AN OVERALL AMERICAN CONSTRUCT, PART III

 

The last posting gives the reader a ranging view of how Americans have developed in terms of their philosophical ideas.  Just stating that, it sounds pompous to American ears.  And the fact that it does brings one back to Allen C. Guelzo’s[1] claim as to the pragmatic bias this nation has exhibited for being doers not thinkers.  And yet the academic history of the nation stretches back almost to its very beginning.

          And for this, one can cite the founding of Harvard just six years after the settlement of Boston in 1630.  One can further credit the religious enterprise, in this case that of the Puritans, to seek answers to the more metaphysical questions of life.  While this tradition is noted today for its very strict, moralistic theology, it attempted to discover reality that is not readily observable in the material world. 

Now all of this development was a complex mix of views and biases; for example, thrown into this was the common-sense philosophy of Scottish thought in the eighteenth century (more on this below).  But central in the beginning there was Puritanism that along with its fire-and-brimstone sermons was a strong commitment to congregational arrangements and their covenantal origins.

          Puritanism represents the stoic side of American thinking and one name that emerges as one studies these various influences is that of Jonathan Edwards who was a leader of the Great Awakening, a reemergence of Puritanical allegiance that was reestablished in the mid to late 1700s.  That movement was a sincere effort to bolster Puritanical morals after some slippage due to initial successes in the colonial settlements. 

This is not to claim this historical figure was some great thinker, but a thinker he was and was later designated as president of Princeton (he died as he was about to assume that office in 1758).  But even in the midst of the Great Awakening, the practical side of American thought did not go away.

          On the other side of this dual personality, the next contributor, one that overlaps in time with Edwards and his ilk, is Benjamin Franklin who published his Poor Richards Almanac in 1732 and his Autobiography in 1791 (he died in 1790).  Here one finds the practical tradition of Americans being extolled.  Uplifted were qualities of business acumen and common sense.  And in addition, as alluded to above, was the Scottish philosophic bent of Thomas Reid (1710-1796) and others who if not affecting Franklin, did have an effect on Thomas Jefferson.

Reid wrote the following:

Man was destined for society.  His morality, therefore, was to be formed to this object.  He was endowed with a sense of right and wrong, merely relative to this.  This sense is as much a part of his nature as the sense of hearing, seeing, feeling; it is the true foundation of morality, and not the kalon, truth, etc., as fanciful writers have imagined.  The moral sense, or conscience, is as much a part of man as his leg or arm.  It is given to all human beings in a stronger or weaker degree, as force of members is given them in a greater or less degree.  It may be strengthened by exercise, as may any particular limb of the body.  This sense is submitted, indeed, in some degree, to the guidance of reason; but it is a small stock which is required for this; even a less one than what we call common sense.  State a moral case to a ploughman and a professor.  The former will decide it as well and often better than the latter because he has not been led astray by artificial rules.[2]

This statement gives more philosophical language to the very down-to-earth perspective that was common among Americans not only of those days but throughout the nation’s history. 

And this sort of leaning can readily be seen as feeding another movement that would turn out to have a profound influence that this blog highlighted in its last posting.  That is the movement known as Transcendentalism.  And these lesser religious notions or themes are picked up through the 1800s and one can cite the fictional works of Herman Melville (Moby Dick) and Nathanial Hawthorne (The Scarlet Letter).  Their novels directly attack the Puritanical thinking that was judged in these works to be too inhuman in its expectations.

          One can than trace this other tradition to the development, years later, of Pragmaticism and the works of William James and John Dewey.  And that brings a student of this tradition into the twentieth century – Dewey died in 1952.  But how philosophical was this tradition and, for that matter, the Puritanical tradition?  Admittedly, not very.  Even the more well thought out tradition of Pragmaticism could boast of only a relatively few top-notch thinkers such as Dewey and James.[3]  But then again, its emphasis, even as a philosophy, was on doing, not thinking.

          And perhaps this lack of theorizing helped those who opposed these voices influenced by the Enlightenment.  Inspired by the Great Awakening in an around about way, and the work of Edwards, was the influence exerted by the Romantics.  While this Romanticism, as expressed in Transcendentalism, was mostly anti-religious, it was pro sentiment and emotion and reactive against pure reason and objectivism – and as such was a mixture of anti-religious dogma, but pro-religious fervor.

