A new Introduction is now available, to better reflect what the new edition talks about. So, please read it first, and then if you're interested, read on. JK
Introduction
Liberalism: A Different Philosophic Choice Never in more than 2 million years of human history has there been a greater need for more people to first learn about liberal philosophic ideas, and then practice and testing them for their results. Huge feudalistic concentrations of money-power are now controlled by a few banks, corporations, and a small number of obscenely wealthy people. To many of them liberal democratic institutions are the enemy. Many of them continue attacking democratic ideas and institutions in many nations, including the US, and liberal models of education remain a favorite target. The 5 books in this series are designed to easily teach many people more about how our world has been, and is now, being largely controlled by a small feudalistic conservative class. For many in that class gaining even more personal wealth-power is the most important goal in life, rather than increasing the common good for everyone.
This series of 5 books plainly describes John Dewey's (1859-1952) much more liberal democratic models of life and nature. They not only describe the ideas of America’s most famous and productive liberal philosopher, but also the long struggle between conservatives, moderates, and liberals for control of other people by controlling how they act and what they think. Such control is maintained with the help of important conservative political, economic, educational, and scientific institutions. As is becoming painfully clear to more and more people, today, slavery to economic debt has replaced the physical forms slavery existing already for thousands of years.
As many people know, and most people now believe, most philosophy has been not much help in the struggle to end all forms of feudalistic power. For many people it’s become much too difficult to read and understand. In many ways it’s true. Over many centuries both conservative and moderate philosophers have developed ways of writing most people don't understand. These books, however, are aimed at easily overcoming that problem. In them I’ve used plain and simple words most people already understand for describing the 3rd main tradition in Western philosophy, its liberal tradition as developed by John Dewey. After all, why use words like metaphysics, epistemology, axiology, esthetics, and pedagogy when almost no one knows they mean? So, to overcome that major obstacle I've used words like nature, experimental learning, ethical values, psychology, politics, are, science, and also education, one of Dewey's most important subjects.
In general, then, these books will describe Dewey’s new liberal models of those very important subjects with words used each and every day by most everyone. And what’s more, to make Dewey's ideas even clearer, they’re also compared to Plato’s conservative and Aristotle’s moderate philosophic models of life and nature. Such comparisons will, I hope, help convince as many people as possible to begin actively testing Dewey’s liberal ideas for themselves, and see both their useful personal and social results. We liberals say we should continue liberalizing and democratizing the feudalistic institutions still dominating much of life today, and thus making it much more stressful and frustrating than it need be. Also included in that list is one of the oldest feudalistic institutions in the world, namely military systems. There are, in fact, liberal democratic alternatives to all such institutions, and they are all easy to understand and test. Just imagine, for a moment, all the terrible suffering and needless killing of innocent Iraqi men, women, and children that would not have happened if the US military was a truly democratic institution, rather than an obedient servant of our politicians. How many terrorist attacks in the US would have been avoided too, including the Boston Marathon bombings?!
The Story Begins
Since our ancestors began turning their small villages into towns and then cities during the last 10,000 years, gaining and keeping power and control over others has been a major goal for small early ruling classes. Often, a small number of people realized how having such power helps make their own lives easier and more enjoyable. The could eat better food, wear better clothes, live in better homes, and work less. Even the earliest cities in what is now Iraq, leaders controlled others enough to build them magnificent palaces while most everyone else lived in poverty and ignorance. Such rulers learned they could teach others to grow food for their leaders and even fight and die in the wars mainly increasing ruler wealthy and power. Since then that feudalistic system has been kept in place and become the social status quo. The main goal of such rulers was to get and keep as much monopolistic power as possible for as long as possible; any competition to their power was simply unacceptable and intolerable.
Naturally, even in those first cities social classes like rulers, priests, artisans, serfs, and slaves evolved, and just as naturally those with social power continued building institutions to keep that social status quo in place, often using religious spirit-ideas we now know began evolving tens of thousands of years earlier. There’s some evidence spirit-ideas were being practiced as long ago as 60,000 years! Even though there was really no objective evidence for such spirit-objects, they continued being practiced as a way to explain natural events and even heal diseases. Then, as cities began growing spirit-ideas helped justify the feudalistic political, economic, and educational status quo! A current example is many conservatives believing same-sex marriages are truly against god’s will.
Dewey used such new reliable ideas as these to build his new modern liberal model of life and nature. Such feudalistic institutions continue to this day, now using money-power to support such systems! As Dewey noted many times, the more people practice acting as if an idea is true, the more it feels true! In his liberal Behavioral psychological model our bodies and minds are always connected to each other; the phrase he used in body-mind. In fact, many ruling classes today still use their institutions to continue resisting and hobbling any kind of liberal democratic challenges to their power; for them any kind of competition remains an ugly and repulsive word for many conservatives and moderates even today! Socialism is merely one such word.
Within the pages of these 5 books, such people will be called conservatives; their main goal has been, and remains, conserving, maintaining, and expanding their own power over others most of all. Controlling our still largely feudalistic educational and political institutions helps accomplish that goal, and thus keep human habits of obedience and acceptance to the status quo firmly in place! Today in the US, for example, a small hugely wealthy class of conservatives continues amassing more wealth-power, often at the public expense, and also using it mainly to keep increasing their social, political, economic, and educational control in as many places as possible. No doubt, 2 important economic tools for maintaining such control is the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
Certainly, not all conservatives are so greedy and power-hungry; many in fact are more humane and liberal. But these 5 books challenge the models of excellence of all those who aren’t. They not only offer more liberal democratic models of those institutions to choose from, but also ideas for peacefully and intelligently making all conservative feudalistic institutions more democratic, liberal, and focused on the public or common good, rather than just mainly the wealth-power of a small ruling class. In many ways conservative institutions remain among the most obstructive institutions to a better world for everyone on the planet. If the wealthy have the best medical and educational opportunities, then why shouldn’t everyone?
Is my generalization cup running over? Am I exaggerating too much? Book 1 in this series will offer many examples of such behavior, so readers will be able to make a more informed choice for themselves. Here’s one example. It's no doubt safe to say, at many colleges and universities today liberal models of life and nature like Dewey’s rarely get even mentioned, much less lectured about. And even when they are studied by a few young students, they often don’t have the mature reading skills to understand what liberals like Dewey are talking about. To them, as it was to me, much of his work felt like he was in a different world.
In any case, however, there remain powerful economic forces obstructing the spread of competitive liberal ideas, even at many universities and colleges! Many have evolved into wealthy corporations themselves, with billions of dollars they invest to keep making more money, rather than increase the number of students they educate! Many have multi-billion dollar endowment funds built with the help of wealthy conservative alumni, and those that don't keep working to get them! Also, some wealthy conservatives even pay conservative professor’s salaries to teach only conservative ideas, especially about economics; the less competition they have for those ideas, the better they like it. Socialism to them is like devils were to medieval peoples.
As a result, one of the great threats to the capitalistic economic status quo is Dewey’s democratic socialism; the best goal of wealth is helping those with fewer options and less power. It also encourages people to feel they should have the right to control all their economic institutions and their results if they so choose! So again, such a liberal model of excellence offers a very different model for how our economic, political, and educational institutions should work. For example, should more public banks be built to better serve the public good, rather than keep increasing Wall Street profits? For Dewey, the essence of democracy was to keep increasing the public good, rather than just the welfare of a small wealthy feudalistic class. And of course what public school students are made to study hasn’t changed much since medieval times. Perhaps the biggest change has been the addition of scientific book-studies, but aren’t useful character habits and employment skills just as useful in today’s new economy? They certainly were to Dewey. For us Deweyan liberals, not teaching young folks the useful character habits for living in a more democratic world is like throwing a baby fish into a shark-infested ocean! It’s often a formula for disaster, as our prison population and crime rates tell us!
