IS POLITICS DETERMINISTIC?

[Note:  If the reader has taken up reading this blog with this posting, he/she is helped by knowing that this posting is the next one in a series of postings.  The series begins with the posting, “The Natural Rights’ View of Morality” (February 25, 2020, https://gravitascivics.blogspot.com/2020/02/the-natural-rights-view-of-morality.html).  Overall, the series addresses how the study of political science has affected the civics curriculum of the nation’s secondary schools.]

For those who might not be familiar with the term, determinism, it is the idea that humans do not really have control over their actions; that people are deceived into believing they do because they are conscious of going through some mental “decision-making” process before they act.  Of course, the exception to this process occurs when people react to an unexpected change in their immediate environment. 

This would be the case, for example, if one suddenly looked up and saw a ball headed for his/her noggin and the person automatically ducks.[1]  Perhaps the reader has noticed that while watching a baseball game and, from time to time, a foul lined ball will shoot directly backwards.  The people sitting behind the plate duck when that happens even though they know a fence is there to protect them. 

Obviously, there is no decision-making; there is just reaction in those types of cases.  But such occasions are rare; the rest of the time people, according to determinism, do more calculating than choosing.[2]  Commentators have related behaviorism to determinism.  The deterministic argument holds that due to the experiences a person has had, the physiological make-up of his/her body (a product of natural selection), and the conditions that a person faces at a given time, the way that person “decides” to act is, well, determined by those other forces. 

That is, the person will always react to any situation by “choosing” the option that the person perceives is best for him/her given the conditions.  Since the person has little control over the above listed factors, his/her choice is determined by them.  Even in an action which is judged to be a sacrifice, the best action for the person is determined by the emotional cost he/she will bear by doing otherwise.

Now, due to space constraints, the description here is simplifying things a bit, but what is pointed out is that whether it seems to be the best choice – in terms of the person’s self-defined interests – or not, it is.  People don’t choose against themselves as that is defined in its broadest terms.  And one has very little control over the experiences or situations that “teach” a person what those interests are.   In the extreme, this denies the existence of free will. 

Applying these ideas leads to the practice, by those who want to solicit specific behaviors, of manipulating the factors of a situation so that the uses of rewards and punishments lead to desired outcomes.  Many behaviorist studies are about finding which stimuli, rewards and punishments, lead to which behaviors.

For example, the motivations John R. P. French and Bertram H. Raven[3] identify (coercion, reward, legitimacy, expert, and reference) are different forms of punishments and rewards.  For example, expert power indicates that one follows the advice of an expert, not because it is something the person necessarily wants to do, but because not to do so, it is believed, will elicit a punishment of a greater degree.  That would be the case if not immediately, then eventually.  

The mind computes the expected rewards and punishments and decides to advance as much reward as possible and diminish as much punishment as possible.  And all is potentially calculated including the effort or costs involved with the calculations and the time sacrificed by following a course of action.  Yes, even laziness is a factor, but whether one is lazy or not in a given situation is the result from prior calculations.

And while such venues where political decision-making takes place, supporting behavioral approaches to the study of politics – and any resulting political posturing – does not explicitly cite this understanding, but they proceed as if people do not have free will and can be manipulated.  Their resulting plans seem to assume that this is the case.  And another factor is, these studies do not claim to predict individual behavior, but the behavior of collectives.

And this line of assuming is not foreign to most people.  Does the typical person ever promise a child extra dessert if he or she behaves in a certain way?  Or perhaps stays on a job or in a career because the pay is so good or secure and the alternatives are known to be wanting or unknown?  If yes, they have experienced behaviorism at work. 

Even those who decide otherwise are so affected but have experienced other prior reward/punishment conditions.  The recipient and dispenser of rewards and even punishments correctly predict behavior by providing the correct stimulus.  How much of parenting, managing fellow workers, or governing consists of calculating such factors?  Intuitively, one can say most of what various “supervisors” consider is what rewards and/or punishments work.

