Taking Back The Articles of Confederation - Introduction

In the summer of 1787, a group of counter-revolutionaries met in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. They were asked by the Congress of the United States of America to gather and work on necessary amendments to the existing constitution. Instead they decided to throw the old document away and write a new one. The new document minimized the role of the people, divided the government into parts so that it would make majority rule difficult and moved the center of power beyond the reach of the common man. These counter-revolutionaries became know as America's “Founding Fathers” and the document they wrote the US Constitution.

Over the last two hundred years, the original government of the United States under the Articles of Confederation has became lost to history. Yet – as has become clear to many in the Occupy movements and the Tea Party – the current government of the United States is not serving the majority of the American people but rather a small elite who use it for private gain and political power. We need to recover awareness of the thirteen years during which the United States were governed under the Articles of Confederation. These were years of great accomplishment, the establishment of an independent North America and the beginning of a new experiment in confederal government where power remain close to where people lived.

There exists a profound neglect of this beginning. One might assume there would be interest in these years, in which the government of the United States was fundamentally different from the government that we have come to know. But the confederal period has never been fully assimilated into the great American myth of the “Founding.” Nor has the model of confederal government expressed in the Articles gotten much respect from those who have commented on the period. The confederation and the Articles either have been ignored or have been dismissed as a thankfully short-lived detour. This neglect and disregard is not justified. Indeed, the neglect of the Articles helps explain both the failure of conservative critics of the present American regime to go beyond mere criticism of “Washington’ and “big government” and the failure of its defenders to offer meaningful reforms of their own.

Reconsideration of the Articles of Confederation is an indispensable step in educating the impulse toward less government that has become one of the dominant strains of American politics. Reconsidering the Articles can tell us something not only about how confederal government might work but also refocus attention on the advantages for democracy of renewed governance at state and local levels. The Articles are crucial in this regard in that they stress not “less government” as much as “more politics.” And they are as deeply rooted in the American political tradition as the Constitution of 1787.

In upcoming installments I will try to cast some light on the Articles. This does not imply that a simple return to 1786 would resolve our 21st century problems. But it seems clear that our current government is too big and too much in the hands of the 1% to allow us to meet the challenges we face in the globalized world of the new century while also preserving the justice, progress and fairness by which America has prospered. Reminding ourselves of the beginning may help us find a way to begin again and perhaps prepare the way for a new constitutional convention and a new way to do our politics.


Note: “Confederal” denotes a political system in which the member states, not a central government, are sovereign. A “federal” system is one in which ultimate sovereign authority is exercised by the central government and not by the individual member states. The European Union is a confederal system while the government of the United States is now a federal system. The Articles refers to the union of states as a “confederacy.”

A Riff on Modern Capitalism

During most of human evolution, we lived by hunting and gathering.  Our daily activities were focused almost entirely on getting enough food to survive today and tomorrow.  Around 10 thousand years ago, we started replacing hunting and gathering with agriculture and animal husbandry.  Along the way, we no doubt began engaging in trading and bartering.  But the pursuit of today's bread and meat remained the central part of our daily existence.  By now, in industrial and post-industrial society, the actual production of food has become an activity which most people in developed - and increasingly in developing -  societies do not directly participate.  Instead, we earn our daily bread - and much else we now find essential for "modern life" - through buying and selling, earning and spending.

Production is now just one small part of the process of sustaining human life and society in the modern world.  People must buy and must be encouraged to buy.  Advertising is essential in this process so we get bombarded constantly with it.  All of life can seem built around being incessantly offered opportunities to spend our money.  If people stop buying - perhaps because they cannot earn - then selling becomes difficult, production may falter and more people end up not earning.

As production becomes more remote from the actual consumption processes - buying/selling, earning/spending - that feed us, space has grown for some to profit mightily from satisfying and creating needs.  This is not always bad.  The Internet and iDevices vastly open space for human interaction and productivity.  But the space for profit has become quite big and indeed can be thought of as a kind of petri dish for growth of a "tumor" - the mythical "job creator" - in the middle of the human enterprise.

The problem is how to even conceptualize a way of organizing our society around some other way of life.  We can't really all return to hunting and gathering.  Making and trading also cannot sustain our seven billion.  For each according to his needs and from each according to her ability would rely even more on an "invisible hand" than our current capitalist system as no mere human hand could sort out all our needs and capabilities. 

For now there seems no good answer other than trying to reduce the size of the tumor.

