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The Gaffer's Philosophy;
Part 1, Introduction:
February 4, 2002:
This is the first of my promised series of essays about government
and social issues. It is about a political and a social philosophy.
In this series, I intend to present my views on what I consider
to be the important issues of our culture. At this time, I have
no idea of the final number of essays which will be required.
I can only say that I see it as a rather ambitious undertaking.
The more I consider it, the more items come to mind, and the more daunting the task looms. Nonetheless, I will continue to the end or to the death, whichever comes first. However, I will not feel bound to add to this series every week. I will reserve the right to take a side trip if something of interest presents itself. And, of course, I always reserve the right to produce absolute nonsense when the mood strikes me.
When I first conceived this series, I thought of it as defining my ideal political candidate. Later I realized that I had too narrow of a focus. Then I thought of it as defining an ideal political platform. I soon realized that was also too narrow. I finally understood that I would only be satisfied by presenting a complete social and political philosophy.
I see this narrowness of focus as one of the perennial problems of our American approach to government. We have and we promote a candidate or an issue. What we should have and promote is a comprehensive program for our government and our society. It should address all levels of government; not just the federal level. It should be about ethics, politics, and social issues. And, It should spring from philosophical idealism.
So, I am defining here, my idea of a political and a social philosophy. Those two concepts, social and political, cannot be separated. They are wound together tighter than a double helix. This is not the bologna of the classic party platforms, which no one gets to see. I'm talking about a truly comprehensive program of government and responsibilities from top to bottom. This is about a philosophy, not about a person, issue, or political party. It has to do with responsibility. In that, I am sure I will be criticizing a number of government policies. When I do, I will try not to put it on a personal level. I hope to remain issue and philosophy oriented.
This is a very large and ambitious project and I shall probably have to back track several times as I go along. I'm sure there will be inconsistencies. There will be corrections and adjustments as I learn from my own arguments with myself and the critical input I am sure to receive. At the end, I hope to remove all ambiguity and inconsistency from this work.
If you wish, you may accuse me of megalomania for undertaking such an ambitious project. I will accept that because I believe someone has to do it. It's like the old challenge. If not me, who? If not now, when? So far as I know, this has not been completely done in America since the Federalist Papers were created by Hamilton and his associates. All the work I have seen is issue or politic specific and is not very comprehensive. Usually, it is not very honest either. This is particularly true of the so called political platforms. Now, I think it is time because we have gotten way off of the track. We have abandon our sense of responsibility.
As to responsibility, in American government and society, I see four levels. All four levels must be addressed by a comprehensive program. One of the major problems I see in our current government is this lack of clearly defined areas of responsibility. This causes a skewing of the focus of power toward the highest levels of government. The federal government tends to accumulate more and more power while the local governments slough off responsibility and beg for handouts. It was not always this way. At one time, ‘states rights' was a meaningful concept and responsibility was assumed.
In America, the highest and least sensitive to human issues is the federal level of government. This is also the level which returns the least value to the people for revenues collected. There is more bureaucracy to support and more pork to distribute. The second, also very insensitive to human issues is the state level. Here again, the government body is far removed from the real concerns of the people.
Much closer to the real needs of the people is the local community government. This is where the people have the most direct input and receive the most value for their tax dollars. At this point it needs to be said that large cities are a special case of community. In fact, many are more closely fitted to the state model than to the local community model. Therein lies the unique problems of large city government and management. We could make a very good case for treating the large cities as a separate level of government, not unlike the state level.
Too often in their relationships with the people, the large cities do act more like states than communities. They are isolated by many levels of bureaucracy. So, the distinction must be made between a town or village and a metropolis. Even a city as small as Flint, Michigan can lose its sense of community and end up with terribly, terribly bad government. The childish in fighting and interdepartmental feuds will quickly deplete the resources of such a city, as they have in Flint.
The final level of responsibility, and one we tend to ignore, is the responsibility of the home and citizen in the scheme of government and society. It is very important for a comprehensive program of government to define what is not the responsibility of government. That is, to define the responsibility of the home, family, and citizen in the overall scheme. To often of late I see people demanding to transfer the responsibility of the home and the parents to the various government agencies, and especially to the local schools.
It is useful to point out the fact that business and industry also have responsibilities to the culture. However, these are not specif levels of responsibility. They are issue related. As such, they must be addressed as issues at their specific levels of responsibility. For the most part, they will come up in the discussion of commerce. The same is true of the influence of the media on our culture. Although it has responsibilities, which it rarely fulfills, these again come down as issues.
Concerning the issues, in addressing peoples needs and demands, I see two classes. Most important are those which impact all or most of the citizens. As examples, energy and health care come to mind. These are the issues that a philosophy of government must address in detail. The remaining class are what I call minority and fringe group issues. These effect small groups of people and should be addressed differently. They cannot be allowed to absorb the full resources of the community at large. Too often they do just that because we fail to see their minor significance in the larger picture.
In dealing with issues, I believe that one of our major problems in politics today is that we do not look at the larger picture. We look at separate issues and create simplistic, single issue solutions. We act without much regard for overall impact. We must do better than that. We must take a more comprehensive view. We can begin that by taking a historical perspective in our social and political philosophy. We need to remember what we are about before we seek solutions.
Then, we must examine all of the levels of responsibility for each issue. We want to see at what level of responsibility the various facets of an issue lie. An issue should never manifest above the level where it can be effectively resolved, as most issues do now. We begin with the family and move upward in this process. Only from that perspective can we create a comprehensive long term political and social philosophy.
Once we have that philosophy, anything we do from then on must be consistent with it. If not we must not do it, or we must admit that we are changing the philosophy. Historically, we have not done that. Our government has consistently modified the humanistic philosophy on which this country was founded. There is, to be sure, a pretense that nothing has changed. I believe a look at our historical beginnings will show that it has changed; for the worse.
Now this essay was my introduction to this series. In the next
essay, I will try to give an outline of how I intend to proceed.
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