Creative Democracy

A recent discussion here at Long Sunday has reminded me why I liked John Dewey.  Though much of his political philosophy may seem anachronistic today, he was a passionate defender of participatory democracy for over half a century.  Perhaps his most succinct and inspiring account is in the essay written for his 80th birthday, Creative Democracy- The Task Before Us:

If I emphasize that the task can be accomplished only by inventive effort and creative activity, it is in part because the depth of the present crisis is due in considerable part to the fact that for a long period we acted as if our democracy were something that perpetuated itself automatically; as if our ancestors had succeeded in setting up a machine that solved the problem of perpetual motion in politics. We acted as if democ-racy were something that took place mainly at Washington and Albany- or some other state capital-under the impetus of what happened when men and women went to the polls once a year or so-which is a some-what extreme way of saying that we have had the habit of thinking of democracy as a king of political mechanism that will work as long as citizens were reasonably faithful in performing political duties.

Democracy is a way of personal life controlled not merely by faith in human nature in general but by faith in the capacity of human beings for intelligent judgment and action if proper conditions are furnished. I have been accused more than once and from opposed quarters of an undue, a utopian, faith in the possibilities of intelligence and in education as a correlate of intelligence. At all events, I did not invent this faith. I acquired it from my surroundings as far as those surroundings were animated by the democratic spirit. For what is the faith of democracy in the role of consultation, of conference, of persuasion, of discussion, in formation of public opinion, which in the long run is self-corrective, except faith in the capacity of the intelligence of the common man to respond with commonsense to the free play of facts and ideas which are secured by effective guarantees of free inquiry, free assembly and free communication? I am willing to leave to upholders of totalitarian states of the right and the left the view that faith in the capacities of intelligence is utopia. For the faith is so deeply embedded in the methods which are intrinsic to democracy that when a professed democrat denies the faith he convicts himself of treachery to his profession.

Now much of Dewey's faith may seem naive in comparison to what is happening today in the United States.  But he was also very cognizant of the dangers presented by suspicion and repression of free speech:

When I think of the conditions under which men and women are living in many foreign countries today, fear of espionage, with danger hanging over the meeting of friends for friendly conversation in private gatherings, I am inclined to believe that the heart and final guarantee of democracy is in free gatherings of neighbors on the street corner to discuss back and forth what is read in uncensored news of the day, and in gatherings of friends in the living rooms of houses and apartments to converse freely with one another. Intolerance, abuse, calling of names because of differences of opinion about religion or politics or business, as well as because of differences of race, color, wealth or degree of culture are treason to the democratic way of life. For everything which bars freedom and fullness of communication sets up barriers that divide human beings into sets and cliques, into antagonistic sects and factions, and thereby undermines the democratic way of life. Merely legal guarantees of the civil liberties of free belief, free expression, free assembly are of little avail if in daily life freedom of communication, the give and take of ideas, facts, experiences, is choked by mutual suspicion, by abuse, by fear and hatred. These things destroy the essential condition of the democratic way of living even more effectually than open coercion which- as the example of totalitarian states proves-is effective only when it succeeds in breeding hate, suspicion, intolerance in the minds of individ-ual human beings.

Comments

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

As the person who initially mentioned Dewey, I should say that one of the reasons I did is that his ideas about, say, participatory democracy build upon an anti-foundationalist, anti-essentialist philosophy...something he shares with Butler, Foucault, &c. The resistence to Deweyian anti-foundationalism by contemporary theorists strikes me, as you indicate above, as being largely based on the anti-democratic, anti-populist nature of much contemporary theory. Quite a complicated matter, that is, and not one I'm able to consider in depth at the current moment, but fortunately, I recently read a few threads here on just such matters.

[Alain]

Scott, thanks for the comment. Though I admire much in Dewey's thought, and his personal example as a "public intellectual," I do have my differences. Though I am generally sympathetic to participatory models of sovreignty, there are many challenges in the current situation that give one pause. The current rise of American fundamentalism would seem to be antithetical to the sort of ethos that Dewey championed. And his enthusiastic embrace of empirical science as a model for social and political thought would need some revising, though in some ways he may provide a certain corrective to current prejudice against science.

Without rambling on, Dewey is clearly a model of an engaged theorist who still had faith in "the people." It would be interesting to rediscover him amidst the current context of domestic spying, torture, and the "unitary executive."

[John Emerson]

I think that Dewey, along with Margaret Mead and Bertrand Russell, is exactly whom Christians are talking about when they say "secular humanist". Even in the fifties when I was young these guys were influential at the popular level (e.g., Redbook magazine). That seems so far away now.

None of the positive forms of leftism, progressivism, and populism were able to deal with the facts of nationalist warfare and the accompanying propaganda media. Dewey also was, IIRC, a little bit insensitive to issues of class and ethnicity, and assumed that reasonableness, honesty, and good will were more prevalent than they really are.

I think that apolitical neutrality as an ideal in journalism and academia has been imposed to suppress political agents of the Deweyan type. Post-WWII, preparing for the Cold War, the powers that be came to believe that any populist activity at all tended toward Bolshevism or fascism, and that if we were going to switch enemies from time to time (as in 1946-7) we should probably minimize popular awareness of major foreign policy principles.

[Jodi]

Alain,
I like these passages. A friend of mine just wrote an interesting dissertation that draws heavily from Dewey. She has a couple of articles in a large new book on publics based on a art exhibition. I think the book is edited by Bruno Latour.

You won't be surprised, however, that I have reservations. What sticks out to me is the way that Dewey's 'free' speech in fact is quite regulated and that he thinks of fullness of communication as something opposed to or incompatible with division and antagonism.

To my mind, unrestricted communication quite regularly leads to hatred and division. Or, better, it lets hatred and division be expressed as such. Differently put, there is nothing in communication per se that suggests agreement or commonality.

[alain]

Thanks Jodi. I actually agree with your assessment. Dewey did not envision the level of divisiveness that a "tolerant" and "open" public discourse could generate. And I do not think that he would imagine the extent to which reactionary fundamentalism, and militarism, would come to dominate American politics. I believe all of Dewey's talk of a certain faith in democracy, in the ability of people to reason collectively to address social problems, is so striking because it is so antithetical to what we live and breathe on a daily basis. But when Scott mentioned Dewey within the context of the discussion of Butler, it reminded me of this particular essay. Ironically, in his own time Dewey was often criticized for being unclear, for being too concerned with his "naturalistic metaphysics," - that sometimes his writings were even considered esoteric.

But from what I remember of his work, he spent a great deal of time in his later years (at least in the 1920's and 1930's) trying to address the social and economic crisis of his time, and do so in a way accessible to the "common man." To the degree that Butler has recently written and spoken publicly on specific issues (like the Palestinian/Isreali conflict) she seems to be moving in a similar direction, even if she comes from a very different philosophic direction. Though, as I recall her first book was a study of the 20 th century French appropriation of Hegel, and Dewey spent his early years quite enamored with German idealism.

[ricia]

great post/discussion, have passed it along.

[Jodi]

Alain, great historical comparison. We might also keep in mind changes in the quality of books published for general audiences, changes in the number of words in the average person's vocabulary etc. I don't think this has to be thought of as dumbing down; one could think of it terms of a flourishing of specialized languages or in terms of the need for fewer general words because a bunch of technologies take over for us (so, reading Melville's 26 synonyms for rope becomes quite a challenge). What I'm trying to say is that the so-called public intellectual of the 1950s-1960s could write more challenging work than most publishers today think of as marketable to the general public.