alone, and it is small cheer that our best intellects are caught in
the political current and see only the hope that America will find
her soul in the remaking of the world. If William James were alive
would he be accepting the war-situation so easily and complacently?
Would he be chiding the over-stimulated intelligence of peace-loving
idealists, and excommunicating from the ranks of liberal progress
the pitiful remnant of those who struggle “above the battle”? I like
to think that his gallant spirit would have called for a war to be
gallantly played, with insistent care for democratic values at home,
and unequivocal alliance with democratic elements abroad for a peace
that should promise more than a mere union of benevolent imperialisms.
I think of James now because the recent articles of John Dewey’s on
the war suggest a slackening in his thought for our guidance and
stir, and the inadequacy of his pragmatism as a philosophy of life
in this emergency. Whether James would have given us just that note
of spiritual adventure which would make the national enterprise seem
creative for an American future,--this we can never know. But surely
that philosophy of Dewey’s which we had been following so uncritically
for so long, breaks down almost noisily when it is used to grind out
interpretation for the present crisis. These articles on “Conscience
and Compulsion,” “The Future of Pacifism,” “What America Will Fight
For,” “Conscription of Thought,” which _The New Republic_ has been
printing, seem to me to be a little off-color. A philosopher who senses
so little the sinister forces of war, who is so much more concerned
over the excesses of the pacifists than over the excesses of military
policy, who can feel only amusement at the idea that any one should
try to conscript thought, who assumes that the war-technique can be
used without trailing along with it the mob-fanaticisms, the injustices
and hatreds, that are organically bound up with it, is speaking to
another element of the younger intelligentsia than that to which I
belong. Evidently the attitudes which war calls out are fiercer and
more incalculable than Professor Dewey is accustomed to take into his
hopeful and intelligent imagination, and the pragmatist mind, in trying
to adjust itself to them, gives the air of grappling, like the pioneer
who challenges the arid plains, with a power too big for it. It is not
an arena of creative intelligence our country’s mind is now, but of
mob-psychology. The soldiers who tried to lynch Max Eastman showed that
current patriotism is not a product of the will to remake the world.
The luxuriant releases of explosive hatred for which peace apparently
gives far too little scope cannot be wooed by sweet reasonableness, nor
can they be the raw material for the creation of rare liberal political
structures. All that can be done is to try to keep your country out of
situations where such expressive releases occur. If you have willed
the situation, however, or accepted it as inevitable, it is fatuous
to protest against the gay debauch of hatred and fear and swagger
that must mount and mount, until the heady and virulent poison of war
shall have created its own anti-toxin of ruin and disillusionment. To
talk as if war were anything else than such a poison is to show that
your philosophy has never been confronted with the pathless and the
inexorable, and that, only dimly feeling the change, it goes ahead
acting as if it had not got out of its depth. Only a lack of practice
with a world of human nature so raw-nerved, irrational, uncreative,
as an America at war was bound to show itself to be, can account for
the singular unsatisfactoriness of these later utterances of Dewey.
He did have one moment of hesitation just before the war began, when
the war and its external purposes and unifying power seemed the small
thing beside that internal adventure which should find our American
promise. But that perspective has now disappeared, and one finds
Dewey now untainted by skepticism as to our being about a business to
which all our idealism should rally. That failure to get guaranties
that this country’s effort would obligate the Allies to a democratic
world-order Dewey blames on the defection of the pacifists, and then
somehow manages to get himself into a “we” who “romantically,” as
he says, forewent this crucial link of our strategy. Does this easy
identification of himself with undemocratically controlled foreign
policy mean that a country is democratic when it accepts what its
government does, or that war has a narcotic effect on the pragmatic
mind? For Dewey somehow retains his sense of being in the controlling
class, and ignores those anxious questions of democrats who have been
his disciples but are now resenters of the war.