Antagonistic to the ideas emanating from science, from Descartes to Newton, these religiously inspired ideas and emotions became part of the American story.  In more current days, the remnants of the Romantics can be found in Born Again messaging that one can find among Evangelicals of today.  Heavily reliant on the Bible, its literal interpretation of that book provides much of what its adherents consider truthful accounts of the physical world. 

And why are these views taken as truth?  Because it feels true.  Passion, not reason, for Romantics is the essential guide.  And here, even Transcendentalism can be viewed not as a movement toward reason, but toward emotionalism, at least as it is represented by Ralph Waldo Emerson.  All this will be described and explained in later postings.  Links to such characters as John C. Calhoun and his representation of southern agrarianism will be pointed out.  Here, the aim is to give the reader the warning that all of this, while it can be analyzed and of which sense can be made, is not an account of a single-minded people.

One can detect the two traditions, Puritanism and the Enlightenment.  How both affect Transcendentalism and its effects, given Santayana’s overview (see previous posting), all of these combined and co-existed under an organizational and political arrangement defined by federalist principles. 

Organizational principles are not handed down from above.  They instead have to stand free with enough supportive ideals and ideas which have to be thought of, implemented, and defended to survive various challenges such as those facing the Civil War generation, and many think, the present generation.

They are the product of the human mind and are implemented through complex mixtures as those found in this nation’s past.  More will be shared in upcoming postings including a more detailed accounts of what this and the last two postings introduce and describe to the reader. 

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[1] Allen C. Guelzo, The American Mind, Part I – a transcript book – (Chantilly, VA:  The Teaching Company/The Great Courses, 2005).  Unless otherwise indicated, factual information found in this posting is derived from this source.

[2] As quoted in Gary Wills, Inventing America:  Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence (New York, NY:  Vintage Books, 1978/2018), 202-203.  This quotation was utilized in a previous posting.

[3] This claim is belied by Louis Menand’s account of Pragmaticism.  See Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club (New York, NY:  Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2001).

AN OVERALL AMERICAN CONSTRUCT, PART II

 

In tracing American theoretical, philosophic thinking, this blog in its last posting describes the lack of such thinking among them.  It reports a general judgement; that is, it pointed out American reputation of being doers, not thinkers.  It ended its reporting by citing Tocqueville on that account. 

One can add many voices to that of the Frenchman all throughout the 1800s and into the 1900s including that of James Fennimore Cooper, Supreme Court justice Joseph Story, psychologist G. Stanley Hall, and philosopher George Santayana among others.  But it is with Santayana that this posting wants to remind long time readers of this blog, what this blogger had to offer some years ago.[1]

          The nation, during the 1800s, drifted away from the communal nature of American politicking that Tocqueville describes.  Why?  One writer who sheds some light on this question is George Santayana.  Santayana was a Spanish American philosopher who is credited with this famous quote: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” In 1911, Santayana published an address, “The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy,”[2] which offered a historical analysis as to why Americans had become less communal.

To begin with, Santayana points out that since the earliest days of the nation there has been a two-sided Christian view which has molded a lot of our social and political thought. On the one side, there is a fire-and-brimstone Calvinist view which bolstered concern for the ravages of sin and expressed itself as an “agonized conscience.” The other side promotes a gentler message, a social transcendentalism, developed more formally in the eighteenth century. Each encouraged its own social philosophy.

Calvinism pushed Americans to be disciplined. Hard work took on a moral status under this view. The discipline it inspired became very necessary as early Americans had to tame a frontier environment. Its harsh conditions with its dangers were met by a people armed with a view of life and morality suited to meet its challenges.

So successful was this mental and emotional framework that it became victimized by the success it allowed these settlers to achieve. Americans soon began to develop a prosperous economy and consequently, with more material security, they began to have available the finer things in life. They found it difficult to maintain their Calvinistic perspective, at least to the levels they endured earlier.

Calvinism did not disappear, but it lost its more stringent character. In the wake of a strong disciplinarian religious outlook, a strong congregational tradition survived.  Here it is useful to highlight a reference to the development of congregations.

From its earliest settlements, this form of social arrangement, the congregational model, characterized how Americans organized themselves. Key to this was organizing agreements among settlers through the utilization of covenants. According to Daniel Elazar, [3] covenants were sets of communal commitments by the settlers which established the basic social and political arrangements of the group.

