THE RISE OF ILLIBERALISM
With the fall of the Soviet Union, it was widely assumed that liberal democracy would spread and endure, enjoyed by increasing numbers of people on all continents. The end of communism and the democratization of authoritarian states, as well as the unprecedented economic uplifting of hundreds of millions of people who had lived in destitution, all spoke to the triumph of liberal values. It was a time when faith in the Enlightenment could be renewed: Democracy, economic development, human rights, scientific and technological wizardly, expressed most dramatically in the growth of digital technologies, emerged to usher in the new millennium. All spoke to an upward arc of continuing progress.
Yet in a few brief decades this optimism has been severely challenged. In rapid order we have witnessed nothing less than a fundamental disenchantment, not only with democratic forms of government but also with the very foundations of science and intellectual integrity on which the modern, democratic state rests. The emergence of “illiberalism” is widespread and very ominous. In its political manifestations we see the emergence of nationalist parties and fervent anti-immigrant backlashes in Western Europe, growing authoritarianism in Eastern European states, as well as in Turkey, China, India, and elsewhere. And most strikingly, we experience it in the United States in ways that bring into question, as never before, the stability of our democratic institutions.
This new nationalism expresses itself in populist movements and attacks on a free press and an independent judiciary. In a manner frighteningly reminiscent of mid-twentieth century movements, one hears of a yearning for “strong men,” as faith in the responsiveness of democratic governments grows weaker.
Despite the optimism felt after the Soviet period, there were earlier signs of dark times brewing on the horizon. The emergence of religious nationalism and political movements justified by religion—most dramatically represented by the Iranian Revolution of 1979—huge and growing economic disparities intensified by the triumph of neo-liberalism, and the persistence of mass atrocity crimes, all spoke to the intensification of parochial loyalties out of despair with universal values and a breakdown of wider allegiances characteristic of the modern liberal state.
THE AMERICAN CONTEXT
What is occurring across large sectors of the international arena, we are experiencing in the United States in unprecedented ways. Dark forces have widened and metastasized to challenge not only democratic institutions, but also the most fundamental norms that make a coherent society possible.
These forces of illiberalism are dramatically expressed through the persona and policies of Donald Trump, who defied the polls and the pundits to win the White House in 2016. But Trump represents the culmination of trends that began much earlier.1
The surprising presidential victory of Trump in 2016 is an exemplification of economic, political, and intellectual trends that have long been brewing. The result is greater warrant at this moment to fear for the future of American democracy than at any time since the Civil War. Our democratic institutions, which Americans have long taken for granted—the independence of the courts and the media, our system of checks and balances, fundamental respect for our Constitution—are now being undermined. But even more menacing, as noted, is the gratuitous assault on the very norms that underlie democratic institutions, and beyond, the very fabric of social life. Among them are such intuitively basic foundations as the appeal to facts, truthfulness, and rational consistency, and the employment of the rules of evidence as components of rational decision-making. Among the leading casualties of this ominous trend is a cavalier and politicized disregard for the authority of science. President Trump provides the leadership and legitimation of the these subterranean forces, but he won the White House by appealing to a grassroots constituency of prevailing working-class voters who feel left behind as America has shifted to a postindustrial economy, and an influx of foreigners have created a cultural landscape and society that they sense is increasingly alien.
These changes have generated an ugly anti-immigrant backlash and have unleashed racist and white supremacist outbursts unwitnessed on the national level in decades. We now live in a divided society. Partisan political divisions have resulted in a stagnated Congress. At the popular level, those who feel themselves disadvantaged and who are apprehensive and angry that the doors of economic opportunity are shut, especially for the next generation, view those living on the coasts as “liberal elites” who hold with contempt those in the American heartland. A result is the emergence of a new tribalism, centered not so much around ethnicity and religion, though that endures, as much as political ideology and one's position on defining issues such as abortion, gun ownership, gay rights, government regulations, and other causes that have been the centerpieces of the culture wars spawned in the 1960s. A searing causality of this tribalism that has excoriated putative elites and their values is an assault on higher education and the knowledge and authority that education brings. Absorbed into this assault is profound anti-intellectualism that animates a distrust of science and, beyond, the compelling nature of facts and evidence, when science, facts, and evidence threaten tribal identity and cohesion.