Western Civilization's Three Main Philosophic Traditions
As a new millennium began unfolding in 2,000, better communication tools and skills continued helping better educate more people about the on-going struggle between liberal, moderate, and conservative ideas. Such a competition goes back to the ancient Greeks, and the birthplace of Western liberal democracy. There, a few amazing Greeks first defined Western philosophy’s 3 main traditions, and each continues growing even today. After Democritus (460?-370?) built his Atomist model of life and nature and liberalism emerged, then came Plato's (428?–348 BCE) conservative spirit-model, and after him Aristotle's (384–322 BCE) moderate Form-model. Their basic assumptions about nature will thus be used in these pages to define liberal, conservative and moderate philosophic models.
In general, Plato's basic conservative spirit-assumption had been widely used for many tens of thousands of years before he lived. He assumed eternal and unchanging spirit-objects exist and somehow interact with physical nature to guide and control its movements. For a long time before Plato many conservatives said spirit-objects control many, if not most, of the actions we see around us. What’s more, after him it remained the most widespread model of life and nature with the growth of Christianity. Perhaps a good way to picture his model is with this example. Imagine a pool of shimmering water reflecting somewhat the more stable and distinct objects around it. The water images, Plato might say, represents our material world; it’s always moving and changing objects are thus incapable of producing absolutely certain truth. However, the objects it reflects are solid, unchanging, clearer, and more stable. They reflect the true nature of spirit-objects, and are thus capable of producing certain knowledge. What's more, they must be like mathematical objects which Plato thought actually do produce unchanging kinds of truth: 2 + 2 always and forever equals 4.
Again, however, it should be clear. Such spirit-objects are merely an assumption simply because there is no objective evidence they really exist! Almost certainly, our native ancestors began using such ideas long ago to help explain the dream images they kept seeing while sleeping. They were simple called spirits, and remained useful for explaining other natural events like storms, earthquakes, diseases, and so on; they were all spirit caused. Then, after cities began growing about 8,000 years ago, such conservative religious ideas became useful for justifying their accepting of educational, political, and social events like war and why people were born into their social class. Their rulers continued teaching people they should merely accept and faithfully trust such spirit-objects really existed! In any case, however, these days dream events and poetic reflection examples are simply not the same as scientific verification.
To this day many conservatives still believe an almighty, good, kind, and merciful spirit-god has created and guides all earthly movements, down to the death of the smallest bird and insect! As we’ll see throughout these books, however, thousands of different spirit-ideas have evolved in just the last 20,000 years! So, the obvious question becomes which conservative model is right and true? In any case, however, Plato is, no doubt, the most famous conservative philosopher in Western history and so we’ll be looking at many of his ideas and assumptions, especially in Books 1 (Sketches of Excellence) and 3 (Ancient Models of Excellence).
His student Aristotle is here defined as the most famous moderate philosopher in Western history. Most philosophers have been either conservatives or moderates, which is why it’s often said everyone is either a Platonist or an Aristotelian. Naturally we Deweyan liberals strongly disagree, and we’ll see why while describing more of ancient and medieval philosophy and history.
Moderate philosophers are defined here as once again merelyassuming within most natural objects there exist some eternal and unchanging objects guiding their growth and development. Aristotle called them Forms, but again it’s important to remember, the assumption lacks any kind of objective evidence! No doubt, that idea helped Charles Darwin build his famous evolutionary model of life and nature in the 1800s. In effect, then, Aristotle too merely asks people to accept on faith the idea of Forms. After studying with Plato for about 20 years, and seeing how many serious problems were created with a 2-fold spirit-matter assumption of nature, and after reading much of liberal Democritus’s work, he felt it was better to experiment with the more natural idea of Forms, rather than atoms or spirit-objects. In fact he thought Socrates liked his assumption too. As we’ll see later, however, Forms too created some serious philosophic problems, especially their having no objective evidence of their own.
Incidentally, such moderate feudalistic models of life and nature are still practiced at the highest levels of government here in the US. Radical capitalist Ayn Rand (d. 1982) felt Aristotle was one of the most important philosophers of all time. What’s more, some of her followers not only have, but retain great amounts of political and economic power. One, Alan Greenspan, was appointed by conservative Republican President Reagan in 1987 as Chairman of the Federal Reserve Banking System, and worked tirelessly to reduce useful government economic regulations. That way wealthy Wall Street banks and corporations would be free to create as many new products as they wanted, and to make as much money as they could. One result was the serious economic meltdown in 2,008-9! As we'll see in Books 1 and 3, however, Aristotle was a typical aristocratic Greek who believed some people were slaves by nature, and so should even be forced into that lifestyle! Feudalism to him was an eternal and unchanging form of nature itself! His god existed beyond the stars atop all of nature and inspired almost all its movements. Such a model was later called Deism.
What helped motivate both of them to build such different models of nature? Mainly 2 liberal Greek movements began challenging all such conservative and moderate ideas. One was Democritus’s Atomist model, and the other was a liberal democratic Sophist movement. No doubt, the most famous liberal Sophist was a man named Protagoras (490?–420? BCE). For liberal humanists like him mankind creates all the values and institutions we have; "man(kind) is the measure of all things...". Whatever ideas people accept become their truth! That idea explained why there were so many different models of truth being practiced! And both of them embraced the new democratic institutions and ideas growing around Greece; both Plato and Aristotle would reject such ideas almost completely. Incidentally, Plato dedicates a dialogue to Protagoras and portrays a young Socrates talking rather immaturely with him.
With both Democritus and Protagoras 2 more liberal models of nature began growing many decades before Plato and Aristotle even lived. From its very start in western Turkey in the early 500s BCE, liberal thinkers assumed there were no spirit-objects or Forms in nature. There were only physical objects continuing to change. Then, as a small group of traveling Sophists were helping young folks learn skills useful in a democratic world, Atomism's most amazing writer Democritus almost made it impossible for anyone else to improve on his work. With good reason many ancient thinkers equaled him to both Plato and Aristotle, not the least of which was his Atomism which eventually became the fundamental idea of all Western science! However, his liberal ideas and models of life and nature too were about as useful to conservatives like Plato as communist and socialist ideas were to conservative US capitalists in the 1900s! As a result, much of their writings have been lost or destroyed, and it would be many centuries before they would be re-discovered and circulated in the 1500s.
So, how will such liberals be defined here? Again, by a basic assumption about nature. Many Sophists like Protagoras honestly admitted they saw no objective evidence for any eternal and unchanging objects in nature! Thus, the only absolute and eternal truth was that there could be no absolute and eternal truths! Both Plato and Aristotle declared philosophic war on such ideas and assumptions. Dewey, however, with science's help, eventually accepted that liberal assumption about nature. If science couldn't prove such objects existed, like spirit-objects or Forms, then why believe they did? Our strongest experimental knowledge found nothing in nature is eternal and unchanging.
Still, there's one important exception to that definition of a liberal, that being Democritus himself. In many ways he was a liberal democrat, but he too assumed atoms were the only natural objects which didn't change and evolve. Nature for him was merely a series of random combining and breaking apart of such atoms. Even his god was composed and atoms, existed far from earth, and had nothing to do with any earthly movements. More recently, however, even his assumption about eternal atoms has evolved into ever-changing forms of energy. For that assumption, in fact, there is much objective evidence. In short, liberals are defined as those who assume nothing in nature stays always the same.
Another of Dewey's assumptions should be mentioned too. How might such a nature be described? Well, he used just 2 words: ‘stable and precarious.' With a high degree of probability we liberals can assume nature will always be both stable and precarious, or precariously stable! I myself prefer the words 'supportive and dangerous', but they mean essentially the same things; nature will always be both supportive and dangerous. Earthquakes, floods, droughts, fires, and dangerous diseases will remain a part of nature, as will supportive features too, like breathable air, drinkable water, and food.
