THE NATURAL RIGHTS VIEW APPLIED

There are various versions of the natural rights perspective, but this blog has focused on the original version attributed to the philosophy of John Locke, how that version was interpreted in America during the time of the writing of the US Constitution in 1787, and the contemporary version which is noted for its lack of substantive normative elements. 

Locke wrote of the moral superiority of hard work as he rallied readers to oppose the privileged position of the nobility in Britain of the late 1600s – a group called the “no ability” by Thomas Paine.  Today’s version simply holds that valuing hard work is up to the individual to accept or reject.

Of course, the later version is what has become dominant in how the nation defines its politics and many of its social views.  If one accepts this description, one can readily imagine how deduced and associated values affect relations between and among people from family situations to boardroom discussions.  This blog used a plot line from a show, Men of a Certain Age,[1] to illustrate how natural rights thinking prevails as a family deals with a common issue.

The plot begins when the main character, a divorced father who has custody of his teenaged daughter, comes home unexpectedly to find her in a compromising position with her boyfriend.  A vibrant “conversation” ensues between the father and the daughter and among the topics that pop up is individual rights.  By engaging in this discussion, father and daughter demonstrate how politically defined principles affect domestic, homebound concerns.

          If one shifts one’s attention from family situations to the economy, the influence is more direct.  Capitalist or free market approach to economics is morally based on natural rights arguments, demonstrating how the natural rights perspective is actualized in this very important institution. 

Perhaps these moral elements do not become more passionately expressed than when the economy is in duress as it was in 2008, highlighting many of the moral issues in which defenders and opponents of this view debated what should be done or not done.  The prospect of losing millions of jobs in a relatively short amount of time will make any person review and reevaluate what he/she believes is good and evil.

One cannot deny the enormous wealth that capitalist/free market economies have been able to create.  The attributes of free market allow people to overcome the obstacles that keep them economically constrained.  They embolden people to actively seek and discover what their interests are and find ways to advance them.

Despite exploitive conditions that early factory workers or miners sustained, over the longer term, more people benefited by instituting free markets in the industrial age.  Why?  Because in a capitalist economy each person looks after his or her own interests by the means he or she chooses to pursue.  When so engaged, in a system of competition, a person is motivated to act productively and efficiently to maximize his/her interests.  Accumulatively, the interests of the greater society are also advanced – at least most of the time.

Where a liberty-based morality holds, as is the case with a free market society, a people will tend to prohibit attempts to interfere with the workings of such a system – even when the economy is in danger of collapse as it was in ’08.  Defenders of free market system might be motivated to exert such a prohibition for financial reasons, but many do so for moral reasons as well. 

Among its defenders, there are those – the purists – who argue for unrestrained markets.  For example, there are libertarians who claim that an integral aspect of capitalist systems is the tenet that individuals who have the freedom to make their own choices should be held accountable for those choices.  When government bails out those who have freely chosen to pursue counterproductive options, it promotes the entailed “foolishness” and all the counterproductive consequences such behaviors produce.  This is immoral in their estimations.

But not all defenders of free markets agree.  There are those who might consider themselves as moderates.  Usually, moderates see a role for government in free market economies.  They might even see that role as moral as when the government bailed out certain segments of the economy in 2008 such as the banks and the auto industry.  Without government action, the economy would have probably collapsed into a world depression causing untold human misery.  For them, such a turn would have been immoral.

Therefore, such a governmental role was considered justified – if not the particulars of what was done in ’08 – by most of the populous.  The qualifier is, to see such interference as legitimate, a person needs to compromise pure natural rights values, at least as they are currently defined.  In a free market society, though, the burden to justify such government interference lies with those who propose it.

To summarize, purists, those who abide by uncompromised natural rights beliefs – i.e. in a belief in unfettered individualism and free markets – approach a near hands-off posture by government.  They oppose most governmental programs such as Social Security.  This bias is so ingrained that people such as libertarians see interference by government as immoral.

On the other hand, those who basically agree that people should be left to their own devices in identifying and seeking their interests and believe people should be able to own and control property such as businesses, also believe government is there to help with those cases in which either the individual or the economy fails.  They tolerate some restraints and, beyond that, government programs that help those who might find themselves at a level of destitution.  After all, given the vicissitudes of life, anyone can be so afflicted.   

It is over these diverse views that much of the nation’s political debates occur.  That is, most political disagreements revolve around how strongly citizens hold natural rights values.  Currently, the debate over healthcare reflects how purists and moderates are pitted against each other.  

Those who are purer in their natural rights beliefs are considered conservative voters[2] and those who see a place for economic restraints, socialist programs such as Social Security and welfare programs, are considered liberals (albeit, the term liberal is somewhat confusing in that natural rights beliefs are based on classical liberal philosophy) or progressives.  To see this division at play, one need only watch the evening news.

---

[1] Mike Royce and Ray Romano, Men of a Certain Age, Ray Romano (2009; Hollywood, CA:  TNT) television series.

[2] Conservatism is not limited to this standard.  Social conservatives – those who tend to be pro-religion – are also considered conservative voters and might even disagree with economic conservatives about how anti-government they are in relation to economic activity. 

