Conclusion: (De)Liberation: John Dewey’s Human Nature and Conduct in the 21st Century

This is the third article in a three-part series. To begin at the beginning, please go here.

Conclusion: (De)Liberation for All

To realize its full promise, we must seek (De)Liberation far beyond the scattered margins of personal life, leveraging its power through collective action. The timing is both intimidating and propitious. Humanity is currently living through three overlapping and interrelated crises — one acute and two chronic. The acute crisis is the COVID-19 pandemic, which as of this writing has caused more than 27 million confirmed cases and nearly 900,000 deaths worldwide. The two chronic crises are climate change and the erosion of liberal democracies around the world. The latter is exacerbated by increasing skepticism that liberal democracy is the best form of government to secure the rights necessary for a free society, the former by the inertial robustness of human nature itself. To make matters worse, the negative impacts of all these crises are compounded by rising global inequality.

The stakes are high and the implications concrete. Looking back over history, Dewey reminds us that progress has been a messy and costly affair:

We realize how little the progress of man has been the product of intelligent guidance, how largely it has been a by-product of accidental upheavals, even though by an apologetic interest in behalf of some privileged institution we later transmute chance into providence. We have depended upon the clash of war, the stress of revolution, the emergence of heroic individuals, the impact of migrations generated by war and famine, the incoming of barbarians, to change established institutions. Instead of constantly utilizing unused impulse to effect continuous reconstruction, we have waited till an accumulation of stresses suddenly breaks through the dikes of custom…It is not safe to rely upon this expensive method of renewing civilization. We need to discover how to rejuvenate it from within. (102–3)

Accidental progress, though better than no progress at all, is insufficient for the effective maintenance of a flourishing, long-lived society. We must pursue intentional progress, using our ever-growing stock of scientific knowledge to anticipate threats and solve them before they arrive ravenous at our collective doorstep.

Here’s how I think Dewey would have us meet the moment:

Thought too often is specialized in a remote and separate pursuit, or employed in a hard way to contrive the instrumentality of “success.” Intellect is too often made a tool for a systematized apology for things as “they are,” that is for customs that benefit the class in power… No wonder that at times catastrophes that affect men in common are welcomed. For the moment they turn science away from its abstract technicalities into a servant of some human aspiration; the hard, chilly calculations of intellect are swept away by floods of sympathy and common loyalties.

But, alas, emotion without thought is unstable. It rises like the tide and subsides like the tide irrespective of what it has accomplished. It is easily diverted into any side channel dug by old habits or provided by cool cunning, or it disperses itself aimlessly. Then comes the reaction of disillusionment, and men turn all the more fiercely to the pursuit of narrow ends where they are habituated to use observation and planning and where they have acquired some control of conditions. The separation of warm emotion and cool intelligence is the great moral tragedy. (257–8).

Who among us has mixed “warm emotion and cool intelligence” into (De)Liberative medicine? I will highlight a few who are on the cutting edge, noting with full transparency that they reflect my personal, political, and national preferences.

Perhaps no organization can claim better (De)Liberative credentials than the Effective Altruism movement. This movement combines hard-nosed utilitarian calculations with moral wisdom and broad consequentialist goals, relentlessly seeking new ways to “do good better,” as co-founder William MacAskill puts it. Though Dewey was critical of the utilitarian approach, he imagined that we could one day make “accounting and auditing a subordinate factor in discovering the meaning of present activity,” using data and statistics as “a means of stating future results more exactly and objectively and thus of making action more humane” (214–5). Effective Altruism is arguably humanity’s best available embodiment of this ideal.

On the American political front, Andrew Yang’s recent presidential campaign signified a huge shift in America’s (De)Liberative potential. Yang’s bid for the Democratic nomination stood out because of his combination of data-driven policies, futurist orientation, and compassion for his fellow citizens. His central policy proposal was The Freedom Dividend — a form of basic income designed to end abject poverty across the nation and set the stage for a new economic era of Human Capitalism. This heroic focus on direct support for our most vulnerable citizens earned Yang credibility across the political spectrum, which he is now injecting into a new project called Humanity Forward.

There has probably never been a more pressing need for technological reform, and The Center for Humane Technology is imagining and advocating for overdue changes. After years of working in the tech industry and witnessing its problems firsthand, co-founder Tristan Harris unplugged and did some serious (De)Liberation. He and the other stalwarts at the Center now spend their time fighting for a technological future that prioritizes well-being and puts an end to the currently-commonplace abuses of our attention and personal data.

In the media space, Yascha Mounk’s Persuasion is a new and exciting effort to restore sanity and respect to our online communication. This project pledges to defend the values of a free society and — contrary to the prevailing dynamics on social media — “to persuade, rather than to mock or troll, those who disagree with us.” Hopefully this and other (De)Liberative online communities can begin to salvage and improve our civic discourse.

One hallmark of modern (De)Liberation the availability of large global datasets, combined with the technology to digitize, visualize, and make them readily available to the public. Our World in Data is providing this service with incomparable meticulousness and depth. Their analysis and presentation of COVID-19 data is remarkable, as are their other deep dives into the worldwide statistics on poverty, disease, hunger, climate change, war, existential risks, and inequality. These resources are indispensable for activists, researchers, ethicists of all stripes.

With renewed calls for police and prison reform in the United States, people are taking a fresh look at Restorative Justice. This practice is decades old and includes methods adapted from much older indigenous traditions. Though costly, Restorative Justice has a long track record of success. It has never been tried at scale in the US, but it is possible that this (De)Liberative method of addressing crime will now gain momentum and become a bigger player in American communities and around the world.

There are plenty of others pursuing worthy (De)Liberation, but these are the ones that have caught my attention and impressed me most in recent years. I hope readers who made it this far will leave a comment and share their favorite (De)Liberative individuals or organizations.

Finally, don’t forget that (De)Liberation is, first and foremost, something we all have to experiment with and take responsibility for as individuals. The tools with which to understand our nature, improve our conduct, and change the world are useless if we don’t pick them up.

If you enjoyed this article, please consider visiting my blog, Words&Dirt. You can subscribe here and get updates each time I publish something new.