Scott Kamps
* Part 2 in a 3-part series
Our founders understood the pursuit of happiness as the quest for the good life – not self-indulgent search for instant satisfaction.
Our society has rejected this perspective; an egregious example is the pervasiveness of “sex education” and how many think it’s absurd to teach abstinence until marriage.
The idea that there’s goodness in young people controlling their passions is a difficult endeavor. Understanding the long-term benefit of waiting (for one’s self, future spouse and posterity); and for deeper future happiness – rather than the immediate indulging of the brute desires of youth – is now considered irrational by many.
But, anyone who knows how the world works knows which life leads to greater well-being in the long run.
The founders recognized the benefit of using reason to control passions: an individual’s happiness depended on making decisions using long-term reason rather than short-term passion. Further, they argued this principle applies to political bodies as well as individuals.
Federalist 55 says, “In all very numerous assemblies, of whatever character composed, passion never fails to wrest the sceptre from reason. Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob.”
Madison’s statement highlights the fact – often not understood in our day – that America is not a democracy. Our founders believed that direct democracies – like Athens – unleashed mob passions that demolished deliberation. The Constitution was designed to restrain “violent passions” like anger, envy, ambition and greed; incorporating cooling mechanisms to slow down the formation of impetuous majorities, to advance “public happiness” (i.e., the happiness of the people).
Historian Daniel Howe argues the Federalist Papers applied faculty psychology to the design of the republic in the Constitution. Rather than trying to balance the three forms of government (rule of one, rule of the few and rule of the many) – like those who preceded them – the founders sought to balance three aspects of reason:
* The legislative branch corresponded with the understanding that received and processed information;
* The executive branch corresponded with the will that took action (subordinate to the law); and
* The judicial branch corresponded with the conscience that judged right from wrong (correcting unjust/partial laws).
One of the greatest threats to our republic was thought to be the formation of “factions.” Factions were defined in Federalist 10 as impetuous mobs “united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adversed to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.”
Social media encourages the very causes of faction “sown in the nature of man” that the founders sought to deter. It undermines deliberation and foments inflammatory posts based on “violent passions,” creating echo chambers that stoke up more of the same.
Ask yourself if emotional posts of passion or well-reasoned posts are more common on any social media platform.
In a republic, good citizenship requires more than voting intelligently and responsibly. We also have a responsibility to learn how to master our passions, resist group think and learn to think for ourselves.
Scott Kamps writes a bi-weekly column for The Graham Star. He can be reached via email, thestableguy@frontier.com.