Without a consensual commitment to these baseline values, we have entered a surreal universe and have opened the door to societal breakdown. It is against the background of these startling and ominous developments that those committed to the maintenance of a viable American future need to forcefully advocate for democracy and engage in a renewed process of education toward that end. Even after Donald Trump exits the scene, there will be much rebuilding to do.
Science and democracy, both under attack, are the twin pillars of modern society, and, for those of liberal sensibilities, they are mutually sustaining. While one can imagine scientific endeavor taking place in nondemocratic environments, and with greater difficulty democracies wherein scientific progress is not given much emphasis, such a scenario contradicts the unfolding American narrative that has defined the country's self-understanding since its founding. An American society that is not democratic and that depreciates the importance of science would be a betrayal of America's core identity. It would also result in a much diminished America and the country's retreat from global leadership, where it has maintained a prominent position since World War II.
Whether the Trump phenomenon is transient or opens the door to an even darker future is impossible to predict. But a strong dynamic and counternarrative coursing through the American character is an appreciation that the future is open, and that it can be guided by the values and visions of its people. If this is the case, then the future calls for a renewed commitment to democracy and a reclamation of the importance of science and the scientific spirit.
The task is to get beyond stridently polarizing tribalism and inspire a reinvigorated enchantment with democratic values and processes. Solutions, needless to say, will be complex and long-range. A restructuring of the economy will be required, in order to reopen doors of opportunity that are currently closed and restore upward mobility, which is stalled. This will include radically reducing the unprecedented wealth gap that weakens democracy and democratic participation. As a broad generalization, when reality no longer works for people, irrational explanations for their condition become more attractive. Ways must to found to take big money out of politics. Reinvigorated moral leadership needs to emerge to re-inspire a divided society with unifying visions of the American Idea beyond racism and xenophobia, speaking to the strengths of an inclusive pluralism. What is also needed, as noted, is a reacquaintance and re-enchantment with the principles of democracy and civic involvement at all levels, and a deepening understanding that these principles are not only intrinsic to the American way of life as we have known it, but that they hold out the promise of the best life for all.
THE RANGE OF DEWEY'S THOUGHT
The times we are in, therefore, make a renewed appreciation for the thought of John Dewey especially relevant. Dewey's was arguably America's premier philosopher of democracy and a staunch defender and expositor of the scientific outlook. In briefest terms, Dewey, more than perhaps any other modern thinker, created a fusion between the democratic process and the scientific method. For Dewey, the scientific method entailed a democratic process and, similarly, democracy encompassed a process that is broadly scientific. For Dewey, “Democracy as a way of social life is the expression of a humanized experimentalism. In other words, the ethics of creative democracy are an expression of wide sympathy and a heartfelt concern for the common good, guided by experimental empiricism.”2
Dewey's philosophical output was prodigious and ranged very broadly. “He worked philosophically and at great length on problems of ethics, art, psychology, sociology, logic, religion, politics, and the area for which he is best known and was most influential—education.”3
Concepts as such as “democracy,” “science,” “empiricism,” “experimentalism,” and “the common good” are centerpieces of Dewey's philosophy and point to both his method and the aims toward which his entire philosophical output was directed.
Dewey was born in Burlington, Vermont, in 1859, completed his doctoral work at Johns Hopkins, and started teaching at the college level at the University of Michigan in 1884. Ten years later, he moved to the University of Chicago, where he assumed the chairmanship of the philosophy department. Dewey's move away from purely speculative issues accelerated during his time in Chicago, in part through his acquaintance with Jane Addams, the famed social worker and founder of Hull House. It was at Hull House that Dewey became directly involved with the problems wrought by urbanization, social change fueled by industrialization, and the plight of immigrants. It was here that Dewey associated with workers, union organizers, and radicals of all stripes. He was most impressed that the residents, in accordance with Addams's philosophy, were not the objects of a patronizing charity but were self-governing in working through the challenges they confronted. There can be little doubt that these early experience were formative in molding Dewey's philosophy of democracy.
It was also in Chicago that Dewey founded the Laboratory School at which he could test out his pedagogical hypotheses. This was the period in which Dewey developed the philosophy of education for which he best known and developed an international reputation.
