Ideas Matter:

Democratic Power and Authoritarian Force (2nd Edition)

Ideas are formed in language to communicate. So, words matter too.

Words are symbolic images. So, symbols matter too.

Symbols in stories, myths, beliefs, arts, and science make up culture.

Cultures create and destroy worlds through politics.

And that’s why ideas matter.

This is a reflection on two big ideas that struggle to create, change, or perhaps destroy our world — one represented by Russian Ivan Ilyin, the other by American John Dewey — both prolific contemporary 20thcentury philosophers or public thinkers from two very different life worlds in contrasting experiences and diverse social, intellectual, and religious expressions. Ideas evolve in articulating them with others and with oneself. It’s just as genes evolve as organisms interact to meet and deal with their environment. The ideas and words of Ilyin and Dewey emerged in a complex of other experiences and ideas, that is in context. They stand as rocks in a rushing stream shaped by the waters and winds and perhaps by a miner’s pick seeking gold. Nevertheless, these two rocks, as long as they stand, give us insight as to how and where to paddle on.

In The Road to Unfreedom Timothy Snyder shows how the philosopher Ivan Ilyin and his disciples and critics draw the Russian world and shape the worldview of Vladimir Putin today. It starts in a mirror reflecting the Viking King Vladimir in Kiev after he converted to Christianity and through violence spread Christianity in sync with the expansion of Russia under the Czars up to Peter the Great who is Putin’s exemplar. We cannot comprehend the choices and actions of Putin without understanding the world out of which he comes. And Snyder believes that Ilyin and his philosophy paints his world.

The Eastern Orthodox Church is the religious foundation of an imperial Russia which includes Ukraine and Belarus. Ilyin’s authoritative ideas of Strong-Man rule, aligned with Christendom under the Patriarch’s blessing, now work through the new Czar Vladimir Putin to unite the world.

Ilyin, in his doctoral thesis, adopted the great Hegelian theory of progress in History through stages. He adapted that theory of history and progress from the view of enlightened intellectuals, aristocrats, oligarchs, and religious leaders. He saw the role of Russia with Czar and Patriarch linked in an idea leading the people, including the lower classes, towards unity, truth, freedom, truth, and justice to make Russia Great again. They envisioned the agents of change from the top of the social order.

Marx turned around that grand scheme from the point of view of the Proletariat — the workers in the factories of the industrial age. Lenin modified the Marxian of a democratic socialism to include the serfs of his own agricultural country who with the workers would be the agents of change by first establishing a hierarchical dictatorship of the Proletariat with the one Communist Party head as the head of Russia. No too much different than the old Czar.

Unity for Ilyin meant acceptance of the beliefs including the role of Mother Russia in the world. Those core beliefs have been unveiled by philosophers, scientists, and engineers studying nature and by those representing and teaching the mind of God beyond nature. The Czar advised by the Patriarch is the final judge of what beliefs are true and what actions conform to that truth. Freedom for humanity is the ability to prosper within the bounds of the state established by and for those who through their labor produce value for the Holy Russian Empire.

Both Lenin and Ilyin have a hierarchical authoritarian viewpoint. [i]

_______________

I applaud Snyder for recognizing the importance of ideas without absolutizing them, without sanctioning them, without making them the truth and the way. He restores history from certain philosophies and theologies and their grand righteous theories. And that differentiates himself and ourselves from Ilyin and Putin and from the many new efforts of the autocratic and authoritarian Right. Snyder demonstrates how Trump and the ism he founded is another variant of the authoritarian virus that kills democracy.

My own philosophy of evolutionary democracy acknowledges two major traditions. 1) American pragmatism and 2) Continental phenomenology. Both traditions helped me articulate and act primarily in local communities to foster democratic social change in the environments in which I consulted and engaged through dialogue.

Continental phenomenology employs as philosophic method what William James, a founder of pragmatism, called radical empiricism because it returned to the human experience prior to and in the act of its expression in words, formulas, and other human tinkering and manipulation — not to deny the importance of those expressions but to uphold, interpret, and critique them.

My own mentor was Maurice Merleau-Ponty, in my mind the champion of phenomenology, who pointed me to the invisible in consciousness even as my words gave things their visible form verified as conditionally real with experimentation and evidence. He showed me the way to accept the ambiguity of existence and never get addicted to absolutes — especially in ideas. He showed me how absolutism in politics, religion, science, and life occurs and how it is an illusion stimulated by our very way of interacting with the world and each other through words and symbols.

This led me to compare John Dewey’s analysis of language and other symbolic formulations to understand human existence in and to a world as our evolving organisms interact with each other and our unique and changing environments. Through our symbolic activity we become learning, collaborating, and transcending beings. But we are also subject to the “objectivistic fallacy,” where we get caught in the icons — the objects we use to understand and act — and neglect the invisible background, context, process in which they emerge. What Merleau-Ponty calls the “illusion of the absolute.”

