{"id":17091,"date":"2016-06-22T15:27:31","date_gmt":"2016-06-22T19:27:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=17091"},"modified":"2016-06-22T15:27:31","modified_gmt":"2016-06-22T19:27:31","slug":"pragmatism-and-the-problem-of-evil","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=17091","title":{"rendered":"pragmatism and the problem of evil"},"content":{"rendered":"

Discussing Dewey in the Summer Institute of Civic Studies<\/a> yesterday, I (and, I think, several colleagues) had the sudden recognition that American pragmatists tend not to deal with evil<\/em> very persuasively. In The Public and its Problems<\/em>, Dewey writes:<\/p>\n

Nevertheless, the current has set steadily in one direction: toward democratic forms. That government exists to serve its community, and that this purpose cannot be achieved unless the community itself shares in selecting its governors and determining their policies, are a deposit of fact left, as far as we can see, permanently in the wake of doctrines and forms, however transitory the latter. They are not the whole of the democratic idea, but they express it in its political phase. Belief in this political aspect \u2026 marks a well-attested conclusion from historic facts. (p. 146)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Dewey’s\u00a0idea is that we can’t justify processes like electing leaders\u00a0a priori<\/em>. There is no natural right to vote; it doesn’t depend on a social contract. Rather, it’s a “deposit of fact” left from human learning over many centuries. Voting\u00a0exists because we have learned to vote. Fortunately, that process is progressive and beneficial: the current has steadily flowed toward democracy. It is crucial not to fetishize\u00a0any given process or right, because we will come up with better ones later. When we think of documents like the Constitution, Dewey says, “the words \u2018sacred\u2019 and sanctity\u2019 come readily to our lips” (pp. 169-70), interfering with our critical reasoning and our ability to learn from experience.<\/p>\n

These words were published in 1927. About 14 million people were sentenced to the Gulag from 1929 to 1953. Auschwitz opened in 1940.\u00a0The current was not exactly steady in the direction of democracy. Robert\u00a0Zaretsky has a\u00a0beautiful piece<\/a> in today’s Times about how not being occupied during World War II made\u00a0Americans–probably white Americans more than others–“stupid.”\u00a0\u00a0According to Zaretsky, Czeslaw Milosz was fairly indulgent of our stupidity, although he diagnosed it clearly. It is precisely the kind of foolishness suggested by the first sentence in Dewey’s quotation above.<\/p>\n

What if we said the following instead? Human beings torture each other, enslave each other, carpet-bomb each other, and intentionally wipe out whole communities. This happens often. Enough: it has to stop. Translated into constitutional terms, “thou shalt not torture people” turns into a right to due process and rule of law. We\u00a0must do our best to\u00a0make such\u00a0rights sacred and nonnegotiable. They are not literally sacred, in the sense that God or nature decreed them. But they are bulwarks against\u00a0cruelty, which is the worst of us, to paraphrase\u00a0Judith Shklar’s Liberalism of Fear<\/a>. When everything is left open to experimentation and learning, people may spend hundreds of years “learning” that they can own other people\u00a0or that Jews are blood-sucking parasites.\u00a0We should rather treat as sacred and unamendable such passages\u00a0as\u00a0Article One<\/a> of the German Constitution:<\/p>\n

(1) Human dignity shall be inviolable. To respect and protect it shall be the duty of all state authority. (2) The German people therefore acknowledge inviolable and inalienable human rights as the basis of every community, of peace and of justice in the world.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I think that there are pragmatist replies to this kind of liberalism, but I can’t be satisfied with them unless they explicitly invoke and address the problem of evil. I’m worried about\u00a0this kind of theme in Dewey (ably summarized by John M. Savage in John Dewey’s Liberalism<\/a>):<\/p>\n

\"Dewey\"<\/p>\n

I’m all for cultivating democratic habits, but that’s not the only bulwark against tyranny. It’s also helpful to ban tyranny and to make\u00a0that\u00a0prohibition permanent.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Discussing Dewey in the Summer Institute of Civic Studies yesterday, I (and, I think, several colleagues) had the sudden recognition that American pragmatists tend not to deal with evil very persuasively. In The Public and its Problems, Dewey writes: Nevertheless, the current has set steadily in one direction: toward democratic forms. That government exists to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17091","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-philosophy","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17091","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=17091"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17091\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17097,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17091\/revisions\/17097"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17091"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17091"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17091"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}