The need for such fundamental democratic institutions as freedom of thought
and speech follows, for Dewey, from requirements of scientific procedure
in general: the unimpeded flow of information and the freedom to offer
and to criticize hypotheses. Durkheim offered similar arguments up to a
point, but came to the conclusion that political opinions should rest on
"expert opinion", those without expertise being required to defer
to the authority of the experts (and especially to sociologists). While
Dewey may not have known of Durkheim's essay, he did consider and reject
this view, and he did so for frankly empirical reasons: "A class of
experts is inevitably so removed from common interests as to become a class
with private interests and private knowledge, which in social matters is
not knowledge at all." Here Dewey links up with another of this themes,
that privilege inevitably produces cognitive distortion: "All special
privilege narrows the outlook of those who possess it, as well as limits
the development of those not having it. A very considerable portion of
what is regarded as the inherent selfishness of mankind is the product of
an inequitable distribution of power-inequitable because it shuts out some
from the conditions which direct and evoke their capacities, while it produces
a one-sided growth in those who have privilege" (Dewey and Tufts, Ethics,
pp. 358-386). Thus, if a value as general as the value of democracy is
to be rationally defended in the way Dewey advocates, the materials to be
used in the defense cannot be circumscribed in advance. There is no one
field of experience from which all the considerations relevant to the evaluation
of democracy come.
The dilemma facing the classical defenders of democracy arose because all
of them presupposed that we already know our nature and our capabilities.
In contrast, Dewey's view is that we don't know what our interests and
needs are or what we are capable of until we actually engage in politics.
A corollary of this view is that there can be no final answer to the question
of how we should live, and therefore we should always leave it open to further
discussion and experimentation. That is precisely why we need democracy.
At the same time, we do know that certain things stunt our nature and capacities.
Dewey was well aware that equality and freedom can conflict, and that there
is no easy solution when they do conflict; but he would, I think, feel that
this conflict is too much emphasized in present-day political philosophy.
In Dewey's view, there is simply no doubt that inequality, on the
scale that exists today, stunts our nature and capacities, and thus leads
to unfreedom on a massive scale. If we are to talk about "conflicts
between equality and freedom", we should also talk about the ways in
which inequality leads to unfreedom.
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