What I come to is a sense of suddenly being left in the lurch, of
suddenly finding that a philosophy upon which I had relied to carry
us through no longer works. I find the contrast between the idea that
creative intelligence has free functioning in wartime, and the facts
of the inexorable situation, too glaring. The contrast between what
liberals ought to be doing and saying if democratic values are to be
conserved, and what the real forces are imposing upon them, strikes
too sternly on my intellectual senses. I should prefer some philosophy
of War as the grim and terrible cleanser to this optimism-haunted mood
that continues unweariedly to suggest that all can yet be made to work
for good in a mad and half-destroyed world. I wonder if James, in the
face of such disaster, would not have abandoned his “moral equivalent
of war” for an “immoral equivalent” which, in swift and periodic
saturnalia, would have acted as vaccination against the sure pestilence
of war.
II
Dewey’s philosophy is inspiring enough for a society at peace,
prosperous and with a fund of progressive good-will. It is a philosophy
of hope, of clear-sighted comprehension of materials and means. Where
institutions are at all malleable, it is the only clew for improvement.
It is scientific method applied to “uplift.” But this careful
adaptation of means to desired ends, this experimental working-out of
control over brute forces and dead matter in the interests of communal
life, depends on a store of rationality, and is effective only where
there is strong desire for progress. It is precisely the school, the
institution to which Dewey’s philosophy was first applied, that is of
all our institutions the most malleable. And it is the will to educate
that has seemed, in these days, among all our social attitudes the most
rationally motivated. It was education, and almost education alone,
that seemed susceptible to the steady pressure of an “instrumental”
philosophy. Intelligence really seemed about to come into conscious
control of an institution, and that one the most potent in molding the
attitudes needed for a civilized society and the aptitudes needed for
the happiness of the individual.
For both our revolutionary conceptions of what education means, and for
the intellectual strategy of its approach, this country is immeasurably
indebted to the influence of Professor Dewey’s philosophy. With these
ideas sincerely felt, a rational nation would have chosen education
as its national enterprise. Into this it would have thrown its energy
though the heavens fell and the earth rocked around it. But the nation
did not use its isolation from the conflict to educate itself. It
fretted for three years and then let war, not education, be chosen, at
the almost unanimous behest of our intellectual class, from motives
alien to our cultural needs, and for political ends alien to the
happiness of the individual. But nations, of course, are not rational
entities, and they act within their most irrational rights when they
accept war as the most important thing the nation can do in the face
of metaphysical menaces of imperial prestige. What concerns us here
is the relative ease with which the pragmatist intellectuals, with
Professor Dewey at the head, have moved out their philosophy, bag and
baggage, from education to war. So abrupt a change in the direction of
the national enterprise, one would have expected to cause more emotion,
to demand more apologetics. His optimism may have told Professor Dewey
that war would not materially demoralize our growth--would, perhaps,
after all, be but an incident in the nation’s life--but it is not easy
to see how, as we skate toward the bankruptcy of war-billions, there
will be resources available for educational enterprise that does not
contribute directly to the war-technique. Neither is any passion for
growth, for creative mastery, going to flourish among the host of
militaristic values and new tastes for power that are springing up like
poisonous mushrooms on every hand.
How could the pragmatist mind accept war without more violent protest,
without a greater wrench? Either Professor Dewey and his friends felt
that the forces were too strong for them, that the war had to be, and
it was better to take it up intelligently than to drift blindly in; or
else they really expected a gallant war, conducted with jealous regard
for democratic values at home and a captivating vision of international
democracy as the end of all the toil and pain. If their motive was the
first, they would seem to have reduced the scope of possible control
of events to the vanishing point. If the war is too strong for you
to prevent, how is it going to be weak enough for you to control and
mold to your liberal purposes? And if their motive was to shape the
war firmly for good, they seem to have seriously miscalculated the
fierce urgencies of it. Are they to be content, as the materialization
of their hopes, with a doubtful League of Nations and the suppression
of the I. W. W.? Yet the numbing power of the war-situation seems to
have kept them from realizing what has happened to their philosophy.
