THE PRACTICAL

This blog, at its core, argues for a moral approach toward civics education.  In that respect, it has identified two social qualities that facilitate the moral sense the blog favors; that is, social capital and civic humanism.  In summary, these qualities are related to citizens engaging with their fellow citizens to design and implement public policies aimed at achieving the common good.  They call for a commitment from citizens to place their personal interests in line with the common good or, at least, not to be aligned against it.

          As such, these are qualities focus on how good citizens should conduct their individual affairs or their individual behaviors, at least as they pertain to civic related interactions with others.  But how about what is moral at the societal level?  This writer has been in search of an overarching answer to this question.  Surely there are numerous views on this and they, in turn, reflect philosophic/religious constructs.  Also, they can be aligned according to political ideologies.

          From the middle ages through the 1600s, the Western world chose religion to define moral questions – including those societal concerns such as a people’s governance, their economics, and their social institutions such as marriage.  This proved unsustainable.  With the beginning of the Protestant Reformation, religion proved too divisive for a nation to maintain essential domestic and international harmony and peace.  Spain, for example, went bankrupt fighting religious battles against Protestant forces.

          One sees the eventual acceptance of a secular moral approach with various developments, not the least being the US Constitution.  That document only mentions religion in the first amendment prohibiting the establishment of a religion by the public authorities or public policy prohibiting religious practices.  As with other rights in the document, these are not unlimited rights, but subject to reasonable restrictions.[1]  Ultimately, what is considered reasonable will be based on secular arguments, not religious ones.

          In this writer’s search, he has hit upon the arguments of a conservative writer, Jonah Goldberg.[2]  While this blog has avoided taking sides on domestic politics, Goldberg’s arguments do have various angles to them.  He offers positions that can be both acceptable to liberals and conservatives. 

In so far as this is true, this blog will begin a review Goldberg’s foundational argument.  It will first present a portion of his take on human nature and follow that up with a critique as to what this conservative proposes.  This short posting offers his first observational comments – the beginning of his datum statements or “where as …” statements.

          He begins by reporting, as demonstrated above with the religious reference, that history indicates there are no metaphysical basis for the good that, in turn, can be used to form and maintain a moral sense of the good.  Instead, a notion of the good, to be proficient, is the product of practical choices.  They are practical in that people or societies derive them by their experiences – pretty much as the decision to drop religion as the source of such decisions.

          In so deciding, then, logic calls for a people to first determine a standard for determining the good.  In this, Goldberg is forced to take a minimal philosophic position.  That is, he imposes the following criteria:  a practical, public construct allows for more people to live happy, prosperous, meaningful lives without harming others in their pursuits of these aims; and that the construct should call on the members of the community or collective to fulfill a duty, to be engaged in this pursuit (similar to the aims of social capital and civic humanism).

          So, this is a view that does not seek to satisfy or placate a deity, fulfill a historical projection, or any other metaphysical mandate.  It merely aims at defining the good as those societal policies, actions, goals that advance this – what one might call – the common good. 

And the chief source for the needed information to pursue these aims is history.  Historical experiences become the main body of information a people use to determine what is prudent.  Yes, other sources – such as scientific information or philosophic analyses – can supplement significantly, but history gives one the overall sense of what works.

          And to round off this initial report, Goldberg points out that some societies have been better at these pursuits than others.  And that ends this first segment of what Goldberg is arguing.  The next posting will not only argue in agreement with him but also offer some other ideas to this basic view.

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[1] For example, there have been attempts in South Florida to restrict or eliminate animal sacrifices – rites associated with Santeria.  Overall, they are allowed, but the legal question made it to the Supreme Court.  Obviously or perhaps surely, if the rite of a religion called on human sacrifice, that would not be allowed and, therefore, such a prohibition restricts this right.

[2] Jonah Goldberg, Suicide of the West:  How the Rebirth of Tribalism, Populism, Nationalism, and Identity Politics Is Destroying American Democracy (New York, NY:  Crown Forum, 2018).

AND THEN THERE IS LAW-ABIDING BEHAVIOR, PART II

[Note:  this posting marks an end of a series of posting in which the writer provided updated information relating to the question of how effective civics education has been in the US.]

