John Dewey and American Democracy.

JOHN DEWEY is often referred to as "the philosopher of democracy." And one need not see this as a terribly complimentary appellation in order to find it fitting. Dewey was, after all, largely responsible for identifying democracy in the minds of many Americans--and almost all American intellectuals--as "the one, the ultimate, ethical ideal of humanity." And there's the rub.

The notion that political decisionmaking is the ultimate ethical experience is, in essence, a form of vacuous self-idolatry. Such a notion rests on replacement of the transcendent ethical principles which must guide all decent human relations by the "principle" that if we voted for it, it must be right. Such a notion itself rejects the will of God in favor of the will of the group--"justly, freely, and openly determined" to be sure. as Robert Westbrook half wittingly shows, Dewey was in large part responsible for replacing God with democratic or "practical" science as the center of American intellectual life. But what Mr. Westbrook cannot do, because his own radical politics make Dewey's attempted Deicide seem such an obvious good to him, is provide any clear insight into Dewey's wider effects on American thought and character.

Most of Mr. Westbrook's efforts in this surprisingly coherent pierce of intellectual history are expended in "saving" Dewey from the charge that he was not really a radical. Dewey's truly radical socialism ought to be no secret. To be sure, it has been questioned over the years, but for purely instrumental reasons--because "liberals" who use his ideas like to present themselves as mainstream Americans, and because those further left have never forgiven Dewey for opposing the spread of Stalinism.

Dewey's socialism grew logically from his deification of democratic politics. Traditional American democracy, intended by the Founders as a procedural protection of the substantive goods of family, church, neighborhood, and property, was, for Dewey, merely a facade covering "capitalist" class interest. Dewey sought to "democratize" all of life by subjecting all human activity (economic activity in particular) to the political will of the majority--a majority whose proper education in bureaucratic decision-making Dewey kindly volunteered to undertake as soon as the scourge of religion was removed from intellectual life.

Odd as it seems in retrospect, religion's hold on American intellectuals was finally destroyed by the importation--thanks in large part to Dewey--of the rather bizarre German version of idealism, the idea that reality is the creation of the human mind. But then intellectual religion in the late nineteenth century was already dissipating itself in a sea of social activism and mystic naturalism. Besides, intellectuals pride themselves on being odd, and there always had been the urge to dispense with God and declare oneself the "creator" of all "values." Idealism itself was merely a gloss upon Immanuel Kant's evisceration of the Golden Rule into the "logical" equation, "Don't do it unless you'd like everyone to do if"--itself merely a more rigorous formulation of the Jacobin claim of reason's moral superiority to clerical "superstition."

At its root pragmatism, the philosophy Dewey and William James jointly cooked up from Hegel and Darwin (with just a pinch of Marx), is the claim that man's reason is the proper measure of all things. After using idealism to destroy what remained of religion's hold on the university, Dewey discarded the notion of any ideal, arguing instead that all of life is merely contingent, that all may change, including human nature and society, and that all should change whenever change is convenient.

The goal, for Dewey, was to free man from his superstitions so that he might develop his capacities to the fullest. But in stripping the classical idea of human perfection from its basis in natural law--transcendent rules of proper thought and behavior--Dewey left only the science of empirical observation as the means to measure human worth. And science cannot measure what does not, by its own lights, exist. Because the soul cannot be measured, then, the pragmatist rather happily finds himself with only material criteria by which to judge the whole of life. The equal distribution of material goods, enforced by participation in the "democratic process," thus becomes the only "proper" pragmatic goal.

God had to go because He was transcendent, traditional, and tyrannical. He got in the way of "cooperative" efforts aimed at exploiting the apparent promises of terrestrial experience. Far better, thought Dewey, to construct a "civil" religion by which man could worship his own products. It was curious, then, was it not, that totalitarianism accompanied the death of man's faith in God? Yet not so curious, for the identification of politics as the good can lead only to the idea that man is good merely as a creature of politics (as in the cannibalistic Nazi Volkgeist or the Marxist project of creating the New Socialist Man) or to the legitimation of a dreary social democracy that impoverishes us all but is "fair, open, and equal."

Of course, most Americans have declined to follow Dewey into the realm of "non-theistic humanism"--we are even simple-minded enough to call it atheism. But the products of the pragmatic revolution surround us. From a welfare state that provides the material necessities of life while destroying its wards' reasons for living, to a bureaucracy intent on "scientifically" providing perfect safety and well being even at the cost of our liberty, to the "participatory democracy" of the college indoctrination session wherein our children are taught that God is just another oppressive, lying dead white male, Dewey's legacy is much less marginal than Mr. Westbrook would have us believe. Only by recognizing that the "goods" we so desired have thrust aside the spirit in our lives can we push Dewey's unworkable "pragmatism" and its bureaucratic progeny back into the man-made void whence they came.

Mr. Frohnen is a freelance writer living in Decatur, Georgia.