The agreements were formalized as written agreements in the form of a charter or a constitution. To solidify this important promise to each other, the settlers called on God to witness the agreement. This form of organizing was repeated in the separate and isolated American colonies. The model continued into the development of state governments with the only difference being that the covenants eventually became compacts in which the initial agreements were established without calling on God as witness.

As referred to above, with a diminishing harshness of a stricter Calvinism, the “genteel tradition” or transcendentalism, an imported philosophy from Europe, became prominent. Leading this effort, Ralph Waldo Emerson helped define transcendentalism for Americans.  He, utilizing Kantian tradition of systemic subjectivism, formulated a system of thought that can be credited with initiating Americans' thinking along more individualistic lines.

Emerson strongly promoted self-initiative which was highly valued in a mostly frontier nation. The quality was easily integrated into a romanticized version of Yankee lore.  Two characteristics were emphasized in this vision: emphasis on present needs and the importance of will over intellect.

As opposed to the earlier Calvinist focus on evil, transcendental thought seemed to have a blind eye for it and rhapsodized an “up-beat-ness” and optimism. To Emerson, these dispositions translated themselves into confidence or trust in oneself, in one's ability. Along with confidence came a positive self-definition and a faith in intuition: “the perspective of knowledge as they radiate from the self.”[4] 

At the risk of being too much of a synopsis, one can see the Calvinist influence as stoic and transcendentalism as being epicurean.  The Americans’ version of federalism, if one describes it with the use of a Venn diagram, was situated in the overlap of the two traditions.  However, an imbalance seemed to emerge.

Without the previous prevalent Calvinistic source of humility, there turned out to be no internal check on the exuberance that transcendentalism promoted. Among the turmoil associated with an emerging nation, two competing social perspectives emerge, that of a marketplace and that of a commonweal.

One, the marketplace view takes hold. Two, the commonweal view competes. The marketplace view defines citizens by their role in the bargaining processes of the market. In this view, each person seeks his or her own self-interest.  One can view this development as the first meaningful challenge to a federalist perspective as the nation’s prominent view of governance and politics. 

It initiated and encouraged a transactional view to politics.  Yet, in the commonweal view, which was retained as a viscerally felt, idealistic espoused theory, citizens have undivided interests.  To this day people give it lip service.  This, according to Elazar, led to the evolution of three distinct political subcultures in America.[5]  

They are the moralistic, the individualistic, and the traditional.  While each maintained a federalist base, at least at an idealistic level, one can readily sense the origins of its demise.  But this account still has more to describe before this eventual evolvement took place.  Future postings will seek to do that.

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[1] Robert Gutierrez, “From Brimstone to Gentleness” and “Individualistic Political Subculture,” posting numbered 90 and 91 respectively (n.d.), Gravitas:  A Voice for Civics (a blog), no longer posted.  This rendering is further edited to meet the blog’s current editorial style.

[2]George Santayana, “The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy,” in The Annals of America, Vol. 13 (Chicago, IL: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1968/1911), 277-288.

[3] Daniel J. Elazar, “Federal Models of (Civil)Aauthority,” Journal of Church and State 33 (Spring 1991):  231-254.  Also, for supportive argument see Andrew C. McLaughlin, The Foundations of American Constitutionalism (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1972).

[4] Santayana, “The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy,” 281.

[5]Daniel J. Elazar, American Federalism: A View from the States (New York, NY: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1966).

AN OVERALL AMERICAN CONSTRUCT, PART I

 

This writer, in his recently published book, introduces an instructional mode for the teaching of civics education.[1]  He calls that mode historical dialog-to-action (HD-to-A).  Simply described, it calls on students to discuss, argue, and debate (in ascending order) civic issues through analyses of their historical developments. 

The main rationale for such an approach is that through historical developmental stories, students can be appraise holistic accounts about how current challenges have come to be.  The essence of the challenges chosen is their endangerment in fulfilling federalist values, for example, the way the opioid crisis has endangered the equity of millions of Americans.  The aim is not to determine what should have happened, but to what should happen in the future in dealing with the identified challenges.

While that is the aim, a lot must be filled in to guide such an effort – both in terms of content and, to some degree, instructional methods.  This posting sets out to initiate addressing of the former – the content.  And in that, such an effort, to be logically in line with what this blog has argued, that overview of the nation’s history would ideally reinforce a federalist bias that this blog has claimed characterized much of that history. 

