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We the People Are Failing Our Government
Airplanes fly because the people who design them understand physics. They know how pressure changes as air flows over a curved surface. They understand lift and drag, and how force and mass relate to each other to determine acceleration. They’re experts in the science of materials, in finite element analysis, in instrumentation and control systems and combustion and ten thousand other arcane details of science and design and manufacture.
None of this means that they get it right every time, as Boeing’s recent travails remind us. But they get it right often enough to make air travel the safest means of transportation.
Imagine for a moment that all those aeronautical designers and engineers were hired by people who knew nothing about aeronautics, and who were neither competent to evaluate the resumes of their potential hires nor to evaluate the work done by them once they were hired; and, worse, that the candidates for the positions knew that their interviewers were clueless. How would that affect the quality of the men and women employed? How would it affect the viability of air travel once a generation or two of wholly unvetted “engineers” had been allowed to fiddle with the existing designs?
Our founders gave us a government. It is a complicated yet elegant machine composed of interlocking parts intended to work simultaneously in concert with and opposition to each other. It was created by men who were experts in the theory and practice of government, men who had diagnosed the failures of numerous prototypes and, based on those diagnoses, designed a new form of government, a constitutional democratic representative union of independent states: a republic with formal restraints on both the reach of the government and the whims of the people.
We the people are tasked with hiring the men and women who staff the critical positions in that government. If we know little of how our government was intended to function, we have no sound basis for evaluating the people we vote into office nor the policies they propose. Today there is ample evidence that we are a nation of civic ignoramuses. How many understand what the much-maligned electoral college is, how we got it and why it’s important? How many understand the damage done by the 17th Amendment to the carefully balanced tension between the House and Senate? How many are equipped to see the sheer lunacy of the Green New Deal’s call for a broad usurpation of our rights as citizens? How many understand even the idea of a constitutionally limited central government that is not merely prevented from performing certain tasks, but rather that is constitutionally authorized to perform only a small number of specific tasks?
We are failing to provide a competent civics education to our children, and have been for generations. We have a population ignorant of the most basic aspects of government but which we nonetheless exhort to vote, as if merely standing in the booth were the totality of civic duty. A large proportion of the electorate has the legal right to vote but lacks the moral standing to do so because it knows nothing about the thing for which it has a sacred duty of stewardship.
We can not blame the children for the failures of their teachers, who themselves know next to nothing about the nature of our government. I don’t know what it will take to trigger a rebirth of pride and interest in our nation’s history and in the framework on which it was built and the ideas behind it. But if we reach the point where we’re analyzing the wreckage following the crash, it will be too late.
Published in Politics
I share your concern.
It isn’t really a comforting thought I suppose, though I take some small solace in it, that nowhere is it ordained that things have to work out for the better. Humans are a remarkable species, uniquely capable of improving our situation and manipulating our environment. That has led, in America and the west, to extraordinary prosperity, security, comfort, and leisure. It’s easy to imagine how that might change our quotidian concerns, make us careless. Our nation was founded at a time of relative hardship, when oppression was a current problem or recent memory for most people. It’s tempting to imagine that freedom and tyranny are cyclical, but the fact is that humanity has never been, in numerous nontrivial ways, where it is today. What we on the right tend to see as the foolishness or even ill-will of people on the left may well simply be a natural product of our advanced prosperity intersecting the fringes of human nature.
I would like to see our challenges as not so much a battle with villains as a consequence of the spectrum of natural behavior expressed in exceptional times.
That doesn’t make the consequences any less dire. It just makes the “enemy” more human.
Take comfort in the fact that we have iphones now, and can treat a lot of cancers. Life is better in every possible way. Or so I’m told.
And complexity.
It seems that man — both individually and collectively — needs something to “push against” to thrive. Absent that, he tends to self-sabotage. Perhaps this addresses the age old question of why there is evil in the world. What more suitable thing for man to “push against” than his own, flawed nature.
America became great because it had the opportunity to start fresh as a deliberated corrective to the past. I’ve long suspected that meaningful long term progress in man’s circumstance will require a similar fresh start, and that it won’t happen on Earth because things have gotten so stable (historically speaking) here. Perhaps when a Moon or Mars colony wins it’s independence we’ll have another chance.
You could very well be right about the need to push against something. But conservatives used to tell us that the difference between the American and the French revolutions was that the American revolution was not a fresh start. We didn’t throw out all our institutions inherited form the English in order to start over anew. We had a conservative revolution, and that’s why we didn’t degenerate into violence, terror, and tyranny like the The French Revolution did.
A fresh start doesn’t mean you have to throw out everything that came before. I used the word deliberated… well, deliberately.
