Rediscovering Americanism: And the Tyranny of Progressivism Page 6
In his 1930 book, Individualism Old and New, Dewey acknowledged Marx’s influence on him and progressivism: “[T]he issue which [Marx] raised—the relation of the economic structure to political operations—is one that actively persists. Indeed, it forms the only basis of present political questions. An intelligent and experienced observer of affairs at Washington has said that all political questions which he has heard discussed in Washington come back ultimately to problems connected with the distribution of income. Wealth, property and processes of manufacturing and distribution—down to retail trade through the chain system—can hardly be socialized in outward effect without political repercussion. It constitutes an ultimate issue which must be faced by new and existing political parties. There is still enough vitality in the older individualism to offer a very serious handicap to any party or program which calls itself by the name of Socialism. . . .”48 “We are in for some kind of socialism, call it by whatever name we please, and no matter what it will be called when it is realized. Economic determinism is now a fact, not a theory. But there is a difference and a choice between a blind, chaotic and unplanned determinism, issuing from business conducted for pecuniary profit, and the determination of a socially planned and ordered development. It is the difference and the choice between a socialism that is public and one that is capitalistic.”49
Dewey criticized Marx’s call for the violent overthrow of the status quo. However, Dewey insisted that the present attachment to the principles and values of the American founding must be repudiated and replaced with the new scientific approach, which he argued addresses the modern social conditions of the collective. “The scientific attitude is experimental as well as intrinsically communicative. If it were generally applied, it would liberate us from the heavy burden imposed by dogmas and external standards. Experimental method is something other than the use of blow-pipes, retorts and reagents. It is the foe of every belief that permits habit and wont to dominate invention and discovery, and ready-made system to override verifiable fact. Constant revision is the work of experimental inquiry. By revision of knowledge and ideas, power to effect transformation is given us. This attitude, once incarnated in the individual mind, would find an operative outlet. If dogmas and institutions tremble when a new idea appears, this shiver is nothing to what would happen if the idea were armed with the means for the continuous discovery of new truth and the criticism of old belief. To ‘acquiesce’ in science is dangerous only for those who would maintain affairs in the existing social order unchanged because of lazy habit or self-interest. For the scientific attitude demands faithfulness to whatever is discovered and steadfastness in adhering to new truth.”50
Dewey’s appeal to and faith in the social sciences is akin to a religious fundamentalism. “The destructive effect of science upon beliefs long cherished and values once prized is, and quite naturally so, a great cause of dread of science and its application in life. The law of inertia holds of the imagination and its loyalties as truly as of physical things. I do not suppose that it is possible to turn suddenly from these negative effects to possible positive and constructive ones. But as long as we refuse to make an effort to change the direction which imagination looks at the world, as long as we remain unwilling to reexamine old standards and values, science will continue to wear its negative aspect. Take science . . . for what it is, and we shall begin to envisage it as a potential creator of new values and ends. We shall have an intimation, on a wide and generous scale, of the release, the increased initiative, independence and inventiveness, which science now brings in its own specialized fields to the individual scientist. It will be seen as a means of originality and individual variation. . . .”51
Acceptance of the social sciences and experimentation, without the inhibitions of old beliefs, is intended to achieve a new individuality with real freedom, shaped by present events and surroundings. “Individuality is at first spontaneous and unshaped; it is a potentiality, a capacity of development. Even so, it is a unique manner of acting in and with a world of objects and persons. It is not something complete in itself. . . . Since individuality is a distinctive way of feeling the impacts of the world and of showing a preferential bias in response to these impacts, it develops into shape and form only through interaction with actual conditions; it is no more complete in itself than is a painter’s tube of paint without relation to a canvas. . . . In its determination, the potential individuality of the artist takes on visible and enduring forms. The imposition of individuality as something made in advance always gives evidence of a mannerism, not a manner; something formed in the very process of creation of other things. The future is always unpredictable. Ideals, including that of a new and effective individuality, must themselves be framed out of the possibilities of existing conditions, even if these be the conditions that constitute a corporate and industrial age. The ideals take shape and gain a content as they operate in remaking conditions. We may, in order to have continuity of direction, plan a program of action in anticipation of occasions as they emerge. But a program of ends and ideals if kept apart from sensitive and flexible method becomes an encumbrance. For its hard and rigid character assumes a fixed world and a static individual; and neither of these things exists. It implies that we can prophesy the future—an attempt which terminates, as someone has said, in prophesying the past or in its reduplication.”52
In 1934, Dewey delivered a speech, “The Future of Liberalism,” in which he declared: “The commitment of liberalism to experimental procedure carries with it the idea of continuous reconstruction of the ideas of individuality and of liberty, in their intimate connection with changes in social relations. It is enough to refer to the changes in productivity and distribution since the time when the earlier liberalism was formulated, and the effect of these transformations, due to science and technology, upon the terms on which men associate together. An experimental method is the recognition of this temporal change in ideas and policies so that the latter may coordinate with the facts, instead of being opposed to them. Any other view maintains a rigid conceptualism, and implies that facts should conform to concepts that are framed independently of temporal or historical change.”53
The work of the social scientists—in and out of government—is inexhaustible. Social experimentation is continuous and, if need be, sweeping.
