Dewey, John. Freedom and Culture.
John Dewey, Freedom and Culture (New York: G. P Putnam’s Sons Publishing, 1939).
No matter what is the native make-up of human nature, its working activities, those which respond to institutions and rules and which finally shape the pattern of the latter, are created by the whole body of occupations, interests, skills, beliefs that constitute a given culture. As the latter changes, especially as it grows complex and intricate in the way in which American life has changed since our political organization took shape, new problems take the place of those governing the earlier formation and distribution of political powers. The view that love of freedom is so inherent in man that, if it only has a chance given it by abolition of oppressions exercised by church and state, it will produce and maintain free institutions is no longer adequate. (p. 7)
The idea that human nature is inherently and exclusively individual is itself a product of a cultural individualistic movement. The idea that mind and consciousness are intrinsically individual did not even occur to any one for much the greater part of human history. (p. 21)
The business of inquiry is with the ways in which specified constituents of human nature, native or already modified, interact with specified definite constituents of a given culture; conflicts and agreements between human nature on one side and social customs and rules on the other being products of specifiable modes of interaction. (pp. 32-33)
Events are sensational in the degree in which they make a strong impact in isolation from the relations to other events that give them their significance. They appeal to those who like things raw. (p. 43)
Before we engage in too much pity for the inhabitants of our rural regions before the days of invention of modern devices for circulation of information, we should recall that they knew more about the things that affected their own lives than the city dweller of today is likely to know about the causes of his affairs. They did not possess nearly as many separate items of information, but they were compelled to know, in the sense of understanding, the conditions that bore upon the conduct of their own affairs. Today the influences that affect the actions performed by individuals are so remote as to be unknown. We are at the mercy of events acting upon us in unexpected, abrupt, and violent ways. (pp. 44-45)
The effect of the increase in number and diversity of unrelated facts that now play pretty continuously upon the average person is more easily grasped than is the influence of popular generalities, not checked by observed facts, over the interpretation put upon practical events, one that provokes acquiescence rather than critical inquiry. (pp. 46-47)
The alleged fixity of the structure of human nature does not explain in the least the differences that mark off one tribe, family, people, from another – which is to say that in and of itself it explains no state of society whatever. (p. 111-112)
The futility of exclusive appeal to psychological factors both to explain what takes place and to form policies as to what should take place, would be evident to everybody – had it not proved to be a convenient device for “rationalizing” policies that are urged on other grounds by some group or faction. (p. 112)
The assumption that desires are rigidly fixed is not one on its face consistent with the history of man’s progress from savagery through barbarism to even the present defective state of civilization. If knowledge, even the most authenticated kind, cannot influence desires and aims, if it cannot determine what is of value and what is not, the future outlook as to formation of desires is depressing. Denial that they can be influenced by knowledge points emphatically to the non-rational and anti-rational forces that will form them. (p. 140)
If it is possible for persons to have their beliefs formed on the ground of evidence, procured by systematic and competent inquiry, nothing can be more disastrous socially than that the great majority of persons should have them formed by habit, accidents of circumstance, propaganda, personal and class bias. (p. 148)
The spread of literacy, the immense extension of the influence of the press in books, newspapers, periodicals, make the issue peculiarly urgent for a democracy. The very agencies that a century and a half ago were looked upon as those that were sure to advance the causes of democratic freedom, are those which now make it possible to create pseudo-public opinion and to undermine democracy from within. (p. 148)
Callousness due to continuous reiteration may produce a certain immunity to the grosser kinds of propaganda. But in the long run negative measures afford no assurance. While it would be absurd to believe it desirable or possible for every one to become a scientist when science is defined from the side of subject matter, the future of democracy is allied with spread of the scientific attitude. (p. 148)
That the schools have mostly been given to imparting information ready-made, along with teaching the tools of literacy, cannot be denied. The methods used in acquiring such information are not those which develop skill in inquiry and in test of opinions. On the contrary, they are positively hostile to it. They tend to dull native curiosity, and to load powers of observation and experimentation with such a mass of unrelated material that they do not operate as effectively as they do in many an illiterate person. (pp. 149-150)
The need is not that scientific men become crusaders in special practical causes. Just as the problem with art is to unite the inherent integrity of the artist with imaginative and emotional appeal of ideas, so the present need is recognition by scientific men of social responsibility for contagious diffusion of the scientific attitude: a task not to be accomplished without abandoning once for all the belief that science is set apart from all other social interests as if possessed of a peculiar holiness. (pp. 152-153)
It is quite true that science cannot affect moral values, ends, rules, principles as these were once thought of and believed in, namely, prior to the rise of science. But to say that there are no such things as moral facts because desires control formation and valuation of ends is in truth but to point to desires and interests as themselves moral facts requiring control by intelligence equipped with knowledge. (pp. 153-154)
A culture which permits science to destroy traditional values but which distrusts its power to create new ones is a culture which is destroying itself. War is a symptom as well as a cause of the inner division. (p. 154)
As believers in democracy we have not only the right but the
duty to question existing mechanisms of, say, suffrage and to inquire whether
some functional organization would not serve to formulate and manifest public
opinion better than the existing methods.