Those who ascribe to this position might sight the patterns that human behaviors follow.  With enough knowledge, marketing strategies can do a good job of determining what products will sell; pollsters can often predict which candidates will win.  Relatives can tell what a person will do when a life issue arises.  Pure free will, it seems, would make these predictions impossible. 

The only thing that prevents one hundred percent accuracy in these predictions is that just as in predicting the weather, there are too many factors interacting in highly complex ways that affect one’s decisions.[4]  And as with the weather, rates of successful predictions, especially at the individual level, are significantly low.  But most government decisions are not directed at an individual level, they aim at affecting populations – there the predicting level is much higher.

At least, that's what pure behaviorists would say.  There are few pure behaviorists these days. Historically, the names of Ivan Pavlov, Edward Lee Thorndike, John B. Watson, and B. F. Skinner can be cited as pioneers in behavioral studies.  Any introductory psychology textbook reviews the basic tenets associated with the works of these famous men. 

While somewhat tamed from their original constructed view, behavioral studies are still in vogue and used in all sorts of social calculations from psychology to marketing to political and economic analyses.[5]  But looking at that history is telling of current educational thinking.  The heyday of behaviorism began in the twentieth century.  Why did this shift toward behaviorism happen during the last century?  At work were several historical trends. 

Since the Enlightenment era, in the eighteenth century, science has been on an ascendancy in western countries.  Due to the successes it garnered in practical areas such as agriculture and medicine and then industry, people began to rely more and more on the sciences.  This process arose and reached its apogee with the technological advancements of World War II and the postwar years. 

Until the beginning of the twentieth century though, its influences were pretty much limited to the study of natural phenomena.  But starting with the twentieth century, scientific protocols were beginning to be applied to social concerns.  Practitioners soon were aware that science's reliance on observable reality limited social sciences to the study of behavior since it was impossible to observe what goes on in the brain – of course, that observation was made at a time long before magnetic resonance imaging was developed. 

Behavior was what one could see and what one could measure.  Anything else was subject to speculation; at least, that was the case behaviorists made.[6]  Practically, scholars who followed the systems approach to social reality began to rely on scientific protocols in their studies.  Political science became highly statistical as the methods followed the hypothesis testing format which had been (and still is) the mainstay of the natural sciences.

          How this progression of viewing governance and politics from a natural rights view to how that view has affected the study of politics via behavioral studies was reviewed in past postings by reporting on the work of David Easton and the development of the political systems model.  The question that remains is how those developments in political science have affected how civics is taught in the nation’s secondary schools.  To do that a review of a major textbook of American government will be shared.

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[1] For an insightful and somewhat detailed account of what happens physically in brain under such a condition, see Robert M. Sapolsky, Behave:  The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (New York, NY:  Penguin Press, 2017).

[2] Along with this calculating or computing notion, see Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works (New York, NY:  W. W. Norton and Company, 1997).  Pinker graphically describes this process of computation and demonstrates how complex it is.  He adds to this explanatory approach to human behavior the effects of natural selection, another non self-determinate process.

[3] John R. P. French, Jr. and Bertram Raven, “The Bases of Power,” in Current Perspectives in Social Psychology, ed. Edwin P. Hollander and Raymond G. Hunt (New York, NY:  Oxford University Press, 1967), 504-512.

[4] Interested, read B. F. Skinner’s book, Beyond Freedom and Dignity.  B. F. Skinner, Beyond Freedom and Dignity (Seattle, WA:  Hackett Publishing, 2002). 

[5] A more current source and directed at training future government bureaucrats is Mark R. Leary, Introduction to Behavioral Research Methods, Seventh Edition (New York, NY:  Pearson, 2017).  Here again, the sense that people act as a result of the effects of stimuli, does not explicitly claim people do not have free will, but it just about assumes it.

[6] Of course, not all psychologists agreed with this assessment.  For example, those who now or then ascribe to the ideas of Sigmund Freud would disagree since the focus of their study is the subconscious.