POLITICS: Part II, the philosophy: started from the European Enlightenment, now we’re here
By: Isha Shah
The U.S. clutched onto slavery until the ripe old age of 89, long after the last of its peer nations had abolished the practice (including its former colonizer, Great Britain, which outlawed slavery in 1833). It took no less than a civil war with the nation’s worst casualty count to date to pry the practice from its grasping fingers. A century of de jure segregation to be followed by ongoing de facto systemic oppression later, the U.S. was, and is, hardly at peace with the change.
Given this history, our founding documents written by mostly slaveholding middle-and upper-class men, seem rich. “All men are created equal,” pronounces the U.S. Declaration of Independence. However, the subsequent history of the U.S. and its ongoing oppression of people of color, women, the disabled, queer folks, the undocumented, the poor, and countless others offer little evidence that the U.S. operates according to this principle it so boldly considered “self-evident” at its founding.
So, wherefore this expanded Child Tax Credit? The good old U.S. of A, sending monthly payments to every child, of every race, caste, creed, and income level? Where in our history could have ever hinted at this level of universality? This installation of TMP’s extended Child Tax Credit series will review three major intellectual movements of the 17th to 19th centuries — not for the purpose of demonstrating that a universal child credit would be a straightforward extension of U.S. history and legislation (it is not) but rather that if taken to the letter, there is very little in the philosophical basis of the U.S. that prohibits the expansion of the CTC — and that in fact, it is more closely aligned than our current socioeconomic structures.
Philosophies of our founding: European Enlightenment Philosophy
What does 17th century Europe have to do with the seemingly modern policy proposal that is the universal child allowance? The European Enlightenment was the first philosophical movement of recent centuries that provided a basis for a universal benefit, afforded to all rather than the predestined few. The Enlightenment principle of natural right has two main tenets:
Each individual, as a birthright, has certain rights of self-governance that are antecedent to the government, and
It is the role and indeed the very purpose of the government to secure these rights (e.g., “right to property”)
The Founding cohort adopted these ideas as the basis for the laws of this nation — emphasizing that it is not only that the legitimacy of the new government rested on its ability to protect these natural rights, but the very justification for its existence was their preservation. This is hardly a foreign concept today (especially given the distortion of this rhetoric to justify the recent violent reactions to false claims of election fraud), but understanding the forces this philosophy arose in opposition to offers insight into the societal ills that an Enlightenment principles-based universal benefit seeks to remedy.
Divine Kings, Gold Souls, and Caste
For the centuries spanning from the inception of the British monarchy to the Glorious Revolution of 1688, monarchs on the British Isles governed with the “divine right of kings” — authority believed to have been bestowed by a higher power and therefore supersedent to those of all royal subjects. By the late 18th century, when colonists in the Americas began to grumble and King George III sank into ever-greater madness, British citizens were likely growing wise to the “divinity” of their monarch. English monarchs, having only emerged in the 1000s A.D., were of course not the first ones to decide they were justified to their lot in life by dint of some cosmic force.
In fact, as far ago as the 400s B.C. the Ancient Greek philosopher Socrates believed that philosophers should rule among men because they had the most purported wisdom; for a time during his successor Aristotle’s life in the 300s B.C., it was even believed that each human was born with a certain metal at their core — bronze, silver, or gold — and that this metal determined one’s rightful place in society. If you were stuck as an apprentice to an incompetent artisan who still managed to get by, there was not much you could or should do — you were likely a bronze-souled individual, and your boss probably had a heart of gold. The same cosmic forces that had brought you and your boss into the universe had also written into you both your respective places in the social hierarchy. Your positions were inseparable from your existence.
This soul-metal system is, of course, Caste Lite. Bronze- and gold-souled individuals do not know they are such, they are just presumed to be from the places they have ended up in society. In the caste system, there is no question — everything about you from your name to your family and your family’s history is an outcome and a prescription from the station of your birth. This is in exact opposition to the sentiments expressed in the U.S. Declaration and by the expansion of the Child Tax Credit.
