1. Two Rivers

The black and White Aragvi Rivers in Georgia that do not mix, just as the principles of Individual Sovereignty and Sovereign Authority do not mix.

Please, a little patience as I begin this story. It doesn’t start with profound statements about democracy or the American Experiment. It starts with complex, seemingly obscure ideas. This is a little like finding all the edge pieces when you start a jig saw puzzle: it focuses our attention. 

We teach history details–names, dates, and events–like links in a chain. This history is easy to teach and easy for public figures to tangle in kinks. The story we tell is a prejudiced mythology. To minimize fighting over every detail my story begins by focusing on two fundamental processes: change and stability. These processes flow across time like two rivers. Each has countless tributaries, obstructions, pollution hazards, and changing flora and fauna along the shores. To avoid getting tangled in the countless details, my story steers for the open water: the central ideas.

We typically treat change and stability as polar opposites where maintaining stability requires minimizing change. Instead, they are separate processes plotted on distinct X and Y axes. World War II dramatically changed American social and economic life to maintain a markedly stable country.

We justify political ideas by selectively picking bits of history. Conservatives consider the 60’s counter culture and anti-war movement national threats. They misunderstood or did not care that Viet Nam and covert wars destroyed national and international stability. The unrest provided conservatives a weapon to reshape a nation where they saw too much education, too many rights, and too many middle class people becoming involved in politics.

Too few people know the origin of these two rivers of political though. Too many misunderstand the political motivations. Sources such as Plato’s Republic and the origin of English common law are valuable, but are minutia, details that do not change your vote. Political theorists love when you agree, “Ancient Greeks created democracy” so long as you ignore the details. Ten percent of Athenians could vote. Plato hated democracy.

Deep political philosophy is not where our polity lives. What “feels right” determines our political behavior and it comes from our mythologies. Political strategists cherrypick details to defend or attack. Aristotle defended democracy, understood it depended on genuine education, but also believed in the inherent superiority of some peoples.

What creates this “feels right”? Imagine knowledge as the cargo on the ships that sank over millennia. People searching for lost treasure dive to the wrecks and sift through layers of muck without recognizing the dangers in holds that led long dead captains to scuttle their ships.

The ideas that create our “feels right” tie together in complex, non-rational ways because they’re mashed one atop the next. Mom, baseball, apple pie: criticize one, you criticized all of them and are un-American. The salvaged beliefs that shape our “feels right” are dredged from that decaying quagmire. Feelings drive actions more powerfully than knowledge and make it difficult to separate one idea in that pile of wreckage from another. This cultural quagmire is the weltanschauung (1).

We absorb information from the weltanschauung by observation. The collective presumption of what is “right” lies below conscious awareness. These culturally ingrained expectations do not determine what is right or wrong. These feelings determine what we will consider relevant in selecting the rules that identify what “right” is, rather than judging whether something fits in the box labeled “right”. Consider:

Is justice punishment of a criminal or restoration for the injured? A person kills a family member. How do you achieve justice? The Iroquoian nation expected the killer’s family to make satisfactory reparations. What if the killer disappeared? The pre-Islamic Arab Mururwah accepted the death of any member of the killer’s tribe as just punishment. Because Christianity prioritized the individual soul, today injured families can gain justice only if the killer is caught. However, a punished killer does not replace the dead parent or income provider. Why does American “feels right”, dismiss restoration in favor of punishment?

Our current political turmoil comes from the manipulation of old, vaguely articulated ideas. This mucky quagmire is buried in every defense of traditional values. It hides in Edmund Burke’s claim that it is the duty of each generation to pass unchanged the values of the previous generation to the future generation. Such justifications by conservatives such as Kirk or Pareto (introduced in future posts) cloak themselves in minutia: dust storms of platitudes on patriotism, vague claims of duty, rights without responsibilities, and justifications by religion. Our challenge is to identify the principles that justify laws and our body politic, then contrast them against “feels right”.

Traditional value arguments, such as Burke proposes, leave unexamined the legitimacy of those principles. They deny the necessity of examining whether the principle beneath them were justifiable then, now, or going forward. Traditional values arguments make stability an empty term. The principles defining “right” determine the policy and society’s moral character. In governance, what is it that politicians want to keep stable: the promise of individual liberty or the protection of power and status? Those alternatives principles form our two rivers.

Going forward: the invention of modern politics. Economic pressures forced new ideas of individual rights during the Age of Enlightenment. A century later the counter-Enlightenment (the Romantic Period) rejected individual rights in favor of a restored stability benefiting the wealthy. The Modern polity began with Locke’s 1651 liberalism (change) and Burke’s 1790 conservatism (stability). Four additional theorists embody the transition from government by Divine Right to Limited Government.

1. Sir Robert Filmer’s Patriarcha, of the Natural Power of Kings (written 1620s, published (1680)

2. Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan (1651)

3. John Locke’s Two Treatises on Government (1651, published 1689)

4. Jean-Jacques Rousseau On the Social Contract (1762)

5. Thomas Paine Common Sense (1776) Age of Reason (1791-92)

6. Edmund Burke Reflections on the Revolution (1790)

(1) Weltanschauung, (vel-tan-sha-ung), a model of cognitive understanding, is consistent with phenomenology – ethnomethodology in sociological theory and generative semantics in cognitive psychology.