The betrayal of their first hopes has certainly not discouraged them.
But neither has it roused them to a more energetic expression of the
forces through which they intend to realize them. I search Professor
Dewey’s articles in vain for clews as to the specific working-out of
our democratic desires, either nationally or internationally, either
in the present or in the reconstruction after the war. No programme is
suggested, nor is there feeling for present vague popular movements
and revolts. Rather are the latter chided, for their own vagueness and
impracticalities. Similarly, with the other prophets of instrumentalism
who accompany Dewey into the war, democracy remains an unanalyzed term,
useful as a call to battle, but not an intellectual tool, turning up
fresh sod for the changing future. Is it the political democracy of
a plutocratic America that we are fighting for, or is it the social
democracy of the new Russia? Which do our rulers really fear more, the
menace of Imperial Germany, or the liberating influence of a socialist
Russia. In the application of their philosophy to politics, our
pragmatists are sliding over this crucial question of ends. Dewey says
our ends must be intelligently international rather than chauvinistic.
But this gets us little distance along our way.
In this difficult time the light that has been in liberals and radicals
has become darkness. If radicals spend their time holding conventions
to attest their loyalty and stamp out the “enemies within,” they do not
spend it in breaking intellectual paths, or giving us shining ideas
to which we can attach our faith and conscience. The spiritual apathy
from which the more naïve of us suffer, and which the others are so
busy fighting, arises largely from sheer default of a clear vision that
would melt it away. Let the motley crew of ex-socialists, and labor
radicals, and liberals and pragmatist philosophers, who have united
for the prosecution of the war, present a coherent and convincing
democratic programme, and they will no longer be confronted with the
skepticism of the conscientious and the impossibilist. But when the
emphasis is on technical organization, rather than organization
of ideas, on strategy rather than desires, one begins to suspect
that no programme is presented because they have none to present.
This burrowing into war-technique hides the void where a democratic
philosophy should be. Our intellectuals consort with war-boards in
order to keep their minds off the question what the slow masses of
the people are really desiring, or toward what the best hope of the
country really drives. Similarly the blaze of patriotism on the part of
the radicals serves the purpose of concealing the feebleness of their
intellectual light.
Is the answer that clear formulation of democratic ends must be
postponed until victory in the war is attained? But to make this
answer is to surrender the entire case. For the support of the war
by radicals, realists, pragmatists, is due--or so they say--to the
fact that the war is not only saving the cause of democracy, but is
immensely accelerating its progress. Well, what are those gains? How
are they to be conserved? What do they lead to? How can we further
them? Into what large idea of society do they group? To ignore these
questions, and think only of the war-technique and its accompanying
devotions, is to undermine the foundations of these people’s own faith.
A policy of “win the war first” must be, for the radical, a policy of
intellectual suicide. Their support of the war throws upon them the
responsibility of showing inch by inch the democratic gains, and of
laying out a charter of specific hopes. Otherwise they confess that
they are impotent and that the war is submerging their expectations, or
that they are not genuinely imaginative and offer little promise for
future leadership.
III
It may seem unfair to group Professor Dewey with Mr. Spargo and Mr.
Gompers, Mr. A. M. Simons, and the Vigilantes. I do so only because
in their acceptance of the war, they are all living out that popular
American “instrumental” philosophy which Professor Dewey has formulated
in such convincing and fascinating terms. On an infinitely more
intelligent plane, he is yet one with them in his confidence that
the war is motivated by democratic ends and is being made to serve
them. A high mood of confidence and self-righteousness moves them
all, a keen sense of control over events that makes them eligible to
discipleship under Professor Dewey’s philosophy. They are all hostile
to impossibilism, to apathy, to any attitude that is not a cheerful and
brisk setting to work to use the emergency to consolidate the gains
of democracy. Not, Is it being used? but, Let us make a flutter about
using it! This unanimity of mood puts the resenter of war out of the
arena. But he can still seek to explain why this philosophy which has
no place for the inexorable should have adjusted itself so easily to
the inexorable of war, and why, although a philosophy of the creative
intelligence in using means toward ends, it should show itself so
singularly impoverished in its present supply of democratic values.