So, what is the historical basis for this “natural right,” the precursor to universal rights and benefits, if divine kings and caste were so enshrined in the social structures of the time? Why does the expanded Child Tax Credit not assume that certain children are more deserving of support than others?
Tabula rasa and the state of nature
A fundamental underpinning of the system of natural right is tabula rasa, or the idea from the French philosopher Rousseau of the 16th century that assumes no one comes into the world with divine nutrition labeling. This is of course antithetical to any of the philosophies listed above.
With the assumption of natural right, a king no more has the right to rule than a pauper; the gold-souled no more than the bronze-souled; the highest-caste no more than the lowest. Since all are born with a clean slate, no one is more entitled to any more or fewer rights than the other — after all, with a clean slate, there would be no basis upon which to make the judgements necessary to allot destinies, rights, and power. Instead, according to this tenet, each individual should be allowed to make their own way into the world, and the position which they achieve in an environment in which all are afforded equal opportunity should be considered their rightful position.
Tacitly, this approach acknowledges that everyone does not have equal capabilities, but no one can justifiably be prohibited from engaging in the pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness. Because everyone is entitled to the chase, all humans are equally entitled to rights of self-governance. None have any reason to govern over others except by the will of the governed.
However, this theory obfuscates the obvious distortions required to apply it to reality. It is similar to how the equations taught in primary schools for the trajectory of projectiles only hold true in a vacuum, absent inconvenient yet incontrovertible forces such as friction. Consider, for example, the constraints to self-determinism for a family living in a dangerous neighborhood, a faltering school zone, or out-of-reach of a reliable public transit system. Navigating such an environment is closer to moving through molasses while the movements of those borne with security, safety, and guidance may be closer to a vacuum. Further, the ease of the latter may be facilitated by the conditions of the former.
This is exactly what was predicted by philosopher Thomas Hobbes in his description of the “state of nature,” in which everyone is exercising their natural rights all at once and all over each other: life is “nasty, brutish, and short.” A life in which individuals are governed only by themselves and protected only by their own capabilities, English philosopher Locke asserts, is “full of fears and continual dangers.” The very reason for relinquishing the right to full individual governance to elected officials is for protection and coordination, which is still unavailable to the oppressed even after signing over the right. Under the tenets of natural right and tabula rasa, there is no justifiable reason for the difference. Income is no more a prerequisite for these rights than race or gender.
The universal child allowance renders the assumptions made by those who founded their economic and governance systems upon natural right more valid (or, simply less invalid). By providing a universal allowance, the government would in effect be removing the obstacles in a child’s pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness that were borne of injustices affecting the child before their birth and could persist into their lifetime. No one blank-slate child should have any more agency than another, and a universal Child Tax Credit offers all children both the opportunities and the agency to realize their natural right.
Philosophies of our building: Transcendentalism
Where the European Enlightenment philosophies of the 17th century emphasized a type of “equality” that laid the groundwork for the universality of benefits, the early 19th century American Transcendentalist movement allowed for the idea of flexibility in these benefits as well, asserting that individuals could decide for themselves how to best pursue prosperity.
The movement was led by scholars, activists, and tree-huggers who rejected the Puritan notion that the structures imposed by church, family, and society were necessary to contain the threat posed by human imperfection. The Transcendentalist ethos was built around the belief that anyone, from slave to king, could have a Transcendental experience in which they experienced “an original relation to the universe.” While the restrictions posed by Puritan models of society permitted a relationship to the divine through a limited number of carefully policed paths, the Transcendentalists considered finding one’s own relationship to the universe and the divine outside of these structures all but a moral obligation.
Transcendentalist values, which are now mainstream American values, include individualism, taking responsibility for oneself, solitude, and nonconformity as a source of innovation. Self-sufficiency is paramount for any self-respecting Transcendentalist. Margaret Fuller went so far as to suggest that periods away from a society whose members are in various states of “distraction” and “imbecility” are necessary so that an individual does not become “a stranger to the resources of his own nature.” The individualism and equality promoted by the Transcendentalists would find their way into such American cultural milestones as Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 1841 essay “On Self-Reliance” and reforms in education, healthcare, and social services.
