Sacco, Vanzetti and Dewey

Reading Dewey's Characters and Events (his so-called "popular" essays, for journals like The New Republic) continues to fascinate me.  One sees in them a wit that is not evident in his philosophical works.  His understated response to Bertrand Russell's rather simple-minded comments about pragmatism being a natural result of American commercialism is devastating, I think.  Also, and far more interesting, is that one sees how a professional philosopher considered the events which crowded Dewey's long life.  He witnessed a great deal of history.

Being a lawyer, I particularly enjoyed reading an article he wrote commenting on the report of the Lowell committee concerning the trial of Sacco and Vanzetti.  As most know, these Italian immigrants had been convicted of murder in the course of an armed robbery.  They were proud radicals and acknowledged this, and were prosecuted during one of the "Red scares" which popped up now and then in those times (the 1920s) and later in the history of this Glorious Republic.  The trial and subsequent appeals were matters of some controversy at the time and many of the famous players of that world weighed in on one side or the other.  Whether they were guilty is apparently still a matter of controversy among historians, or so I glean from a quick Web search.  Governor Dukakis more or less apologized for their execution by the State of Massachusetts some time before his ill-fated campaign for the presidency.  I recall watching a movie about the matter in the days of my increasingly distant youth, when I lived in the Boston area.

Appeals having been exhausted, they were scheduled for execution when Dukakis' predecessor as governor sought to assuage public outrage by appointing a committee made up of the renowned President of Harvard, Lowell, the President of MIT and, rather curiously, a probate judge, ostensibly to report to him on their views of the propriety of the execution.  The committee did an investigation and submitted a report, which can be read on the Internet by those interested.

Dewey addressed the report in one of his articles of the time, and seemingly tears it to pieces, very thoroughly and systematically.  Starting from the premise that the committee's function must be considered extra-judicial, as judicial review had been exhausted and a governor has no judicial authority in our legal system, he demonstrates remorselessly that when so considered the committee was a failure, and its report not only inadequate but even gratuitous.

Having read the report, I have some sympathy for the committee members, because if the report is accurate regarding the issues they were intended to address, those issues seem to be legal ones, or such as to give the impression they were to be addressed from a legal perspective.  Surprisingly, one of the questions they were to answer for the governor was whether they believed that Sacco and Vanzetti were guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.  I'm not sure how anyone could make such a determination without being a member of the jury and witness to the trial itself, but the committee after reviewing the trial transcript and interviewing various and sundry concluded that they were.

The committee's report does, in fact, read as though its members felt they were engaged in a kind of judicial review, as it's conclusions seem based overwhelming on a determination whether there was adequate evidence to overturn the jury's verdict, or hold a new trial, something the appellate courts had already ruled on.  In the law, appellate courts accord a great deal of deference to a jury's verdict.  The testimony of new witnesses and new evidence brought up after the trial is dismissed as being "cumulative", i.e. similar to exculpatory evidence which was admitted at trial.  The presiding judge was apparently one of those judges lawyers dread, a loudmouth who made his contempt for the defendants and his conviction of their guilt well known, though he apparently did so for the most part out of the courtroom.  The committee acknowledges his conduct was contrary to judicial decorum, but decided the fact he had himself judged guilt did not come across in the trial proceedings.  The committee acknowledges that the prosecutor made much of the defendants radical background and that this could have worked to prejudice the jury, but evidently thought the defendants had "opened the door" to such questioning by their own statements.  The members of the committee seemed reassured by the very unsurprising fact the jurors they interviewed felt they had made the appropriate decision.

So, if the governor was looking for something that would have advised him regarding the propriety of the executions that was not, in effect, a legal analysis of the prior proceedings, he did not get it from the committee.

The committee itself has been attacked as being made up of three Boston Brahmans would could be expected to be in favor of execution merely due to the fact that a couple of Italian immigrant anarchists were involved.  That may have been the case, and the defendants may well have been unjustly convicted.

For purposes of this blog post, though, I find two things interesting.  The first is that when clemency is being considered, it would certainly seem appropriate to consider whether there had been a fair trial, but that need not be the only consideration, and as that is ultimately a legal issue it is questionable to what extent that can be determined after appeals have been exhausted.  It is in any case unlikely that when a matter has been considered through the Supreme Court, a committee made up of two academics and a probate judge will find that the reviewing courts made errors of law.

The second is that there was a time when professional philosophers contributed to "popular" journals regarding significant social and political issues, and did so I think intelligently.  I don't do all the reading I should, but I don't think this takes place today in any significant sense, at least in this country.  I wonder why it does not, and wish it did.  Perhaps philosophers are commenting on political and social issues somewhere in cyberspace, though.  If so, I wish they had more of an audience.