One reason schools quit teaching civics is that it was thought to be indoctrination rather than education. Of course, that was a rationale rather than a reason. Schools are now all in favor of indoctrination at the expense of education when it comes to topics like climate change and gender.
And also a sense of morality, We certainly are lacking in the education of the general populace (e.g. President Obama for two terms), but we are slipping morally as well (abortion on demand, children raised by one parent, the secularization of everything, etc.).
By education, I meant both intellectual and moral education. I didn’t give my definition, sorry.
I’m not sure I want government schools to be involved in moral education.
It seems to me that most education, outside objective subjects like physics and math, is indoctrination by definition. Can we pinpoint when that become an excuse for the left to end positive indoctrination and replace it with their own?
“Positive indoctrination.”
You’ve just made what I think is the crucial distinction. If we think of “indoctrination” as the teaching of things that aren’t necessarily objectively derived — or, at least, not demonstrated to be derived when they’re taught — then we make a mistake to condemn it without reservation. There are lots of things we want to indoctrinate, lots of value we want to pass on without requiring that a rational explanation be provided or evidence presented.
Our mistake, as Barfly suggests, is that we stopped conducting our traditional indoctrination. That alone is enough to ruin us; replacing it with bad indoctrination merely hastens the process.
Henry, I like your post, but I have some disagreements.
I think that we can blame the young for their ignorance, at least in part. The Truth Is Out There. It’s not that hard to find. I’m not willing to exonerate people who choose to live in a Leftist bubble.
I think that the problem is a moral dispute, not civics education. It’s essentially the Christian world-view vs. the atheistic world-view, though the dividing line isn’t exclusively defined by faith. Thomas Sowell calls it the difference between the “constrained vision” and the “unconstrained vision,” and doesn’t seem to base his argument explicitly on the question of faith. He does base his argument on the flawed nature of humanity and the impossibility of perfecting ourselves.
Jerry, I appreciate your points, and you could be correct. But I think part of civic education is teaching a reverence for the institutions, as well as an understanding of their mechanics. I probably should have spelled that out, because it isn’t obvious. The goal is to teach patriotism. Today, thanks in part to some very mistaken intellectuals, we teach the opposite.
Some conservative writer, and I forget which, recently described our problem as a lack of gratitude. I suppose that’s really it. We should be teaching children just what we have in America, and why we should be grateful for something so rare and brilliant.
No, I don’t think we can pinpoint it. It happened gradually. Like you say, it’s pretty hard not to have indoctrination in schools, so it wasn’t really a matter of being against indoctrination and then for it. They were mostly opposed to indoctrination back when it was traditional civic, patriotic, and moral values that were being inculcated into the children. In other words, they were and are hypocrites, though maybe they didn’t realize it at first.
Henry,
I was being a little jocular with you when I gave you the old twilight zone episode in my first comment. To be more serious I must go back in time. Over the last 150 years, there has been a steady degradation of our values. First, we can start with agnostics like Hegel who gave us a pseudo-religious belief system but pulled the rug out from under real religious faith. Next, at the turn of the century morality itself was undercut as a new nihilism becomes popular. Moral ideas were considered purely subjective or “just emotion-charged words”. Finally, and very recently, an extreme nihilism that proclaims that “facts don’t matter, only the narrative matters” is in vogue.
The last change, if you think clearly about it, is the most appalling of all. How in the world can you live as a responsible sane member of this society (or any other society) and actually believe that “facts don’t matter”. Twenty years ago, such a statement would be good evidence of someone who was delusional and needed psychiatric care. As I listened to the first Democratic Party Presidential debate I felt that delusional would be a good description for the entire Democratic Party and anyone who endorsed their programs. I can see a direct relationship between such a lack of concern for fact and the completely hopeless policy proposals that Presidential candidates were presenting to the public as if manna from heaven.
Perhaps we should start at the level of fact humiliating the deranged. When AOC was challenged that her Green New Deal would cost 95 Trillion Dollars she backed down and said her wild claim had only been “aspirational”. She needs to be reminded of her idiocy every day. Next, we should move up to the level of moral/ethical choice and insist on Rights and limited government as laid out in the Constitution. Here is where making a traditional civics course mandatory for every high school student must be put back into the curriculum. Finally, we must challenge the relentless attack on Religion and stand up for the constitutional guarantee of the Free Exercise of Religion. The culture will become so rotten (even more rotten than it already is?!) if we don’t stop this slide to Gomorrah.
Regards,
Jim
Then what’s left is an ammoral education . . .
Schools are teaching morality – the “superior” morality of secularism.