INTRODUCING THE NATURAL RIGHTS CONSTRUCT

As a people, Americans have had a history of entertaining various political ideations.  This can be stated even when America was no more than a string of early settlements up and down the Atlantic seaboard.  Yet, for most of the time Americans have inhabited this continent, the federalist view of governance was prominent.  This is no longer the case, but from the earliest years until the end of World War II, this dominance was in place.

That means that federalist ideas and ideals had more influence in forming the nation’s constitutional principles than any other set of ideas.  This is the case not only in forming our national government, but also in forming all our state governments.  This blog has and will review the development of these principles and how they were challenged by other perspectives, none more so than the natural rights construct. 

A lot of current references to federalism cite how one is either in favor of a power being vested at the state level or at the national level.  This is not incorrect, but it is a bit misleading.  When one thinks of federalism, one should not forget the root of the word.  To federate means to form with another person or group a strong union in which the interests between or among the parties are in a congruent relationship; to advance one’s interests is to advance the other’s or others’ interests.  Or, in other words, to federate is to create a binding partnership.

The tie-in which refers to the vying powers between levels of government is derived from the fact that in creating the national union, the states, along with the people, came together to formulate a national partnership.  This was a natural development from the way settlements, regions, and then the states themselves were formulated.  All of this has been described and explained in previous postings.

So, as the events that led to the nation’s independence and then, some years later, the formulation of the nation’s compact – the US Constitution – the strident issue was which level of government was going to dictate policy in the governance of everyday life.  Therefore, most of the historical accounts of the late eighteenth century emphasize the arguments between those leaders who promoted a stronger central government and those who wanted to keep as much power in the states as was possible. 

While this not only became the main political debate of that time, it also established the language by which to discuss federalism until the present day.  But there was another disagreement taking hold. From England, a newer mental construct gained popularity on American soil.  That construct was the original version of the natural rights perspective.  It had its beginnings during the late 1600s and, about 100 years later, became notable and influential in America. 

It was the years between the writing of the Declaration of Independence and the writing of the US Constitution and its ratifying process (the late 1700s) that this British import took on notoriety among politically involved Americans.  It would pose the first meaningful challenge to the dominance of federalist thought.

The natural rights’ ideas and ideals first took form from the pen of the philosopher, John Locke.  To this day, there is a lack of agreement among historians about how influential this initial form of the construct was on this side of the pond.  This is of concern to this blog because a good deal of its overall presentation is based on the claim that our political culture evolved more from traditional federalism than from the natural rights perspective.

More specifically, not all historians agree with this level of federalist commitment on the part of the founders.[1]  The question revolves around how much influence John Locke had at the time of the Constitutional Convention in 1787.  What is important to remember is that what Locke argued is not what constitutes the natural rights view today.  That perspective has changed significantly from early years.

Back in the late 1600s, the impetus of those who agreed with Locke in Britain was to begin representing the political and cultural aims of the merchant and budding industrial class which was becoming more influential due to its growing successes.  There, Locke’s ideas threatened the interests of the entrenched landed (country) interests of the lingering nobility, which included the inherited positions in Parliament that were granted representatives of that class. 

There is no direct application of Locke’s ideas in America.  In America, Locke’s writings gained popularity in a different environment.  Initially, these ideas were more subdued and they appealed to a different constituent.  The most obvious difference was the lack of a favored nobility in America.  In addition, natural rights’ arguments spread slowly among the populous.

The fight here was one of pitting the interests of country (rural areas) interests of hard-working farmers against those of the towns.  The fear among America’s yeoman farmers was about how large the financial, mercantile, and embryonic industrial businesses should be.  Were they going to run roughshod over yeoman farmers?  It was these farmers who found Locke’s ideas appealing.  It was the country faction in America that first saw value in this more individualistic perspective.

Today, there are some historians who maintain that Locke’s influence was stronger than what is claimed in this blog.  Among those historians who support the stronger influence by Locke and those who took up the natural rights argument is the recognition that with our constitutional development there was the origin of a constitutionalism.

This development provides for a principled, systemic manner by which to stem the power of lawmaking bodies, be they Parliament, Congress, or any state legislature.  The principle is that the individual (and localities) have rights beyond the reach of legislatures.  One can argue that this principle had a meaningful effect during the years when the 1787 constitution was written, proposed, ratified and during the development and ratification of the Bill of Rights. 

This central idea was considered a radicalism that Locke’s writings introduced.  It was a passionate position held by its advocates that promoted a newfound sense of liberty, entitlement, and individual integrity.  While it affected British politics, it took on legal status in the US.  The timing for this development coincided with the new constitution in 1787.  It affected the ensuing arguments of the time.

This was one of the concerns that led to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia – of Philadelphia Freedom fame.  In addition, one of the main compromises between the Anti-federalists and Federalists[2] was this constitutional provision by which to address abuses by legislative bodies.  Thereafter, this principle was codified with the ratification of the Bill of Rights – the first ten amendments to the Constitution.  