To restate that argument, the US, since its colonial past, held as a dominant view concerning government and politics, a federalist version of what those entities should be.  That dominance lasted till the years after World War II and then it was overcome by a shift to the natural rights view or construct. 

Both views are aspirational in nature and should not be considered descriptive of what was or is.  The version of federalism that earlier Americans held was what this writer calls parochial/traditional federalism and it called for the federation of mostly the European-based population of the American nation.

Given these claims, a look at the historical overview of the nation not only gives one stories of how this development took place but provides evidence as to the veracity of this overall claim regarding the role of federalism.  But before delving into these concerns, a few definitions are needed. 

By federalism this blog has not emphasized, nor totally ignored, the structural elements of that construct; that being of the two levels of governance, the central government and the state governments.  Instead, this blog has been mostly concerned with what Daniel Elazar calls the processes of federalism.[2]

Those processes basically highlight the construct’s call for a citizenry to adopt a partnering mode of civic intercourse.  Or more in line with the term, federalism, citizens establish and maintain themselves as being federated with each other.  The term federalism is derived from the Latin term foedus – meaning to be leagued through an agreement (a covenant) that, in turn, is held to be sacred.[3] 

A further distinction is between a covenant and a compact.  According to Donald Lutz, the former calls on God to witness such an agreement, the latter does not.[4]  The US Constitution is a compact.  The common citizen becomes aware of such an agreement when he/she considers the solemnity of the marriage vow.  Usually in a church, that agreement is a covenant; before a state official, it’s usually a compact.  Both are held equally scared.

This overview reappears in this blog from time to time.  The historical development stated above also reappears often.  But as this blog sets out to test its overall historical view, this context is judged essential in this initial posting.  And before moving on, one more repetitive note should be added. 

By saying federalism served as the central view of governance and politics it is not to say all agreed with it or that other ideas, theories, models did not exist under its umbrella.  But, for this latter grouping, there should be a logical connection between what more specifically served to guide Americans, e.g., Puritanism, and what constitutes the more general tenets of federalism. 

And those tenets can be summarized by a few words:  cooperation, collaboration, commonality, and community.  More granular terms are equality (a regulated equality), liberty (a federal liberty), and civic virtue (a common value held by the founding fathers[5] and a quality that introduces a moral aspect).  This list can be expanded, but if one considers what the phrase “to be federated” means, the reader can think of his/her own terms to describe this view of citizenry.

So, given this, what overview serves to provide a substantive general look at what constitutes the nation’s history.  For that purpose, this blog relies on the overview authored by Allen C. Guelzo.[6]  In introducing his treatment, Guelzo poses the question:  do Americans have a collective mind?  And to address that question:  what is a national mind?  It is a shared view – a construct – that to some degree defines what a people see social reality to be.  And Americans seem to approach that question a bit reluctantly.

They are considered to be doers, not thinkers.  Of course, such a dichotomy cannot be totally true.  A people do need to think, and they do need to do; so, the question is:  how far a people carry on their affairs favoring one or the other?  The eventual dominance of Pragmatism in the late 1800s seems to indicate a “doer” bias, but Pragmatism itself is a well thought out philosophical position.  But this is getting ahead of the story.

In the writings of Elazar, he tells of how the original settlers, those of Massachusetts Bay being prominent, brought with them this Puritanical, covenantal approach with them.  The Mayflower Compact (a covenant) initiated this approach.  The signees of the document entered into a federalist arrangement. 

But to return to Guelzo’s account, he identifies this Puritanical influence as the starting point for how Americans began defining themselves.  The Puritanical strain shortly was mixed in with those influences emanating from the Enlightenment – and as it will be fully described at a later date, a Scottish Enlightenment.[7]  Guelzo uses the analogy of two cooks – each one of these two traditions – cooking up America’s intellectual history.

But was there another “cook”?  Guelzo points out that one of the aspects of the American experience discouraging an intellectual bent was the practical realities that Americans faced in settling a continent.  Typical days that these early generations faced were filled with how one was going to make it till sunset.  The bulk of the population had its days filled with a slew of practical hurdles the frontier provided. 

