I wish I had a nickel for every time I have written in this
blog, “sixty or so years ago.” The
phrase refers to the notion that about sixty or so years ago, the natural
rights construct became the prominent mental construct among Americans as to
how they thought and felt about government and politics. That promotion was at the expense of the
traditional federalist construct. I have
in this blog shared some of the history that traces the transfer. I wrote about how since the times of the
early republic, our political beliefs and feelings have slowly drifted from the
puritanical origins of congregational unions.
That origin led the way to our governmental foundational bias of forming
polities through the use of covenantal arrangements. I will spare you a whole retelling of the
story; let it suffice to say that this religiously inspired origin went through
secularization and then a shift from a collectivist orientation to a stronger
and stronger individualism.
In the past century, we had the effects of the Great Depression
and World War II. These two tide-changing
experiences proved to be the end of the dominance of the federalist – the construct
reflecting our covenantal perspective – mindset and the beginning of the dominance
of the natural rights mindset. In my
telling of this story, to date, I have left out the effect of the influence our
reliance on science has had. I alluded
to it when early on I related how the growth of positivist scientism influenced
our views of the social sciences and the reliance on systems theory. Since this blog is about civics, I emphasized
how this influence affected political science.
What I left out was that the adoption of a science bias was not without
contentious claims and a bit of a conflict among those who favored a more
scientific approach to studying social realities. That conflict has had consequences and they
are of such a nature that they need to be accounted for if we are serious about
implementing a newer form of federalism.
Let me explain.
We, as a culture, have adopted science so thoroughly that it
is easy to believe that the influence of science has been around for centuries. Not so.
The effects of science on our culture can be dated back only to the end
of the nineteenth century. The famous
early social scientists had their “heydays” back in the late 1800s. At that time, such pioneers as Vilfred
Pareto, Emile Durkheim, and Max Weber began using more scientific methodologies
to study social realities. There began
to evolve a general belief that science could study any realm of reality and
render such explanations and understandings so that someday one could predict
how people would behave under given situations.
After all, the purpose of science is to be able to predict. One strong spokesperson of this view was
Lester F. Ward. He wrote:
Man’s destiny is in his own
hands. Any law that he can comprehend he
can control. … His power over nature is unlimited. … Human institutions are not
exempt from this all-pervading spirit of improvement. They, too, are artificial, conceived in the
ingenious brain and wrought with mental skill born of inventive genius. The passion for their improvement is of a
piece with the impulse to improve the plow or the steam engine.[1]
That viewpoint only became stronger as the new century took
hold.
Between 1900 and 1950, spurred on by the progressive forces
of the Progressive Era, the New Deal, and then the challenges of World War II,
there was a very strong bias that undermined the remnants of the federalist
view. That newer bias held that desired
social change could be engineered
with enough social scientific knowledge.
That change could not only be substantively formulated by the use of
such knowledge, but its implementation could also be achieved by the
appropriate experts and sufficient resources – usually meaning enough
money. Such efforts entailed large
bureaucracies, high levels of central planning, and national efforts. Of course, this flew in the face of
federalist thinking that relied heavily on local community responses to social
ills. Part of the problem was that
social problems themselves had become national in scope, mostly pushed by a
more national and then international economic system. Local realities were to ever greater degrees
being affected by events farther and farther away. The Great Depression and a world war brought
these realities into sharp focus and could no longer be denied by objective
observation. But not everyone bought
into this “engineering” approach.
One of the outspoken critics of this planned change approach
was William Graham Summer. While these
critics did not turn their collective backs on the use of science, they did find
the ambitious projects these social engineers were conducting as troublesome. Not only did such critics view Ward’s view a
folly – a naïve and presumptive form of arrogance – but sacrilegious: we study social realities scientifically to
gain insight, but “never in the world by reconstruction of society on the plan
of some enthusiastic social architect.”[2] Instead, Sumner saw such knowledge as merely
an assistance as one goes about his/her business. Society, under this view, will balance itself
out if the natural human and physical forces are allowed to “do their thing.” He argued for a laissez faire approach and saw Wardian engineering as meddlesome
and even dangerous. He called for such efforts
as affronts and urged all these do-gooders to mind their own business.
Since those days, we have had a heavy dose of both approaches. The engineers took an early advantage as the
nation, as stated above, slogged through the Great Depression and then had to
conduct the monumental effort of defeating the Axis Powers of Germany, Italy,
and Japan. But even though overall they
met with successes, they were not unqualified successes. It took an entire ten years to get out of the
depression – not until preparation spending for the war did we get to full
employment – and the war effort left us with a new enemy, the Soviet
Union. But what finally cost the
engineers their favored position was the social upheavals associated with the
Vietnam War – the engineers got us into that mistake – and finally the Great
Inflation of the 1970s. Taking its place
was the old Sumner view of laissez faire
under the guise of Reaganomics. Of
course, not all of the measures instituted by the engineers disappeared. Remnants of the Progressive Era and the New Deal survived: Social Security, FDIC, and the FED are
examples. And the older line of thinking
also had later successes such as Medicare and Medicaid. Economically, we, under the regime of the
engineers, had an economic policy described as Keynesian from the 1930s to 1980
which relied heavily on expert economic planning. This was replaced by the supply side economic
regime introduced by Reagan’s administration.
With the financial crisis of 2008 and its aftermath, a lot of that
economic construct has come under attack.
That’s where we are today. Things
are in flux; perhaps it’s time for a change.
There is more talk of what is known as clinical, as opposed
to engineered, approaches to change.
This approach is more reliant on personal narratives, interactions with
subjects, partnership building, collaboration, and shared decision-making. It doesn’t disregard positivist/quantitative
based knowledge, but sees such study as verification for what is learned from
qualitative study. It sees politics less
as a zero-sum game and more of a win-win game.
Whether a new approach is developed where this more inclusive view
becomes dominant, we will see. There is
one arena where this newer approach is being used and the critics are
vociferous; that’s in the field of foreign relations.
President Obama has been trying to institute a foreign
relations approach that relies more heavily on diplomacy. His recently negotiated deal with the
Iranians is an example. I will not
analyze the whole range of issues involved, but the President’s stance is one
of seeking an arrangement with Iran in which both sides win. The President’s critics accuse him of
weakness that will be exploited by our adversaries. I believe this illustrates the challenges
that a more federalist approach will have to overcome. We’ll see what the outcome will be.
In any event, the stage is set. Will a newer form of federalism be able to
take hold? If so, will it mean that such
a change will cause a ripple effect in other realms of our social life? Can it affect, for example, what we teach in
schools, in our civics classrooms?
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