But was this sense, the notion that individual rights could trump legislative enactments, accepted in either the political culture or in the courts?  It took the courts until the twentieth century to apply this protection of individual rights in any institutional way.  Until then, legislative supremacy, as an expression of republican ideals, was the standard by which courts treated this notion of individual rights.

Often, that established legal approach was used to undermine individual initiatives, such as when courts regularly upheld local ordinances over individual claims.[3]  Even with the upshot of this radicalism, the framers of the constitution were more concerned with how to structurally define the way the people would assume control through representation and majority rule.  

But that is not to say that limiting lawmaking bodies, keeping them from abusing rights and liberties of the individual, was not a concern.  It can best be considered a newer ideal that was amplified in significant ways during those early years.  One way to think of this development is to see it as an ideal:  government has no authority to disregard or trample basic individual rights.  The ideal would now be more firmly established, at least in the writing of these documents if not always in the actions of applied government policy.

[1] Isaac Kramnick, “John Locke and Liberal Constitutionalism I,” in Major Problems in American Constitutional History, Volume I:  The Colonial Era Through Reconstruction, ed. Kermit L. Hall (Lexington, MA:  D. C. Heath and Company, 1992), 97-114. 

[2] To remind the reader, Anti-federalists were for a weak central government and strong state governments and Federalists wanted a strong central government.

[3] Even after the Civil War and the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment, the Slaughterhouse decisions upheld local ordinances that protected New Orleans’ establishment of slaughterhouse monopoly at the expense of competing butchers.  This case illustrates the bias toward representative, law-making bodies over individual citizens.

TRUMP THIS

At times, one wants to figure out in a meaningful way why a person acts as he/she does – it’s important to know.  Usually, in such cases, one is not considering reflexive behavior as when a person instinctively ducks an approaching object.  As one digs deeper into the question, one will eventually be led to what that person considers is good or bad.  That is, the ultimate reason for behavior is a normative concern. 

If one is inquiring about a serious behavior, a behavior that affects others in a consequential way, the good and bad character takes on a moral quality.  And finally, if the behavior relates to a power relationship, then one is dealing with a political situation.  As such, there is a civics education connection.

The claim being made in this and following postings – and hopefully sufficiently backed with scholarly findings – is that the nation’s efforts at teaching civics is guided by a political construct.  That construct is called the natural rights construct.  As with any political construct, this one has a narrative representation of what politics is and what politics should be.  This posting addresses the latter, the ideal.

Given this moral character, one is well served in understanding a political construct by beginning with that construct’s ideal, its values or what it considers morally good and bad.  Such an understanding provides a reason for all the construct’s elements, why it believes what it claims to be real or of normative value.  This type of understanding contextualizes the rest of its attributes.

The natural rights construct is not the only construct that bids for the nation’s commitment.  There are others and the natural rights view has not always been the dominant one – a topic for another posting.  There are various issues over which this competition for the nation’s commitment is conducted.  One such issue has been central in America’s constitutional history.

That is, the tension is over which of the following values should be given priority:  liberty or equality.  This has been a recurring issue in the political arguments among Western thinkers and politicians.  More specifically, the debate is one that pits a value for individualism against a value for community.  Liberty represents a commitment to individualism while equality is associated more with community. 

Faced with a question regarding why someone acts politically as he/she does, often at the heart of any such motivation has something to do with what that person believes is more important:  the interest(s) of an individual or the interest(s) of some community or other collective. 

Usually, that sort of inquiry into a social event or condition is looking at a disagreement between or among parties that doesn’t agree about which is more important.  What adds to the difficulty is that participants, with their own sense of which is more important, discuss the issue as if there is agreement on this foundational question.  This usually leads not to collaboration, but to the parties arguing past each other.  

But the central moral question, too often unspoken, relates to:  when reality or policy strives to advance or protect liberty at the expense of equality, or vice versa, which of these ideals is a person willing to sacrifice or minimize to bolster the other?  With President Trump’s just issued budget, a lot of the contention over its provisions is regarding this very choice.  Yet the debate in the media and even on the floor of Congress will not speak to this very question. 

Of course, the advocates do not hold the value of liberty or equality equally, In terms of the biases of natural rights’ adherents, those who are well ensconced in its value structure, liberty is that person’s political trump value; it anchors his/her civic morality.  This does not mean he/she totally abandons equality, necessarily, but its importance is less than the importance of liberty.  As such, he/she values the classical tenets of liberal political thought. 

Fundamentally, liberal thought claims that a person should be free to form and hold his/her own self-defined values and goals in life accompanied with the freedom to pursue those values and goals.  Per John Locke's standard, the right to seek one's value choices is constrained only by the rights of others to do the same.  This principle of a person to be such a free agent has been given a title:  individual sovereignty.[1]  Or as John Locke proclaimed:  “every man [or woman] has a Property in his [her] own Person.”[2] 

Of course, Americans generally agree with such a value.  They generally believe in it and even cherish it.  But is that devotion a trump value in the value structure of a citizen?  In terms of an individual citizen, is liberty his/her trump civic value? 

The question is to what extent is this value held?  For those who do believe liberty to be the trump value, they tend to see government's ultimate function, even its only function, is to insure this ideal of liberty.  They see that the aim of governmental policy should be to ultimately secure individual sovereignty with the least amount of coercion possible.  And any challenge to liberty, as just defined, is naturally of the highest importance. 