The next step for Transcendentalism
The changing values of the mainstream American populace toward people of color and women have moved along the tracks laid by Transcendentalist and European Enlightenment values. Slavery is the antithesis of Transcendentalism — if everyone is capable of having a transcendental experience and a unique relation with the world, then no one is any less divine than anyone else. Divine individuals are not chained. Likewise, Margaret Fuller advocated that women be units unto themselves before entering the relationship of “degradation” that is marriage.
The next logical step is to provide individuals freedom from not just constraints borne of bigotry, but of financial and social limitations as well. In order to be free of the control of other people, it is necessary to have a source of physical sustenance for oneself. In “On Reliance,” arguably the primary text of the Transcendentalist movement, Emerson defines the particularly Transcendentalist form of self-reliance as self-sufficiency not necessarily in a financial, but spiritual and intellectual sense — to be free of society, family, church.
And here is where a universal allowance intersects with Transcendentalist beliefs. Throughout the centuries, any marginalized group has been constrained through a restriction of access to the means that would allow self-sustenance; slaves, and low-caste individuals in other systems, barred from gaining literacy and other means by which they could gain their livelihoods other than servitude; the working class, unable to amass capital; women, unable to access the education and employment that would allow them to be financially free. In order to be free of the control of other people, it is necessary to not only secure the necessities of life — food, water, shelter, safety, education, society — but also the opportunity to exercise choice.
A universal child allowance allows for the protection from the arbitrary whims of an unthinking or greedy society having an outsize impact on one’s “original relation” — it offers a state of solitude in a sense, an ability to withdraw from the structures imposed by your position as a child of poor parents. In fact, Emerson finds this reliance on others’ approval so abhorrent that he defines a term for it — “the foolish face of praise”:
There is a mortifying experience in particular, which does not fail to wreak itself also in the general history; I mean the forced smile which we put on in company where we do not feel at ease in answer to conversation which does not interest us. The muscles, not spontaneously moved, but moved by a low usurping wilfulness, grow tight about the outline of the face with the most disagreeable sensation.
This “most disagreeable sensation” is all but a necessity for those who must rely on others’ magnanimity and caprices for their livelihood. If it was anathema for Emerson to force this smile at such a trivial occurrence as a “conversation which does not interest” it is hardly justifiable for him ask that workers remain at the mercy of their those who demand they work under unsafe conditions to receive the wages that hold them back from the precipice of poverty, or a spouse to remain conciliatory and demur to their abusive but breadwinning partners. Emerson asks his readers to forgo the “foolish face” — but they would only be able to do so because to lose a forced grin does not put their lives or health at any real risk.
Further, Thoreau and others considered gaining self-reliance as a skill, to be practiced and strengthened over time. Children of these families are of course not self-reliant (there are laws against that sort of thing) but further, their ability to be so in the future is also hindered. There are skills, knowledge, and connections that individuals have that allow them to exist in a state of self-reliance, in the spiritual and intellectual sense that the Transcendentalists emphasize. In order to be self-reliant, it is necessary to exist in networks, roles, and locations that allow it.
Philosophies of our building: Common schools, common good
Every morning, approximately 50 million U.S. school-age children stream into the halls of a public school. At first glance, the fundamental premise of publicly funded schools is radically progressive. Everyone, including those without children, must pay into a sprawling institutional system employing educators, maintenance workers, administrators and everyone else necessary to provide an intangible service to a bunch of wholly unproductive members of society. The promise is that subjecting the youngest members of society to hours of this service will eventually be a net benefit for (1) the children and (2) the community at large.