But this, in and of itself, according to this blogger, added to the need for a federated approach.  Alexi de Tocqueville describes the common experiences of Americans in the 1830s.[8]  The outstanding characteristics highlighted in that description were how intense were the levels of cooperation, collaboration, and community – these characteristics were not considered as so many duties, but necessary and even sources of entertainment.  And in this, one can see how Ralph Waldo Emerson was keen on pointing out Americans’ practical thinking. 

Even de Tocqueville expressed concern over Americans’ lack of philosophic concern.  He wrote, “Each therefore, withdraws into himself and claims to judge the world from there … [he, therefore has] the shallowest of ideas, and tend[s] to be tightly chained to the general will of the greatest number.”[9]

The plan for the next posting is to pick up on this overview.  To this point, one can readily see that what is described above does not contradict federalist thought among Americans but by reviewing these finer elements of the nation’s past, one can further describe federalist influences and explain why it held on so strongly until the late 1940s.

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[1] Robert Gutierrez, Toward a Federated Nation:  Implementing National Civics Standards (Tallahassee, FL:  Gravitas/Civics Books, 2020).  Available through Amazon.

[2] Daniel J. Elazar, Exploring Federalism (Tuscaloosa, AL:  The University of Alabama Press, 1987).

[3] Center for the Study of Federalism (n.d.), https://federalism.org/about/what-is-federalism/ .

[4] Donald Lutz, The Origins of American Constitutionalism, (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1988).

[5] Thomas E. Ricks, First Principles:  What America’s Founders Learned from the Greeks and Romans and How That Shaped Our Country (New York, NY:  HarperCollins Publishers, 2020).  He analyzed George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison.

[6] Allen C. Guelzo, The American Mind, Part I, II, III – transcript books – (Chantilly, VA:  The Teaching Company/The Great Courses, 2005).

[7] Ricks, First Principles.

[8] Alexi de Tocqueville, “Political Structure of Democracy,” in Alexis de Tocqueville:  On Democracy, Revolution, and Society, ed. John Stone and Stephen Mennell (Chicago, IL:  Chicago University Press, 1980/1835).

[9] Guelzo, The American Mind, Part I , 11.

A COMPLICATED BALANCING ACT, PART II

 

Picking up on the last posting, this one continues commentary on an apparent Biden Administration policy choice that does have implications on how well Americans are federated.  What the government is aiming to do does reverse a historical development. 

To summarize that development, it takes the following form over the centuries:  humans went from nomadic economies to agricultural economies, to industrial economies, and then to a post-industrial, service economies especially in those economies that were most successful.  At each turn, productivity increased – more output per units of inputs in the production process. 

But now, of late, there seems to be a new advocacy for some retracking in this grand progression.  At least in the US, there are calls for rebooting the industrial sector of the economy.  Why?  Apparently, the reason is more political than economic.  When manufacturing was exported to other countries, this left behind millions of dispossessed workers.  They found themselves instead of holding good paying jobs in manufacturing facilities to being unemployed or employed in significantly lower paying jobs. 

The good pay was now going to those who were trained/educated in technical skills such as in computer-based work.  Instead of manufacturing centers enjoying vibrant economies, tech centers, such as Silicon Valley in California, became the new enriched centers in the American economy.  And a slew of workers who were caught up in these relatively quick changes, were not in the positions of life – due to age, family status, or other factors – to quickly shift onto new employment paths, at least, not reasonably so. 

What were available to them were low skill retail work or personal service options such as yard maintenance businesses.  Many of these workmen/workwomen found themselves working as waiters or waitresses in local or chain restaurants and mostly for tips.  While the economy grew mostly as a result of services in IT or financial businesses, the bulk of these former industrial workers became the fodder for radical politics. 

While not all radicals are underemployed Americans and all un or under employed Americans are radicals, this Venn diagram has a good deal of overlap.  Hence, there exists a political reason for finding relief.  And the obvious turn should be toward revamping the nation’s manufacturing capacity.  Linda Yueh[1] uses the term “rebalance” to describe this recent reversal toward manufacturing. 

If one needs an “economic” reason for this reverse, one can cite the 2008 financial crisis.  There, the service-oriented financial industry almost led the nation and the world to a world-wide depression.  It pointed to the possibility that the nation was too service oriented and being too dependent on that sector to maintain a healthy economy. 