The last posting looked at the last of the elements this blog has identified as being those social characteristics composing what one can call good citizenship.  Those characteristics include being civically literate, politically engaged, being disposed toward engagement, becoming skillful in that engagement, civility, and, the last one, being disposed and exemplifying law-abiding behavior.  In terms of the last element, the previous posting pointed out that while overall crime rates have dramatically decreased in the last several decades, not all is well in this regard.

That is, while overall crime rates have been reduced, the US is still the leading nation in terms of incarcerated citizens and residents and has the highest crime rates when compared to other countries (the reader is invited to look up that posting to see the evidence for these claims). 

To continue this account, this posting begins by pointing out that there has also sprung up criminal activity in certain areas since the nineties.  One such area, for example, is the institution of dispersion and selling systems of heroin to many Americans addicted to opioids.  A good deal of this activity has been initiated by Mexican drug dealers but took advantage of demand that already existed among many Americans. 

They – the Mexicans – devised effective, on-demand distribution arrangements in numerous communities around the US.  Their customers are not inner-city junkies, as the heroin trade of old was and found in major urban centers, but among, in many cases, middle class whites who have gotten themselves hooked on opioids.

Oftentimes, these middle-class customers became addicted after they were exposed to some chronic pain management protocol under the supervision of legitimate doctors.  A lot of this, in turn, was based on an underestimation of the addictive quality of the drugs prescribed and aggressive drug company strategies in marketing opiates.  Once hooked, these people became desperate to find cheaper and unlimited supplies of a substitute drug – heroin, a type of opioid – to satisfy their cravings.[1] 

While this account finds the plight of these people highly regrettable, it nonetheless judges their behavior and many others who are involved as illegal.  The growth of this legal problem reflects the lack of support current American society offers to such unfortunate individuals.

A telling incident is described by the journalist Sam Quinones when the number of such addicted individuals came to light in a New Mexican region called Chimayo.  He writes:

That night, Kuydendall [a federal DEA agent] walked into the Rancho de Chimayo restaurant, and was startled to see congressmen, judges, the head of the New Mexico State Police, and city councilman, along with Bruce Richardson, the board of the Chimayo crime prevention group.

          “You have done nothing,” Richardson told the officials that night.

          He brought forward a large pickle jar filled with used syringes.  The public officials gave the what Kuykendall considered elected-officials responses, appeasing no one.

          He drove home to Albuquerque that night.  The politicians’ presence told him that they knew things were bad.  He had always told younger agents to focus on the biggest dealer wherever they were stationed.  That dealer may not be Pablo Escobar, he would say, but the biggest dealer in a small town is still a problem in that town.[2]

The sense this writer gathers from this short excerpt is that the problem of heroin consumption had time to start and get started before this reaction took place.  Also, that the citizens described took on a consumer of government services orientation toward the elected officials – how are they, the politicians, going to fix the problem, with little to no expression of how “we” will fix the problem.

All of this developed under the purview of these effected communities, but they were slow to respond to the tragedy these cases represented.  More interactive communities, it is believed here, would have been more apt to discover and find solutions or ameliorations to the resulting opioid crisis.  But that full story is for another venue.

As for the bigger picture, one can see criminality as a degree of incivility.  This account has identified the lack of civility in American society as a definite social problem.  It is hard to determine whether, by historical standards, it is more acute today.  It could be that today's civics educators have not done any worse on this score than those of past years and, of course, this blog does not place total blame for these conditions on civics educators.  But, irrespective of how relatively severe the problem is today, the nation’s civics educators should address it.

And that effort should not address it as merely one other topic, but as a concern central to the mission of civics education. 

One can make a further point to those who do not see this issue as being serious as depicted here.  Those who cite, in order to down grade the issue, that a lot the problem is due to over-zealous policy of adjudicating minor drug sellers, one should know other crimes are downplayed.  Oftentimes, what has been dismissed as just cultural proclivities – yet harmful to some population of victims – are best handled in some informal ways.

In recent years, news services have told the nation, for example, of how many under reported and under addressed cases of sexual abuse there have been.  In many instances, those in authority ignore or do not suitably address such abuse against predominantly women in the military, college campuses, and in some industries such as in show business.  Such incidents have sparked the “Me Too” movement among feminist groups.