It is not irrelevant to the point that a score of passages could be
cited in which Jefferson refers to the American Government as an experiment. (p. 158)
There is a difference between a society, in the sense of an association, and a community. Electrons, atoms and molecules are in association with one another. Nothing exists in isolation anywhere throughout nature. Natural associations are conditions for the existence of a community, but a community adds the function of communication in which emotions and ideas are shared as well as joint undertakings engaged in. (p. 159)
The power of the rabblerouser, especially in the totalitarian direction, is mainly due to his power to create a facetious sense of direct union and communal solidarity – if only by arousing the emotion of common intolerance and hate. (p. 160)
The necessity of transforming physical interdependence into moral – into human – interdependence is part of the democratic problem: and yet war is said even now to be the path of salvation for democratic countries! (p. 166)
The conflict as it concerns the democracy to which our history commits us is within our own institutions and attitudes. It can only won only by extending the application of democratic methods, methods of consultation, persuasion, negotiation, communication, co-operative intelligence, in the task of making our own politics, industry, education, our culture generally, a servant and an evolving manifestation of democratic ideas. (p. 175)
Resort to military force is a first sure sign that we are giving up the struggle for the democratic way of life, and that the Old World has conquered morally as well as geographically – succeeding in imposing upon us its ideals and methods. (p. 175)
If there is one conclusion to which experience unmistakably points it is that democratic ends demand democratic methods for their realization. Authoritarian methods now offer themselves to us in new guises. They come to us claiming to serve the ultimate ends of freedom and equity in a classless society. Or they recommend adoption of a totalitarian regime in order to fight totalitarianism. In whatever form they offer themselves, they owe their seductive power to their claim to serve ideal ends. (p. 175)
Our first defense is to realize that democracy can be served only by the slow day by day adoption and contagious diffusion in every phase of our common life of methods that are identical with the ends to be reached and that recourse to monistic, wholesale, absolutist procedures is a betrayal of human freedom no matter in what guise it presents itself. (pp. 175-176)
An American democracy can serve the world only as it demonstrates in the conduct of its own life the efficacy of plural, partial, and experimental methods in securing and maintaining an ever-increasing release of the power of human nature, in service of a freedom which is co-operative and a co-operation which is voluntary. (p. 175)
We have no right to appeal to time to justify complacency about the ultimate result. We have every right to point to the long non-democratic and anti-democratic course of human history and to the recentness of democracy in order to enforce the immensity of the task confronting us. (p. 176)
The very novelty of the experiment explains the impossibility of restricting the problem to any one element, aspect, or phase of our common everyday life. We have every right to appeal to the long and slow process of time to protect ourselves from the pessimism that comes from taking a short-span temporal view of events – under one condition. We must know that the dependence of ends upon means is such that the only ultimate result is the result that is attained today, tomorrow, the next day, and day after day, in the succession of years and generations. Only thus can we be sure that we face our problems in detail one by one as they arise, with all the resources provided by collective intelligence operating in co-operative action. At the end as at the beginning the democratic method is as fundamentally simple and as immensely difficult as is the energetic, unflagging, unceasing creation of an ever-present new road upon which we can walk together. (p. 176)