Also, the nation’s current reaction to the pandemic has indicated that the US fell short of some essential products such as masks, gowns, and other protective apparel.  That has led some to consider whether as with this shortage, perhaps Americans would we wise to produce enough of emergency goods for this or possibly other unplanned eventualities.  Should the nation not produce those goods it can possibly need now or at some future date? 

These are legitimate economic reasons to look at whether the nation has relied too heavily on services to meet the needs of the American people.  Now add to that some context: 

·       c. 70% of the US and other western economies are service based;

·       yet the US economy is the second largest industrial country (second to China);  

·       even China’s service sector is growing; and

·       automation threatens roughly 25% of existing manufacturing jobs in the US.[2]

Despite these conditions, in the West, along with the US, manufacturing amounts to less than 20% of total production (in Britain it is closer to 10%, in Germany closer to 20% or a bit above that). 

The point being made is:  this problem of dispossessed workers is not limited to the US, it is a problem that is not going away, but the US and these other countries are not totally out of the manufacturing game.  Therefore, this call for increased manufacturing seems highly doable and should be seriously considered.

While federation theory does not justify the resulting identity politics that this dispossession of workers has led to, it does see their plights as problematic beyond just the fact that one has a significant number of people being upset.  With these shifts of fortunes, difficult questions arise.  As stated elsewhere in this blog, that theory promotes what it calls regulated equality[3] and the current state of affairs disabuses its implied value.

This whole process has taken place with the social structure of accumulation (SSA) perspective known as the neoliberal SSA.[4]  That view, reflecting the Reagan economic agenda with its strong laisse faire bias and policies, has led to extreme inequalities of income and wealth.  This leads one to judge that the resulting increases in productivity associated with services has benefited relatively few people in the West. 

For example, early in the 1960s, the top 1% of households’ net worth was 125 times the median wealth in the US.  Currently, that has grown to 190 times.[5]  This is just one indicator that unbalanced growth has favored of the rich.  And given the above-described fate of former industrial workers, one can see why many Americans are turning to a radicalism of the right.  Therefore, if for no other reason, federation theory finds such concerns over production and globalization as legitimate areas to address from a moral point of view.

This blog will revisit this concern in the future, but it leaves the reader with two question:  should a capitalist nation, such as the US, issue public policy that promotes reindustrialization or should governmental policy play a neutral role and allow the markets to determine what, where, and how production should occur?  If the answer is somewhere in between these two more extreme positions, in which direction and how far should it favor one or the other?  The common good is dependent on hitting the right balance.

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[1] Linda Yueh, What Would the Great Economists Do?:  How Twelve Brilliant Minds Would Solve Today’s Biggest Problems (London, UK:  Penguin, 2019).

[2] For this last bulleted point, see Annie Nove and John W. Schoen, “Automation Threatening 25% of Jobs in the US, Especially the ‘Boring and Repetitive’ Ones:  Brookings Study,” CNBC (January 25, 2019), accessed February 2, 2021, https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/25/these-workers-face-the-highest-risk-of-losing-their-jobs-to-automation.html .

[3] The term regulated equality refers to the value in which one prizes for the most part equality before the law but make allowances for the hardships bound to occur within mostly capitalist economies.  Usually, the regulated elements take the form of minimum wage, unemployment insurance, and retirement benefits.  It can also include welfare programs, public housing, public education, and other services to meet minimum subsistence standards.

[4] William K. Tabb, The Restructuring of Capitalism in Our Time (New York, NY:  Columbia University Press, 2012).

[5] Jeanne Sahadi, “Wealth Gap Widens,” CNN Money (August 29, 2006), accessed January 28, 2021, https://money.cnn.com/2006/08/29/news/economy/wealth_gap/#:~:text=In%20the%20early%201960s%2C%20the,wealth%20in%20the%20early%201960s.

A COMPLICATED BALANCING ACT, PART I

 

Linda Yueh[1] points out a new economic development that seems to attempt to draw back to an earlier time.  This is being felt across western nations.  President Biden’s current call for the American government to have an infrastructure program represents America’s version of this newer effort.  This is the case since the president is calling for that program to rely on American produced products.

          This and the next posting address this shift in American policy.  This current posting gives a historical background that one should keep in mind when considering any new initiative regarding employment policy options.  The next will address the political-economic factors currently affecting governmental and business decision-making.

Such policy as promoting infrastructure expenditures to obtain domestic manufactured goods, as being experienced in different advanced countries, is meant to kickstart the manufacturing sector of those economies which has experienced a deemphasis in the last few decades.  Of late, many of the advanced nations have been deindustrializing and shifting their economies toward service industries.