Incidentally, the fact almost no one today knows what a great liberal philosopher Democritus was is yet more evidence for the on-going philosophic battle between liberals, moderates, and conservatives. After all, the less one believes in only liberal ideas like atoms and democracy, the easier it is for people to accept moderate or conservative assumptions! In fact began battling began in the ancient world and continued throughout the Middle Ages. As a result, almost all of Democritus's amazingly creative and accurate writings have been lost or destroyed. Such censoring actions by conservatives and moderates have helped them keep control of our all-important social, economic, and educational institutions for thousands of years! People live and die, but institutions live on. For centuries uneducated and vulnerable children were told powerful spirit-objects exist, and how to please them, so what real freedom of choice was there to pick a philosophic model of life besides those 2? How free was mankind to choose liberal democratic ideas of equality or experimental ideas of science, including medical science? For centuries it was practically impossible!
Also, I should mention this. Different general ideas about political excellence also help define those 3 traditions. Again, there are some exceptions to this rule, but in general conservatives have wanted to keep political power concentrated in a small ruling class or monarch, often passed on from farther to son, and thus maintain a top-down feudalistic political model. That model too began growing in the earliest civilizations, like modern Iraq and Egypt. Thomas Hobbes (d. 1679), however, is one exception; he was an Atomist who also felt a powerful monarch was the best form of government. Other than that, however, monarchies and popes are usually a common conservative feudalistic form of political and religious power. Also, the US constitution framers put the president at the head of a feudalistic military system. When the president said attack, soldiers either obeyed or were punished.
Politically, moderates like Aristotle have been a little more liberal. He allowed a little more room for excellent democratic forms of political power, like those democracies aiming to improve most everyone's life, but he too felt it best to put political power in the hands of one best ruler, or a small group.
And of course liberals like Dewey have celebrated democratic political power at all social levels, city, county, state, and national. That also includes economic and educational power as well. The more such decision-making power is concentrated in the hands of a few, the more unstable and dangerous life becomes. As a general rule, moderates and conservatives want those kinds of power given to as few people as possible, while liberals want as many people as possible to have such power. To this day such power struggles continue on, with the conservatives becoming dominant in the last few decades of the 1900s. Despite many useful scientific and medical inventions, great economic power and wealth, as well as educational power, continues being concentrated in the hands of a few. As a result, for millions of people around the world life has become more stressful and frustrating rather than more satisfying and enjoyable. We'll see many examples of that in these books.
One more conclusion thus seems obvious. For us Deweyan liberals such unstable and dangerous social results continue challenging us to better organized and concentrate our own political power. Unless we liberals learn how to more intelligently organize and use such democratic power, we’ll continue seeing our tax laws favor the already obscenely wealthy, and making it more difficult to build, say, more publicly owned banks, water, electrical, and transportation utilities, and even neighborhood controlled schools! Conservatives and moderates will thus continue controlling more and more of our nation's wealth and power. Already some economists are reporting about 90% of profits these days are going to the already wealthiest among us! For us Deweyan liberals that situation is completely unacceptable and in great need of improvement. The more wealth is concentrated in the hands of a few, the more difficult it becomes for others to make enough money to live on. For us, people need to hear ideas like from the long-time libertarian politician Barney Frank. He put it bluntly, "…voters kick money’s ass!" So, the on-going challenge for all liberal-minded people is to better organize, concentrate, and maintain our political voting power! Instead of openly violent revolution which generally produces worse results than before, liberal democratic voting power is a most intelligent counter-balance to all the uncontrolled greed and selfishness we still see on a daily basis.
Incidentally, here’s some political irony worthy of conservative Socrates himself: Today wealthy conservatives and their political servants continue telling people the government and its regulations are the main social problem, when in fact the government they largely control is helping create and maintain highly unstable and unfair living conditions for most of us. The recent history of more frequent economic recessions and increasing public debt is objective proof of that idea. Political truth telling rarely gets more absurd, distorted, and perverted than that!
Liberal and Conservative Clashes in the 1900s
No doubt, many may feel such goals are unattainable; they can't be reached or maintained. But for us Deweyan liberals that's exactly what conservatives and moderates want people to believe! It makes their work that much easier. We liberals need a more positive feeling. In fact, many of our political and educational institutions have become much more liberal than before. For example, with Dewey’s help a Progressive Democratic Movement grew quite powerful in the US in the first 40 years of the 1900s! After World War 2 a conservative counter-movement began working to weaken all such liberal improvements and continues to this day.
Dewey’s liberal ideas helped build our present more progressive models of democratic excellence. Thanks to our progressive movement, many states now allow voters to even pass laws directly, and by-pass the wealthy-backed political system altogether. No doubt, sometimes there were setbacks, like with the continuing de-regulation of our present feudalistic economic structure, but after all nothing lasts forever; even it too can be better controlled with more concentrated and focused democratic power. After all, obscenely wealthy people who often merely inherit their wealth show little sign of using it mainly to help those with fewer resources. Incidentally, Dewey too would also be calling for a constitutional amendment overturning the recent Supreme Court ruling giving free speech rights to corporations and their huge amounts of money. Corporations are run by people; they’re not people. When's the last time you saw a corporation breathe air or eat a hamburger? Apparently that question wasn't important for 5 conservative Supreme Court Justices in an infamous 2010 ruling opening the political doors wider for more corporate control.
In the early 1900s, however, many people simply got fed up with the feudalistic economic, political, and education systems they were supporting, and so began peacefully reconstructing them with the help of concentrated voter power. Many of Dewey's liberal democratic ideas helped millions of people resist and reform the great economic, political, and educational systems controlled by a few thousand people! Needless to say, in that process many new democratic improvements were made. For example, new laws were passed at state levels giving more people direct democratic power to pass their own laws, and thus avoid the obstacle of economic power remaining only with a few people. Also, new Constitutional amendments were passed for taxing personal incomes to better circulate more of the wealthy's money, and also democratically elect their own senators. Giving women the right to vote was also added to the Constitution. Don't believe for a minute real improvement cannot happen; they can and have.
Naturally, a small class of wealthy conservatives fought back with their wealth and political power; they wanted to weaken all progressively liberal systems as much and as often as they could! Conservative propaganda against liberal ideas like socialism became a powerful tool with the help of a new invention called radio, and of course with newspapers. Words like communist and socialist became demonized for millions of people, and were often applied to progressive democrats too. Franklin Roosevelt's 1940 running mate Henry Wallace was one of them. In fact, conservative Democrats in Chicago openly blocked him from becoming the Vice Presidential candidate in 1944!
Then, after communist forces took control in China in 1947 conservative US congressional Republicans began labeling many State Department and even Hollywood actors and writers as communists and socialists. Like undemocratic conservatives down through the centuries, they simply wanted no competition for their own ideas. As a result, many liberals were fired from their jobs and even blacklisted to keep them from working. With the help of conservative newspapers around the country and in congress such demonized words began playing the same psychic roles devils and heretics played in the medieval world (500-1500 CE)! They were something to be eliminated and even killed. Such ideas were also used after 1980 to weaken and hobble all liberal labor union power! No competing power was to be allowed! As a result, today their power has been greatly reduced. People with home, auto, and education debt need to work for whatever a company is willing to pay them, and often even agree not to join a union.
In the 1930s, however, such liberal democratic power was kept alive as yet another very serious economic depression occurred. Thousands of banks had used their clients’ money to invest in the stock market, but when that system finally collapsed in 1929, millions of people lost their savings and unemployment shot up to 25%. For all its great productive power, capitalism remains a very unstable economic system; no doubt its feudalistic power is partly to blame! In any case, the Great Depression then caused enough people to vote for a fundamental change in the role of government! Most people at the time seemed to believe in a libertarian model of government: the best government merely does no harm while protecting people and property! All during the 1920s Republican presidents were elected and practiced such a conservative political philosophy. However, after the Great Depression settled across the US in the early 1930s, and millions lost their jobs and life savings, people needed help finding new jobs to pay their bills. In short, they needed a more active and helpful government, one that actually helped create jobs, rather than merely acting so as to not harm people.
