Part 1: (De)Liberation: John Dewey’s Human Nature and Conduct in the 21st Century
Introduction: (De)Liberation in Times of Crisis
In 1918, the world was reeling from the impact of two global catastrophes — one created by human bellicosity and the other by biological happenstance. While millions perished in the trenches and torn landscapes of World War I, millions more grappled with one of history’s deadliest strains of influenza. For soldiers, the prospect of dying from an enemy’s bullet or bayonet may have seemed preferable to death by filth and disease. For noncombatants, it must have seemed inconceivably cruel for providence to celebrate the last year of the Great War by kicking off a pandemic.
Given the intensity of the moment, 1918 would not appear to be an obvious year for progress in our understanding of the human condition. That spring, however, American philosopher and psychologist John Dewey delivered three lectures at Stanford University, which were later expanded and published in a volume called Human Nature and Conduct: An Introduction to Social Psychology. The book not only identified the essential cognitive patterns that came to dominate modern psychology, but also posited practical ethical frameworks for translating those patterns into intelligent agency.
Dewey’s driving desire was to end the historical severance of ethics from the natural conditions in which ethical inquiry unfolds. This requires us to treat ethics not primarily as an internal, private process, but rather a social, public project in which “the issue shifts from within personality to an engineering issue” (10). Dewey explains:
A morals based on study of human nature instead of upon disregard for it would find the facts of man continuous with those of the rest of nature and would thereby ally ethics with physics and biology. It would find the nature and activities of one person coterminous with those of other human beings, and therefore link ethics with the study of history, sociology, law and economics…The intelligent acknowledgement of the continuity with nature, man and society will alone secure a growth of morals which will be serious without being fanatical, aspiring without sentimentality, adapted to reality without conventionality, sensible without taking the form of calculation of profits, idealistic without being romantic. (12–3)
Looking back on the last century of intellectual progress, two conclusions are obvious. The first is that the interdisciplinary “growth of morals” recommended by Dewey has proceeded with encouraging alacrity. The second is that, despite our positive gains, there is still much to be done. As we seek to understand and undertake this work amidst a moment of renewed global crisis, Dewey’s prescient perspectives have much to offer. Returning to and building on these frameworks can help us gain clarity and actively increase our autonomy and well-being — a process I will refer to as (De)Liberation.
Part One: Habit and Impulse
I. Habit
“Man is a creature of habit,” Dewey writes, “not of reason nor yet of instinct” (125). This was of course not an original assertion; the importance of habit in Western Philosophy goes back at least as far as Aristotle, and Dewey’s work owes much to William James, who in the late 19th century characterized adults as “mere walking bundles of habits” and introduced the fundamentals of psychology to American culture (The Writings of William James, 20).
Dewey’s particular take, however, honors his stated goal of aligning ethical thinking with our animal biology and sociality. To him, habits are “physiological functions” that are “acquired” and represent “the cooperation of organism and environment” (14). Social influence and direction, which Dewey denotes as “customs,” are especially critical:
Customs persist because individuals form their personal habits under conditions set by prior customs. An individual usually acquires the morality as he inherits the speech of his social group. The activities of the group are already there, and some assimilation of his own acts to their pattern is a prerequisite of a share therein, and hints of having any part in what is going on. (58)
Habituation is an ongoing process by which people internalize patterns of behavior from their environment and automatically employ them to get along and get ahead. These powerful patterns “rule our thoughts, determining which shall appear and be strong and which shall pass from light into obscurity” (25). Here Dewey begins a sustained assault on the myth of the “economic man” (or “homo economicus”), an idea that arose in the 19th century and persisted throughout the 20th century in various guises. Dewey rightly considered this a disastrous misreading of human psychology:
Reason pure of all influence from prior habit is a fiction…The medium of habit filters all the material that reaches our perception and thought. The filter is not, however, chemically pure. It is a reagent which adds new qualities and rearranges what is received…Thus our purposes and commands regarding action (whether physical or moral) come to us through the refracting medium of bodily and moral habits. (31–2)
We now know that the brain itself is the primary “reagent” or “refracting medium” that “adds new qualities and rearranges what is perceived,” in concert with our ancillary perceptive mechanisms. This acknowledgement of the vastly subjective nature of experience, which after Dewey’s time helped produce postmodernism and its associated relativist blunders, did not lead Dewey to question the fundamental validity of ethics or rationality. Rather, it called him back to our shared environment as the location from which common viewpoints and projects are derived: “A psychology based upon habits…will…fix its attention upon the objective conditions in which habits are formed and operate” (86). This focus on the relationship between habits and objective conditions is a cornerstone of Deweyan thought, and our first step in the path to (De)Liberation.
II. Impulse
Since impulses arise within the body and physically bring our habits into existence, addressing habits first may put the cart before the horse. Dewey anticipates this objection, using it as an opportunity to reveal his unique interpretation of impulse:
Impulses although first in time are never primary in fact; they are secondary and dependent…the meaning of native activities is not native; it is acquired…These phenomena which have a meaning spring from original native reactions to stimuli, yet they depend also upon the responsive behavior of others. (89–90, emphasis his)
We see here the overwhelming extent to which Dewey’s view of the human organism is socially-centered and intersubjective; even something as internal and private as an impulse is meaningless without the context of other people and the surrounding environment. Impulses unify us in the recognition of our common humanity, with all our activities and desires springing from a shared “native stock of instincts”:
The same original fears, angers, loves and hates are hopelessly entangled in the most opposite institutions. The thing we need to know is how a native stock has been modified by interaction with different environments. (92)
Making room for diversity through expression of custom as well as sameness through biological heritage, Dewey forms up the foundation of a vibrantly pluralistic civilization. This foundation is firmer today than in Dewey’s era, with much edifice and art still needing to be crafted.