Human Nature and National Character

How one sees “human nature” probably reveals a lot about one's self. The range of views is broad. Some may deny there is such a thing, seeing human beings at birth as blank slates. Some may see humans as intrinsically good and others as essentially evil and still others everything in between.

However, it must be that human beings are by nature social. Our species had to evolve this way to survive. But beyond being just “social,” human beings all want to love and be loved. Yes, perhaps there are those born with some failed wiring who we call psychopaths. In the normal case, we are born wanting to be immersed in warm relationships with others, quite apart from sex. This suggests that by nature, most of us are born being “good” people, eager to talk and listen, eager to learn and share, eager to exercise our minds and bodies while exploring our world. This is what it means to be homo sapiens.

Nurture takes us from this starting point and either allows us to grow strong and mature as self-confident, wise and kind beings or it tears us down. We either develop as secure and open egos with positive character traits – honesty, compassion, loyalty, inquisitiveness – or we become encased in what Freud called reaction formations, negative character traits formed as defensive mechanisms against the bad things that we suffer as we age. Few of us are saints or outright devils. Most of us come out somewhere in between and some shine even when surrounded with sorrow and want. By nature we are good. Departures from this owe mostly to the inequalities and inadequacies of our social organizations.

National character is analogous to individual character. The humans that make up any language, ethnic or social group start out and grow as we all do. But they are confronted by the “character traits” built up over history and many of these traits are collective reaction formations, expressing those events – real or as imagined – that have defined that history. Nations are departures from a common human inheritance and nature. But they are also real. And it seems that few of us are ready to live without them.

Possibilianism

That nothing exist is the logically more stable state of being. Nothing needs anything further and ought to be unchangingly nothing. That there be something requires a departure from nothing, requires explanation. I.e., nothing should be being.

But we are, and the universe is. We don't know anything about what preceded the Big Bang, what dark matter and dark energy are and mean, what consciousness is, where it comes from, or where it may go. It may be that we will never know. It may be that as St Thomas Aquinas suggested, when reason can take us no further, that is the finger pointing to God. In any case, we know too little to rule out what science cannot explain and too much to believe much of what we take for certain.

An adherent of possibilianism is called a possibilian. The possibilian perspective is distinguished from agnosticism in that it consists of an active exploration of novel possibilities and an emphasis on the necessity of holding multiple positions at once if there is no available data to privilege one over the others. Possibilianism reflects the scientific temperament of creativity, testing, and tolerance for multiple ideas.

Eternal

To be eternal is to exist no where, in no time.

Civilizations in the Goldilocks Zone

A "Goldilocks" planet is a one that would be neither too hot nor too cold to support life. This is the catchy term science has given to describe those hypothetical planets orbiting stars in the "comfort zone" that would permit liquid water and perhaps life such as we might recognize.

Perhaps one can talk of intelligent life and civilizations in an analogous fashion. Intelligent life would arise from creatures with the potential for intelligence as man arose from more primitive primates. In some of these cases, while creatures might arise with a degree of intelligence they would not progress far or they would evolve much more slowly. Perhaps their environment would be relatively undemanding with conditions allowing the species to flourish without elaborating itself into large civilizations that then enter a cultural/technological evolution of their own. These might be termed "Garden of Eden" species. They might never leave their own planet or solar system and could be stable for very long periods of time.

At the other extreme, there might be intelligent species that evolve very quickly - perhaps to keep up with a more dynamic environment or perhaps out of some dynamic internal to its unique cultural/intellectual makeup. These civilization would tend to be unstable and the most extreme of them would grow beyond the ability of their planet to support them. These civilizations would suffer catastrophic declines and perhaps extinction. They might never survive long enough to go beyond their own atmosphere.

In between these two ends of the spectrum, civilizations would evolve at a fair pace, perhaps suffering precipitous events but eventually settling down to a sustainable level of dynamic evolution and change. These civilizations would be the Goldilocks ones in which the rate of change is neither too slow nor too fast for their intellectual, social, cultural, economic and political systems to keep up with. They might be the ones to go as far afield into the universe as physics and their own culture allows.

It would be nice to think that the human species of Earth is in that Goldilocks zone. But it is too early to say and the 21st Century may decide the issue.

Bits of Consciousness

It seems that all the minutia of our mental activity - our mind - is governed strictly by physical matter and biology. It must be so, consciousness is pure awareness and without content. (That mental activity is physically-based suggests that higher processing speeds are possible.)

Conscious is analog, not digital, not quantized. However, physical reality, including time, is quantized.

In the beginning was awareness. That without end is without meaning.