At the time Dewey kept helping people see that new more active role for government was best; he even wanted it to be more active than it was. So, in 1932 millions of people focused their democratic power and elected more active progressive Democrats like Franklin Roosevelt. They empowered his government to begin actively working to help those greatly weakened by the depression, my parents included. People needed a more actively liberal government, rather than a Republican one whose leaders kept telling people don't worry, prosperity is just around the corner. As the 1930s rolled on, however, such corners grew less and less visible.
Again, since then conservative Republicans have been working to weaken all such helpful programs, with the help of their faithful representatives in congress and the Supreme Court. They continued attacking all forms of helpful and useful government programs and regulations, even voting rights and public school reforms. Actually such actions weren't really new. As we’ll see within this series of books, for thousands of years conservatives have continued obstructing many democratic reforms, thus keeping progress for democratic equal rights and freedoms advancing at a snail’s pace, if at all.
With that kind of history in back of us we Deweyan liberals say with confidence: Such greedy and power-hungry conservatives have been, are now, and almost certainly will continue being a menace to the public good! It's as if they feel most people don't deserve the help, and that they’re some kind of sub-human animal! And so the liberal struggle to end all forms of feudalistic institutions continues to this day, especially economic, political, and educational ones. Many conservatives may admit it too; the very word itself means to preserve a feudalistic status quo!
Much more evidence for that conclusion will be presented throughout these books! As millions of people have recently seen, such struggles have continued on into the new millennium. In 2008-9 we’ve had yet another very serious worldwide economic meltdown, the direct result of yet more useful government economic de-regulation of the few huge banks now controlling much of the world's wealth and economy! In fact, that a recession continues producing seriously stressful results both in the US and much of Europe! Millions of people have lost their homes and jobs, and have found it very difficult to find new ones. Many have agreed to work for less pay while many corporations continue seeing record profits roll in and helping enrich officers and boards of directors. In one respect they may be compared to the medieval Church, dictating what millions of people should think and do.
In any case, our obscenely wealthy upper class and its monopolistic corporations continue taking as much of the public's money as they feel is safe. No doubt, conservatives too are practical people. To them it's obvious: The less money and more debt people have, the less power they have for empowering liberal politicians to help them! Simpler than that, political philosophy is difficult to get. And again, the more concentrated wealth becomes, the easier it gets for wealthy conservatives to keep increasing their own wealth-power by destroying as many helpful publicly owned systems as possible, even useful electrical, water, transportation, and even retirement systems like Social Security and Medicare too. It may not happen tomorrow, but they're certainly working on it; of that there should be no doubt to anyone! Rather than increase taxes on the already wealthy, conservative Republicans would rather cut the funding for such useful social programs. It's merely more evidence of conservatives actively working against the public good.
Of course when the next great depression or recession will happen is anyone’s guess; some are predicting 2016, less than 2 years away. In any case it's almost certain to happen again. Since the US was formed in 1789 our capitalist for-profit economic model has been a notoriously unstable system for everyone but the very wealthy! Even during depressions many wealthy folks lost only some of their money. In short, capitalism is great for creating great wealth for a few, but terrible at redistributing that wealth for the benefit of the many whose work helped create such wealth. In effect, then, for the wealthy capitalism has become yet another feudalistic system for maintaining and increasing power over others. Is it any wonder, then, they continue attacking all other economic models, especially liberal socialistic models aiming at increasing the public good, rather than merely concentrating more private wealth. Banks owned and operated by the public, socialized banks, are one more example of a more liberal economic banking model.
John Dewey and His New Liberal Philosophic Model
Said simply, then, these 5 books popularize Dewey’s liberal philosophy, sometimes called Experimentalismor Naturalistic Humanism; in them nature and human welfare are most important, rather than the welfare of a few or the quest for absolutely certain Truth or eternal life. If there is a life after death, shouldn't all kind and helpful people be entitled to it? He was a productive writer; his written work fills over 30 volumes, but like many professional philosophers, many of his books are difficult to read and understand. A professional vocabulary makes them so. However, in these 5 very readable books I've described many of his ideas with ordinary words most people already know, and also in Book 1 tried making them more enjoyable with some limericks. With his work, and of course the work of many new sciences like anthropology (the study of mankind) and archeology (the study of mankind's constructive work), a very different model of human nature and human evolution is now available; both physical and mental evolution. What's more, it's based on much new objective evidence than either conservative or moderate models. Our new more powerful learning art, testing ideas experimentally, demands objective evidence for all ideas, evidence easily examined by anyone. My challenge, then, was simply to make his new model more understandable and enjoyable for more people to learn about. Where is it written liberal philosophy, science, psychology, ethics, and education ideas can’t be fun and easily understood?
For much too long philosophy has been monopolized by university professors, made un-enjoyable to say the least, and downright difficult to say the most. Since Western universities began growing after 1,000 CE, philosophy's been monopolized by a small class of conservative scholars who were often more interested in debating religious questions among themselves rather than communicating their ideas to the general public. It's probably because conservative rulers and religious leaders didn’t teach most people to read, much less ask philosophic questions. For them, the less people knew, the better. To a degree Dewey is guilty too, but perhaps no better example of philosophic difficulty is that of German conservative George Hegel (d.1831).
One of Dewey's favorite subjects was education. Since cities began evolving in the 6,000s BCE, education has been a major conservative and moderate weapon for helping preserve feudalistic forms of power. However, by returning to the values and ideas of some ancient Greek liberals, Dewey represents a modern attempt to break all such monopolies; in fact, even our universities haven’t changed much since medieval times. Many keep an undemocratic feudalistic structure where all important decisions are made by a small board of trustees and chancellor, rather than including students and teachers. At a result, recent student debt has mushroomed into the trillions of dollars!
For most of his 92 years Dewey was a university professor who gradually went from a practicing Christian to America's greatest liberal humanist philosopher of the 1900s, and as far as I’m concerned, of all time. Being a liberal myself I may be just a little prejudiced, but to many others besides me he's at least the best, most insightful, and most productive liberal philosopher America has ever produced. His work is wide-ranging in subjects, often deeply insightful, and also accurate in its details. Again, however, it’s often difficult for average readers to understand; he too never really lost the academic vocabulary professors learn and use. Even as I began reading his work in my 20s, my goal soon became making his ideas easier and more enjoyable to read. It was like finding a gold mine of liberal ideas few people could understand. After reading these books it'll be much easier to read Dewey's own works.
How threatened were conservatives and moderates by Dewey's educational ideas? Here's one example. After his death in 1952 conservatives soon responded to his liberal educational ideas. After the Soviets launched their Sputnik satellite in 1957 people like Admiral Hyman Rickover helped persuade moderate Republican President Dwight Eisenhower to lead their educational attack. Looking for some liberal to blame for their own weak space program, Ike publicly told people Dewey’s ideas were mainly the reason the US had fallen behind the Russians. For people like Rickover students should be made to learn facts, facts, and more facts, so that we wouldn't be beaten in the race to dominate near-earth space for military purposes, and perhaps also send astronauts to the moon and back! The race was on to train as many engineers as possible.
However, Dewey’s interests were much greater than education, as mentioned above, and his other books began educating many political and economic activists in my generation to continue challenging all conservative models of those ideas. Since ancient times democracy has been an active political system. During the brutal and vicious Vietnam War, for example, many followers of Dewey continued challenging its legality and necessity with on-going protests and acts of civil disobedience, like blocking trains carrying weapons. Also, conservative for-profit economic models continued to be challenged with the help of Dewey's ideas. He was a democratic socialist; if enough people wanted, say, to experiment with a public bank, then they should be allowed to. As many have learned since the 1960s, money doesn't talk, it commands. As we’ve seen above, such active and peaceful challenges remain an important part of democracy to this day!
To me, the more people know about Dewey's, say, political democratic ideas, the easier it becomes to see how useful they remain for peacefully and intelligently neutralizing greedy conservative and moderate quests for more and more wealth, power, and feudalistic control over people. Dewey knew that goal is often best reached with the help of democratic voting habits. It's also an important tool for giving all law-abiding people their equal rights and opportunities to keep making life more enjoyable and productive for them, and not just for a few wealthy folks. Considering all the feudalistic economic, political, and educational institutions conservatives have created and maintained over the past 8,000 years, Dewey’s liberal models make many useful suggestions for turning all feudalistic systems into more democratic ones.
