ravi
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.
^^^^^
CB: How about if we define social progress as increased cooperation and decreased conflict ? So, Dewey's statement is tautologically true for me. I'd even say our species originates in a leap in sociality or social intelligence or communism. Also, we should define intelligence as that which enhances social cooperation. "Co-operative intelligence" should be a redundancy. Genius in physics that enhances weaponry is not intelligent or we shouldn't consider it intelligent.
I agree with Miles' comment on hunting and gathering societies doing less violence than the Iraq war ( probably all hunting gathering societies put together did less violence than the Iraq war alone). That agreement with Miles may seem inconsistent with the above. But to the extent that class divided society has involved increased violence, we have not been making progress for 12,000 years, but regressing.