Community, Conflict, and Reconciliation

My topic in this paper will be community in the midst of divisiveness. After yet another of our quadrennial festivals of self-loathing that we call presidential campaigns, can anyone maintain that participation in the processes of our democracy makes us better? It was not always this way; often participation in political life was seen as a positive good. The Social Pragmatists, thinkers like John Dewey, James Hayden Tufts, and George Herbert Mead—as well as many others in America's past—praised the life of the active citizen. Tufts wrote in 1918, for example, that "a democratic government is a splendid government in many ways, but it will not run itself." This need for citizen involvement was an advantage, he maintained, because active participation in the processes of self-government itself leads to citizen growth. As he phrased it, "we believe in democracy as rule by the people" because we believe that participation in the democratic process "makes people more intelligent, free, and responsible" (1918, 394, 405). In deliberative attempts to advance our communal interests through greater citizen involvement, we thus have the possibility of learning how to govern ourselves better. At least that is how things seemed to Tufts and others at various points in our history. Things seem different to me now. At present, our political practice is failing. Our society is deeply divided. Our fellows are suspicious of, and hostile toward, each other. Our community is broken.

We need to remember that Tufts's view was never the only one, and that our common life has often been spiky. We have had periods of far greater discord than at present—we had a Civil War once—and we have crawled back from many other instances of social fragmentation since then. A very short list of such conflicts would begin with two major "red" scares and three unpopular wars in Asia. In addition, we have often disagreed violently over the worthiness of potential and actual immigrants, the acceptability of ways of religious worship, and the relative merits of various racial groups. Many times in the past, Americans have found themselves divided; and each time we have, more or less, managed to put the conflict behind us and return to a semblance of communal living.

No doubt we will somehow right ourselves again this time. Hoping to learn something from the past, however, I am interested in considering how Pragmatism might be able to help in this process of reconciliation. When I suggest that the Pragmatic approach might offer us some assistance in reconstructing American community, I am not suggesting that I believe it offers us, in a Jamesian fashion, the means to reunite today's "tough-minded" and "tender-minded" citizens by helping the latter become more open to facts and the former more appreciative of principles (James 1975, 13). Our current problem is of a different sort, and my suggestion is more Deweyan: by reemphasizing the fundamental importance of community to democratic practice, it might be possible to redirect our political interactions away from our current model of divisive combat toward cooperative inquiry.

Specifying Our Current Problem

While there are perhaps any number of ways to try to approach the core of our contemporary troubles, I will attempt to do so by concentrating on what I think are the four central aspects. The first of these is the assumption on the part of many politicians and their supporters that there is only one solution to any of our problems and that they are in possession of this solution. In any intellectual endeavor, of course, such bankrupt absolutism would be rejected immediately. In a similar fashion, absolutism has no place in cooperative social inquiry; but, as we all know, it functions quite successfully in contemporary politics. There, the belief that our side has divined the "true path" that must be followed without wavering operates as a powerful motivator. When Dewey wrote in 1908 of the difference between "customary" and "reflective" (or modern) society, he emphasized that in the former, "it does not occur to any one that there is a difference between what he ought to do, i...