This Is Not News

Nick Shay has a series of posts on Democrats’ approach to political discourse and his suggestion for a new approach. He draws heavily on Dewey, James, and other pragmatists in the later osts, but it’s probably worth checking out the whole thing. Shay’s basic argument is that Democrats appear to be too focused on “discovering truth” about the world and not focused enough on the power of language to shape the world. The launch point for his discussion is the phrase “reality-based community,” which was fairly prominent during the 2004 election. In the fifth part of his series, he says:

When we think in this way, it becomes clear that speech itself is a mode of action. It does work in the world because of the uses that we give it. Language is, according to pragmatist thinkers like Dewey and Richard Rorty, entirely made, is not something that is simply found “out there� in the world, and is not frozen in some predetermined, unitary relationship to reality. It is less a medium that stands between the self and the reality that we are trying to comprehend and more a performative tool.

This means that the history of linguistic expression is not a progressive history. Our language is not something that becomes better fitted to a reality that is somehow separate and distinct. Any true statement is only true as long as it is functions as a tool that we can use. When the language that we employ no longer does the work that we want it to do, when we find that it is getting in the way of the production of new forms that could be put to more effective use, it does us no good to hold onto a particular linguistic tool. We have to constantly be aware of the fact that we are making choices between many competing vocabularies, and we have to decide which language we want to take up for a particular purpose or end. Each word that we use, however, is a not a solution in and of itself. Instead, a word or collection of words is something we put to work in our stream of experience as a possible indicator of the ways in which existing circumstances or experiences can be changed or shifted.

I think it’s significant that Shay includes Rorty in this passage, because the notion he’s putting forward draws more on Rorty than it does on Dewey and James. Yes, the pragmatists emphasized contingency and change. But they were undoubtedly empiricists. They felt that there was a stability to the world that we experience, such that we can use language to make predictions about it. We can test our linguistic constructions for how well they match up with the actual world of experience. James emphasized that verification was vital to truth; Dewey looked to empirical results to show us whether we are warranted in saying something.

This isn’t to say I totally disagree with Shay’s argument. I think the emphasis may be a tad too much to one side, but that may be the result of Shay’s effort to correct what he sees as a leaning too far in the other direction. And there is something of the idea that discourse changes the world that is very much in keeping with the classical pragmatist tradition. In “The Will to Believe,” James argues that it’s OK for us to believe something even before we have completely solid verification of it – so long as it doesn’t actually contradict any of the things that we have verified. And in fact, he says it’s necessary for us to do so, because those beliefs motivate us to act in ways that help verify and make the belief true. If you believe a particular candidate or policy will have a positive effect on the world, you may be motivated to act to support that candidate or policy, by voting, donating, campaigning, or whatever. If the candidate/policy then wins, and turns out to have the beneficial effect you anticipated, that change became real because you, and others, believed in the change before you could verify it. So there’s no doubt that part of creating a better reality is finding the words to help other people see the possibilities that you see.

Before I begin, I’m going to ask a favor. Let us assume for the sake of argument that commentator Thomas Brewton will continue to refer to Dewey from time to time, that Google News will pick up these references, and that the Dewey that Brewton refers to will bear only the slightest resemblance to the actual Dewey. Brewton has mentioned that he wants to metaphorically “put a stake through [Dewey’s] heart and inter him forever,” so I just don’t think he’s going to quit any time soon. But it’s kind of a one-note song. For example, in a recent column, Brewton argues that “a big part of Dewey’s progressive education was his view that history is a “dead” subject that deserves no place in the school curriculum. Students were to learn whatever they need to learn through “experiences” of communal life in class projects.” Beyond the fact that the class projects were supplemented by more traditional classroom work, the class projects themselves were historically based. Students recreated various periods of human history in order to understand the historical roots of our traditions and practices. (This is to say nothing of the role of history in pragmatism as a philosophical system, since Dewey was often concerned with the historical development of an idea.)

More interesting is this blog post from a writer in Hong Kong. Fai Mao is clearly a religious individual who has cause to disagree with the generally secular turn of Dewey’s philosophy. But he takes the view that there is much in Dewey’s educational theory worth drawing on, even for religious teachers. I think this is really a key passage:

C.S. Lewis wrote in his book Letters to Malcolm that the best devotions are those “?that you do while reading a pagan philosopher with a pen in your hand and a pipe in your teeth” ? Well I don’t smoke but I understand the sentiment. Some of my best and deepest devotional thoughts over the past three or four years have come reading Kierkegaard the existentialist, Heiddeger the NAZI, Bergson, Popper and Husserl who were Jewish, and John Dewey who was a lapsed Protestant.

Head on over to Fai Mao’s blog to see which elements of Dewey he finds valuable. For me, the most impressive thing is the willigness to search for the value in the first place.