Yeah, but the way to make people look carefully at what they’re doing is to seriously propose that it’s improper for schools to be involved in moral education.
Don’t hear what I’m not saying. I am saying that an educated electorate–a public comprising individual citizens who are capable of independent intellectual and moral reasoning–is necessary for a republic to succeed.
Henry, your posts are always among those to which I look forward as I always learn greatly from them and also from the comments your posts prompt; this one was certainly no exception and I thank you for it. As I read some of the comments, with the emphasis of some of them on the moral component of our obvious societal collapse, I kept trying to remember the John Adams quote about the Constitution being designed only for a moral people–the old fashioned way, as we not long ago had to just remember things without the aid of search engines — but finally had to “give in” and ask Google for help (maybe I have just inadvertently stumbled on one of the problems in our current educational morass!) so here it is:
“Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other. “
This is one of the many reasons I share @freeven‘s pessimism, as hard as I try not to be gloomy about the future of our Nation, but one must wonder exactly how we get out of the hole the left has dug in our educational system when religion is experiencing a slow death, and in some denominations, a fracturing, which will have the same result, and as for morals, God help us if the morals of “our betters” is any guide to our National moral structure.
Several of our colleagues have mentioned that well known oracle on everything, especially the fact that none of us will be here in 12 years due to global warming, or is it climate change this week, who until very recently was a 28 year old bartender in the Bronx, and she truly is as good an example of our cultural demise as any I can think of. As I believe you noted in one of your comments, this is a graduate of what I understand to be one of the more prestigious institutions of higher learning in America and, in her, it has produced, there is no other word for it, a person almost totally devoid of any knowledge of the foundations on which this Nation was built. We often wonder if there are any educators left at Boston College with enough pride to be aghast at the vapid clouds of ignorance she emits every day.
Therein, the word pride, is another problem- the lack thereof.
Thanks again for a great post. Jim
Henry, thanks for the continued discussion.
I’m skeptical of the idea that we can teach respect, or even reverence, for institutions without regard to the world view and ideals that gave rise to those institutions.
It’s hard to discuss these issues without labeling. If one finds traditional American moral values to be wicked, it seems unlikely that one will respect the institutions that supported those values.
I wonder if Douglas Murray is the conservative writer you’re remembering. I recall him speaking about gratitude on several occasions recently.
Henry, as if to corroborate my– and others’ — ideas about the genius bartender from The Bronx, moments after I posted my comment, this headline popped up: “Not a left party: AOC calls the Democratic Party a ‘center-conservative’ party.” You simply cannot make this stuff up.
What kind of morons went to that school!!??
I’ll say one thing for her. AOC is good looking, but if you took half of her beauty and converted it to brains she would be average on both scores.
Jerry, you and Jim ( @jimgeorge ) (and others here, I think) have brought up the point that the lack of traditional education goes beyond the simple failure to teach civics that I comment on in my post. I’m sure you’re right that this is part of the problem; you may be right that it’s the essence of the problem. I don’t know.
I do think it might be easier to get the schools to teach civics than to get the culture to re-embrace faith. I’m not at all confident that either is achievable; I rather suspect not. That’s a grim thought.
It would be an interesting thought experiment to see if a nation could embrace a civic faith, a patriotic embrace of traditional government without any necessary spiritual component. I generally place myself in that category.
It has been done. See the USSR, for one example. There have probably been others.
I could do this if we were back honoring the Constitution and that would mean I can keep my religious faith without sensing a threat.
I mean of OUR traditional government.
I’m not actually convinced that the religious component is necessary. But it’s what we started with, and so it’s our tradition: talking about restoring our tradition without restoring that as well probably doesn’t make sense.
I think that we’ve been undertaking this experiment for quite some time, and it is not working. You could trace it back to the 1960s; or to FDR; or perhaps to Wilson.
As a conservative, it seems quite unwise to have embarked upon such an experiment. We did have a number of other bad examples, in other countries, that should have given us pause. Not just the USSR, but also France and its many failed Republics; and even Britain in the post-WWII era.
Jerry, I am not a student of history. I’m good at a lot of things, but this has never been my strong suit. But my impression is that America abandoned civic traditions before it abandoned faith.
Looking at other nations as examples doesn’t seem productive to me. Other nations never had our tradition. It would be like comparing Christian nations and Muslim nations and arguing that faith is the key. No Muslim nation ever had our civil traditions either.
I don’t know why we lost our civil traditions, and our participation in and understanding of our own government. I’m not convinced that it’s because we lost our faith. But it seems the proximate cause of our poor choices of representatives and policies is our lack of civic knowledge, not our lack of faith.
It all goes back to the Jacksonian revolution and the debates over internal improvements.