Lesser Expectations

Lately I've been wondering, albeit as a mere dilettante, about the path of philosophy.  We hear much of the distinction between Continental and Analytic philosophy, or Continental and Anglo-American philosophy, and whether they may coexist, or whether one or the other strain is dead or dying, or will become or is predominant.

I will say upfront that to the extent I know philosophy-or at least read it-what I know (or read) would be considered Anglo-American.  My reading has been in the Analytic and Pragmatic traditions for the most part.  My fondness for Stoicism is I suppose an exception, but even there I'm fond of the later Stoics, and they were notoriously unconcerned with metaphysics and epistemology, their focus being almost exclusively with ethics.  It happens that my feeling is ethics and politics should be the greatest concern of philosophy and philosophers in these times.

I think the tendency of Anglo-American philosophy has been to critique the pretensions of traditional philosophy, to the extent it was devoted to ascertaining such things as the True, the Real, the Good (note the capital letters).  Among other things, it has noted that our use or misuse of language has lead us to involve ourselves in futile speculations, or that our search for certainty or absolutes is misguided.  Grand, systematic thinking has been eschewed.  Continental philosophy, or what I know of it, still seems to engage in a search for those words which begin in capital letters, or devotes itself to pondering ways to search for those words which are not as subject to critique by analytic methods.  Alternatively, it may simply despair, and bemoan the meaninglessness of life.

My guess is that philosophy will lead us no closer to knowing the True, the Real, the Good than it has done in the past, which I think is as much to say that it will lead us nowhere it has not already lead us, which is to a very dead end.  I doubt we're any smarter than we have been over the past 2500 or so years, and feel that no matter how hard we think we won't come up with something nobody has thought of in the past.  There are limits to what philosophical analysis can achieve.

This is no reason to abandon philosophical analysis, though.  It may mean that philosophical pursuits will not be as grandiose, as titanic, as otherworldly--as pretentious--as they have been in the past, however.  And I think that's all to the good.

I think it's to the good because it may lead us to focus finally not on what is True, or Real or Good, but on what our intelligence can actually address, i.e. our lives, and the lives of others, and the world of which we are a part.  I don't think this has been much of a concern for philosophers in the past, except as an extension of their unfounded conclusions regarding the True, Real or Good.  Philosophers have speculated regarding the fundamentals of reality, as if there were such things, and having come to certain conclusions laboriously impose them on us, deducing how we should live, think and act, to the extent they concern themselves with us at all.

Aristophanes rightly entitled his farcical spoof of philosophy The Clouds.  Philosophy should come down from them, and focus on the "ordinary day to day life" it has spurned in the past, with some few noteworthy exceptions.  It could use some serious thought, and it will be possible to arrive at solutions which are necessarily provisional as there are no absolutes, but those solutions will become more and more effective as they are tested in real life.

Karl Popper and his Enemies

My first introduction to Popper was in college.  I read Objective Knowledge during a course on philosophy of science.  Only later--much later--did I learn that he had strong, and controversial, views on social and political issues and a contempt for totalitarianism, and that he felt totalitarianism had its basis in the thought of certain philosophers, among them and perhaps most especially Plato and Hegel.  This belief is expressed in his book The Open Society and its Enemies which I've only recently begun to read.

It's a belief I've shared, rather haphazardly, for some time.  I've always been dissatisfied with Plato.  Perhaps this is the result of having been compelled to read The Republic as a freshman, and then having to spend time discussing it in what seemed at the time annoying detail.  It was, I think, my first academic experience in college.  Some professor or group of professors had come up with the idea that all freshman should be required to read certain books as part of a course called "Freshman Studies" and The Republic was one of them.  I loathed it, and carefully avoided taking the course in ancient philosophy which was part of the philosophical curriculum as a consequence.  I suspect that this course was imposed on the philosophy department of the college I attended.  Its members were not fond of philosophy which was not Anglo-American.

I was irritated by the "dialogue" style employed by Plato, generally.  I later read others of them, and my opinion didn't change.  They were stilted and contrived; necessarily, I suppose, but it seemed a most cumbersome and tiresome manner of expression.  Oddly, I don't feel as irritated when I encounter this artifice in other writers, such as Cicero, though I don't like it much regardless of the author. 

But what was most disturbing to me was the nature of the society envisioned by Plato, which struck me immediately as repressive, and the presumption and arrogance which seemed involved in its formulation.  It was unapologetically elitist, and seemed to have its basis in a world-view founded on a curious kind of deductive reasoning the premises of which were in a sense other-worldly and self-justifying.  It seemed to have nothing to do with the real world, in fact.  Nonetheless, it purported to be based on what was truly real, and good, and of course true.