The more devoted advocates – the ideologues – apply this priority in defining or evaluating how moral a person is when considering this other person’s civic behavior.  This view is not limited to considerations about public policy, but is cast on the efforts of civics curriculum developers and implementers.  They extend natural rights beliefs to the freedom of students to develop for themselves any set of moral beliefs they deem appropriate if such beliefs do not trump liberty as just defined.  By applying this moral perspective to a civics curriculum, of course, places individual rights as prominent in what is taught.[3] 

Thus, the student is free to adhere to Christian, Judaic, Islamic, secular humanistic, or any other moral set of beliefs if he/she is not forced to do so.  This includes the freedom to follow them in his/her practices if he/she does not interfere with others also doing the same.

Consequently, under these parameters, all other reasonable moral claims have equal validity.  In other words, the natural rights’ moral position is neutral to the clear majority of moral questions.  Or so it logically claims. 

As mentioned above, the natural rights view became dominant in the American political culture.  This was not always the case.  As has been explained in this blog, it began to become the dominant view of government and politics in the years immediately after World War II.

What the nation has experienced in the years since World War II is an ever-increasing individualistic view of morality in general and, more specifically, in its political ideals.  One can detect this bias across the policies of the various social institutions such as schools, churches, and businesses. 

This newer dominance has become part of the nation’s collective consciousness to the point that it no longer is that conscious; it is just the way things are and need to be in the minds of most of the nation’s populous.  How this became the case is an interesting history.  One can readily see this transition by watching featured films from the various years, before and after World War II, on, for example, Turner Classic Movies network.

But before delving into how this perspective affects current political thought, it is useful to capture a sense of how the natural rights construct was introduced into American political thinking.  This will be a topic of subsequent postings.

---

[1] Jeffrey Reiman, “Liberalism and Its Critics,” in Delaney The Liberalism-Communitarism Debate, ed. C. F. Delaney (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 1994), 19-38.

[2] Meir Dan-Cohen, Harmful Thoughts: Essays on Law, Self, and Morality (Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press, 2002), 296.

[3] Space prohibits a full accounting of this aspect.  Within the ranks of natural rights adherents are believers known as libertarians or followers of such popularized philosophies such as those of Ayn Rand’s objectivism.  Yet, there are other adherents who accommodate more altruistic beliefs and the philosophic ideas of such writers as John Rawls.

A DIVIDED FIELD

The less than optimal conditions described in the series of postings that preceded this one might solicit on the part of the reader a desire for change.  At least, that was the intent of the writer in posting them.  A less then optimal citizenry strikes at one’s sense of patriotism.  It is the intent here to direct that desire towards the nation’s civics curriculum. 

In one way or another, each of the conditions[1] described could be either eliminated or significantly ameliorated if our schools did a better job of teaching their civic lessons.  But when one looks at the condition of civics education, one finds a divided field of educators.  This is part of the problem. 

That portion of the curriculum that mostly deals with addressing the problems outlined in those postings is civics and social studies education.  And what is the state of social studies?  Ronald W. Evans, in his influential book, The Social Studies War:  What Should We Teach the Children?[2] gives an account of the history of social studies during the twentieth century.

His account is a look at the health of social studies.  As the book’s title indicates, things could be better.  That account outlines a debate that roughly pits the views of academics in the field against the views of those who man the nation’s school districts.  As stated in that book, the chasm is not so definite as it is generally experienced; that is, its specific focus has a great deal of overlap.  Here is what that means.

More specifically, the disagreement depicted is between those educators who promote the progressive view of education – open instructional strategies that have students formulate and defend their positions on controversial issues – and those who are aligned with essentialist ideals of promoting American cultural traits and attributes and the instructional biases that promote exposition and demonstration.  The overlap exists in that some teachers borrow from both positions.

The ongoing discussion, though, within social studies, usually takes one form or another of this very division.  But to begin this presentation of this complex debate which is the purpose of this posting and the postings to follow, Evans’ work is a good place to start.

While his book is of significant worth and is related to what this blog will reveal, it does not sufficiently and directly focus its analysis on the debate on which view of government and politics should dictate the content of civics and social studies in the nation’s classrooms. 

Evans’ book introduces the reader to one side of the ongoing debate, the critical theory view and how that construct bolsters multiculturalism.  And the book presents the challenges to such pluralism by describing and explaining the popularity of native culturalism that bolsters an Anglo tradition. 

That latter view is featured in such works as Cultural Literacy by E. D. Hirsch.[3]  Hirsch is concerned with the lack of basic knowledge he observes among students and how that deficiency stifles their efforts to understand US historical developments.

But the real debate within social studies and civics is not so much between multiculturalism and native culturalism as between two constructs:  the natural rights construct and the critical theory construct.  Specifically, the question is:  upon which construct, natural rights or critical theory, should the content of civics and social studies be based?

Evans’ work does not directly address this question; his aim is to highlight the concern about how social studies should bolster either the nation’s pluralism or its traditional, Anglo-based values.  But underlying Evans’ and Hirsch’s works is the assumption that the more basic debate, that of the two constructs – natural rights and critical theory – represents the only choices available.

