JUDGING LIBERATED FEDERALISM, III

 

As of the last posting, this blog was highlighting the role that three mental domains have on decision making, i.e., the domains of the real, ideal, and physiological.  That view of decision making invites a more nuanced and complex basis by which to analyze that mental process.  That is, it is the product of more than immediate perceptions and recognized personal interests, where one engages in considerations that can be and often are quite complex. 

For instance, the choice to act in a certain way might not take place immediately before the act is done and, when the time comes, a change of heart might occur.  This might be a rare occurrence and it would usually be due to some kind of interference, such as a quick change in the situation, how one sees the situation, or an unexpected physical accident of some kind. 

What is important to the assumptions of the liberated federalism construct – what all this concern over decision making is about – is that decisions which result and reflect some ideal domain concern are as important in understanding political behavior as is the decision to act from what people see are the factual elements of a situation.[1]  As with many important aspects of life, political considerations usually carry complicating elements.

          Affecting people in that sort of situation includes several areas of concern.  For example, there has been a growing concern with morality associated with the decisions made by leaders.  First, these decisions will be highly influenced by the environment in which people find themselves.[2]  The natural rights perspective has a notion that individuals are predisposed to make these decisions based on their own analyses of the issues involved and how they affect the decision maker.  As it stands, this is a highly impractical position when the analysis is limited to those factors.

          Why?  For various reasons including the condition that before people understand the importance of making decisions along the lines of political values or social goals, they are inundated with value and goal messages with which they have grown up – their socialization.  These messaging experiences are usually presented by legitimate figures of authority (parents or teachers, for example) and, for the most part, accepted by individuals as “the way things are or should be” and often such “lessons” have staying power.[3]

          But beyond that, to think people are going to put in the time and effort to think of all the relevant factors they need to, in order to arrive at a coherent, logical, and usable decisions or, more generally, develop perspectives of politics or of social reality, irrespective of their immediate interests, is truly unrealistic.  A lot of the aforementioned messaging is stored in a mostly unconscious level of thinking.

Therefore, if the adult world, as presented by parents and teachers, does not provide a set of ideals and an overall construct of political realities (of sufficient complexity), other sources will do so to some extent.  Other sources could possibly include peer groups, in terms of political identification,[4] and mass media.[5]  Of course today there is the influence of social media which is often based on misinformation and salacious content.

          While these sources would not explicitly provide a construct about politics, they influence how people form their basic beliefs, views of reality, and their ideals that people form or accept concerning governance and politics.  That view today, as readily seen on the nightly news reports, would be an anti-intellectual, shallow, and inviable one[6] among significant if not the majority of citizens.  It would be a far cry from the federalist republicanism that characterized the beginnings of the nation.[7]

          Taking a closer look at the ideal domain and how it influences decisions, it contains those messages and desires in the form of values and goals.  They become conscious to people in the form of motivations.[8]  One can deduce from the evidence so far presented that individuals are apt to struggle within themselves as to what is the preferred priority among different desires, especially if conditions make certain optional decisions as mutually exclusive and the options represent different or even opposing desires.

          Choice might mean delaying, postponing, or canceling the quest for certain desires and delaying or eliminating choices that would offer more utility as judged by individuals, or which means fewer negative consequences as measured by standards established in the ideal domain.  Individuals might find real turmoil over deciding between or among challenging desires.  If decisions are made separately from pending realities, and there is a lack of urgency in relation to desired outcomes, then the situations allow more reflective thought.  As such, “thinking ahead” can be very beneficial.

          In less agitated circumstances – say during a classroom discussion – the choices may establish, in high priority areas of concern, more lasting commitments.  These commitments might, in turn, formulate or help develop for individuals the elements of an ideology.  Choices might reflect coherent ideal systems of values and goals.  If these choices are professed strongly by individuals, they, the choices, will be considered seriously in future action decisions.  Here, one can consider this opportunity as experienced in schools as one of schools’ main positive effects.

          These reflected choices can be affected by the socialization processes mentioned above, that people are exposed to, especially during their early years.  These are the years when one is taught the appropriate mores of one’s group.  This process is seen as inevitable.  The question is what set of values and goals people will be exposed to. And a second concern is what opportunities and encouragements they will receive in later life that prompt them to question these basic teachings, for active and engaged citizens should always be disposed to question their beliefs.

          And with that bit of reflection about what goes into decision making, especially those sessions involving decisions relating to governance or politics, that covers what this blogger wished to point out in relation to how federalist ideals and ideas should be treated in civics education.  Therefore, so much for decision making (for now); the next posting will review the main source of content for civics education, that being the discipline of political science.

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[1] For readers who did not read the last posting, the reference here is that decision making is very likely to be affected by assumptions the decider makes.  Those assumptions are readily made due to mental states the decider harbors.  To analyze this process, this blog has identified the three domains of thought which potentially come to bear on any decisions made.  Those domains are the real, the ideal, and the physiological.  For more information, see the last posting, “Judging Liberated Federalism, II.”

[2] Work on this concern for moral leadership has been growing since the early 1990s.  See for example “Moral Leadership:  Meaning, Characteristics and Examples,” Harappa, November 2, 2021, accessed June 14, 2023, https://harappa.education/harappa-diaries/moral-leadership/#:~:text=Maximize%20Growth-,What%20Is%20Moral%20Leadership%3F,ethical%20system%20and%20moral%20purpose. AND more in terms to the initial scholarship in this concept, Thomas J. Sergiovanni, Moral Leadership:  Getting to the Heart of School Improvement (San Francisco, CA:  Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1992).

[3] “Influences on Moral Development,” Lumen/Adolescent Psychology (n.d.), accessed June 14, 2023, https://courses.lumenlearning.com/adolescent/chapter/influences-on-moral-development/#:~:text=Moral%20development%20is%20strongly%20influenced,%2C%20emotions%2C%20and%20even%20neurodevelopment. AND C. S. Sunai, “Influence of the Home on Social Studies,” in Handbook of Research on Social Studies Teaching and Learning, edited by James P. Shaver (New York, NY:  MacMillan Publishing Company, 1991), 290-299.

[4] Camila F. S. Campos, Shaun Hargreaves Heap, Fernanda Leite Lopez de Leon, “The Political Influence of Peer Groups:  Experimental Evidence in the Classroom,” Oxford Economic Papers, 69, 4 (October 2017), accessed June 14, 2023, https://academic.oup.com/oep/article/69/4/963/2737463.

[5] Daniel Bergan, Alan Gerber, Dean Karlan, “Effect of Media on Voting Behavior and Political Opinions in the United States,” Innovations for Poverty Action (n.d.), accessed June 14, 2023, https://poverty-action.org/node/6406/pdf.

[6] “Public Highly Critical of State of Political Discourse in the U.S.” Pew Research Center (June 19, 2019), accessed June 14, 2023, https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2019/06/19/public-highly-critical-of-state-of-political-discourse-in-the-u-s/.

[7] Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic 1776-1787 (New York, NY: W. W. Norton and Company, 1998).

[8] Sergiovanni, Moral Leadership.