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.

PRACTICAL ATTRIBUTES

This posting continues my review of the attributes of an entity – members of a federated union. To date, in the last series of postings, I have described the attributes of status and conscience. Please, if interested, review those postings if you have not yet read them. This posting will describe an array of attributes I summarily call practical attributes. These are: useful resources, character, and roles. And again, the utility of these attributes is to focus the attention of a student of politics or government. This focus can lead to questioning of what goes on when political or governmental actors engage in their work. Appropriate questions can derive insights about the behavior of groups or collectives engaged in politics.

Entities are a main element of a federation since it is willing individuals and/or groups that make up a federation. As such, entities are the membership that will determine the actions of such groups. These groups – either arrangements lacking to some degree in federated qualities or associations that meet the threshold of those qualities and therefore are considered federated – are begun and maintained to meet some set of goals and aims. The assumption is that groups, all other things being equal, are better equipped to achieve their aims and goals if they are federated. Through this assumption, a student can do several things: one, look at groups and attempt to describe and explain why a group is, from a political perspective, either successful or not; two, can inquire into why groups act they way they do; and three, can inquire into how a group should act. Such studies can provide meaningful insights into a group's actions.

Federation theory does not get any more realistic than when it directs our attention to the practical attributes of an entity. Through this aspect of the theory, a student of politics and governance is drawn to those resources that an individual or group might command in order to get its way. After all, that is the purpose of politics – be it altruistic or selfish or something in between. Practical attributes can be seen from two perspectives: from that of a political actor and from that of a student of politics and government. What follows will go back and forth between these two perspectives.

So, what are these useful resources? First, there is, in a given political event, the useful knowledge of relevant conditions that an entity has. Who are the significant actors; what are the relative power levels of these actors; what is the topography – physical, financial, and other social factors – of a given political interaction; and what are the stakes – the interests of the various political or governmental actors involved? For example, when trying to gauge the likelihood of a politician to act in a certain way, it is useful to know which related parties have the ability to secure votes, have access to money, and/or command relevant expertise – apparently politicians respond to these types of people. These questions relate to some of the assets one needs to have in order to be effective in politics and knowing what the actors know about these assets is also useful in being able to describe and understand political and governmental action. Second, there are the personal qualities that can make a difference such as levels of common sense, physical attributes, – health, strength, physical power, athleticism, dexterity, endurance, attractiveness – sociability, – listening skills, communication skills, charm, humor, friendliness, tolerance, disposition toward accepting the unexpected – and an entity's availability to act in relation to time and location – better known as timing. All of these combine to formulate a person's political skills such as in lobbying or campaigning.

The second practical attribute is character. Character relates to another attribute, conscience,¹ but not in terms of the content of an entity's conscience, but in terms of the depth to which the entity holds that content. Any significant depth presupposes that that content is held by the entity as a result of reflection. An entity has character when the person or group has taken the time and effort to think and emotionally commit to the moral ideals which make up that person's or group's conscience. Character also refers to how simple or complicated one's commitments are; does the entity have a uni-dimensional moral perspective or is it complex and nuanced? This latter concern can be dicey in that there is a fine line between being complex or being compromised. Compromised positions generally reflect duplicity or opportunism.

The third practical attribute is role(s). Role refers to status,² but as opposed to expected levels of leadership, roles are the specific functions an entity fulfills or is expected to fulfill. Two entities can have the same role, but one might have more status than the other. Role reflects what one expects the entity to do; status reflects the respect the entity enjoys in relation to what the person or group does. While status reflects how an entity is seen in an arrangement, a role is usually the planned actions that were in mind when the position for the entity was created or revised. Yes, a role can be one of leadership, but it also can be one of follow-ship. Roles, when planned, are created for strategic reasons, although, at times, roles develop through experience and can be informal – they just happen. Their importance can vary over time and, when we compare comparable groups, similar roles can be created or are evolved, but the actual role might vary. They can also vary within a group over time. Therefore, roles are dynamic and changeable. To illustrate, the role of husband and wife varies between families, over the history of families, and over time within a given family.

Again, in terms of character and role, these attributes serve as guides. They suggest questions of given political and governmental groups and their activities. They assist us in asking the questions that lead us toward understanding what is going on and what should be going on with our government, our institutions as far as they are political, and our general social surroundings.

1As I described conscience in my last posting: “ a conscience, in terms of federated commitments, relates to how an entity believes and feels about the values and norms of the federation in which the entity belongs.”

2As I described status in my posting of June 3, 2013: “status is a reflection of how much leadership standing a particular entity either has or is thought to have.”