Ominous Parallels (17 page)

The “nascent movement” when Dewey wrote, the political principle imported from Germany and proliferating in all directions, was
collectivism.

The Enlightenment, states Dewey, is wrong. The traditional liberals (these include Locke and the Founding Fathers) are wrong in their “rigid doctrine of natural rights inherent in individuals independent of social organization.” They are wrong in holding that the individual possessed antecedent “liberties of thought and action ... which it was the sole business of the state to safeguard.” They are wrong in believing that an expanding government is “the great enemy of individual liberty....” All these ideas, Dewey remarks, were “relevant” once, but they are not “immutable truths good at all times and places”; and today, he claims, these “negative” ideas are outdated. Today, we must abandon the Enlightenment’s “peculiar idea of personal liberty”: “atomistic individualism,” laissez-faire capitalism, the concern with private profit and “pecuniary aims,” the “regime of individual initiative and enterprise conducted for private gain”—all of it now must be discarded.
¹⁸

Intelligence, says Dewey, is not “an individual possession,” but “a social asset,” which “is clothed with a function as public as is its origin....” Hence, “property and reward” are not “intrinsically individual.” Since the minds of scientists and industrialists are a collectively created social resource, so is the wealth these minds have made possible. What America needs now, Dewey concludes, is “organized action in behalf of the social interest,” “organized planning” of the economy —in short, “some kind of socialism.”
¹⁹

He does not reject individualism, Dewey says, only the concepts of an independent individual and of individual rights. He calls his theory a “new individualism.”

The process of spreading a philosophy by means of free discussion among thinking adults is long and complex. From Plato to the present, it has been the dream of social planners to circumvent this process and, instead, to inject a controversial ideology directly into the plastic, unformed minds of children—by means of seizing a country’s educational system and turning it into a vehicle for indoctrination. In this way one may capture an entire generation without intellectual resistance, in a single
coup d’école.

Rarely, if ever, has a free nation capitulated to this kind of demand as rapidly, as extensively, as abjectly, as America did. When the country surrendered its educational institutions—in countless forms, direct and indirect, public and private, from nursery school on up—to the legion of Progressive educators spawned by Dewey, it formally delivered its youth into the hands of the philosophy of pragmatism, to be “reconstructed” according to the pragmatist image of man. It was a development which, in a few decades, created a new intellectual establishment in America. It was the inauguration in the country of the Enlightenment of the formal reign of Kant and Hegel, not merely among a handful of intellectuals, but among the leaders of American life in every field.

The goal of the Progressive indoctrinators was not to impose a specific system of ideas on the student, but to destroy his capacity to hold
any
firm ideas, on any subject.

The theory of Progressive education begins with an attack on the traditional, reality-oriented, intellect-oriented approach to education. For the pragmatist, education is not a process in which knowledge of “antecedent” reality, already accumulated and logically organized by men, is transmitted to the minds of their young. The function of education, writes Dewey, is not to communicate “a ready-made universe of knowledge.” A school is not primarily a place to learn “intellectual lessons.” The “staple of the curriculum” is not to be academic subject matter, not “[f]acts, laws, information,” not “various bodies of external fact labeled geography, arithmetic, grammar, etc.”
²⁰

According to the Progressives, education is to be not subject-centered, but child-centered. (“We don’t teach history, we teach Johnny.”) Education is to be “relevant,” relevant to the “real interests” of the child—above all, to his interest in self-expression. His self, in this context, is his “instincts” and his “spontaneous impulses.” Their natural expression is action.

For pragmatism, the child (like the man he fathers) is not primarily a thinking being, but an acting being. He does not learn primarily by listening or by reading; he “learns by doing.” Since he has not been taught “ready-made” knowledge, his classroom doings are to be “experimental.” Like the adult pragmatist, he learns to resort to thought as a “practical instrument” to enable him to escape the obstacles of the moment, whenever these, inexplicably, occur—and then drops the instrument when things are “working” again, as determined by his feelings. Since action is inherently concrete, the child’s doings are centered around disconnected projects, which cut across all the lines of traditional academic subjects, but dip briefly and randomly into whichever subjects the teacher (or the class) feels are relevant to the project of the moment.

Such bits of information as the child does manage to absorb by this method are not, the Progressives insist, to be presented or accepted as certainties. The teacher and the pupils must not be “authoritarian,” but “tentative” and “flexible.”

Except on one point Since group demands, according to Dewey, have metaphysical primacy, the function of the school is not to develop a reality-spirit or an intellectual spirit, but a “social spirit.” Since “mind cannot be regarded as an individual, monopolistic possession,” the function of the school is to be a trust-buster: to recondition any aspiring “monopolist” of this kind (any intellectually independent student), by training him, in Dewey’s words, “to share in the social consciousness, i.e., to submit his mind to the demands of the group. The fundamental goal of education, writes Dewey, ”is the development of a spirit of social co-operation and community life....“ The goal is to foster the child’s ”social capacity“—by, among other things, ”saturating him with the spirit of service....“
²¹

Despite their relativism, the Progressives do feature one absolute, one certainty, one iron thread on which the child’s various doings and projects are strung: society, and the imperative of conforming to it. “Life-adjustment” for this movement means “community-adjustment.” The school is to be centered on the child—and the child is to be centered on the collective. This is the “new individualism” translated into the field of education.

And this is still another reason why the child should not concentrate on facts and truths in his years at school. “The mere absorbing of facts and truths,” writes Dewey, “is so exclusively individual an affair that it tends very naturally to pass into selfishness. There is no obvious social motive for the acquirement of mere learning, there is no clear social gain in success thereat ”
²²
In the Progressive school, the child learns something transcending facts, truths, and selfishness. The modern Johnny may not be able to read, or add, or spell, or think, but he does learn to serve, to serve others, to adapt to others, to obey their spokesmen. He does not absorb “a ready-made universe of knowledge.” Instead, he absorbs a “ready-made,” pragmatist contempt for knowledge (and for reason), combined with a “ready-made,” “practical” philosophy : altruism, collectivism, statism.

