Intellectual Defenestration

Do You do the Dew?

I've been reading John Dewey's A Common Faith for class this week. It's a fascinating little book; a small, relatively short, but incisive and insightful description of what is essentially a naturalistic religion.

Dewey's project is to combine the best of the "religious", in the sense of passionately pursuing an "ideal", without the mess of believing in anything supernatural. Mankind, he says, is to "intelligently" look within the potentialities of the natural to see what he can and should strive for. Placing the ideal in something transcendent or supernatural only cripples man, removing him of the motivation he needs to look within himself for the strength to accomplish the great.

I think he has some good insights. For one, he recognizes that the debate hinges on an authority issue - is the basis and standard for living extrinsic or intrinsic to ourselves? He also has as a decent critique of Protestantism, pointing out that it has been so myopic about only seeing the individual in relationship to God that it has neglected the social structures around it. Protestantism has progressed a bit since then (see, for example, the International Justice Mission), but much of that criticism is still valid.

Dewey, however, goes to the opposite extreme, seeming to almost completely diminish the role of the individual. What he seeks to transform and shape is always the big, societal structures - the political and economic systems. At the end, for example, he says that, "The things in civilization we most prize are not of ourselves. They exist by grace of the doings and sufferings of the continuous human community in which we are a link." (p. 87) In the ongoing struggle between the One and the Many, Dewey confidently elevates the importance of the Many over and above the One.

But the question, then, is who will guide and shape these structures? Whose ideal is to shape these systems? Who leads the Many? Someone has to. He can't stand capitalism, for example, because it is too pessimistic concerning the possibility of someone guiding economic systems.

The implied conclusion is the intelligentsia: the elite oligarchy that is free of the shackles of supernaturalism to pursue the idealistic potentialities using the scientific method.

The ultimate irony is that this belief requires an abstract faith even more groundless than that which he accuses the dreaded "fundamentalists" of having. This has not been born out in our experience. If the last 65-70 years since Dewey wrote A Common Faith have taught mankind anything it is (or should be that) that an elite intelligentsia that divorces itself from any sort of supernatural accountability, decides to undertake the shaping of the societal structure with a "militant" (p. 87) fervor, and treats the needs of the individual as inconsequential is a recipe for totalitarianism. What else were Hitler, Stalin, and Mao striving for?

March 12, 2004 05:03 PM