Here are the key insights that converge in both pragmatism and phenomenology and ground the democratic “mind,” which is a context for our everyday ideas for shaping our world in contrast with the authoritarian mind. (Here I acknowledge I too am captured by my circumstance, my influences, and my experience of democratic social change throughout all my inquiries and expressions.)

My two major philosophical traditions are:

Pragmatism: William James, Charles Pierce, John Dewey, Richard Rorty

Phenomenology: Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Hannah Arendt

Some of their key insights:

1. The Human body interacts and evolves with the environment through symbols (words, images, metaphors).

2. The Human capacity for language fashions and defines an evolving world of things, ideas, concepts.

3. Humans socially construct diverse worlds through symbolic interaction with others.

4. Individual and collective self-awareness (consciousness or spirit) is a dimension of human symbolic activity in and to the world.

5. Humans are spiritually embodied or embodied souls.

6. Human being is a tension between body and soul, matter and spirit, thinking and action, appearance and reality, individual and social, public and private, science and culture, past and future and more. This understanding of the human condition and existence here and now replaces the dualism in modern thought initiated by Descartes (and many would say Plato).

7. Human existence is collective and collaborative and thereby political: critical thinking, problem solving as action for a better world e.g.: free and open society, just society, people as agents not passive recipients, empathy over cruelty, etc.

8. All things are relational — no intrinsic (vs extrinsic) nature, no unchanging essence (with accidental features) except what humans put there to give attention and help inquiry.

And therefore, here are some characteristics of a phenomenological pragmatist in inquiry, perception, and action.

· situational — here and now (between past and future), focused on concrete situation over universal theories.

· spiritual — recognizes that the invisible context or mind play a role in defining the concrete situation.

· future oriented: faith in possibility of humanity to transcend with or without appealing to Transcendents (divine beings, heavenly paradises, eternal time)

· pan-relational (between absolutism and relativism), open to uncertainty, new ideas

· contextual — critically thinking, old solutions and ideas are relationalized, understood in context.

· concerned with power: as agency, not force; the ability to act with others to build a world without cruelty and violence. Authority is necessary for execution but is founded on power, political will.

· practical: seeking the vocabulary and narrative that advances the purpose of human flourishing.

· universally oriented: using metaphors of inclusion and breadth rather than metaphors of depth (ground, essence, pyramid).

· experimental: trying what works to solve a problem, to express in words and action, and to get feedback from others and correct.

___________________

Richard Rorty who in my mind culminates pragmatic political thinking with his last book Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism sketches for me the two roads in our red and blue woods. Let me try to diagram them and then come back to Snyder and Ilyin.

Authoritarianism denotes an Author whether called God, Spirit, History, or Nature. And an order descending from the author which is hierarchical both in the natural/profane/secular realm and the spiritual/transcendent/preternatural realm. In the natural realm where a strong secular leader directs a bureaucracy that is made up of humans in ranks or classes. In the preternatural realm a religious leader, e.g., Archbishop, Patriarch directs a bureaucracy of clerics. The two realms work towards a unity that is preset in Nature, at the end of History, according to the plan of God, through the workings of the Divine Spirit that conquers evil. Progress in history is inevitable following God’s plan or Natures laws and “staying on the side of History” by defeating the cosmic dark force of the other side. Change means violently overthrowing the present domination of the dark force; that implies apocalypse and violent revolution. [ii]

Democracy denotes a People who decide the rules of living and acting together to make their world either directly or through representatives. If there is a higher power, it is the people who have organized themselves speaking and acting together collectively in the public starting with local publics like town halls, popular assemblies, nonprofit associations that make up civil society that hold their leaders and themselves accountable. It is in these community meetings that boundaries are set, commonwealths defined, leaders chosen, laws and rules proclaimed, habits formed, and a free and open society is achieved. The citizens of these publics or commonwealths are diverse in religious observance, ethic heritage, gender and sexual orientation, genetic abilities and coloring, careers and vocations, manner and status of living.

In democracy, there is strict distinction between the private sector to which all these diverse ascriptions are assigned and celebrated. And the public sector where commonality and equality are negotiated and celebrated. Ex pluribus unum. Many styles of life and livelihoods in culture and economies. One people under the rule of the law they negotiate. Private sector diversity and liberty contributes ideas and richness to the public sector without force or social ascription domination. The public sector is inclusive of all who want to participate, speak, and act and secures the diversity and liberties in the private sector by securing the rights of all citizens to assemble, speak, have the necessities of life, and search for personal meaning and happiness. The private sector is the realm of liberty and personal happiness (pleasure) and individuality. The public sector is the realm of freedom and public happiness (respect) and commonality. [iii]

I am describing authoritarianism and democracy more as ideal types in tension and aspiration though derived from the actual experience and study of human behavior and history that reveal the tensions in human existence. I recall that Greeks, Romans, and their followers like Machiavelli rejected democracy because they translated demos as unthinking, uninformed “mobs” led by a tyrant who interpreted their resentments and fears, rather than as informed, organized “people” in the words of Jefferson and Lincoln.