In 1904 Dewey arrived at Columbia University and became the luminary of its philosophy department in what was arguably the department's Golden Age. It was here that he expounded on his philosophical naturalism and its associated applications to a wide ranges of disciplines. Dewey continued with his life-long commitment to activism, even while becoming America's premier public intellectual. He marched with teachers on picket lines in support of their unionization. When he was seventy-eight, he traveled to Mexico City to lead a commission investigating the charges brought against Leon Trotsky, who had been condemned in the trumped up Moscow trials. And he supported and provided hospitality to Bertrand Russell when Russell was denied a teaching position at City College on the grounds of being moral unsuitable. It is noteworthy that Dewey wanted to ensure fairness for Trotsky despite believing him to be a fanatic, however brilliant. And Russell was a philosophical adversary, who had been less than charitable to Dewey. Perhaps most relevant to our interests here was the fact that Dewey's personal values and his public commitments expressed the engagement that lay at the heart of his technical philosophy.
Despite the extensive scope of his thought, it would be correct to conclude that Dewey's major philosophical project was to break down dualisms that plague both technical philosophizing and ordinary modes of thinking.
Dewey's grand intellectual effort was to show the harmony and continuum between ideas and action, thinking and doing, science and religion, science and art, means and ends, facts and values, ideals and reality and…the interrelatedness of the individual and the community. Classical philosophy usually emphasized the separateness of these categories. Dewey, inspired in his youth by the philosophy of Hegel, sought to show their similarities and connections with each other.4
While democracy and science are ostensibly different endeavors, their overlapping characteristics place them within Dewey's grand project of harmonizing if not unifying ostensibly disparate aspects of thought and behavior. In regard to science, Dewey is not primarily interested in the specifics of scientific discovery. And when he discusses democracy, he does not focus on the institutions required for democratic governance, though he affirms these as essential. Dewey, in concert with his naturalistic metaphysics, posits that nature and reality are continually in flux.5 Dewey began his career as an Hegelian idealist, but his later thought expresses an explicit break and contrast with idealistic metaphysics. All things change, and he rejected fixed points and absolutes. As such, when it came to both science and democracy, Dewey assessed them primarily as methods. This close kinship of democracy and science will become clearer by discussing in some detail what he means by each.
DEWEY AND SCIENCE
For Dewey, scientific thinking was a refinement of the processes of thinking in general. In Dewey's view, reality is inherently problematic. In simplest terms, as we move through life, we confront problems at every turn. We are impelled to resolve each problem in ways that contribute to the greatest fulfillment. Once resolved, we then move on to engagement with the next problem. It is the method of resolution that most interested Dewey, and stood at the center of his philosophical pragmatism, which he also referred to at various times as “instrumentalism” and “experimentalism.”
Dewey stands as one of the major formulators, together with Charles Sanders Peirce and William James, of pragmatism, which has often been characterized as a distinctively American philosophy. In its theory of truth, pragmatism broadly identifies what is true with what “works” with regard to creating human satisfaction. In this sense it contrasts with forms of idealism that measure truth by how well the proposition or hypothesis at hand is consistent with an objective, independent, and preexistent reality. Pragmatism extends beyond the resolution of practical problems to embrace moral ones as well. This implies, again, that moral values do not derive from absolutes but emerge out of concrete circumstances and frustrations that seek satisfactory resolution.
Steven Rockefeller provides a summary of how this process functions in Dewey's thought:
Instead of seeking for absolute ideals and offering ready-made solutions to moral problems, pragmatism adopts a genetic and experimental approach to moral problems and focuses on developing a method for dealing with specific moral difficulties as they arise in concrete situations. It directs a person facing a moral dilemma to carefully clarify the nature of the problem and then to give attention to specific alternative values or ideals that might guide conduct in the situation, noting especially the conditions that might actualize them, that is, the means to their realization. With the aid of this knowledge of conditions or means, it studies the actual consequences that flow from acting under the guidance of the alternative values in question. In the light of a knowledge of consequences, it then evaluates these ideals, taking into consideration the specific needs of the moral problem at hand. This is the process of pragmatic moral evaluation.6
Central to Dewey's theory of knowledge is the employment of “intelligence” as an essential component of inquiry, which Dewey never tired of invoking. Intelligence is contrasted with “reason,” which Dewey interpreted as the assertion of prior, fixed absolutes that stand outside of experience and to which experience needs to conform. He at times used analogies to describe the use of reason as a possession of the spectator rather than an active participant in the acquisition of knowledge.