What is the matter with the philosophy? One has a sense of having come
to a sudden, short stop at the end of an intellectual era. In the
crisis, this philosophy of intelligent control just does not measure
up to our needs. What is the root of this inadequacy that is felt
so keenly by our restless minds? Van Wyck Brooks has pointed out
searchingly the lack of poetic vision in our pragmatist “awakeners.”
Is there something in these realistic attitudes that works actually
against poetic vision, against concern for the quality of life as above
machinery of life? Apparently there is. The war has revealed a younger
intelligentsia, trained up in the pragmatic dispensation, immensely
ready for the executive ordering of events, pitifully unprepared for
the intellectual interpretation or the idealistic focusing of ends.
The young men in Belgium, the officers’ training corps, the young men
being sucked into the councils at Washington and into war-organization
everywhere, have among them a definite element, upon whom Dewey, as
veteran philosopher, might well bestow a papal blessing. They have
absorbed the secret of scientific method as applied to political
administration. They are liberal, enlightened, aware. They are touched
with creative intelligence toward the solution of political and
industrial problems. They are a wholly new force in American life, the
product of the swing in the colleges from a training that emphasized
classical studies to one that emphasized political and economic values.
Practically all this element, one would say, is lined up in service of
the war-technique. There seems to have been a peculiar congeniality
between the war and these men. It is as if the war and they had been
waiting for each other. One wonders what scope they would have had
for their intelligence without it. Probably most of them would have
gone into industry and devoted themselves to sane reorganization
schemes. What is significant is that it is the technical side of the
war that appeals to them, not the interpretative or political side.
The formulation of values and ideals, the production of articulate
and suggestive thinking, had not, in their education, kept pace, to
any extent whatever, with their technical aptitude. The result is
that the field of intellectual formulation is very poorly manned by
this younger intelligentsia. While they organize the war, formulation
of opinion is left largely in the hands of professional patriots,
sensational editors, archaic radicals. The intellectual work of this
younger intelligentsia is done by the sedition-hunting Vigilantes, and
by the saving remnant of older liberals. It is true, Dewey calls for
a more attentive formulation of war-purposes and ideas, but he calls
largely to deaf ears. His disciples have learned all too literally the
instrumental attitude toward life, and, being immensely intelligent
and energetic, they are making themselves efficient instruments of the
war-technique, accepting with little question the ends as announced
from above. That those ends are largely negative does not concern them,
because they have never learned not to subordinate idea to technique.
Their education has not given them a coherent system of large ideas,
or a feeling for democratic goals. They have, in short, no clear
philosophy of life except that of intelligent service, the admirable
adaptation of means to ends. They are vague as to what kind of a
society they want, or what kind of society America needs, but they are
equipped with all the administrative attitudes and talents necessary to
attain it.
To those of us who have taken Dewey’s philosophy almost as our American
religion, it never occurred that values could be subordinated to
technique. We were instrumentalists, but we had our private utopias
so clearly before our minds that the means fell always into its place
as contributory. And Dewey, of course, always meant his philosophy,
when taken as a philosophy of life, to start with values. But there was
always that unhappy ambiguity in his doctrine as to just how values
were created, and it became easier and easier to assume that just
any growth was justified and almost any activity valuable so long as
it achieved ends. The American, in living out this philosophy, has
habitually confused results with product, and been content with getting
somewhere without asking too closely whether it was the desirable
place to get. It is now becoming plain that unless you start with the
vividest kind of poetic vision, your instrumentalism is likely to land
you just where it has landed this younger intelligentsia which is so
happily and busily engaged in the national enterprise of war. You
must have your vision and you must have your technique. The practical
effect of Dewey’s philosophy has evidently been to develop the sense
of the latter at the expense of the former. Though he himself would
develop them together, even in him there seems to be a flagging of
values, under the influence of war. _The New Republic_ honorably
clamors for the Allies to subordinate military strategy to political
ends, technique to democratic values. But war always undermines values.
