The Public and Its Problems. Джон Дьюи
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problem in domestic affairs. At last the same issue is actively raised about the relations between national units, no one of which in the past has acknowledged political responsibility in the conduct of its policies toward other national units. There has been acknowledgement of moral responsibility. But the same thing holds good in relations that are private and non-political; the chief difference is the greater ease with which moral responsibility broke down in the case of relationships between nations. The very doctrine of “Sovereignty” is a complete denial of political responsibility.
The fact that this issue is now within the active scope of political discussion also bears out another point made in the text. The matter at issue is in no way one between the “social” and the “non-social,” or between that which is moral and that which is immoral. No doubt the feeling on the part of some that the moral responsibility which concerns the relations between nations should be taken more seriously played a part in bringing about a greater emphasis on the fact that the consequences of these relations demand some kind of political organization. But only the ultra-cynical have ever denied in the past the existence of some moral responsibility. Sufficient proof of this is found in the fact that, in order to interest the citizens of any genuinely modern people in an actual war, it has been necessary to carry on a campaign to show that superior moral claims were on the side of a war policy. The change of attitude is not fundamentally an affair of moral conversion, a change from obdurate immorality to a perception of the claims of righteousness. It results from greatly intensified recognition of the factual consequences of war. And this increased perception is in turn mainly due to the fact that modern wars are indefinitely more destructive and that the destruction occurs over a much wider geographical area than was the case in the past. It is no longer possible to argue that war brings positive good. The most that can be said is that it is a choice of the lesser moral evil.
The fact that the problem of the scope of the political relations between nations has now entered the arena of political discussion, goes to confirm another point emphasized in the book. The same problem of where the line is to be drawn between affairs left to private consideration and those subject to political adjudication is formally a universal problem. But with respect to the actual content taken by the problem, the question is always a concrete one. That is, it is a question of specifying factual consequences, which are never inherently fixed nor subject to determination in terms of abstract theory. Like all facts subject to observation and specification, they are spatial-temporal, not eternal. (The State is pure myth. And, as is pointed out in the text, the very notion of the state as a universal ideal and norm arose at a particular space-time juncture to serve quite concrete aims.)
Suppose for example that the idea of federation, as distinct from both isolation and imperial rule, is accepted as a working principle. Some things are settled, but not the question of just what affairs come within the jurisdiction of the Federated Government and which are excluded and remain for decision by national units as such. The problem of what should be included and what excluded from federated authority would become acute. And in the degree in which the decision on this point is made intelligently, it will be made on the ground of foreseen, concrete consequences likely to result from adopting alternative policies. And just as in the case of domestic political affairs, there will be the problem of discovering something of common interest amid the conflict of separate interests of the distinctive units. Friendship is not the cause of arrangements that serve the common interests of several units, but the outcome of the arrangements. General theory might indeed by helpful; but it would serve intelligent decisions only if it were used as an aid to foreseeing factual consequences, not directly per se.
Thus far, I have kept discussion within what I find to be the field of acts sufficiently evident so that any one who so desires can take note of them. I come now to a point that trenches actively upon the field of important, unsettled hypotheses. In the second chapter of the text, changes in “material culture” are mentioned as an important factor in shaping the concrete conditions which determine the consequences that are of the kind called “public” and that lead to some sort of political intervention. If there were ever any reasonable doubt of the import of technological factors with respect to socially significant human consequences, that time is well past. Nor is the importance of technological development confined to domestic issues, great as it is in this field. The enormously increased destructiveness of war, previously mentioned, is the immediate outcome of modern technological developments. And the frictions and conflicts which are the immediate occasion of wars are due to the infinitely multiplied and more intricate points of contact between peoples which in turn are the direct result of technological developments.
So far we are still within the bounds of the observable facts of the transactions that occur between national units in the same way they occur between the members of a given domestic unit. The unsettled question that now looms as the irrepressible conflict of the future pertains to the actual range of the economic factor in determination of specific consequences. As will be seen by consulting the index, s.v. “Economic Forces and Politics,” the immense influence exercised by economic aspects of modern life receives attention. But as far as concerned political relations between national units, the question then had to do mainly with special issues such as tariffs, most favored treatment, retaliation, etc. The view that economics is the sole condition affecting the entire range of political organization and that present day industry imperatively demands a certain single type of social organization has been a theoretical issue because of the influence of the writings of Marx.2 But, in spite of the revolution in Soviet Russia, it was hardly an immediate practical issue of international politics. Now it is definitely becoming such an issue, and present signs point to its being a predominant issue in determining the future of international political relationships.
The position that economics is the sole conditioning factor of political organization, together with the position that all phases and aspects of social life, science, art, education and all the agencies of public communication included, are determined by the type of economy that prevails is identical with that type of life to which the name “totalitarian” justly applies. Given the view that there is but one form of economic organization that properly fulfills social conditions, and that one country of all the peoples of the earth has attained that state in an adequate degree, there is in existence an outstanding and overshadowing practical problem.
For Soviet Russia has now arrived at a state of power and influence in which an intrinsically totalitarian philosophy has passed from the realm of theory into that of the practical political relations of the national states of the globe. The problem of adjusting the relations of states sufficiently democratic to put a considerable measure of trust in free inquiry and open discussion, as a fundamental method in peaceable negotiation of social conflicts, with the point of view that there is but one Truth, fixed and absolute and hence not open to inquiry and public discussion, is now a vital one. Although my own belief as to where the line of social progress is to be drawn between the two positions is firmly in accord with that of the great majority of members of democratic states, I am not here concerned with considerations of right and wrong, of truth or falsity. I cannot refrain, however, from pointing out how the world situation bears out the hypothesis that the matter of the scope of range and of the seriousness of the factual consequences of associated human transactions is the determining factor in affecting social behavior with political properties too evident to be ignored. The problem of discovering and implementing politically areas of common interest is henceforth imperative.
There is one other point that demands attention. The text points out in a number of places, firstly, that noting of consequences is an indispensable condition over and above their mere occurrence and, secondly, that this noting (on anything like an adequate scale) depends upon the state of knowledge at the time, especially upon the degree to which the kind of method called scientific is applied to social affairs. Some of us have been insisting for some time that science bears exactly the same relation to the progress of culture as do the affairs acknowledged to be technological (like the state of invention in the case, say, of tools and machinery, or the progress reached in the arts, say, the medical). We have also held that a considerable part of the remediable evils of present life are due to the state of imbalance of scientific method with respect to its application to physical facts on one side and to specifically human facts on the other side;