To illustrate his point, Dewey referred to the legacy of Newtonian laws. Though he did not doubt that Newton employed empiricism to arrive at his discoveries, he contended that since they were posited they have been used as fixed certainties that limit further inquiry rather than extending its bounds. In this regard, Dewey applauded the discovery of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle as introducing openness and flexibility into the process of inquiry. Dewey noted,
The principle of indeterminacy thus presents itself as the final step in the dislodgement of the spectator theory of knowledge. It marks the acknowledgment, within scientific procedure itself, of the fact that knowing is the kind of interaction which goes on within the world. Knowing marks the conversion of undirected changes into changes directed toward an intended conclusion.7
To drill down further, Dewey defined intelligence by asserting that
Intelligence…is associated with judgment; that is with selection and arrangement of means to effect consequences and with choice of what we take as our ends. A man is intelligent not in virtue of having reason which grasp first and indemonstrable truths about fixed principles, in order to reason deductively from them to the particulars which they govern, but in virtue of his capacity to estimate the possibilities of a situation and to act in accordance with his estimate. In the large sense of the term, intelligence is as practical as reason is theoretical.8
These brief examples summarize much about Dewey's views on the philosophy of science, knowledge, and life in general. He saw these things as dynamic and not static. They are open-ended and fluid. They require active engagement of human inquiry and experientially grappling with empirical and moral problems to arrive at the best responses that emerge out of those circumstances and the process itself. It was an aim of Dewey's philosophy to apply intelligence in order to recognize the good and render what is good secure.
Engagement for Dewey was key. Our experience engages with nature. And for Dewey the “world” was always what we engage with. Intelligence arises from engagement with problems and how those relations are discovered, measured, manipulated, tested, and controlled. Freedom, for Dewey, was not liberation from the world, it was rather a way of acting with the world and in it. As implied, there is no stark division between the acquisition of knowledge in general and scientific inquiry. Nor is there a division between these processes and the molding of character. For Dewey, we were preeminently social beings investing ourselves in solving problems and we become who we are through active interaction with others.
As noted, Dewey saw science and the acquisition of scientific knowledge as a generalized form of knowledge possessed by both the professional specialist and average people as they engage in the processes of living. In briefest terms, Dewey defined the scientific enterprise as “the existence of systematic methods of inquiry, which, when they are brought to bear on a range of facts, enable us to understand them better and to control them more intelligently, less haphazardly and with less routine.”9
Historian Robert Westbrook identifies five distinct steps in Dewey's path to (scientific) knowledge:
1. a felt difficulty or problem (“thinking begins in what may fairly be called a forked-road situation”); 2. the location and definition of this difficulty; 3. the suggestion of a possible solution to the problem; 4. reasoned consideration of the bearings of the suggested solution; and 5. further observation and experiment leading to the acceptance (belief) or rejection (disbelief) of the proposed solution. At the heart of this process was the making of inferences, a leap from “what is surely known to something else accepted on its warrant.”10
It is of the utmost importance to assess these steps not in a formulaic sense but as functions of personality and the product of learned habits. They are habits immediately recognizable to the woman or man of liberal disposition and that are so much under threat from the tribalism and closed-mindedness that looms over our contemporary political and social landscape. For Dewey these habits implied a “willingness to hold belief in suspense, ability to doubt until evidence is obtained; willingness to go where evidence points instead of putting first a personally preferred conclusion; ability to hold ideas in solution and use them as hypotheses to be tested instead of as dogmas to be asserted; and (possibly the most distinctive of all) enjoyment of new fields for inquiry and of new problems.”11 The importance of developing such habits in great measure accounts for the emphasis that Dewey placed on education as a mainstay of his thought.
Dewey's academic career, especially his tenure teaching philosophy at Columbia University (1904–1932), was set within a charged ideological environment against which he worked out his epistemic and political theories. Dewey's commitment to applied intelligence stood in contrast to closed systems such as fascism, Marxism, and doctrinaire religion, which presented the individual with what William James referred to as a “block universe,” one in which reality was given in advance of human application or was a product of determinism. Yet Dewey was also aware of the robust appeal of dogmatic ideologies and understood that his theory of knowledge, which did not lead to fixed points or concrete ends, might be found emotionally wanting for many.