This assumption is the product of what social studies educators are exposed to:  the official view of the establishment, the natural rights view, and that of most academics, the critical theory view.  This blog’s treatment of the debate makes no such assumption.

Instead, it expands the debate to include a third construct.  That is, there is another view, one that has a rich historical heritage within the minds of Americans and one that still today has an influence on how the nation’s citizenry thinks and feels about government, politics, and social relationships.  As readers of this blog know, that’s federation theory.

This blog has and will continue to weave a narrative that, in part, shares overall descriptions of each construct.  This will be further developed in subsequent postings with the formulation and rationale for the use of the federalist construct.  This blog will do that by further conveying its historical version, traditional federalism, and a more current version, liberated federalism.

The purpose of this posting and those that follow, is for the reader to consider how each construct identifies the following:  the sense of morality that motivates an adherent of any of these constructs to harbor the beliefs he or she holds; the view of government and politics each construct describes and explains; and the construct’s advocated views on citizens contributing to the common good.

---

[1] The conditions for those who didn’t read that series of posting is:  low levels of government/political knowledge, low levels of political engagement, low levels of political skills, low levels of civility, and high levels of criminal behavior.

[2] Ronald W. Evans, The Social Studies Wars:  What Should We Teach Our Children?  (New York, NY:  Teachers College Press, 2004).

[3] E. D. Hirsch, Jr., Cultural Literacy:  What Every American Needs to Know (New York, NY:  Houghton Mifflin Company, 1987).

A MEASURE OF EFFECTIVENESS: RATES OF CRIMINALITY

Early in the history of this blog, this writer provided a reason or set of reasons for the existence of this blog; that is, the state of civic life in this country is deficient and one area with which to address this less than optimal state is civics education.  Since then, one can justifiably ask:  have those conditions been rectified?

Currently, this blog is providing more recent evidence of how civic the citizenry is today.  Leading up to this posting, the blog has looked at levels of knowledge of government and politics, levels of political engagement, levels of skills in that engagement, and levels of civility.  Unfortunately, the same overall evaluation can still be made; as a matter of fact, things have gotten worse.

In this posting, this update will come to an end.  There is one more area of concern this whole issue of good citizenry should address:  levels of law abiding behavior or, stated negatively, levels of criminality.  A responsible civics program should reasonably instruct students to be law-abiding citizens, or so common sense would indicate. A general axiom guiding such instruction should be:  a citizen should obey the law.

After all, one chief constitutional principle in the US is justice under the rule of law.  Also, within this approach there should be the effort to encourage a disposition toward obeying the law.  Yes, one should engage in determining what laws should be passed by the nation’s legislatures – from Congress to the city council – but, once passed, the laws should be obeyed. 

One can cite instances when it is good and just to engage in civil disobedience on rare occasions, but even then, such acts need to be justified and the participants willing to accept the consequences of those acts, including jail time.  Of course, the history of the civil rights movement and perhaps the protests of the Vietnam War come to mind when one considers justified civil disobedience, at least in the minds of many who favored those movements.  But other than those kinds of examples, one should obey the law.

Under normal conditions, why anyone would disobey the law can be complicated.  Reasons can range from the level of severity of the offense (e. g., speeding on an expressway might not be considered criminal behavior) to the economic realities in which an offender might find him/herself.  Regardless of these intervening factors, the general principle should be:  obey the law.

But with any kind of factor one might think acceptable, one should remember that these conditions generally exist everywhere.  Poverty in many places much more extreme than here, exists everywhere.  Mental illness exists everywhere.  Dysfunctional families exist everywhere, and so on ...

Therefore, if we look at comparative statistics about lawlessness among countries, the information should give us at least a sense of how well this nation’s populous lives by the axiom:  one should obey the law.  In turn, the information should also give us another measure of how well civics education is fulfilling its aims and functions.

To start, the US has over 7.3 million people in its prisons.  With 5% of the world's population, it has 25% of the world's prison population.[1]  Comparing the US to another nation which shares many of the same values, the United Kingdom has 150 out of 100,000 people in prison.  The US has 686 out of 100,000 people detained.[2] 

While many factors contribute to any comparison, such as a government's ability to prosecute its laws or over prosecution and punishment for minor crimes – e. g., drug related prosecution – the US does not fare well in comparisons regarding criminality.

But one might point out, as the media has done recently, that a lot of this incarceration in the US is the result of over-zealous laws concerning drugs.  And one good bit of information on this front is a lowering crime rate in more recent years.  For example, the rate of victims per 1,000 population has dropped in the US from 51.7 in 1979 to 15 in 2010.[3]  Yet before we celebrate, there are other relevant numbers. 