This account does not make a claim as to whether such under or non-reporting of such crimes outnumber cases of long prison sentences for drug crimes.  But it does recognize that people in the nation are not readily going to jail and prison for legal behaviors – those behind bars in the overwhelming number of cases did break the law. 

Before leaving this issue of criminality and incivility, one should acknowledge the degree to which one sees unreported incidents of racism and anti-Semitism.  They also are being under reported whether the incidents are within or outside the law.  These two examples of less than ideal attitudes or lack of respect for fellow citizens have an ugly history in the nation.  They deserve more comment than what is being given here.

The nation has made significant advances in eliminating these dispositions, but – and this particularly refers to racism – there are still incidents of their occurrence that lead to tragic results.  Since roughly 2015, the nation has become conscious of unspeakable incidents in which unarmed, African American suspects have been seriously injured or killed by those in authority under highly questionable circumstances. 

Other types of examples frequently make the headlines.  There have been mass killings in churches, synagogues, and schools where multiple victims were senselessly shot and even killed.  While naturally most Americans do not engage in such behaviors and most overt racist or otherwise motivated deranged acts do not occur in everyday life, the level of occurrence and their antisocial quality indicate that below the surface, many Americans do harbor racist beliefs and values. 

A more recent event was the hate inspired demonstrations in Charlottesville, Virginia that resulted in the death of a young woman as a white supremacist – as shown on the news tape – drove his car into a group of counter demonstrators.  Yes, such cases are complex and controversial, but the number of cases cannot avoid being a source of supportive evidence for the conclusion that there do exist racist or other prejudicial attitudes among the populous to significant degrees. 

This needs to be addressed in civics classrooms.  But isn’t the current youth population that is made up of millennials exhibiting more positive behaviors, more positive attitudes and values?  Recently a USA Today article questioned this recent, popular notion; i.e., that today’s youth are more communally oriented and civic minded.  The article debunks this and reports they are not.

Online, this writer looked up the academic review study upon which the USA Today article is based.  He found an abstract for that study; it is reported in an article published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.[3]  The article reviews three studies in which three generations of citizens were analyzed regarding their reported goals.

Specifically, the goals related to “extrinsic” values such as money and image, “intrinsic” values such as self-acceptance and community, concern for others such as expressed through empathy and charitable donations, civic orientation such as interest in social problems, political participation, and community service. 

Other than community service, which has become a graduation requirement in many secondary high school programs, the Gen X generation (born 1962-1981) and the Millennials (born after 1982) demonstrated declines in these characteristics as compared to Baby Boomers (born 1946-1961). 

This further provides evidence that among the nation’s youth there is a serious lack of social capital as defined by Robert Putnam.  To remind the reader, social capital is a societal quality characterized by having an active, public-spirited citizenry, egalitarian political relations, and a social environment of trust and cooperation.[4]  Central to this blog’s argument advocating a change in the ongoing approach to civics education are the lack of communal attitudes and behaviors among the American young. 

In summary, therefore, the belief in a need for changes in civics classrooms is highly warranted.  The current efforts in civics education are judged here as deficient in terms of imparting civic knowledge or civic literacy, skills in attaining knowledge, skills in political engagement, dispositions supporting political engagement, dispositions toward formulating reasonable and defensible positions concerning governmental issues, and adequate levels of desire toward maintaining civility and law-abiding behavior. 

As an educational institution, schools are woefully deficient as far as these important areas of social interactions are concerned; that is, they are not doing sufficiently well in civics education.  And with that this review and updating of how effective American schools perform the responsibilities regarding civics comes to an end.

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[1] Sam Quinones, Dreamland:  The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic (New York, NY:  Bloomsburt Publishing, 2015).

[2] Ibid., 150-151 (Kindle edition).

[3] Jean M. Twenge, W. Keith Campbell, and Elise C. Freeman, “Generational Differences in Young Adults' Life Goals, Concern for Others, and Civic Orientation, 1966-2009,” Originally in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, March 5, 2012, accessed on PDF cite, May 16, 2019, https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/psp-102-5-1045.pdf .

[4] Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 2000).