For the most part, the American intellectuals who accepted the philosophy of pragmatism were under few illusions in regard to its meaning or consequences. They knew what they were doing. This was not true, however, of the general public, businessmen included. The American people were led to embrace the pragmatist philosophy not because of its actual, theoretical content (of which they were and remain largely ignorant), but because of the method by which that content was presented to them.
In its terminology and promises,
pragmatism is a philosophy calculated to appeal specifically to an American audience.

The method, perfected especially by the Deweyites, consists in describing the philosophy in reverse. The pragmatists adopt the traditional language of science and philosophy; they flaunt the long-established, value-laden words which name the ideas deeply admired by most Americans; and they do it while discarding and even
inverting
the meaning of such language. Thus they pose as champions of the very ideas which their own philosophy systematically attacks.

The American public, descendants of the era of Enlightenment, wanted a philosophy of this world; dismissing supernaturalism and religion, the Deweyites stress “nature”—and then construe the term as meaning a flux without identity, to be molded by the desires of the group. The Americans wanted a philosophy based on reason; the Deweyites stress “scientific method” and “intelligence”—then, in the name of these, propound a voluntarist irrationalism which denies the mind’s capacity to grasp reality, principles, or fixed, causal laws. The Americans wanted a philosophy based on facts; the pragmatists stress “experience”—and deny that it yields information about facts. The Americans had little sympathy for self-indulgent wallowing in emotion; the Deweyites denounce “sentimentalism”—while raising feelings to a position of philosophic primacy. The Americans admired human self-confidence; the pragmatists stress man’s “power”—not his power to know, but to create, reality.

The Americans wanted a morality relevant to life; so do they, say the pragmatists, as they disseminate a cynical amoralism. The Americans admired individualism; so do they, say the Deweyites, a “new” kind of individualism, which teaches social conformity as the fundamental imperative. The Americans, scornful of passive tradition-worship, were open to new ideas; in every branch of philosophy, the pragmatists stress “experiment,” “novelty,” “progress,” then offer a rehash of traditional theories culminating in the oldest politics of all: statism. The Americans were unable to stomach the overt mysticism of the post-Kantian Germanic axis in philosophy; the pragmatists present themselves as the exponents of a distinctively “American” approach, which consists in enshrining the basic premises of such Germanism while rejecting every fundamental idea, from metaphysics to politics, on which this country was founded. Most important of all, the Americans wanted ideas to be good for something on earth, to have tangible, practical significance; and, insistently, the pragmatists stress “practicality,” which, according to their teachings, consists in action divorced from thought and reality.

The pragmatists stress the “cash value” of ideas. But the Americans did not know the “cash value” of the pragmatist Ideas they were buying. They did not know that pragmatism could not deliver on its promise of this-worldly success because, at root, it is a philosophy which does not believe in this, or any, world.

When the Americans flocked to pragmatism, they believed that they were joining a battle to advance
their
essential view of reality and of life. They did not know that they were being marched in the opposite direction, that the battle had been calculated for a diametrically opposite purpose, or that the enemy they were being pushed to destroy was: themselves.

Pragmatism is the only twentieth-century philosophy to gain broad, national acceptance in the United States. It is the last philosophic movement in our era to pretend to offer Americans practical guidance and an overall view of life. Its successors in our universities, for two generations now, have renounced even the pretense; they represent not a new kind of guidance or a new philosophy, but the collapse and disintegration of the field. The disintegration has taken two forms, both imported from Europe.

One, the analyst or British axis, rejects any commitment to any ideas, even of a skeptic or mystic kind. Philosophy, in this view, has no distinctive subject matter and no practical (or theoretical) purpose. It is not a study of facts or of values; it cannot describe the universe or define the good. It is a technical linguistic pastime based on arbitrary rules (and often replete with bristling, mathematical symbolism)—an academician’s private preserve or game, detached from reality and irrelevant to life.

The other form of the disintegration, the nonanalyst or Continental axis, regards the analyst viewpoint as the unavoidable, sterile expression of reason. This axis holds that philosophy must deal with reality and with the crucial problems of human life, by rejecting reason.

The best-known version of this view, the Existentialism of the fifties and sixties, held that reality is absurd and that irrational passion is the only means of knowledge. In such a world, said Sartre, man is the controller of his destiny, except that he cannot control it because his mind is helpless; so freedom is a “curse,” and man’s fate is fear, trembling, nausea—from which there is “no exit,” since thought is self-deception, system-building is self-deception, a rational ethics is self-deception. All one can do, therefore, is make a blind, activist commitment to some course, or join the Zen Buddhists in merging with a superior dimension, or praise Fidel Castro as the hero of the century, or do something else, anything else, whatever anyone chooses to feel. (This is what Existentialists described as “individualism.”)

Today academic philosophy in America has disappeared. It has reached the dead end of the Kantian dichotomy of thought versus reality. With its practitioners divided between absurd word-chopping and wordy absurdity-worship, it has completed a full retreat: a retreat by one group from asking any significant questions, a retreat by the other from any means of answering them. The public, in consequence, has retreated from formal philosophy, which it now regards as an object of contempt.

Today Americans no longer seek philosophic guidance from philosophers, but from whoever fills the place philosophers have vacated: politicians, economists, psychologists, gurus, etc. Such men, however, do not originate philosophic ideas or change philosophic trends. They merely transmit the ideas they have been taught and push the trends ever closer to their final conclusion.