While there is little dispute over the positive effects of providing such a generous service to the direct recipient (more education generally leads to higher wages), the question of whether this benefits anyone else is central to the universal child allowance debate — just replace “universal basic service” with “universal basic cash,” and the questions remain the same. Further, there is a question of degree — are these benefits strong enough to merit taxing non-parents to support children? Based on the fact that over 90 percent of all U.S. schoolchildren attend a public school and there are billions of dollars and thousands of positions across the country being devoted to their support, it seems the answer from our government is a wholehearted “yes.”
However, publicly funded and freely available schools are too a policy innovation. Public schools were not originally founded under the progressive assumption that a universal benefit for children is a net benefit for society. Instead, the “common schools,” as they were called at the time, were operated by Puritan churches with the goal of instilling specific morals and obedience to religion in the population. Clergy, with the support of wealthy community members, determined the curriculum. These teachings by default excluded non-Puritan children, and wealthier children were still educated privately.
Henry Barnard, Catherine Beecher Stowe, and Horace Mann, a trio of education reformers at the turn of the late eighteenth century, emerged just as the Transcendentalist influence waned and transformed these regionally-supported, church-run schools into non-sectarian, universally accessible, and state-supported institutions. Together, they held, and in some cases created, the highest U.S. offices related to education: Barnard was the first U.S. Commissioner of Education and laid the groundwork for the U.S. Department of Education; Mann was a U.S. Representative from Massachusetts. That is to say, the concept of children having access to a free, high-quality, and life-changing intervention as a right guaranteed and paid for by the government — undoubtedly a progressive one — was not at the fringe, but rather the driving point of educational reform. These reformers built the institutions upon which our current education system has run for the last one and half centuries.
In fact, many of the child benefits we have today that focus on a single purpose — the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, for example, or certain childcare or education vouchers — are more in the spirit of the Puritanical antecedents of common schools rather than the reforms that Barnard, Beecher, and Mann fought for. Where the original Puritan schools focused on education for religious indoctrination, common schools were built to help a child, upon adulthood, “understand what his [own] highest interests and his highest duties are,” and that the taxation of the population to support schools was justified as “the most effective means of developing and training those powers and faculties in a child, by which, when he becomes a man, he may understand what his highest interests and his highest duties are; and may be, in fact and not in name only, a free agent.”
“Free the child”, Mann argues in this titular work. Many of the same moral arguments that were made in favor of the massive education reform that gave millions of school children the right to receive a free and high-quality education are the same as those in favor of a universal child allowance. In fact, many of Horace Mann’s writings could be lifted from the education context and placed in the bill for the expanded Child Tax Credit without change:
“The elements of a political education are not bestowed upon any school child, for the purpose of making him vote with this or that political party, when he becomes of age; but for the purpose of enabling him to choose for himself, with which party he will vote. So the religious education which a child receives at school, is not imparted to him, for the purpose of making him join this or that denomination, when he arrives at years of discretion, but for the purpose of enabling him to judge for himself…”
Just as a universal education enables a child to “choose for himself” or “judge for himself,” so does a universal child allowance. It does not have any of the moralizing that comes with deciding which foods are and are not eligible for food stamps, which schools are and are not eligible for vouchers, or which wage levels are and are not considered “poverty.” In that way, this is again more American than even some of America’s existing programs, and public schools seem positively socialist by comparison.
In sum, despite the U.S.’s track record on equal treatment of all peoples, and despite the fact that many of the writers of our founding documents would have likely demurred on the topic of extending the rights they waxed poetic about to people outside their race, gender, and social class, it is the case that there does exist evidence — in writing if not in practice — for a universal benefit such as the expanded Child Tax Credit.
Slavery is no longer legal, and women are now enfranchised. The words of our founding documents have been used to justify a de jure extension of universal rights and benefits to increasingly broad swathes of the population. And this is because in its purest form, the philosophies upon which these documents were based and interpreted were in fact progressive, with the universality of rights and the promise of agency to practice them at their core.
Next week’s article, focusing on other social assistance policies and their relation to the expanded CTC, will draw from policy structures established in part on these philosophies in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.