In addition to conflicting with culturally bound and politically transmitted ideologies, Dewey recognized that his theory of knowledge, based on active, intelligent inquiry without the security of predetermined answers or solution to problems, came up against deeply ingrained personal proclivities. In an observation that could well be applied to our contemporary situation, Dewey observed in Freedom and Culture that the constituents of the scientific attitude are challenged by all too common aspects of human behavior:
Every one of these traits goes contrary to some human impulse that is naturally strong. Uncertainty is disagreeable to most persons; suspense is so hard to endure that assured expectation of an unfortunate outcome is usually preferred to a long-continued state of doubt. “Wishful thinking” is a comparatively modern phrase, but men upon the whole have usually believed what they wanted to believe, except as very convincing evidence made it impossible. Apart from a scientific attitude, guesses, with persons left to themselves, tend to become opinions, and opinions dogmas. To hold theories and principles in solution, awaiting confirmation, goes contrary to the grain.12
A question that can be asked is whether Dewey's theory of knowledge contributes to the relativism we witness today and as such abets the erosion of respect for science and scientific authority. Does Dewey's rejection of a priori truths confirm a culture of subjectivity that assures that “guesses…tend to become opinions and opinions dogmas”? In later life Dewey spurned the use of “truth” and opted to employ the term “warranted assertability” to describe the conclusion to which intelligent inquiry led.
The charges of relativism and subjectivism frequently attach themselves to pragmatism, but what saves Dewey from this criticism is his commitment to the social and communal nature of inquiry. New conclusions need to be responsive to the conclusions confirmed by the community of inquirers and new ideas need to cohere with the reservoir of all previously funded ideas. Objectivity is confirmed not by the correspondence of an idea “out there,” but by the intersubjective consensus of human beings. Hence Dewey's theory of inquiry assured that there was little wiggle room, so to speak, to irresponsible or wildly assert conclusions emerging out of a method that was designed for an ever fluid reality.
Dewey recognized that a relative few (might we say an elite few?) possess the scientific attitude while the masses do not. Yet, it is a disposition that Dewey aimed to spread widely throughout society. Why are the necessary habits of mind so narrowly held? Dewey's response is that “the answer given to this challenge is bound up with the fate of democracy.”13
DEWEY AND DEMOCRACY
For Dewey, democracy was the process of intelligent inquiry extended to the level of society. The association of democracy with the routine of periodically casting a vote is an expression of democracy in its minimal form. Democratic practice goes beyond the institutions that enable democratic process to take place. At its core, democracy is a character trait of a free people, a trait that dialectically shapes itself through engagement with people and community, and with their problems.
Dewey took for granted the structural requirements of democracy—elections, a free press, an active judiciary, and fundamental rights. But his primary interests did not lie there. Commensurate with the pursuit of knowledge, Dewey was concerned with society shaping itself in order to bring new values to life and to fulfill human desires. In Dewey's own words,
The keynote of democracy as a way of life may be expressed, it seems to me, as the necessity for the participation of every mature human being in the formation of the values that regulate the living of men together.14
But the regulation is not one that maintains static adjustment. Rather, Dewey was a progressive and meliorist, who saw the improvement of the social condition in the capacity of men and women to mold their environments for the better.
It should be clear that Dewey's vision of American democracy was thoroughly secular, and, while optimistic, was totally divorced from any notion of divine purpose or destiny for the nation. Dewey stood opposed to supernaturalism and the authoritarianism that established religion exemplified, all of which was antithetical to the democratic spirit. Democracy is not the working out on the mundane plane a divine assignment or the fulfillment of a religious vision. In accordance with Dewey's overall philosophy, democratic process is itself on the same level as religion as Dewey reframed it, that is, religion of a very humanistic kind.
His goal was to integrate fully the religious life with the American democratic life, transforming the religious life into a way of practical liberation for the individual and society and the democratic way of life into a way of religious self-realization and social unification.15
But none of this relates to blending the worship of a supreme being with the temporal concerns of daily living, or includes the hope that the will of a divine being will be realized in the American experience. As the philosopher Richard Rorty notes, Dewey's democracy “is a matter of forgetting about eternity.”16 In Dewey's words, “Democracy is neither a form of government nor a social expediency but a metaphysic of the relation of man and his experience in nature.”17 Democracy is a thoroughly human process, totally self-contained within human experience without external references points or norms.
