engaged in economic activity should be left to their own devices and be able to pursue what each individual sees and judges to be his or her own best interests. While a market needs rules by which to operate, those rules should be minimal and neutral. This is the abstract argument for freedom or liberty in our economic affairs.

But here is where reality complicates matters. A few postings ago, I referred to Franklin Roosevelt's concern for the “Necessitous men.” In short, our experience with laissez- faire policies has noted the creation of a disconcerting distribution of wealth and income in which the few are inordinately rewarded and the many are left with little. This is so because as a privileged class forms, its members use their advantages to gain further privileges.

How does this work? Here's an example. A few postings ago, I reported on the increased number of manufacturing firms returning to the US. Of course, this is a welcome development. The problem is that many of those firms more and more rely on robotic machinery to do the manual tasks their respective industrial processes demand. For such firms, while returning to the US means more jobs for Americans, the fact is that there will not be the number of jobs one might initially assume. And for the jobs that are created, workers will need fairly sophisticated skills to perform them; hence, the increased importance of education. The trends not only portend a dismal future for poorly educated Americans, but also, according to an account, the workers of other countries, such as China and India, where a lot of these jobs have been taken, are in danger of facing a jobless future.⁵

In terms of this posting, what are the rights of these citizens? And if the private, business sector shows little to no concern over the fates of millions, then on what basis does laissez-faire policy hang its legitimacy – simplistic notions of liberty?

Let me give you more of FDR's quote: “true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. Necessitous men are not free men.”⁶ This is not necessarily a socialist argument. It is a federalist argument as well. In the model I have presented that outlines the tenets of federation theory, I gave this status for individuals the title, constitutional integrity. It means that we as a people have organized ourselves and formulated a polity in which we are all equal – not in results, as economic results, but in conditions. In reality, when the wealth and income distribution are so skewed in favor of a few, the individuals comprising the many do not enjoy equal conditions. Not only do the rich bask in a material wonderland, but their ability to have influence over the political system becomes so slanted that those lesser privileged members of the commonwealth are no longer free; at least they are not on an equal par with the rich. The level of their liberty to decide over their interests becomes highly compromised. And this is the irony of laissez-faire democracy.

The New Deal was launched with these concerns in mind. It ushered in a time when policy was issued, especially by the federal government, to address these imbalances. The economy grew to staggering heights. The era lasted until Ronald Reagan introduced the “government is the problem” era. Since then, more laissez-faire policies have taken hold and we see how such policies have not only challenged our sense of equality and, therefore, true liberty, but also put our economy on a course of one crisis after another. If we are doomed to a natural rights perspective of national politics, then at least let's remember what true liberty demands: enough economic equality to make true liberty a reality.

1While Putnam's book received negative criticism, he has been able to refute most of the counter claims leveled against the book's findings. For a review of this literature see Talbot, M. (2000). Who wants to be a Legionnaire? New York Times, June 25, nytimes.com/books/00/06/25/reviews/00625.25talbot.htlm .

2Of course the exceptions to this general observation are the downtown areas of cities such as New York which stand out for their exciting environments.

3I avoid using the term, “liberal political theory,” because of the possible confusion that results from how the word liberal is usually used in common commentary of our national political arena. The term, liberal, usually refers, in our national discourse, to leftest or progressive policy choices and is associated with the national political positions of the Democratic Party. As used in the term, liberal political theory, the word has an almost opposite meaning as it is meant to refer to policies that counter governmental action and avoid interfering with individual prerogatives.

4Sandel, M. J. (1996). Democracy's discontent: America in search of a public philosophy. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Citation on p. 54. The term procedural republic can be taken to be the polity that results from implementing the natural rights perspective broadly in its policies.

5For a revealing look at these trends view Radliffe, H. A., II and Gavrilovic, M. (producers). (2013). March of the machines: Are robots hurting job growth? 60 Minutes (CBS News). Episode aired January 13.

6Op cit., Sandel, p. 51.

ACCOUNTING FOR VALUES AND FACTS

This blog has dedicated itself to describing and explaining a mental construct of governance and politics – the liberated federalism construct. This construct is presented as a guide in selecting the subject content for civics and government education.

Through the postings of this blog, I have developed what the tenets of this construct are. I have made it clear that the construct presents a moral view. In doing so, it is my responsibility to address how a moral perspective should be presented in public school classrooms. As I have indicated in past postings, to utilize a view of social reality that is based to some degree on moral claims, one needs to justify such a choice. The reason for this justification emanates from the reasonable concern that such a choice can be seen as an attempt to propagandize a view of politics to a captive audience. My argument to date has been that, to some degree, any curriculum has to be built on some view of not only reality, but also some conception of morality. Prevalent in our public school classrooms today, I have argued, the prominent construct guiding the choice of content in civics classes is what I have called the natural rights construct. Within that construct, I have pointed out that there is a moral outlook. A review of past postings will provide you with the particulars of this view. Let me just say here that it is impossible to present a civics curriculum without taking a moral perspective. I will concede, though, that the liberated federalism construct, the construct promoted in this blog, has a more robust moral view. Despite this robustness, I firmly believe that its use is not amenable to indoctrinating our secondary students. This posting aims at explaining why this is so.

To address this concern, I believe that one approach is to explain how liberated federalism treats the relative importance and roles of values (central to moral considerations) and facts. Their relation to each other has been a subject, in one way or another, that has garnered the interest of many philosophers. By reviewing what two philosophers had to say, this posting will help explain why liberated federalism presents a responsible way to address the moral concerns with which effective citizens must deal.

