Dewey’s Project
More straightforward than it may seem
I fear that the clear sensibility of Dewey’s project has been obscured for many due to the dimensionality and dynamism of his worldview. Dewey was always looking to complicate our understanding of ourselves and our circumstances—to persuade us to abandon dichotomies and certainties and to resituate ourselves within the observable and often reliable and yet ultimately tumultuous and unfathomable movements of the natural world.
So he can be hard to follow. Yet, at the most basic level, Dewey was simply calling on us to reckon with the unavoidable implications of our historic arrival, as a species, into a culturally and spiritually fractured world. He understood that to regain a sense of coherence we would need to reorient ourselves to a baseline set of values. We would have to lighten our hold on the things that had forever defined us and cleave, first and foremost, to a shared set of commitments.
For when it comes to having to live with all kinds of unfamiliar others, there are really just the two opposing directions toward which one might tend. One might tend—either mindlessly or intentionally—toward neglecting, using, or dominating others in pursuit of various narrowly constructed self-interests or one might tend toward caring about and for others across our often deep and imposing differences.
Democracy, as Dewey understood it, was the sociopolitical form of first and last resort for those in the latter camp. Founding commitments to freedom, justice, and equality for all entailed deliberate efforts to cultivate and address the primal human desires of all for a sense of social inclusion and of personal merit and meaning. In a riven and polyglot nation, this would, in turn, require people to learn to how build relationships across the nation’s internal divides. Common understandings would have to be constructed methodically, in accordance with respected practices and parameters.
Democracy would never be easy nor always pretty nor even always achievable. As a form of sociopolitical relations, democracy would always represent a reach. And yet, there were just the two options: one could hoard power for a select few and sequester oneself from the cares and concerns of others or one could distribute power in hopes of learning how to respond to the cares and concerns of those external to one’s known world.
Throughout this same historic period, influential figures were claiming (they still claim) that narrow self-interest is the more—or even only—truly reliable human impetus. A great deal of operative theory, particularly in economics, has been built upon that assumption. This theory has, in effect, invested in our least democratic impulses and has therefore led in the direction of autocracy.
Some think of Dewey as naïve, and by now some of what he says can feel dated. Dewey also, somehow, managed to avoid addressing race, his country’s most brutal cultural chasm. But Dewey did understand that democracy would always represent a reach. That it was something you had to want and for which exceptional efforts would have to made. Which has hopefully become clearer at this point to many more of us as well.
Love this!