Another statistical site offers the following:  total number of persons brought into formal contact with the police and/or criminal justice system, for all crimes in 2011 (top ten nations)

United States         12,408,899 with a population of 322 million (38.58 per 1,000)

Germany     2,112,843 with a population of 81 million (26.08 per 1,000)

France                   1,172,547 with a population of 67 million (17.5 per 1,000)

Russian Fed.         1,041,340 with a population of 147 million (7.08 per 1,000)

Italy            900,870 with a population of 61 million (14.77 per 1,000)

Canada                 688,920 with a population of 36 million (19.14 per 1,000)

Chile           611,322 with a population of 18 million (33.96 per 1,000)

Poland                  521,942 with a population of 38 million (13.74 per 1,000)

Spain          377,965 with a population of 46 million (8.22 per 1,000)

Netherlands 372,305 with a population of 17 million (21.9 per 1,000)[4]

Obviously, the US does not do well in this comparison.  Whether a nation is ruled by a liberal regime as opposed to an authoritarian regime is relevant to how levels of criminality are measured.  So, while these other countries might or might not have as extensive a list of drug laws, the US beats them all in terms of its crime rate.

The closest country is Chile.  Chile, as a Latin country, has a culture, described by Daniel Elazar, as one that harbors an anarchistic individualism.[5]  This blog has argued that the US started out with a more federalist sense of individualism; one that “recognized the subtle bonds of partnership linking individuals even as they preserve their individual integrities... .”[6]  It has, in more recent years, abandoned its more federalist roots (a process that has been described in this blog).  These numbers are but one indicator of how far that shift has made itself known.

To be clear, this description is not speaking of a dystopian image of lawlessness.  As a matter of fact, the nation has experienced in the last decade a drastic drop in crime rates.  Paul Krugman writes:

The murder rate began falling, and falling, and falling. By 2014 it was all the way back down to where it was half a century earlier. There was some rise in 2015, but so far, at least, it’s barely a blip in the long-run picture.

Basically, American cities are as safe as they’ve ever been. Nobody is completely sure why crime has plunged, but the point is that the nightmare landscape of [current – 2016 – political] rhetoric … bears no resemblance to reality.

And we’re not just talking about statistics here; we’re also talking about lived experience. Fear of crime hasn’t disappeared from American life — today’s New York is incredibly safe by historical standards, yet I still wouldn’t walk around some areas at 3 a.m. But fear clearly plays a much diminished role now in daily life.[7]

          This account of current conditions as compared to past conditions sounded to this writer as curious given the family stories he heard about how law abiding people were in the good old days.  He checked past crime rates.  This is what he found:

Changes in the overall incidence of crime are most often measured by examining the index crime rate, which includes the reported crimes of murder/nonnegligent manslaughter, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny, and motor vehicle theft. The reported crime rate was fairly level during the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, before sharply increasing until the early 1970s. … The United States is currently in the midst of the longest period of decline over the entire period shown [1960 to c. 2000], with a 1998 crime rate of 4,615 per 100,000 population, the lowest since 1973, when the rate was 4,155.[8]

The rate during the period between 1933 and 1958 was under 1,000 per 100,000, a fraction of what it has been since 1973, which was over 4,000 per 100,000 population.  The crime rate in 2014, according to FBI statistics, was 2,596 per 100,000.[9]  So in this, the old days were good.

In this blog, a point has been made about how qualitatively different our pre- and post-World War II years have been.  As pointed out, the nation experienced a change in the dominant political construct by which the citizenry sees government and politics.  This crime rate change is but one indicator that this claimed change in political orientation and the nation’s sense of rights has been real.

And as for over-zealous policy in terms of drugs, it is known that other crimes are downplayed.  Currently, the nation is being told of how many under-reported and under-addressed cases of abuse against women and to a lesser degree men there are in the military and on college campuses.  Whether such incidents outnumber cases of long prison sentences for drug crimes is unknowable.  But no one is claiming that people in the nation are readily going to jail and prison for legal behaviors.

Before leaving this issue of criminality and incivility, the incidents of racism and anti-Semitism should be mentioned.  These two examples of less than ideal attitudes or respect for fellow citizens has had an ugly history in the US.  They deserve more comment than what is given here.  The nation has made significant advances in eliminating these dispositions, but – and this particularly refers to racism – there are still elements of them that lead to tragic results.[10] 

In 2015 and 2016, the nation witnessed incidents in which unarmed African-American suspects were shot and/or killed by law enforcement agents under highly questionable circumstances.  There was a mass killing by a young man in a church where multiple victims were senselessly shot for apparently racial reasons.  While most Americans do not engage in such behaviors and most overt racist acts do not occur in everyday life, the level of occurrence and their antisocial qualities indicate that below the surface, many Americans do harbor racist beliefs and values. 

Such cases are complex and controversial, but the number of cases cannot avoid being a source of supportive evidence for the conclusion that racist attitudes exist among the populous.  In most cases, when such attitudes are expressed in overt behavior, laws are broken. This needs to be addressed in our civics classrooms.

One can assume that they are addressed in most classrooms, but such efforts need to be contextualized as offenses to a general moral regime in which citizens are defined as being tied together under a value commitment to egalitarian standards.  While a natural rights view is logically opposed to such prejudicial behaviors, its application with its bias toward everyone doing his/her own thing, lends to an atmosphere that tolerates such attitudes.

---

[1] “Record Prison Population,” CNN, March 2, 2009, accessed March 10, 2017, http://www.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/03/02/record.prison.population/.