It is the outstanding lesson of the whole war that statesmen cannot
be trusted to get this perspective right, that their only motto is,
first to win and then grab what they can. The struggle against this
statesmanlike animus must be a losing one as long as we have not very
clear and very determined and very revolutionary democratic ideas and
programmes to challenge them with. The trouble with our situation
is not only that values have been generally ignored in favor of
technique, but that those who have struggled to keep values foremost,
have been too bloodless and too near-sighted in their vision. The
defect of any philosophy of “adaptation” or “adjustment,” even when
it means adjustment to changing, living experience, is that there is
no provision for thought or experience getting beyond itself. If your
ideal is to be adjustment to your situation, in radiant coöperation
with reality, then your success is likely to be just that and no more.
You never transcend anything. You grow, but your spirit never jumps out
of your skin to go on wild adventures. If your policy as a publicist
reformer is to take what you can get, you are likely to find that you
get something less than you should be willing to take. Italy in the
settlement is said to be demanding one hundred in order to get twenty,
and this Machiavellian principle might well be adopted by the radical.
Vision must constantly outshoot technique, opportunist efforts usually
achieve less even than what seemed obviously possible. An impossibilist
élan that appeals to desire will often carry further. A philosophy of
adjustment will not even make for adjustment. If you try merely to
“meet” situations as they come, you will not even meet them. Instead
you will only pile up behind you deficits and arrears that will some
day bankrupt you.
We are in the war because an American Government practiced a philosophy
of adjustment, and an instrumentalism for minor ends, instead of
creating new values and setting at once a large standard to which the
nations might repair. An intellectual attitude of mere adjustment,
of mere use of the creative intelligence to make your progress, must
end in caution, regression, and a virtual failure to effect even that
change which you so clear-sightedly and desirously see. This is the
root of our dissatisfaction with much of the current political and
social realism that is preached to us. It has everything good and wise
except the obstreperous vision that would drive and draw all men into
it.
IV
The working-out of this American philosophy in our intellectual life
then has meant an exaggerated emphasis on the mechanics of life at the
expense of the quality of living. We suffer from a real shortage of
spiritual values. A philosophy that worked when we were trying to get
that material foundation for American life in which more impassioned
living could flourish no longer works when we are faced with inexorable
disaster and the hysterias of the mob. The note of complacency which
we detect in the current expressions of this philosophy has a bad
taste. The congruous note for the situation would seem to be, on the
contrary, that of robust desperation,--a desperation that shall rage
and struggle until new values come out of the travail, and we see
some glimmering of our democratic way. In the creation of these new
values, we may expect the old philosophy, the old radicalism, to be
helpless. It has found a perfectly definite level, and there is no
reason to think that it will not remain there. Its flowering appears
in the technical organization of the war by an earnest group of young
liberals, who direct their course by an opportunist programme of
State-socialism at home and a league of benevolently imperialistic
nations abroad. At their best they can give us a government by prudent,
enlightened college men instead of by politicians. At their best,
they can abolish war by making everybody a partner in the booty of
exploitation. That is all, and it is technically admirable. Only there
is nothing in the outlook that touches in any way the happiness of
the individual, the vivifying of the personality, the comprehension
of social forces, the flair of art,--in other words, the quality of
life. Our intellectuals have failed us as value-creators, even as
value-emphasizers. The allure of the martial in war has passed only
to be succeeded by the allure of the technical. The allure of fresh
and true ideas, of free speculation, of artistic vigor, of cultural
styles, of intelligence suffused by feeling, and feeling given fiber
and outline by intelligence, has not come, and can hardly come, we see
now, while our reigning philosophy is an instrumental one.