Dewey himself was a liberal political activist. In particular he helped create 2 very important liberal institutions helping to protect peoples’ constitutional rights and freedoms against all those who worked against them. Again, democracy is an active political form, and the more democratic institutions we have, the stronger democracy itself becomes. For example, when many Africans, Native Americans, and women were being terrorized and even murdered in the early 1900s merely for exercising their civil rights, he was asked to help form, with many others, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, (NAACP) in 1909. Many liberals wanted to create an institutional tool to help people of color intelligently fight back against their conservative terrorizing, bigoted, and narrow-minded racist oppressors, many of whom claimed to be god-fearing Protestant Christians. After all, what right does anyone have to terrorize any law-abiding person, and deny them their equal rights? With such actions he was practicing one of liberalism’s core values, namely fighting back against intolerance for all minority peoples. The less that happens, the stronger intolerance grows.
Then, a few years later, he had the opportunity to improve another US political weakness. Democratic President Woodrow Wilson’s government (1913-1921) started denying World War 1 (1914-1919) protestors their First Amendment Constitutional rights of free speech! Some people were even jailed just for speaking against the brutal and senseless slaughter of millions in that war! Again, from the very beginnings of Western civilization war has been profitable for a small group of rulers; to the victors went the enemies treasures and more slaves. Already one of the world's oldest cities, Jericho, had massive walls to protect it. So, in 1920 Dewey and others helped form another one of America’s most liberal institutions: the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). To this day it continues fighting to protect all peoples' free speech rights.
Perhaps its most famous work was helping defend the right of a Tennessee high school biology teacher to teach evolution in public school -- the famous Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925. And of course since then the ACLU has been helping protect all Americans’ constitutional rights of free speech, even, believe it or not, American Nazis! Peaceful free speech is another one of liberal democracy’s core ideals. As we'll see a little later, soon after the nation was founded, in the 1790s conservatives starting restricting that 1st Amendment freedom with their Alien and Sedition Laws! It was yet another early battle in US political history won by conservatives who, by the way, continue railing against the ACLU and its work to this day! Apparently only conservatives should have the power to say what others talk and think about, even if they openly lie about their own actions. As we’ll see in Book 4’s Modern Models of Excellence, some high-ranking governmental conservatives in the 1980s thought it perfectly okay to openly lie to congress about many things, Vice-President George H. W. Bush among them!
No doubt, defending the freedom of speech and peaceful protest for everyone can sometimes be a very challenging job; sometimes people don't want to hear any opposing ideas. For example, although Dewey himself would strongly disagree with Nazi models of excellence, the ACLU defended them and their right to demonstrate peacefully. Our basic democratic freedom of speech should give everyone a right to peacefully assemble, talk about their ideas, and protest as long as they respect just laws. Strange as it may seem, it’s a right not always respected even on some college campuses today! To us Deweyan liberals it's a Nazi model of intolerance, and should be challenged wherever it's practiced.
Eventually, then, in the 1920s Dewey began describing his liberal philosophic models of excellence with words like Experimentalism, Naturalistic Humanism, and Empirical Naturalism. I myself like the word Experimentalism best; it neatly sums up what all ideas should be seen as, namely something to be tested, experimented with, and verified! After all, for centuries before Dewey experimental science had been producing our most reliable and liberating knowledge of natural rhythmic movements. For example, the more we know how atoms move and relate to other atoms and molecules, the easier it becomes to build more helpful health-promoting tools, medicines, and habits.
Again, for Dewey knowing how nature really works the best and most important knowledge to know, rather than any kind of eternal and unchanging objects, as conservatives and moderates like to keep telling us. If such ideas can't be verified, and they haven't, then why believe in them? For Dewey, in our ever-changing nature, the experimental testing of ideas and their results become not only our most important objects to know, but in fact is our ONLY way of knowing anything! As we'll see later, both Plato and Aristotle too sensed that fact of learning. That’s yet another reason experimental testing is our only learning art!
Is that idea true? Well, think about it for just a moment. How can knowing anything be any different in an always moving and changing world? That simple fact of nature makes all ideas merely experimental! Who knows how an idea will work until it's tested? In any case however, since 1600 experimental science has been producing our best and most useful kinds of knowledge. More new useful inventions have been built since then than in the entire history of our earth, now over 4 Billion years old!
Such an experimental learning art has helped create our new modern scientific age. In the process, however, it’s new results and knowledge have begun challenging both moderate and conservative models of life and nature as never before. Their prime goal was to learn absolutely certain kinds of truth, like mathematical facts, merely by reasoning about them. However, since 1600 and the growth of experimental learning, that goal of learning became merely a pre-scientific model, and certainly not the best one. No doubt, many religious conservatives and moderates around the world still assume spirit-objects and Forms exist, but more recently, for less religious conservatives money has become the main tool of social control, not religious ideas. In short, social forms of control have changed from being based on religious assumptions to getting and keeping great amounts of wealth for a small upper class.
It should also be mentioned, for Dewey such an active experimental learning art has also produced some very different ethical and educational models too; in short, more democratic and individualistic models of trial-and-success experimentation. For example, Dewey’s ethical model of excellence wasn’t pacifistic, obedient, and blindly accepting of whatever they were told; far from it. In fact, it gave a much greater value to a person's individual pleasure than conservative and moderate models usually did.
Dewey saw how, for thousands of years, conservatives and moderates' main social goal was making people obedient and submissive to their ideas and actions. The ruler said we go to war, and people became soldiers. All those conservative and moderate ethical models too are now rapidly changing; millions of people today are no longer willing to meekly obey others for religious, economic, or patriotic reasons. More people today want better reasons for doing what they’re asked to do. No doubt, Dewey’s modern liberal models of equal political rights and a pleasure-based psychology are helping grow and encourage such new ethical and educational feelings. For example, why should students be conditioned for 12 years to merely passively accept what their teachers tell them to learn, especially when many students have different educational needs and desires?
What's more, his liberal ethical model doesn’t rule out violence completely, but it doesn’t celebrate it either! On the contrary, it celebrates peace and equal rights which sometimes need violent actions to stop those who practice violence. In short, for Dewey self-defense is another legitimate ethical use of violence. Mainly, however, calm reasoning and sometimes compromise are much more civilized and intelligent ways to settle differences.
Has there really been such a long history of conservative feudalistic systems based on spirit-ideas, and now based more on concentrated forms of wealth-power? Dewey saw how history gives thousands of examples of that idea, beginning with the first cities in Palestine and Iraq. What's more, such actions continue to this day! Such monarchic-religious institutions were in place at the birth of Western civilization itself, run by a small unelected governing class and supported with many spirit-ideas and rituals. And in fact most corporations, governments, and military orgs. even today remain feudalistic in structure. For over a century the US Senate was basically a feudalistic rich man’s club, much like the English House of Lords, as well as monarchies and hereditary aristocracies like that in Europe and Russia. But for Dewey, this is perhaps the most important point of all: When enough people demand those situations become more democratic, as they did in the early 1900s, then they will change.
After World War 1 ended in 1918, Dewey focused on writing his most mature liberal books about nature and human life. The 1920s were called roaring for good reason. Across the country 'underground' nightclubs serving illegal alcohol to millions of people helped create powerful criminal gangs; rival gang members were often murdered, police and judges were often bribed with illegal millions, and even many banks created a stock market frenzy, or bubble, with conservative Republican President Herbert Hoover's blessing. Everyone seemed to be getting richer, that is until the market bubble burst in 1929, taking much wealth and paper wealth with it. As thousands of banks were bankrupt millions of people lost their savings.