[2] Roy Walmsley, “United Kingdom Report,” Home Office, UK Government, Walmsley, accessed October 19, 2016, https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/prison-population-statistics .

[3] Gallup, “Americans Believe Crime Worsening,” Google Search, no date, accessed March 10, 2017, https://www.google.com/search?q=crime+rates+in+US+over+time&espv=2&biw=1093&bih=514&tbm=isch&imgil=P4g2P-obB-jlRM%253A%253BcPni19546Kal8M%253Bhttp%25253A%25252F%25252Fwww.gallup.com%25252Fpoll%25252F150464%25252Famericans-believe-crime-worsening.aspx&source=iu&pf=m&fir=P4g2P-obB-jlRM%253A%252CcPni19546Kal8M%252C_&usg=__zxIEm18APlIHiED8D3gsYadxZL4%3D&ved=0CCcQyjdqFQoTCJeJut67-ccCFcY8PgodmAwJGA&ei=NUj4VdeaD8b5-AGYmaTAAQ#imgrc=P4g2P-obB-jlRM%3A&usg=__zxIEm18APlIHiED8D3gsYadxZL4%3D .

[4] “Top Ten Countries with Highest Reported Crime Rates,” Maps of the World, no date, accessed March 10, 2017, www.mapsofworld.com/world-top-ten/countries-with-highest-reported-crime-rates.html .

[5] Daniel J. Elazar, “How Federal Is the Constitution?  Thoroughly” Readings for Classes Taught by Professor Elazar (presentation materials, prepared for a National Endowment for the Humanities Institute,  Steamboat Springs, Colorado, 1994).

[6] Ibid., 10-11.

[7] Paul Krugman, “No, Donald Trump, America Isn’t a Hellhole,” New York Times, Aug 26, 2016, accessed March 10, 2017,  http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/26/opinion/no-donald-trump-america-isnt-a-hellhole.html?_r=0 .

[8] “Introduction to Historical Data,” Justice Research and Statistics Association (JRSA), 2000, accessed March 10, 2017, http://www.jrsa.org/projects/Historical.pdf .

[9] “FBI Releases 2014 Crime Statistics,” Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), September 28, 2015, accessed March 10, 2017, https://www.fbi.gov/news/pressrel/press-releases/fbi-releases-2014-crime-statistics .

[10] In the “after glow” of the 2016 presidential election, there has been an uptick in very observable incidents of anti-Semitic cases.  Most noted have been the desecration of Jewish cemeteries.

COLLATERAL DAMAGE TO COLLABORATIVE QUALITIES

This blog, of late, has been reviewing the effectiveness of our civics education programs across the nation, not by looking at test results but by looking at the actual state of the nation’s citizenry.  This look is based on the standard suggested by Robert Putnam’s use of the concept, social capital.[1]  To remind the reader, Putnam defines social capital as a societal quality characterized by having an active, public-spirited citizenry, egalitarian political relations, and a social environment of trust and cooperation.  Therefore, a good citizenry is one that exhibits certain attributes.

          These attributes include a citizenry with high levels of political knowledge, high levels of political engagement, a disposition to being politically engaged, high levels of civility, and low levels of criminality.  To date, the blog has reviewed the state of knowledge, engagement, and civility.  The next posting will look at criminality.  In short, by this method of evaluation, civics education has not been doing a good job.  Yes, there are bits of evidence that indicate otherwise, but overall, Americans do not exhibit satisfying levels of these attributes.

          In the opinion of this writer, this is a good place to insert an important factor.  That is, these attributes do influence the economic disposition of citizens and, in turn, affect their politics and governance, particularly when the nation is a democracy.  Putnam's idea does refer to people looking at their society as something greater than their immediate interests and ambitions.  The question arises:  how do insufficient levels of these attributes affect economic, political, and governing aims, goals, and behaviors.

In short, in accordance with the values entailed with social capital, good citizens are willing to seek supportive qualities – a willingness to help each other – in themselves and in their associations and community.  The antitheses would be narcissism and selfishness.  Of course, people are entitled to pursue their individual goals and interests.  The question is:  how do they balance the demands of their own ambitions and those of the collectives to which they belong? 

There are social philosophies that equate the two.  For example, pure market values tend to do that.  Adam Smith, who to many is the father of capitalism, argued that the greater good is achieved by individuals pursuing their individual interests.  The cooperation entailed in providing a wanted good or service within the context of a competitive market, through the “invisible hand,” produces the best results for society. 

While capitalism has provided untold wealth and prosperity, markets do fail and at times will, if unchecked, lead to social detriment.  Jean M. Twenge and W. Keith Campbell present a convincing argument, backed by statistical evidence, about how excessive narcissism and its manifestations were central in creating the conditions that led to the economic crisis back in 2008. 