Dewey's emphasis on democracy as process suggests that the more important manifestation of democratic participation takes place in the smaller, local spheres of life. No doubt, one needs to be concerned with the issues that consume national and international politics, and assuredly Dewey was. But the heart of democracy is most readily found in what has come to be termed “civil society,” that stratum of public situations between the institutions of government and the corporate world. Dewey may have had in mind the New England town meeting as the paradigmatic case. But one can conclude that involvement in improving neighborhood schools, coaching a child's soccer team, or engagement with environmental cleanup campaigns, and finding, in community with others, the best ways to organize these efforts, goes to the heart of Dewey's democratic vision.
Several philosophical concepts intrinsic to Dewey's model are buried within such examples. First is the notion, stated briefly above, that the individual is social and communal in nature. Dewey stood against classic liberalism, which views the individual as separate or independent from others. And certainly Dewey rejected the historical notion that the individual stands in opposition to society so that the gain of one is the loss of the other. A laissez-faire notion of the individual, derived from classical Enlightenment figures, Dewey viewed as the “old liberalism” that needed to be replaced by new values. By contrast, he embraced an organic vision that sees community and active engagement with it as the matrix out of which the individual emerges. This relationship means that Dewey's philosophy is a dynamic one, with social action natural to it.18
Second, while Dewey was assuredly a communitarian, he nevertheless was committed to the value of freedom. But in parallel with his philosophy of the social nature of the individual, freedom for Dewey did not mean an absence of restraint or social encumbrance. There is no doubt that Dewey defended individual liberty in a political sense. He played a role in founding the American Civil Liberties Union, and, as such, saw a necessary place for what philosopher Isaiah Berlin would refer to as “negative liberty.” Yet in his democratic theory what most concerned him was “positive freedom” in that it was an expression of potentialities that could be realized through involvement in democratic process.
In summary, Dewey was a progressive, a Left liberal with strong affinities for democratic socialism, who believed that struggling for social justice was the beating heart of American identity. He lived and worked in a time of ideological ferment. He was critical of capitalism, yet was thorough in his critique of Marxism for its authoritarianism, determinism, and its emphasis on conflict over cooperation and historical insistence that violence was necessary. As a generalization, Dewey's contribution to democracy was to lay out a theoretical template more than the advocacy of specific policies and programs.
Yet in his long career Dewey spoke out on the issues of the day, defended numerous causes, and joined in association with other progressives. He worked for educational reform and, as mentioned, supported the movement of teachers to unionize and the cause of labor. He reluctantly supported America's entry into the First World War, and he opposed American involvement in the Second World War until after the attack on Pearl Harbor. He was not trusting of Franklin Roosevelt, but he affirmed many of the programs put forth in the New Deal. Dewey lent his voice to, and in several instances chaired, a range of activist organizations. Among them were the League for Independent Political Action and the People's Lobby. These groups brought together coalitions of workers, farmers, and the middle class in order to push for a radical third party. The former also attracted the support of a large group of left-wing intellectuals, including W. E. B. DuBois, Oswald Villard, and Norman Thomas.19 In addition to the American Civil Liberties Union, he helped found some of the foremost organizations of his day—the NAACP, the League for Industrial Democracy, the New York Teachers’ Union, the American Association of University Professors, and the New School for Social Research. Dewey, as noted, set the standard for the public intellectual. The historian Henry Steele Commager observed when Dewey died in 1952, “He was the mentor, and the conscience of the American people; it is scarcely an exaggeration to say that for a generation no issue was clarified until Dewey had spoken.”20
DEWEY'S RELEVANCE FOR OUR TIMES
The philosopher Richard Rorty assessed John Dewey, together with Walt Whitman, as the foremost exemplars of a defining narrative coursing through American history. It is the narrative of the American Left, but a Left that is detached from any cosmic authority or plan. It is a pragmatic Left, immersed in experimentalism and optimistic in its conviction that, given the requisite intelligence, problems could be solved, new values could emerge out of new circumstances, and human suffering could be ameliorated. It is a Left that is humanistic in its vision and methods. Much of which is most admirable in America's history has been expressed in the struggle for justice and in social reform on behalf of the oppressed and the excluded. John Dewey's philosophy gives peerless intellectual justification to this noble tradition.