In New York, however, Dewey focused on publishing three important books helping philosophers and philosophy students see his new liberal models of excellence. In the order they were published they are Human Nature and Conduct (1921), Experience and Nature (1925), and The Quest for Certainty (1929). What I've done here is simply use many of their ideas to more easily describe why both the conservative and moderate models of Plato and Aristotle were no longer acceptable. The times they were a’changing. Where once lived unchallenged conservative and moderate Christian models of excellence, with Dewey's help they now had some liberal competition. Moreover, today we can see many examples of that transformation. In fact, spirit-ideas are no longer as popular as they once were, and the same may be said for Aristotle's moderate assumptions of eternally constant Forms. More people have accepted the fact we live in a constantly moveing and changing nature. In any case, however, many of the ideas in those 3 books have been used in these 5 books, along with many more of Dewey's ideas for many other books. They helped me continue challenging all forms of conservative and moderate feudalistic models of excellence.
These Five Books
These books, then, will describe many of Dewey's ideas and also trace some of the social battles between liberals, moderates, and conservatives over the past few thousand years. In fact, such liberal democratic forms of excellence began evolving in Greece in the early 500s BCE; Thales lived around 585 BCE and is the traditional father of philosophy. Dewey also notes he could be seen as the father of modern science too. Then, in the next century, the ancient liberal democratic tradition reached a very high level of thinking with the work of the Atomist Democritus. Again, together with Plato and Aristotle they built Western philosophy's 3 main traditions, defining many of its classical ideas and goals. Thus, knowing a little something about each one makes it easier for more people to not only understand them, but also to more intelligently choose which one to support. After all, in many ways the days are ending when conservative religious and political ideas and habits help keep people obedient to them. There are many other options now available. Centuries of religious terrorism and warfare are almost completely gone, and those that remain can be more easily controlled. As we'll see, from civilization's beginnings in the 6,000s BCE, war has been a profitable gamble for the winners, and a way into poverty and slavery for the losers, encouraged with both conservative religious and political ideas. Book 1 will briefly describe some of these events, while Books 2-4 describe many of them in more detail.
For example, Book 1 will describe how some democratic Greek rulers helped that liberal political form of excellence nature in the 400s BCE; Pericles was one of them. Alas, it wasn't to last. In the 300s BCE they were largely defeated by Alexander's more powerful military forces; they didn't die out completely however. Democratic habits were kept alive within the Catholic hierarchy. At Church councils Bishops democratically voted from time to time to build their models of Christian theology! Apparently democratic habits could be used to build models of theology, but not democratic freedom and an end to both psychic and physical slavery! No doubt, liberal political, economic, and educational models were all kept weak during the Middle Ages, but they began growing again after 1600.
After that, our new modern era dawned based on a more powerful experimental learning art; with its help many new sciences began growing and continue growing to this day. Thus, our modern scientific models of life and nature began offering people a choice between them and the many conservative religious and moderate models of life and nature still practiced. Book 1 simply and briefly describes more of these liberal political, economic, social, and educational choices now available. An entire section is devoted to Dewey's more liberal educational ideas. Why, he asks, should people allow their own public schools to continue telling students learning more and more book facts is the best educational option, and thus leaving students largely undereducated and unprepared for getting decent jobs after high school. After all, some 70% of students don't go on to college, so shouldn't our public schools be helping prepare them for honest kinds of work after graduation, and also learning useful character habits for living intelligently in our new modern democratic world based on equal rights and opportunities? Without such training we'll continue seeing young folks needlessly killed on our streets mainly because their economic choices are very limited. Also, the on-going battle between conservatives and liberals over, say, equal marriage rights for same-sex couples is another result of weak character training. Liberalism, by the way, evolved from a Latin word meaning free and openly generous.
Book 1, then, briefly describes the basic ideas and values of all 3 Western philosophic traditions, especially Dewey's new liberal one. For most of Western history much religious, political, educational, and social power has been controlled by conservatives and a small more or less permanent class of rulers and land owners. Until quite recently conservative domination has also been aided and assisted by a small conservative religious class as well. Such feudalistic institutions often rested on many of Plato's and Aristotle's ideas. For Plato both religious and political power should be confined and concentrated in a small class of rulers trained and educated over many decades to keep themselves isolated from the outside world and its changes, and thus keep conservative models of excellence alive. Death for unrepentant religious heretics was simply another useful social tool to Plato, and was eventually embraced by Roman Catholicism’s main ancient philosopher, Augustine of Hippo. In fact, until just a few centuries ago such small concentrated conservative forms of political, religious, economic, and educational power remained dominated by that Church, as well as monarchial forms of inherited and undemocratic feudalistic power. If nothing else, history teaches us those in power hate and loathe any kind of competition. Book 1 will sketch their and also Dewey's models of human psychology, ethics, religion, and education.
Then, Books 2-5 will describe in more detail Dewey’s new liberal models of life and nature. Book 2 begins by briefly describing the new scientific model of nature, and then moves on to describe some of the excellent habits our native ancestors created. In that long period of development grew 3 distinctly human habit-arts: experimental building, talking habits, and also spirit-ideas now known to be perhaps 60,000 years old. All 3 of those native forms of excellence have continued on into our ancient, medieval, and modern periods.
Book 3, then focuses on describing our ancient period of western thought. No doubt, the most important philosophic event of that era was the evolution of our 3 main models of life and nature: liberal, conservative, and moderate. To say the least, creating a liberal model of life and nature was a crucial turning point in Western civilization. Without it our modern scientific world might never have evolved.
That new liberal philosophic model was born in the early 500s BCE in what is now western Turkey. Then, as liberal humanist and democratic ideas and habits continued growing, Athenian conservatives like Socrates and Plato soon reacted, as did more moderate aristocratic Greeks like Aristotle. Greek culture celebrated competition in many forms, and even in philosophic thinking and debating too. For Socrates the uncriticized life is not worth living. Plato’s work too gives many examples of how Socrates carried on such criticism with abstract ideas, aiming above all to defeat the liberal Sophists and Atomists who felt such ideas were best ignored. For such liberals why merely assume abstract words like Goodness and Beauty were anything but words? In fact, there was no objective evidence they were anything but words!
Then, after Socrates his devoted follower Plato continued experimenting with such words, and defining them as spirit-objects existing in a completely different realm. That kind of thinking was something our native ancestors didn't too; with simple speaking habits they felt spirits were in fact physical things. In short, they simply didn't have much power for abstract thinking. Book 3 will also describe a major turning point in Plato's life. Such spirit-ideas came to be criticized, probably by some of his own students. In fact, such ideas could produce some very serious philosophic problems which seemed unanswerable even to Plato. In fact, after him, his student Aristotle experimentally returned to a Socratic assumption and put such eternal and unchanging objects back into our natural realm. Needless to say, there were many problems with both of those assumptions, and we’ll see some of them described in Book 3's Ancient Models of Excellence.
Book 4’s Modern Models of Excellence will then briefly sketch some of the models of life and nature built after our ancient period, and especially the last 4 centuries. In particular we’ll see a little something of modern science’s evolution after 1,000 CE, and some of the conservative and moderate reactions to its continued growth. For example, in the early 1400s many wealthy Italians began sending people around Europe looking for more ancient manuscripts; they wanted more information about ancient writers and thinkers. Eventually one such person found a few very rare copies of an ancient Atomist poem On Nature by a poet named Lucretius, written a few decades before Jesus was born. At first it was redd mainly for its poetry, but eventually some serious thinkers began seeing how it could be used to build a new liberal foundation for the many experimentally scientific results being discovered after 1600. That poem and many of Democritus's ideas would thus help build the foundation for liberal Atomism’s model of life and nature. Somehow a few copies managed to escape the liberal book burnings some Roman Emperors called for who wanted to become gods themselves! There was simply no room for spirit-gods in Lucretius’s poem.