I am an experiential, problem-solving pragmatist not a Manichaean apocalyptic destroyer of the Other or Evil. I see history, not as inevitable, but as a series of events due to personal and community choices often setting up more problems to be solved. So, I do not mean to demonize Putin and his followers with his adaptation of Ilyin; but I understand how his character as leader contextualized by one of the major traditions in Russia is acting in the world with behaviors I oppose and despise. I oppose former President Trump’s infatuation with Putin and his authoritarian rejection of democracy. I understand the Trumpists who support him and their resentments of a democracy that has failed them by affixing those resentments on others with different ascriptions (ethnicity, religion, lifestyle, immigrants).

I believe with Dewey and Snyder that the only way to avoid the authoritarian drive in the world that is dividing nations within and between is through more democracy. That means not trying to have the other side lose, but to bring everybody to the table of decision making. Democracy is learned not just in the classroom but in action starting with engagement in one’s own locality and institutions. Democracy is not just a goal, it is a means of human flourishing.

Post Script

Many decades ago, I wrote a paper on the Theology of Rebellion. Using Camus’ definition of the Rebel and Eliade’s study of the founding myths of religion. I distinguished Revolution and Rebellion. Revolution implies a circular time with inevitable and recurring birth, death, destruction, revival, return in an eternal order seen in the changing of seasons and the revolving of the sun and stars. I think that’s what Snyder is pointing to in the authoritarian mind by linking the sense of inevitability to the doctrine of eternity. On the other hand, rebellion and resistance identify problems that leave people out of the action and uses whatever tools the people possess to solve them.

Writing in the 1960s, I was talking to my social activist friends whom I saw falling into the revolutionary frame of mind with their talk of violence, being on the side of history, proselytizing rather than listening to and involving their neighbors. At the time I was experiencing the Civil Rights movement and the resistance to the War in Vietnam. Most of all I was experiencing on the west side of Chicago a large community of black folk meeting at Presentation Church invited and assisted by a progressive Catholic Priest working with other church and civic leaders to assist them organize themselves in the American democratic way across race, religion, and status to change one of the structural causes and perpetrators of segregation and inequality in Chicago, namely housing finance.

I truly felt black families’ disappointment of being cheated again in following the American dream of homeownership. I cried with them in their defeats and rejoiced with them in their victories which led to fair housing laws and reparations for how they were swindled out of both money and respect through public policies (even good ones like the GI Bill and FHA). This is the reason why I left off my doctoral program to get more training to choose a career in community organizing. The people of west and south Chicago were my greatest teachers in democratic social change. In this paper I am renewing while revising my original paper and speaking to my friends of the Left today whom the Right and “the moderates” call extreme or fringe Left — asking them to retain their passion for radical democratic social change but without ideological dogmatism.

Organizers and leaders committed to community building and waging peace, as my friend Tom calls it, do not need to be philosophers, certainly not academic or professional philosophers. But they do need to know that their attention, their language, their aspirations, their faith to persist comes out of an often invisible and yet powerful context. Philosophy helps to turn our attention back onto that context and how it is operating in our communities, nations, and selves. It therefore further frees us to critically think about the practices and structures in our social order that need to be modified to achieve what we somewhat theologically call the Kingdom of God (Jesus), a City on the Hill (Winthrop), the Beloved Community (MLK), The Great Society (Johnson).

Notes

[i] I would argue that Marx as interpreted by North American and European socialists teach the pragmatic, nondogmatic, and democratic dimension of Marx.

[ii] Many of my leftist friends preach that religion, and especially organized religion, goes hand in hand with authoritarianism. And it often does. But my experience of the legacy of Dorothy Day, the early Puritans, John XXIII, the Berrigan brothers, Catholic social teaching, the Social Gospel, Martin Luther King, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Tikkun Elam, Islam Social Justice, Civil religion, and so many more indicates that religion also goes hand in hand with democratic social change. I think that the problem is not religion and indeed the religious experience and expression is a feature of culture even an nontheistic one. The problem is dogmatism.

[iii] Here you see my influence from Hannah Arendt who was taught by Heideggar and in her last writings dialogued with Merleau-Pointy on the invisible in human experience and thinking.