Dwayne,
[and towards the end, also a question for Ian and Wojtek]
looking for ways to clarify my recent posts (including Sean Gonsalves' recounting of Freud, Einstein and Zinn's thoughts on the history of [interaction within] the species), I followed a hunch to revisit some writings of John Dewey, which I will start documenting here, and perhaps try to sum up in terms of how I understand them and how they relate to my previous posts regarding scientists, atomism/ individualism, etc.
First the quote:
To say that all past historic social progress has been the
result of co-operation and not of conflict would be ... an
exaggeration. But exaggeration against exaggeration, it is
the more reasonable of the two. And it is no exaggeration
to say that the measure of civilisation is the degree in
which the method of co-operative intelligence replaces the
method of brute conflict.
Most who consider themselves leftists will probably neither disagree not find anything particularly novel in the above. The term I wish to highlight and build upon is his idea of "co-operative intelligence", to which end I will offer other thoughts from Dewey on the limitations of the liberal notion (or subscription to the idea) of intelligence (and its use) as an individual attribute and activity.
Ian, Woj, and others who may wish to respond:
The quote above is preceded by a criticism of the use of 'class' as the defining concept for describing turn of the 20th century existence. Dewey writes:
In spite of the existence of class conflicts, amounting at
times to veiled civil war, any one habituated to the use
of the method of science will view with considerable
suspicion the erection of actual human beings into fixed
entities called classes, having no overlapping interests
and so internally unified and externally separated that
they are made the protagonists of history -- itself
hypothetical. Such an idea of classes is a survival of
a rigid logic that once prevailed in the sciences of
nature, but that no longer has any place there. This
conversion of abstractions into entities [*] smells more
of a dialectic of concepts than of a realistic examination
of facts, even though it makes more of an emotional appeal
to many than do the results of the latter.
Thoughts?
--ravi