          And this leads one to become conscious of what seems to be a historical progression which began eons ago.  To begin, humans were mostly nomadic.  They traveled and caught game as their paths followed changing conditions of the year.  Some finally hit on agriculture that allowed them to settle, build homes and communities, and began to establish social institutions that mark all human settlements.  For example, all established societies have the institutions of government, religion, economy, family, and education.

In various agricultural settlements, according to Arnold Toynbee, due to challenges – e.g., rising flooding tides of a nearby river or two – local populations potentially met those challenges with responses to placate the ensuing damages the challenges created.  That called on them to organize themselves to the degree that a civilization resulted.[2]  Of course, this entire development is complex and deserves its own analysis, but certain insights can be drawn for the purposes of this and the next posting.

Initially, this “civilization” result was the exception and only occurred after centuries of mostly agricultural dependence.  But once civilization broke out, the effects of civilized societies spread throughout much of the inhabited world.  For example, all of Europe became civilized even though that vast area was not affected by the original challenges that spurred Western Civilization.[3]

This civilizing effect, in turn, led to many developments in various human pursuits.  Roughly, in the nineteenth century, the academic and business sectors of the European civilization developed combustible engines and industrial economic activity took off.  Why?  Well, the obvious reason was the variety of goods that such activity produced.  But a more economic reason was that the productivity – the amount of output per unit of input – rose enormously.  Therefore, not only were people’s wants more readily satisfied, but profits surged upward.

          But that advancement was limited to certain societies, mostly western nations in Europe, North America, Australia, and eventually in non-western Japan.  In each country, an inherent battle ensued between the owners of production and labor.  Initially, industrialists were able to offer employment to workers, but at subsistence (in some cases, below subsistence) wages. 

Workers organized unions and during the late twentieth century began winning significant wage increases.  In the US, an autarky, and other countries, this led to inflation – higher prices for goods and services.  It also led in the US to lower quality products.  It seems that when an economy lacks competition, higher prices and lower quality of goods seem to ensue. 

The answer for industrialists, who seemed most conscious of the high wages, was to find low wage labor sources.  That existed in pre-industrialized countries such as China and India.  All this coincided with advances in computers that facilitated doing business with areas around the world.  Therefore, a lot of manufacturing found its way to China, India, Vietnam, and other preindustrial countries since the 1970s. 

Oversimplifying things, one can judge these changes as a formula for developing a global economy and heightened competition for US producers and workers.  The next posting will describe what all of this has meant for the current political-economic conditions of this country.  As a bit of prevue, the results are not limited to the US, but they also affect other Western countries. 

In the coming years, will the US, a la Toynbee, meet the ensuing challenges with effective responses – which according to the theory means advancement to an even more enriched future – or will it mean a failing future in which the fate of this democratic republic might truly be at stake?  Or stated another way:  What does January 6 really mean?

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[1] Linda Yueh, What Would the Great Economists Do?:  How Twelve Brilliant Minds Would Solve Today’s Biggest Problems (London, UK:  Penguin, 2019).

[2] Arnold J. Toynbee, A Study of History (New York, NY:  Dell Publishing Co., 1971/1946).

[3] In terms of Western Civilization, the following is offered by the New World Encyclopedia:

 Civilizations arose in response to some set of challenges of extreme difficulty, when "creative minorities" devised solutions that reoriented their entire society. Challenges and responses were physical, as when the Sumerians exploited the intractable swamps of southern Iraq by organizing the Neolithic inhabitants into a society capable of carrying out large-scale irrigation projects; or social, as when the Catholic Church resolved the chaos of post-Roman Europe by enrolling the new Germanic kingdoms in a single religious community. When a civilization responds to challenges, it grows. When it fails to respond to a challenge, it enters its period of decline. Toynbee argued that "Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder." For Toynbee, civilizations were not intangible or unalterable machines but a network of social relationships within the border and therefore subject to both wise and unwise decisions they made. If leaders of the civilization did not appease or shut down the internal proletariat or muster an effective military or diplomatic defense against potential invading outside forces, it would fall.

“Arnold J. Toynbee,” New World Encyclopedia (n.d.), accessed January 29, 2021, https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Arnold_J._Toynbee .