SHARED MORAL PRINCIPLES

 

One way to gauge how times have changed during the nation’s history is to compare how people have judged what is right or wrong, good or bad within different times.  Unfortunately, one cannot interview, for example, early American colonists.  But one can study the artifacts and written records they left behind.  On that score, one has the work of historians and even political scientists who have dedicated their professional efforts to look back.  As for current views, one need only look at what contemporary folks have to say or write.

          In this effort, one eminent scholar of the past is the late political scientist, Daniel Elazar.  As for establishing – as this blog has pointed out – what have been federalist views of morality, Elazar claims it was the central guide for judging right or wrong, good or bad not only politically, but in overall social environments.  He shares,

 

Covenantal foundings [sic] emphasize the deliberate coming together of humans as equals to establish politics in such a way that all reaffirm their fundamental equality and retain their basic rights … Polities whose origins are covenantal reflect the exercise of constitutional choice and broad-based participation in constitutional design.  Polities founded by covenants are essentially federal in character, in the original meaning of the term (from foedus, Latin for covenant) …[1]

 

Those colonists, by agreeing and signing such documents as the Mayflower Compact, purposely bound themselves to perpetual unions for specified reasons such as advancing mutual safety, expressing reciprocal respect for one another, and soliciting or having God as their witness. 

A more secular form (actually the more encompassing category) of this sort of agreement is a compact that consists of the same type of commitments without a reference to God as a witness.  Technically, the Mayflower Compact was a covenant.  Also of note is the relationship between the terms covenant and federal.  Federalism is derived from basic covenantal agreements.  They impose a certain moral view on social arrangements so initiated – in the case of this quote, the arrangement is a polity, but one can apply it to other less encompassing relationships such as a marriage or a business arrangement in which one has meaningful assets at stake.

The point is that such moral bindings presuppose that people are willing to take on a broadly based moral position.  To remind the reader, this sort of concern is being shared to explain a basic dialectic struggle with which Americans have been engaged in almost since their origin as a people.  That struggle would be federalism vs. natural rights views of governance and politics as experienced both within and without governmental interactions.

What of the natural rights view?  How does it see things in these realms of interaction and morality?  Again, one can look at what is being said or written by those who exemplify or act in accordance with this other view.  Probably no source further demonstrates or expresses the core elements of the natural rights view than the ideas of a current hedge fund manager who has experienced extraordinary success. 

Fitting that bill is Raymond Thomas Dalio, who is associated with the Bridgewater investment firm and has amassed a personal wealth of over one billion dollars.  Dalio has also written a sort of “how-to book.”  And he begins that work by reviewing how one should approach business, and by implication, life in general. 

He writes, “The most important thing I learned is an approach to life based on principles that helps me find out what’s true and what to do about it.”[2]  He goes on to state that principles are the foundations of how one should behave to get what one wants.  They function to guide courses of action not only in business but in life in general.  The aim is to satisfy one’s goals.

He encourages readers to give these principles a good deal of thought.  He analogizes them as recipes that can be applied to similar situations that call on decisions about how to behave.  He addresses the need for common or shared principles for social arrangements (families, communities, the nation) but refers only to their functionality and does not recommend one would adopt common principles per se.

Instead, he emphasizes that one is best served by having his/her own principles.  “If you can think for yourself while being open-minded in a clear-headed way to find out what is best for you to do, and if you can summon up the courage to do it, you will make the most of your life.”[3]  So, what is his first principle (and one can assume, the most important)? 

“Think for yourself to decide 1) what you want, 2) what is true, and 3) what you should do to achieve #1 in light of #2 …”[4]  Sure, shared principles assuage group efforts, but that concern is not expounded upon in what he describes.  As a matter of fact, Dalio then doubles down on principles being one’s personal thing by claiming they can be anything one wants as long as they reflect how one is constituted. 

The ultimate “sin” is for one to be phony.  And to solidify one’s commitment, one should write down what one’s principles are – apparently, writing them adds not only to one’s ability to remember, but to also upgrade the essence of the commitment to some sort of permanence.  If the point being made here is missed, Dalio reflects natural rights thinking and one cannot help noting his contextualizing his thoughts in heroic terms.

Now compare that approach to the principled commitment expressed by the early colonists and founders of the states.  Their development was not just an arbitrary way of doing things but reflected a strongly entrenched cultural expression.  This overarching cultural value perspective that they expound can be verified by the fact that covenants reoccur throughout the colonies among groups with little or no communication among themselves.[5]

From these constitutional commitments, the resulting governmental development adopted a matrix structure in their arrangements, i.e., a grid type of structure in which there are many cells that assume high levels of coordination, cooperation, and collaboration – and, oh yes, common values.  That is, it depends on the citizenry to be federated in which each cell is a different element of power.  This arrangement not only distributes the levels of control, but also multiplies the access points by which citizens can seek political satisfaction. 

Described in this manner, federalism becomes a central feature of the nation’s constitutional makeup.  It encompasses – and as time has elapsed, in more sophisticated fashion – the other, often cited principles of the nation’s constitution:  popular sovereignty, separation of power, and checks and balances.  Its centrality, though, is not one of merely definitional neatness, but one that maintains the cultural and historical richness of the founding experience. 

This posting ends with another Elazar quote:

The old covenants followed a recurring format or model: … an historical prologue indicating the parties involved, a preamble stating the general purposes of the covenant and the principles behind it, a body of conditions and operative clauses, a stipulation of the agreed-upon sanctions to be applied if the covenant were violated, and an oath to make the covenant morally binding.[6]

 

One can easily see that those who entered such agreements, and so bound themselves, were not making a passive commitment, but a moral one of central importance.

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[1] Daniel J. Elazar, “Federal Models of (Civil) Authority,” Journal of Church and State, 33, (Spring, 1991), 233-234.

[2] Ray Dalio, Principles:  Life and Work (New York, NY:  Simon and Schuster, 2017), loc. 60 (Kindle edition).

[3] Ibid., loc 78-88 (Kindle edition).

[4] Ibid., loc 88 (Kindle edition).  As a sub note, he adds:  “… and do that with humility and open-mindedness so that you consider the best thinking available to you.”  These latter qualities reflect a procedural concern for what is most utilitarian given human nature, not some concern for morality.

[5] See for example, Agreement between the Settlers at New Plymouth (Mayflower Compact), 1620, The Salem Covenant, 1629, The Watertown Covenant, 1630, Providence Agreement, 1637, Government of Pocasset, 1638, Fundamental Orders of Connecticut, 1639, Frame of Government of Pennsylvania, 1682, the Constitution of South Carolina, 1776, New York, 1777, and Massachusetts, 1780.  Each of these colonial and independent state documents follow the covenantal model of agreement.

[6] Elazar, “Federal Models of (Civil) Authority,” Journal of Church and State, 244.