The relationship between impulse and habit is similar to that between an energetic child and a routinized but pliable grandparent. Impulses occur sporadically, often unexpectedly, pestering our habits but also keeping them from becoming too calcified. “Impulses are the pivots upon which the re-organization of activities turn,” Dewey explains. “They are agencies of deviation, for giving new directions to old habits and changing their quality” (93). Despite its capricious and sometimes untrustworthy character, we depend on impulse as an “indispensable source of liberation” (105).
III. (De)Liberation Denied
Before exploring the optimistic prospects of (De)Liberation, we should confront the insidious ways in which 21st-century society renders our habits and impulses weapons of mass destruction. To bring our language up to date, the mental processes Dewey understood as habit and impulse we now call “System 1” thinking, as popularized by the Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman. This type of thinking, also referred to as heuristics, “operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control” (Thinking Fast and Slow, 20).
Other modern thinkers have created a plethora of terms and images with which to think about this aspect of our psychological makeup, from Jonathan Haidt’s “emotional elephant” to Antonio Damasio’s “somatic-marker hypothesis” to Edward O. Wilson’s “evolutionary chimera, living on intelligence steered by the demands of animal instinct” (The Social Conquest of Earth, 13). Each of these plays its part in revealing just how automatic and unconscious most human behavior turns out to be. Dewey was right about the untenability of the “economic man”; our status as “rational optimization machines” has eroded with each passing decade (Behave, Robert Sapolsky, 642).
Philosopher Thomas Metzinger provides an excellent summary of this predicament:
We are all constantly swimming in an unconscious sea of intercorporality, permanently mirroring one another with the aid of various unconscious components and precursors of the phenomenal Ego. Long before conscious, high-level social understanding arrived on the scene, and long before language evolved and philosophers developed complicated theories about what it takes for one human being to acknowledge another as a person and a rational individual, we were already bathed in the waters of implicit, bodily intersubjectivity. Few great social philosophers of the past would have thought that social understanding had anything to do with the premotor cortex, and that ‘motor ideas’ would play such a central role in the emergence of social understanding. Who could have expected that shared thought would depend upon shared ‘motor representations’? Or that the functional aspects of the human self-model that are necessary for the development of social consciousness are nonconceptual, prerational, and pretheoretical? (The Ego Tunnel, 171)
While Metzinger goes on to highlight a few of the 19th- and 20th-century thinkers who got the ball rolling, he does not mention Dewey. But Human Nature and Conduct clearly situates Dewey as one of the “few great social philosophers of the past” who identified deep connections between the body, other bodies, and the physical world that became more and more obvious as the 20th century gave way to the 21st.
Today we know that people are somewhat less sensitive to changes in their environment than Dewey supposed. The powerful influence of genetics and hardwired stages of neural development cannot be ignored. The reality of System 1 thinking shouldn’t extinguish our claims to rational and intelligent behavior, but it does starkly illuminate our cognitive weaknesses. Neuroscientist Kevin J. Mitchell explains:
The process of refinement by experience is, by its very nature, self-terminating. Connections that are reliably driven by sensory stimuli will be strengthened and those that conflict with patterns of experience will be weakened or even pruned away. That process changes the patterns of activity that arise in response to the next stimulus, biasing them toward that one pattern and away from another, in turn further reinforcing that bias by the same processes of plasticity. Eventually, through this positive feedback, you will get a system that is very good at processing certain types of stimuli — the ones we encounter reliably and that matter to us — but that has lost its capacity to learn to discriminate other types of stimuli. Indeed, the biochemical processes of plasticity that underlie wholesale activity-dependent refinement are actively turned off in the brain after a certain stage (at different times for different systems), consolidating the now-optimized circuitry and closing off potential for further change. (Innate, 90, emphasis his)
Exacting exploitation of the “self-terminating” nature of experience could close the door permanently to (De)Liberation. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the last several decades of technological progress. Mind-bending inventions such as the Internet, personal computers, smartphones, and social media have taught us just how easy it is to manipulate habit and impulse, imprisoning our attention in dopamine-dosing mental loops that preclude reflection and stifle autonomy. Increasingly, the modern human is subject to the constant scrutiny of systems that track our habits and harness unconscious impulses to nudge us toward goals over which we exert little or no influence. Historian Yuval Noah Harari explains:
For thousands of years philosophers and prophets have urged people to know themselves. But this advice was never more urgent than in the twenty-first century, because unlike in the days of Laozi or Socrates, now you have serious competition. Coca-Cola, Amazon, Baidu, and the government are all racing to hack you. Not your smartphone, not your computer, and not your bank account; they are in a race to hack you and your organic operating system. You might have heard that we are living in the era of hacking computers, but that’s not even half the truth. In fact, we are living in the era of hacking humans.
The algorithms are watching you right now. They are watching where you go, what you buy, whom you meet. Soon they will monitor all your steps, all your breaths, all your heartbeats. They are relying on Big Data and machine learning to get to know you better and better. And once these algorithms know you better than you know yourself, they can control and manipulate you, and you won’t be able to do much about it…In the end, it’s a simple empirical matter: if the algorithms indeed understand what’s happening within you better than you understand it yourself, authority will shift to them. (21 Lessons for the 21st Century, 272, emphasis his)
Given the current state of global affairs, it’s hard to argue that we haven’t already ceded too much authority to algorithmic systems controlled by a tiny number of people leveraging more wealth than ancient kings could have ever dreamed of. And all this is happening at the same moment that our ecosystem is collapsing, liberal democracies are failing, and a pandemic is surging across the planet. Careful, long-term planning and radical reinvention through scaled collective action are, it would seem, the only things standing between the average person and prolonged immiseration.
This it the first article in a three-part series. To continue, please go here.
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