Popper argues that Plato's metaphysics ultimately requires him to be a totalitarian.  He's quite critical of him as a result, but his distaste for Plato is nothing compared with his distaste for Hegel.  Plato he sees as a great genius, and it seems he feels his totalitarianism is explicable given the times and circumstances; not admirable, but understandable.  Hegel he considers a "charlatan" and worse, and he doesn't hesitate to say so.

He portrays Hegel as an agent (even a venal toady) of Prussian authoritarianism, and he lashes into his philosophy, portraying it as a deliberate perversion of Kant slanted to justify the Prussian, and indeed any other, status quo.  The present state--political and otherwise--being the best expression of the Absolute Spirit, or Idea, or whatever, it is necessarily worthy of support, and is indeed the current embodiment of Reason and Freedom, etc., no matter just how repressive it may be.  Autocracy is a matter of historical necessity.  Well, you get the drift.

I've always found it difficult to read Hegel, but he strikes me as the fountainhead of German romanticism and mysticism one sees ever since, with Fichte and most lately Heidegger.  One knows of his influence on Marx and his followers as well, of course.  I haven't read far enough yet, but I suspect Popper will argue that Hegel's approach to philosophy was eventually used to justify communism and fascism, especially the Nazi version.

As I understand him, Popper feels that totalitarianism, like the philosophies of those thinkers he criticizes, has its basis in an essentially anti-scientific and irrational point of view, though it strives to cloak itself in science, as it were, and historical necessity.  This strikes a chord, I must admit.  But I think it is also the case that totalitarian thinkers are also in a sense religious in an institutional sense, or perhaps more properly have personalities similar to those of religious zealots.

There is an awful self-righteousness involved in repression of all kinds; a sureness, an arrogance.  And a belief in and desire for certainty, in all things.

Nothing New under the Sun: Dewey's Popular Essays

I'm reading Characters and Events, a collection of John Dewey's articles written for magazines such as The New Republic, and am struck by two things.  First, he writes much better in these "popular" essays than he does in his philosophical works, which I must admit is a relief--and also interesting in its own right.  Second, that much of what he wrote many decades ago is sadly familiar.  Very sadly, in fact.

He writes, for example, of the influence of fundamentalism in American society, and how the conflict of religion and science in the United States is a subject of wonder and amusement in Europe.  In Dewey's time, of course, the greatest conflict was over Darwin's theory of evolution.

He writes also of concerns over the vast number of immigrants entering the nation through Ellis Island, and how they are to be assimilated into American society.  Apparently, General Woods and others were proposing that this be achieved through a system of universal conscription.  All would be assimilated through military service, though there was, at the time, no war to be fought.  A war would be provided soon enough, of course.  Dewey was concerned about American society becoming militarized along the European model, and not unsurprisingly felt that if assimilation was to be achieved, or imposed, through the federal government it would be better achieved through a system of national education.

We haven't come very far, it seems.  We have the same concerns now, and are debating the same debates.  So little have we learned, apparently, that the players may as well be the same.  We may as well have William Jennings Bryan thundering away portentously.  As for General Woods, I haven't heard much about universal conscription as the cure for the "disease" of immigration, but perhaps that is because our military is already rather busy at this time; busy enough not to take on the additional burden of assimilation.

Our system of national education hasn't done much to to alleviate such concerns.  Dewey might be inclined to blame this on the fact that our system remains in many respects localized.  Our school districts are locally controlled, with school boards being selected through local elections.  So we have some boards in some states insisting that schools teach what is deemed appropriate by local electors, and certain local electors, or those actually interested in voting for members of school boards in some cases, continue to have doubts as their ancestors had doubts regarding evolution, and perhaps immigrants as well.

What accounts for this?  Why is it that we are, apparently, incapable of learning, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say inclined to conduct ourselves as we have always conducted ourselves regardless of what is learned?

We may simply be creatures of habit and routine so entirely that we will not think intelligently unless compelled to do so.  We feel compelled to do so when we perceive there will be an immediate benefit to us, or when the failure to do so will result in a direct harm.  When we are relatively content, we prefer not to think at all, thinking being difficult.

There is a problem, though, and that is that thinking is so difficult we resort to it only when other options have been exhausted.  If we are seriously discontent, we may prefer to act without thinking if it seems that by acting we will achieve what might be achieved by thinking.

If we are creatures of habit, one wonders if it would be possible to develop a habit of thinking.  I think this is one of the things Dewey sought to propose in his works on education.  But thinking often demonstrates that habits are bad, and perhaps we would rather maintain those habits we have than develop new ones.