American essays -- 20th century; State, The; World War, 1914-1918
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.
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