Needless to say, America has spun different and darker narratives, those of racism and nativist xenophobia. Imperialism and violence, hegemonic capitalism, social subjection, and marginalization reflect the ignoble underside of American history. At its worst, slavery, genocide, Jim Crow, violent hate groups, and white supremacist organizations are as intrinsic to the American story as the persons and movements that have stood for the better angels of the American experience. And currents of anti-intellectualism have always run through the American character.
The same nation that could elect its first African-American to highest office in short order has replaced him with an unhinged, unread, pathological narcissist and liar, who has unleashed and legitimated the darker expressions of the American national story. It is within this dark context that we can assess John Dewey's relevance.
It is hard to imagine a social condition more antithetical to Dewey's philosophy and politics than the one we experience in 2018. Beyond the attack on science, to the phenomenon of “alternative facts” and “post-truth” assertions, it is hard to know in detail what Dewey would make of the current age. Digital technologies, which have infinitely broadened access to ideas, have also siloed information in ways that intensify opinions and reify them into extremist dogma.
Dewey's theory of science as well as his elaboration of democracy require discussion, mediation, negotiation, and compromise in order to arrive at satisfactory responses, which themselves will be provisional and subject to inevitable change. The contemporary public, from Congress to the grassroots, seems so angrily divided as to foreclose such a process, which at least requires enough openness and respect across lines of difference to allow such a process to take place.
Our times and Dewey's, needless to say, greatly differ, but there are enough similarities in regard to broader phenomena that we can feel confident in concluding where Dewey would stand. He would have decried the hegemonic role of corporatism and the corporate state in suppressing individual freedom.
He would have been aghast at the decline of public education and the imposition of testing as a form of regimentation that directly contradicted the experiential centrality of his educational theory and its lived practice.
In his social theory, Dewey stridently opposed the ideology of the melting pot for robbing minorities, including immigrants, of the richness of their cultural experiences. He was an ethnic pluralist, who nevertheless would have been horrified at the retreat into tribalism that plagues so much of our national life. Ethnic pluralism is only worth having if diverse groups communicate with each other. The point of his philosophy centered around the sharing of different values in order to create richer lives for all concerned.
And Dewey would have railed against the recrudescent nationalism emerging domestically and abroad. Dewey was a cosmopolitan and in principle felt that any type of nationalism or patriotism that blocked the association of people around science, art, and commerce should be abandoned. According to Stephen Rockefeller,
Dewey continues to adhere to the view he expressed in the early 1890s that the democratic life is a strategy for dissolving all social divisions and for creating world-wide human community. The experience of the two world wars only deepened Dewey's convictions on this matter.21
Yet our times may not be completely bleak nor devoid of Deweyan values. The ominous pall of the Trump phenomenon is being met by an outbreak of grassroots activism. In her book Necessary Trouble, journalist Sarah Jaffe documents the Occupy Movement, Black Lives Matter, struggles around the country for a $15 minimum wage, efforts to unionize Walmart workers, and other causes, many that fall beneath the radar of the established press, and all carried out by local activists.22 In what seems like a throwback to an earlier era, public school teachers in West Virginia have successfully concluded a statewide strike to win a five percent pay increase. And hundreds of thousands of high school students have come together to organize protests in Washington, DC, and around the country for sensible gun laws in the wake of a mass shooting at a school in Parkland, Florida. Accurate prediction of the future is not ours, but Dewey, humanist that he was, believed that the future is always open and that the dialectics of change, guided by intelligence, is an antidote to despair.
Robert Westbrook, in his study on Dewey and American democracy, interprets Dewey as more radical than he is generally assessed to have been. He sees Dewey as an influence in the 1960s in inspiring the content of the “Port Huron Statement,” which was the manifesto of the Students for a Democratic Society with its call for “participatory democracy.” One might conclude as we enter a new age of reaction and rebellion against the forces of repression that Dewey's commitment to participatory democracy may prove to be his contribution of greatest relevance in this moment. We may be at the dawn of a rebirth of democracy that coveys much of the Deweyan spirit.
In the final analysis, the relevance of Dewey's thought today is tagged to the relevance of academia to the everyday realm of human affairs. And a compelling case can be made that what transpires in the ivory tower is less relevant than it was in Dewey's day. But Westbrook argues that, if we seek a blueprint by which to guide our actions and lead us to a better future, “we could do worse than to turn to John Dewey for the measure of the wisdom we will need to work our way out of the wilderness of the present.”23