Also described is the very important Industrial Revolution, the rise of a small obscenely wealthy upper class, and some liberal reactions to the new economic feudalism based on wealth rather than religious ideas. Many of the conservative newly rich weren’t afraid to use their wealth for building the kind of economic, political, educational, and judicial systems allowing them to keep more or less monopolistic control for themselves. Opposition philosophers like Karl Marx (d. 1883) and the English democratic socialist Fabian Society became 2 liberal alternatives to that feudal capitalist economic model. Dewey identified with the Fabians.
Then, Book 5’s Models of Educational Excellence sketch some historical educational highlights, and of course Dewey’s liberal ideas too. Not only our universities, but our public elementary and high schools still demand students learn many of the subjects taught in the Middle Ages; the big difference has been the elimination of religious studies and the addition of scientific ones. In short, they continued teaching students mainly academic book facts, while formally eliminating the very useful subjects of character habits like obeying just laws, helping those less fortunate, and learning practical and useful job skills.
In short, based on the social results they helped create, Dewey felt our public schools should be criticized; how else were they to be improved unless they were? One criticism said such conservative schools help increase many serious social problems, like juvenile and adult crime, even at the highest levels of government and banking, youth and adult unemployment, increased school dropouts, millions of public monies diverted to build prisons rather than better schools, illegal drug use, racial and sexual discrimination, and even tragic killings of young folks around the country. For us Deweyan liberals such results can all be improved with the help of more student-centered, democratic public schools where respect is given to the 3 stages of child development Dewey talked about and experimented with at his Lab School at the University of Chicago. It too still exists by the way. In short, his constructive educational model was student-centered, rather than academic trivia and teacher centered!
These 5 books, then, are simply aimed at sketching some of the historical battles between the ideas of our 3 main philosophic traditions. We’ll also see how such competition between them still exists today, not merely on a philosophic level but actively on a social level as well. Mean and unfair racial and sexual discrimination exist to this day. For example, over many decades during the Middle Ages and early modern periods, conservative Christians openly and publicly murdered tens of thousands of people it judged were witches and heretics, including women and children! Can you imagine how terrifying such sights were for people who watched them? They were in fact powerful social tools of obedience to the conservative status quo! By simply not accepting a conservative model of eternal and unchanging Spirit-Truth, and obeying their ethical ideas, people were judged to be dangerous to the public good.
More recently, too, a majority in a number of US states have voted to deny same-sex couples their equal marriage rights, again trying to terrorize them with feelings of inferiority. For us Deweyan liberals the more people know about such events and the models of life and nature they come from, the better able they’ll be to make a more intelligent choice about the philosophic model they feel is best. As we’ll see, down through history those 3 core assumptions about nature have been used to justify many different kinds of actions and feelings about life.
The 5 books in this series, then, are designed to easily help people build 2 new habit-arts. One is learning more about liberal, moderate, and conservative models of life and nature, and the assumptions they ask their followers merely to accept on faith, without any objective evidence at all. Without such knowledge people remain intellectually weak, mentally undeveloped, and less than fully human. For thousands of years merely accepting such assumptions has been used to keep people obedient to those with more social power, and thus maintain a feudalistic status quo. Especially for religious conservatives, obedience is an important sign of excellence.
The other useful habit-art is learning how to intelligently liberate themselves from any kind of weak, excessive, and unhealthful habit. Those kinds of self improvement habit-arts are another result of Dewey's Behavioral model of psychology. Those habit-arts, then, will help make people more independent and democratic in their thoughts and actions, and thus become freer and better able to take a more intelligent control of their own lives and their all-important economic, educational, military, and political institutions. Again, organized democratic voting power to produce such results is one important key. Peaceful protests and demonstrations are useful, but not as useful as voting power; politicians want to keep their cushy jobs as long as they can. And what's more, with the help of our new electronic communications network, the internet, it's become infinitely easier to keep informed about what our elected representatives are doing, and to also let them know how we feel about their actions. In short, voting and communication power are 2 very important weapons against all forms of conservative and moderate feudalistic status quo actions!
Intelligent Choosing
A few words about making intelligent choices will end this Introduction. Which model of excellence feels best to you, and why – liberal, moderate, or conservative? That's the main choice these books are offering. Our 3 different main models of philosophic excellence continue offering people a choice, and so knowing some facts about each tradition makes one's choice more intelligent. Many people often make a less intellligent choice, and choose the model their parents practiced. These books are offering the possibility of a more intelligent choice.
For example, was Plato right? Do spirit-objects really exist in their own realm beyond material nature, and somehow guide movements in our physical realm? Does knowing their meanings provide the best knowledge? Should we believe in a spirit-god, and if so, what’s its nature? Is it all-powerful, all-knowing, all merciful and good, or is it completely aloof to what’s going on here and now, as both Democritus and Aristotle said? Also, how do we know any spirit-idea is best? Should we choose a conservative spiriti-matter model of nature even though there's no objective evidence spirit-objects exist? If so, then how can we actually know anything about such objects if they’re totally non-physical? And perhaps most importantly, if there isn’t any evidence they exist, then why choose to believe they do? Why not simply choose to treat every law-abiding person with respect and dignity, and honor their claim to equal rights, even though they aren't conservatives like us?
Or should we choose Aristotle's moderate model of life and nature? For many centuries, Catholic theologians like Thomas Aquinas (d. 1275) felt Aristotle's aristocratic models of excellence reflected many of god’s absolute Truth. With Thomas's help Aristotle became The Philosopher for many centuries. Should we really choose to believe he deserves that title, and if not, why not? Like Aristotle's teacher Plato he too assumed nature has some permanent and unchanging objects within it, and knowing only them could produce absolutely certain scientific knowledge, as well as the highest human happiness – contemplative reasoning! Should we choose to merely accept such assumptions?
Aristotle called such objects Forms. A few human Forms within everyone help make people what they are, everything from slaves to aristocrats. Thus, peoples' characters are determined before they're even born. Should we choose to accept that idea or not? Also, forhim science became the art of knowing absolutely eternal Forms; natural evolution is wrong and a rose is forever a rose! What’s more, groups of plants, stars, planets, non-human animals, and people too all have their own eternal Forms of excellence within them, making them what they are and always will be. In short, Forms keep nature eternally the same, so just accept the status quo and get on with your life. Even today many Catholics are still basically Aristotelians, as are many followers of the noted atheist, capitalist free-market guru Ayn Rand. With Aristotle as a model she chose selfishness as a form of ethical excellence. Should we choose to accept thosemodels of excellence?
Or should we choose a more liberal democratic model of life and nature? Would choosing a more liberal model like Democritus', Protagoras', and Dewey's feel better? Should nature be seen as merely a huge mass of rhythmically changing energetic material? Should we choose to assume such a nature is both stable and dangerous, as Dewey suggested, experimental learning is our only learning art, and the best knowledge helps us keep building more life-improving tools, medicines, and healthful habits for everyone? Answers to such questions help make all our philosophic choices that much more intelligent and informed.
Before making such important choices shouldn't we also know what our strongest learning model is? Is it merely logical reasoning as Plato said, sense experience and reasoning as Aristotle said, or is it actually testing our ideas experimentally to see their actual results? Can anyone really become a fully conscious and intelligent person without first answering such questions? Is experimental testing our only learning art, or or are our instinctive feelings and faith assumptions more trustworthy? Can we really become a truly intelligent individual without knowing more about our own human history and development before making such important choices?
Such questions may seem difficult at first; what important question doesn't? But are they? If we take one small step at a time such questions become easier to answer. To me not taking some time to learn more about such questions and choices is perhaps the main obstacle to becoming more intelligent and fully human.
If redd carefully Book 1 in this series, which is offered at this site, will help make anyone’s choices more informed, intelligent, and easier. Also helpful is the recent growth of a wonderful new electronic source of information, the Internet; with its help it’s easier than ever to keep learning about our new models of life and nature. For example, even today it’s easy to find examples of conservatives around the world using spirit-ideas to justify more harmful and brutal actions, like maintaining class-dominated, feudalistic, undemocratic religious and educational systems, run by a small elite of either wealthy or religious leaders. Is their goal of making everyone believe what they believe the best goal in life? Such conservatives often tell people only they know the absolute Truth about spirits and so they must obey their rituals or else suffer eternal pain and torment when they die! Or, are such ideas merely more examples of conservative propaganda, and what’s now called negative conditioning. And if so, then what other more liberal philosophic choices are available?