Experimental method is not just messing around nor doing a little of this and a little of that in the hope that things will improve. Just as in the physical sciences, it implies a coherent body of ideas, a theory, that gives direction to effort. What is implied, in contrast to every form of absolutism is that the ideas and theory be taken as methods of action tested and continuously revised by the consequences they produce in actual social conditions. Since they are operational in nature, they modify conditions, while the first requirement, that of basing policies upon realistic study of actual conditions, brings about their continuous reconstruction. It follows finally that there is no opposition in principle between liberalism as social philosophy and radicalism in action, if by radicalism is signified the adoption of policies that bring about drastic, instead of piecemeal, social change. It is all a question of what kind of procedures an intelligent study of changing conditions discloses. These changes have been so tremendous in the last century, yes, in the last forty years, that it looks to me as if radical methods were now necessary. But all that the argument here requires is recognition of the fact that there is nothing in the nature of liberalism that makes it a milk-water doctrine, committed to compromise and minor “reforms.” It is worth noting that the earlier liberals were regarded in their day as subversive radicals.54
Indeed, Dewey insisted that the progressive ideology is more than a governing ideology. It must reverberate throughout all corners of society. “[T]he full freedom of the human spirit and of individuality can be achieved only as there is effective opportunity to share in the cultural resources of civilization. No economic state of affairs is merely economic. It has a profound
effect upon the presence or absence of cultural freedom. Any liberalism that does not make full cultural freedom supreme and that does not see the relation between it and genuine industrial freedom as a way of life is a degenerate and delusive liberalism.”55
In fact, Dewey was an early advocate of reconstructing education to comport with his notions of progressivism and integrate his ideology into the public school system. He was a renowned education “innovator” whose influence throughout academia remains considerable to this day. Dewey argued against merely teaching basic academic coursework, which both teacher and student are to transcend. Instead, education is to emphasize the general consciousness for the social community and collective, focusing on the student’s (whom he called “the immature”) psychological development in this regard—cognition not of individual thought but groupthink. Of course, the student is discouraged from absorbing the truths, traditions, and customs of the past and rather is encouraged to be pragmatic, flexible, and experimental. In his 1916 book, Democracy and Education, Dewey argued:
It remains only to point out . . . that the reconstruction of experience may be social as well as personal. For purposes of simplification we have spoken . . . as if the education of the immature which fills them with the spirit of the social group to which they belong, were a sort of catching up of the child with the aptitudes and resources of the adult group. In static societies, societies which make the maintenance of established custom their measure of value, this conception applies in the main. But not in progressive communities. They endeavor to shape the experiences of the young so that instead of reproducing current habits, better habits shall be formed, and thus the future adult society be an improvement on their own. Men have long had some intimation of the extent to which education may be consciously used to eliminate obvious social evils through starting the young on paths which shall not produce these ills, and some idea of the extent in which education may be made an instrument of realizing the better hopes of men. But we are doubtless far from realizing the potential efficacy of education as a constructive agency of improving society, from realizing that it represents not only a development of children and youth but also of the future society of which they will be the constituents.56
Dewey condemned the existing approach to education for lacking socialization and the scientific inquiry he demanded:
The pupil learns symbols without the key to their meaning. He acquires a technical body of information without ability to trace its connections with the objects and operations with which he is familiar—often he acquires simply a peculiar vocabulary. There is a strong temptation to assume that presenting subject matter in its perfected form provides a royal road to learning. What more natural than to suppose that the immature can be saved time and energy, and be protected from needless error by commencing where competent inquirers have left off? The outcome is written large in the history of education. Pupils begin their study of science with texts in which the subject is organized into topics according to the order of the specialist. Technical concepts, with their definitions, are introduced at the outset. Laws are introduced at a very early stage, with at best a few indications of the way in which they were arrived at. The pupils learn a “science” instead of learning the scientific way of treating familiar material of ordinary experience. The method of the advanced student dominates college teaching; the approach of the college is transferred into the high school, and so down the line, with such omissions as may make the subject easier. . . .57