Values and facts; how do they relate? The philosopher, David Hume, made an extensive case for forming a dualism between these two. To him, we cannot derive values, what we believe to be good and, by contrast, what we believe to be bad, from facts. Values cannot be reasoned. They are instead the product of sentiment – our emotions. They are products of the “gut.” Let us use an extreme case to illustrate the point: most of us value life and, therefore, we find murder as immoral. Do we believe this because the facts surrounding murder lead us to conclude that murder is bad or immoral? Let's analyze this question.

One could cite the fact that murder will not only hurt the victim, but also disrupt the lives of that person's loved ones. Of course, murder, in terms of the victim, deprives him or her of everything he/she has. These are facts. We might say that murder disregards the value of human life and if left unsanctioned, the results would be that such incidents would generally increase the likelihood that any one of us could be victimized. Our own lives might consequently be more in jeopardy. These are conjectured truths or facts. Or one might simply state that we are beings who empathize and that incidents of murder just make us sad for those directly affected. Since we don't like being sad, we should establish the conditions, such as policing and setting up judicial courts, to arrest and punish murderers. All of these conclusions are, at least in part, based on factual claims, but do they lead us to valuing life and finding murder as immoral? According to Hume – and many thinkers – the answer is no.

Hume argued that all of these facts gain importance only because they relate to something we prize emotionally – that is life, in general, or our individual lives, specifically. All of these facts don't matter one bit unless we have such a sentiment. In general, Hume argues that our knowledge of facts is derived from experiences. He had a sporadic view of experience. He saw our self-awareness as being the product of a succession of experiences in which one experience did not have to necessarily or in fact have much relation to other experiences. This view has been described much like a movie in which each instance is captured by a separate, individual exposure. We, for example, see the facts that constitute ourselves (our ego) as changing constantly. We are not in a meaningful way the person we were yesterday and we will not be the same person tomorrow. The nature of this “sporadic-ness” doesn't end with how we view ourselves. By limiting what we can consider a fact – to those things we directly experience – Hume argued that we cannot experience causes per se, and so, therefore, we cannot reasonably attach a cause to any effect – such as one billiard ball striking another and causing the second ball to move. We make such connections because we want, for practical reasons, a certain degree of predictability in the world in which we live. We want to survive and to do so, we believe recurring phenomena will continue to occur, just as the chicken develops the habit of viewing the farmer who feeds it every day as a welcome experience until the day the farmer wrings its neck. Though the chicken cannot experience cause and effect, it apparently makes such a connection of farmer-food due to the recurrence of the farmer's daily appearance. The influence that such a recurrence has is derived from the predisposition of the chicken to want to eat and survive.¹

The philosophy of John Dewey helps us out here. His view points out that despite the fact that such a sentiment for life is essential in establishing the immorality of murder, facts are important in our attempts to analyze moral or ethical questions generally or, in the case of murder, specifically. Dewey was, in his writings, put off by dualism such as value/fact, cause/effect, ends/means, body/mind. He agreed with Hume on the notion that all knowledge is derived from experience. He was very concerned, though, with a qualifier: experience has to be reflected upon within the context in which it becomes known to us in order for us to make sense of the experience. Dewey's view, as opposed to Hume's sporadic view, is that experience has more of an on-going quality whereas context is very important in giving meaning to any phenomena we experience. In terms of cause and effect, for example, Dewey writes about causes leading to effects and then effects being new causes for other effects and so on. As one of the founders of pragmatism, Dewey is very much into what works. While both Hume and Dewey argue against absolute values or absolute morality, they both arrive at such a claim from different origins. For Dewey, morality exists in factual results. While Dewey didn't argue against the bases of values or moral beliefs being sentiment, he seems to upgrade the role of facts or experiences as being important in the formulation of our values. For example, facts present us with conditions that limit alternatives or fix outcomes, and this reality has a great influence on which values we develop. As Philip Selznick writes about Dewey's thinking: “… it is reasonable to say that the norms are to that extent based on facts and even 'derived' from facts. [On the other hand,] They may also, and at the same time, reflect quite arbitrary interests and inclinations.”²

Of course “interests and inclinations” are sentiments - things that we merely want. But even with these sentiments, consequences of our value choices are subject to inquiry - to factual realization. How our choices affect our personal well-being and the social well-being around us are not events occurring in our psyche, but are actual conditions in our world.

By Hume saying that values are the product of our “gut,” he implicitly delegates them to having an arbitrary essence. They are subject to a behavioral mode of development. More in line with Hume's thinking, we adopt values through conditioning (reactions to rewards and punishments) and this, in turn, is arbitrary. While this very well might be the case for some individuals or for all individuals concerning certain values, Dewey would claim that values can also be learned through problem-solving and, as such, can be purposeful and not arbitrary. He distinguished between “behavior” and “action.” Behavior is derived from conditioned experiences – resulting from rewards and punishments and little reflection – as opposed to action which is derived from purposeful experiences in which students, through cognitive awareness and reflection, actively seek those results that are intrinsically self-rewarding and self-fulfilling.

The mental construct this blog promotes, the liberated federalism construct, is based, to a great degree, on Dewey's thoughts outlined above. It is a normative view of governance and politics based on reflection. As such, the construct would rely on presenting students with instructional strategies that involve them in reflective activities. My personal bias is to favor progressive strategies, but the use of the construct does not preclude other types of strategies as long as whatever is used does not exclusively count on students merely committing to memory those facts, generalizations, and beliefs contained in the content. The construct insists that students reflect on the content, in an open manner, regardless of whether the material is presented through problem-solving activities or taking lecture notes or whatever else the instructor presents or has the students do.

1For a delightful account of Hume's philosophy see Gaarder, J. (1991). Sophie's world: A novel about the history of philosophy. New York, NY: Berkley Books.

2Selznick, P. (1992). The moral commonwealth: Social theory and the promise of community. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Citation on p, 21.