If you’re starting to feel how important merely a few core philosophic ideas and assumptions are, that’s good. Your painless philosophic growth has already started, so why not keep it growing? Take ethical ideas for example. Knowing how growing more intelligent habits of acting and also how to weaken excessive and harmful habits are 2 important ethical challenges. After all, knowing how to keep increasing one’s healthful pleasure is a major ethical challenge. After all, everyone has their own set of ethical habits, and so talking about them makes ethical philosophy that much easier to understand and practice!
Many undemocratic conservatives, however, often act as if such ethical ideas of personal pleasure are always and forever wrong and so shouldn’t be chosen. They continue believing in, say, unequal sexual rights and values. Also, with such liberal ethical ideas it also becomes easier to choose a liberal education model as well, and see it as one of the most important institutions for building a stronger democracy for everyone! Without such democratic public schools, where students are allowed to choose that they want to learn, and then shown how to act intelligently after making their choice, more feudalistic schools make it easier to keep feudalistic institutions in place. Is that the educational choice you want to make? After all, many conservatives are still regularly encouraged to build habits believing such liberal ethical and educational models are not only wrong, but dangerous! Are they making the right choice? For example, many still believe marriage should be only between a man and a woman, whereas we liberals say if 2 people love each other then why shouldn't they too have a right to marry each other? Who’s right; what’s your choice and why is it your best choice?
Have you made an intelligent choice yet about educational models, or have you merely accepted the present system without knowing any of its harmful results or alternatives? Are you being made to pay more in taxes than necessary to correct the socially and personally dangerous habits our public schools should be correcting? Most people have merely accepted the present book-obsessed educational system, mainly because they don't know about educational alternatives or the weak social results they're helping produce. How intelligent is that?
Again, learning about alternativephilosophic assumptions and models is not difficult; only a few different assumption are really important. For example, we Deweyan liberals assume it's better for students to learn practical kinds of knowledge, skills, and character habits useful in our democratic society, rather than more and more trivial academic facts. Our liberal educational model simply helps make life more peaceful and democratic. Why shouldn’t any student learn what they want to learn? Why should our schools help take away anyone's learning freedom? After all, the more a student is emotionally committed to learning something, the more they want to learn something, the easier it is to teach them other useful skills and character habits too. It'll be easier to learn, say, democratic habits like equal rights and respect for all our just laws as well as law-abiding people! Luckily, we live in a time when it’s much easier to make such ethical and educational choices, but in any case, it may be best to build such schools one grade at a time, rather than changing the system all at once! There may be some wisdom in the saying, slow and steady wins the race. That freedom too is another blessing of living in a more liberal and science-dominated democratic world; people now have more power and knowledge to keep learning more about both life and nature, and make more intelligent choices for themselves.
These kinds of philosophic questions and choices are all based on just a few simple ideas and assumptions; they’re not complicated and abstract rocket science. Daily, liberals, moderates, and conservatives keep talking and testing many of these core ideas. True, philosophic differences don't always produce peaceful and productive results, as the often grusome history of African civil rights teaches us, but peaceful non-violent give-and-take between our 3 main philosophic traditions is probably stronger now than it ever was.
Largely because of that, young folks are now freer than ever before to make more intelligent choices about both how our institutions should be run, and how to best live one's life. For us Deweyan liberals those new freedoms are something to be nurtured and cherished with active practice. Again, with the growth of electronic teaching tools like the Internet, as well as books like these, more people than ever before can become more educated and empowered to make more intelligent philosophic choices in their lives! Such choices help define people everywhere.
That's the good news. The bad news is such teaching tools are so new many people haven’t yet learned how to help make themselves more intelligent. Many have, but most haven't. Also, more readable books like these are still a rarity, and so most people continue practicing the same habit-values they learned in childhood, with really seeing their weak, excessive, and unhealthful results. They’re what might be called undereducated people. However, that alone shouldn't stop people experimenting with new ideas if their results are positive and solve problems more easily.
Young folks remain more challenged than ever; often their parents don't know about our 3 main philosophic traditions, and so don't know much about making intelligent choices themselves. Also, conservative book-obsessed public schools, homes, and churches aren't much help either; many such people already feel they know nature's absolute truth. Still, it doesn't mean more intelligent choices can't be made. They can if people will simply help educated others as much as possible. For example, is the economic choice of helping build a local public bank a good choice, or building a more liberal public school in the area? People power can be quite useful for such experiments. A few dedicated people can start actively teaching others about their ideas, and ask for their help. The 1st step is to choose the model you want to test, like teaching children more useful skills and character habits in more liberal schools.
No doubt, in some places there may be large obstacles to overcome. Personally I wouldn't want to try building a liberal public school in many parts of the Arab world, but there are still many other places to experiment with safely. Educating local people about more liberal models of, say, education or ethics or psychology would probably be much easier in other places, easier but not obstacle free. Even in so-called advanced countries education at the high school and college level remains largely feudalistic and controlled from the top down. And even so, educating others about more liberal models of life and nature is challenging often because books like these aren't available. I know that was my experience in college.
When, for example, did any public school or even college student hear anything about socialist Fabian economic ideas, or John Dewey's educational ideas, or about liberal ethical, psychological, and political models of excellence? When did students hear anything in class about equal rights, socialist economics aimed at increasing the public good, fairly taxing the already obscenely wealthy, spirit assumptions, or even about actively protesting some unjust and dangerous situation in the real world? Thousands of atomic weapons in the US alone continue threatening millions of lives. Recently, I heard about a rather scary situation. A public school teacher was fired for merely encouraging her students to write letters to an imprisoned person! It's another example to how a conversative educational bureaucracy often won't tolerate any kind of real-world contact between it and students. How disconnected and monastery-like are your own neighborhood public schools and colleges? In them such liberal ideas are still regularly ignored, and thus helps make intelligent educational choices that much more difficult. If you're interested in reading more about liberal educational models of excellence please go to www.liberaleducation.weebly.com.
Perhaps newness is the greatest obstacle we Deweyan liberals face. After all, in many ways his liberal models of life and nature are still in their early stages of popular growth. Not even 100 years have passed since Dewey died and our modern era is only about 4 centuries old. Thus, liberal popular writers like myself simply accept such challenges and work to overcome them. Our main goal is to continue democratizing all our institutions so more people are included in all decision-making processes. The more feudalistic our institutions remain, the more unstable and dangerous our world remains. Again, imagine how dangerous life became for millions of Iraqis in 2,002 when merely a few hundred US politicians woted to bring death and destruction to their nation, even though almost all of them probably had no part in the 9-11 attacks in the US! Did conservatives make the right choice? Was the best choice to send more troops and weapons of destruction to kill and disable many thousands of innocent people?
If redd, then, these books will more easily help expand one's knowledge about life and nature, and thus liberate it from less intelligent ways of thinking. They can help free one's self from merely a blind obedience to any model of life and nature, while at the same time teach the main ideas and assumptions of our 3 main traditions. As psychology's new Behavioral models keep telling us, all models of excellence are ultimately personal habits conditioned by the world around them; they’re not absolute Truth, they’re just learned habits.
No doubt, some are much stronger than others, like, for example, a person’s eating habits, but even they can be improved with some enjoyably intelligent practice! In fact, each generation has the power to remake life for the better. Largely because such liberal assumptions, ideas, and habits continue threatening conservative and moderate social, economic, educational, religious, and political forms of feudalistic power, a philosophic battle continues on in many countries even today, including the US too. So, the more we continue ignoring the weak, excessive, and unhealthful results they produce, the more they'll keep producing such results. To us Deweyan liberals today, such habits are a kind of psychic weakness to be improved, rather than encouraged! What’re your choices going to be?