What, then, should students be taught? “The problem of an education use of science is then to create an intelligence pregnant with belief in the possibility of the direction of human affairs by itself. The method of science engrained through education in habit means emancipation from rule of thumb and from the routine generated by rule of thumb procedure. . . . Under the influence of conditions created by the non-existence of experimental science, experience was opposed in all the ruling philosophies of the past to reason and the truly rational. Empirical knowledge meant the knowledge accumulated by a multitude of past instances without intelligent insight into the principles of any of them. . . . Science is experience becoming rational. The effect of science is thus to change men’s idea of the nature and inherent possibilities of experience. . . . Science carries on its working over of prior subject matter on a large scale. It aims to free an experience from all which is purely personal and strictly immediate; it aims to detach whatever it has in common with the subject matter of other experiences, and which, being common, may be saved for further use. It is, thus, an indispensable factor in social progress. In any experience just as it occurs there is much which, while it may be of precious import to the individual implicated in the experience, is peculiar and unreduplicable. From the standpoint of science, this material is accidental, while the features which are widely shared are essential. . . . In emancipating an idea from the particular context in which it originated and giving it a wider reference the results of the experience of any individual are put at the disposal of all men. Thus ultimately and philosophically, science is the organ of general social progress. . . .”58
Dewey’s advocacy of education as a means to socialize a nation’s youth toward a collectivist social and economic mentality was in keeping with his glowing critique of the Soviet Union’s approach to education a few years earlier. After visiting the Soviet Union, on December 5, 1928, Dewey wrote in The New Republic that “in the ‘transitional’ state of Russia chief significance attaches to the mental and moral (pace the Marxians) change that is taking place; that while in the end this transformation is supposed to be a means to economic and political change, for the present it is the other way around. This consideration is equivalent to saying that the import of all institutions is educational in the broad sense—that of their effects upon disposition and attitude. Their function is to create habits so that persons will act cooperatively and collectively as readily as now in capitalistic countries they act ‘individualistically.’ The same consideration defines the importance and the purpose of the narrower education agencies, the schools. They represent a direct and concentrated effort to obtain the effect which other institutions develop in a diffused and roundabout manner. The schools are, in current phase, the ‘ideological arm of the Revolution.’ In consequence, the activities of the schools dovetail in the most extraordinary way, both in administrative organization and in aim and spirit, into all other social agencies and interests.”59 Dewey continued: “During the transitional regime, the school cannot count upon the larger education to create in any single and whole-hearted way the required collective and cooperative mentality. The traditional customs and institutions of the peasant, his small tracts, his three-system farming, the influence of home and Church, all work automatically to create in him an individualistic ideology. In spite of the greater inclination of the city worker towards collectivism, even his social environment works adversely in many respects. Hence the great task of the school is to counteract and transform those domestic and neighborhood tendencies that are still so strong, even in a nominally collectivist regime.”60
Walter Weyl (1873–1919) was another dominant progressive voice and strong nationalist. He opened his 1912 book, The New Democracy, with a withering attack on early-twentieth-century America, followed by a cynical manipulation of the American founding. “America today is in a somber, soul-questioning mood. We are in a period of clamor, of bewilderment, of an almost tremulous unrest. We are hastily revising all our social conceptions. We are hastily testing all our political ideals. We are profoundly disenchanted with the fruits of a century of dependence. . . . It is in this moment of misgiving, when men are beginning to doubt the all-efficiency of our old-time democracy, that a new democracy is born. It is a new spirit, critical, concrete, insurgent. A clear-eyed discontent is abroad in the land. . . .”61
Weyl continued: “In reality the democracy of 1776 was by no means perfect. The Declaration of Independence was not an organic law, but an appea
l—a very special and adroit appeal—to the ‘natural right’ of revolution. It was a beautiful ideal, as wonderfully poised in mid-air as is today the golden rule among the thrice-armed nations of Europe. The average American was not a true believer in its doctrines. The ‘better classes,’ tainted with an interested loyalty to King George, could not abide rebels, petitioners, and ‘agitators,’ and among the signers were many conservative men who feared ‘too much democracy,’ although they saw the advantage of issuing a ‘platform,’ and of hanging together to avoid ‘hanging separately.’ ”62 “America in 1776 was not a democracy. It was not even a democracy on paper. It was at best a shadow-democracy. Nor was the substance of democracy conferred by the federal Constitution. If our modern ideal of democracy does not lead back to the noble eloquence of the Declaration, still less does it revert to the federal Constitution, as it issued, in 1787, fresh from the Philadelphia Convention. Our newer democracy demands, not that the people forever conform to a rigid, hard-charging Constitution, but that the Constitution change to conform to the people. The Constitution is the political wisdom of dead America.”63
In fact, wrote Weyl: “So intimately has this Constitution been bound up with our dearest national ideals and with our very sense of national unity, so many have been the gentle traditions which have clustered about this venerable document, that one hesitates to apply to it the ordinary canons of political criticism. For over a century we have piously exclaimed that our Constitution is the last and noblest expression of democracy. But, in truth, the Constitution is not democratic. It was, in intention, and is, in essence, undemocratic. It was conceived in violent distrust of the common people. . . .”64 “The greatest merit—and the greatest defect—of the Constitution is that it has survived. It might be well if the American people would recast their Constitution every generation. We would assuredly do better in 1911 with a twentieth century organic law than with an almost unchangeable constitution, which antedated the railroad, the steamboat, and the French Revolution, and was contemporary with George the Third, Marie Antoinette, and the flintlock muskets. In the early days, however, when the States were jealous, exigent, and eternally over vigilant, any bond of union, if only strong enough, was good. . . .”65