An irrational degree of self-enhancement promoted the excessive materialism and its accompanying debt, which resulted from buying houses beyond people's means to running up credit card charges which placed people in unsustainable positions.  Of course, lending institutions, run by equally narcissistic or purely self-centered motives, fed this monumental irresponsibility.[2]

There has been a lot of ink used by economic experts who trace these reckless developments back to the 1980s.  This includes an enormous shift of wealth to the upper classes.  To cite an article in the New York Times, quoting experts Jacob Hacker of Yale and Paul Pierson of Berkeley:  “Over the last generation more and more of the rewards of growth have gone to the rich and superrich.  The rest of America, from the poor through the upper middle class, has fallen further and further behind.”[3] 

This inordinate level of income and wealth to the upper class needs to be invested, while otherwise productive economic activity is hampered by a diminishing ability of the low and middle classes to consume.  Two results occur:  one, the excess money (capital) in the hands of the upper class becomes fodder for developing “bubbles;” i.e., investments that heighten asset prices such as stocks and real estate when the fundamental economic conditions do not justify their increases.

And two, the lower classes engage in excessive borrowing to make up for the lost wealth and income (to maintain their standards of living).  There were also leveraged investment schemes in which borrowing was collateralized by assets attained with borrowed money.  Another flow of capital made its way to financing productive facilities in foreign countries offering cheap labor.  In these cases, we have a lack of investment to generate sufficient middle class employment in this country.  Hence, we have a diminishing middle class. 

The bubble effect and the excessive leveraging just described were conditions that also preceded the Great Depression of the 1930s.  But before it is determined that what has happened to the economy mirrored the conditions of the '30s, one needs to understand that the nation is situated presently in a much more complex world economy. 

It seems the economy has avoided the catastrophes of the Great Depression, but the pain associated with the Great Recession has been real and still lingers in certain segments of the economy.  According to many commentators, the associated conditions had a significant effect on the results of the 2016 presidential elections.  As was stated above, conditions are getting better, but the effects of the Great Recession are still being felt.

Whether this short description is correct or not, the nation did see in the pre-collapse period an excessive narcissism based on assumptions created by the faulty economy.  The people spent way over what they were earning (by borrowing on the artificially inflated equity in their houses) for a long time.  That time ran out.

Again, the concept of social capital is relevant since this idea refers to a citizenry that has adopted a meaningful degree of selflessness.  Yet what we experienced and continue to experience is a social situation in which we see increasing levels of selfishness and narcissism.[4]  In addition, this noted disparity in income and wealth has many consequences.

In Putnam’s more recent book, Our Kids:  The American Dream in Crisis,[5] he writes about how the disparity has led to a high degree of economic and social segregation among the nation’s economic classes.  The nation is creating the social dynamics that will make it more difficult to sustain its social infrastructure that supports its essential institutions.  That is, the nation is losing its sense of being federated among all its citizenry.

Therefore, one can expect in the coming years a less public-spirited citizenry, less equality in terms of both economic factors – such as opportunity – and political factors, and less trust and cooperation.  The populous will most likely experience weakening communal bonds and increased animosity among economic segments of the economy – a look at the 2016 presidential race and its aftermath seems to be bearing this out.

Reflective of this economic backdrop, the nation’s politics will likely become even more bizarre and antagonistic.  It will not be surprising if this antagonism adopts a more organized form.  With social media as a resource, one can imagine an organized and militant response by disadvantaged groups.  In part, one hears this with the increase nationalistic rhetoric that is being bandied about.  The point is that the American society is reaping what it has sown. 

And most telling is what Putnam points out: most Americans are only semi-conscious of these developmental causes.  They are simply not being instructed as to these socioeconomic developments.  They know that things are not as good as they used to be, but they have little understanding of what is taking place beyond the most obvious consequences such as the loss of manufacturing jobs to low-wage workers in lesser developed nations. 

To illustrate his points, Putnam writes about two children who live a few miles apart, one a product of an advantaged family, the other of a disadvantaged situation – one can’t even use the term “family” to describe his home life.  Despite their physical proximity to each other, there is little to no chance they will ever have any contact with each other.  This is desperately different from the social world Putnam grew up in back in the 1950s.

In that earlier world, his high school had students from differing social and economic classes.  The level of interaction among the different segments of the student body was healthy and often.  This is not so true today and the level of such interaction is becoming more and more infrequent. For one thing, poorer kids are stuck in dysfunctional schools while wealthier kids are more apt to attend private schools.  The “indivisibility” of the nation is becoming a memory. 

The conditions by which civics education has been taught indicate that social capital is not being promoted.  No; civics education is not responsible for the 2008 economic collapse but it was, with other factors, complicit.  And with the overall view of how ineffective civics education has been, this blog will, in the next posting, add one more area that is related to civics education but seldom considered:  levels of criminality.

---

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

[2] Jean M. Twenge and W. K. Campbell, The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement.

[3] Bob Herbert, “Fast Track to Inequality,” New York Times, November 2, 2010, accessed March 6, 2017, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/02/opinion/02herbert.html? r=1&src=me&ref=homepage .

[4] Jean M. Twenge and W. K. Campbell, The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement  AND  CNN, The Eighties, television documentary, produced by Tom Hanks and Gary Goetzman (2016; Atlanta:  CNN, Playtone, and Herzog and Company) television.

[5] Robert D. Putnam, Our Kids:  The American Dream in Crisis (New York, NY:  Simon and Schuster, 2015).