Beyond technocracy and political theology: John Dewey and the authority of truth

I. Introduction

In 1927, John Dewey published The Public and Its Problems—a response to Walter Lippmann’s diagnosis of the “eclipse of the public” as a permanent feature of modernity fatal to robust, ethically grounded conceptions of democracy like Dewey’s. That same year, Carl Schmitt published an article that would become the basis of The Concept of the Political, which—despite the extraordinary political gulf that separated Schmitt’s political commitments and Dewey’s—shared with the latter’s work a critical eye toward liberalism and technocracy, and sought to reconstitute the foundations of political life beyond the divisions of individual, society, and state. Dewey, Lippmann and Schmitt have often been caricatured, respectively, as an idealistic Social Democrat whose Vermont roots shaped his persistent faith in human equality, education and radical social reform; Lippmann an elite “out of touch” but realist technocrat who coupled faith in bureaucracy and expertise with suspicion of mass political participation; and Schmitt a dangerous Nazi sympathizer who exploited essentialist divisions within society to spur a populist revival in politics that worked to undermine core tenets of liberalism and the rule of law.

If first by tragedy in the interwar period, the then-farcical rise of Donald Trump in 2016 exposed the attendant political divides in the American political landscape and the repetition of familiar themes in political thought and reality. All three thinkers have experienced a scholarly renaissance in the past three decades, but their interrelationship, beyond the Dewey–Lippmann debate, and their anticipation of several contemporary issues should appear uncanny, if understudied, today. Schmitt’s critique of pluralism—specifically, British Pluralists like Harold Laski and G.D.H. Cole who built on William James’ pragmatic conception of truth—also points to a broader theoretical contrast vis-à-vis truth and questions about the authority of the state. This article turns to the responses of Lippmann, Schmitt, and Dewey to the unstable basis and implications of truth—empirical or scientific, moral and axiological—and the antinomy between truth and democracy claimed during the interwar period and in our polarized, “post-truth” moment. Dewey’s critique of Lippmann’s and Schmitt’s epistemological claims, especially their insistence on the intractability of subjective pluralism, provides a still relevant normative vocabulary in defense of liberal democracy. Central to Dewey’s claims—and most salient today—is his insistence that all epistemic inquiries cannot rely on strict fact/value distinctions: such inquiries implicate more than cognitive and rational processes, but also, values, emotive factors, social bonds, relationships of trust, and the full panoply of experience. Improving and critically assessing our ways of thinking—in addition to our commitment to the authority of warranted truth claims—are, according to Dewey, of a piece with a commitment to ethical, participatory democracy.

I bring to the fore questions pressing for the current moment: what happens once we arrive at “truth,” what does it demand of us, and why would we be motivated to act in accordance with its prescriptions? In short, what authority does truth purport to have over us? Across the political spectrum, truth has reemerged as the touchstone of legitimate political authority and a defensive rallying cry, even as the understanding of “truth” itself becomes reconfigured and distorted. More generally, the post-truth moment has been marked by pervasive misinformation, “alternatives facts” disseminated directly by governmental officials, and public distrust in institutions central to a viable liberal democracy—such as elections, news media, scientific and medical establishments, and higher education. ¹ The very distinction between factual evidence and subjective opinion continues to erode, as research suggests that the persistent belief in misinformation and conspiratorial thinking may be entrenched at the neural level, rooted not only in cognitive processes but also, in deeply-held emotive or motivated biases. ² Whether our commitment to democracy itself can withstand this threat has come pointedly into question. As Jason Brennan wrote days after the 2016 U.S. presidential election, “There is no real solution to the problem of political ignorance, unless we are willing to break with democratic politics.” ³

Regarding the issue of truth in contemporary democratic theory specifically, a divide is evident between, roughly, a deliberative and epistemic camp and, on the other, a realist and decisionist camp. ⁴ The former constellation of thinkers—most notably, Habermas, Rawls, and current epistemic democrats—generally believe that institutional principles and guarantees of constitutional democracy, can lead to a convergence towards rationally defensible, and democratically legitimated, claims. ⁵ These institutional principles and guarantees include, among other things, public spaces for free expression and inquiry. Representative of the latter approach are thinkers like Richard Rorty and Bernard Yack, who see a tension between truth and democracy; democratic institutions and majoritarian decisions arrived at through voting mechanisms are not conditioned by rational deliberation but rather, by rhetoric. ⁶ The people’s decisions are matters of power or irreducible conflict, not universal principles aimed at consensus. Democratic theorists are also confronted with the related rise of populism and technocracy as mirror phenomena that together, champion and undermine collective trust in the claims of experts, the people, or demagogues who allege unmediated access to truth. ⁷

At stake—both historically and today—is a quest for the best method of finding authority grounded in truth for the sake of preserving an autonomous sphere of individual freedom against irrational subjectivism backed by coercive force. Both Lippmann and Schmitt mirror the contemporary distrust of rampant subjectivism and the rejection of pluralism because of its failure to provide a truth that serves as an ordering principle for politics. I do not parse the nuanced details and differences between existing schools of thought on issues of truth, democracy, power, and rational consensus. Rather, I take Dewey’s works as a valuable model for moving past Lippmann’s technocracy and turn to normative supra-empirical truths and Schmitt’s turn to sovereign dictatorship and conflict as the touchstone of truth and authority in politics.

Moving beyond this stalemate between truth and democracy might require, as Nadia Urbinati argues, that one “elaborate a different conception of truth and conclude not that politics is opposed to truth, but that politics employs reason and knowledge in order to achieve a goal that is not cognitive but practical.” ⁸ In this article, I argue that Dewey’s turn to inquiry works towards this precise task, with a conception of truth and politics, reason and knowledge, that defends participatory democracy and the type of democratic ethos necessary to work towards and commit to acting on verifiable truth claims. To throw Dewey’s democratic commitments into relief and to understand the implications of truth in contemporary debates, I look to the three thinkers in tandem. In Section 2, I present a critical outline of Lippmann and Schmitt’s shared identification of subjective pluralism and their attempt to derive state authority and moral motivation in light of the normative limits of technocratic expertise. These sketches are not intended to offer radical reinterpretations of these thinkers but instead to highlight the epistemological assumptions they share in buttressing their critique of the value of liberal democracy. In Section 3, I present Dewey’s treatment of truth in relationship to democracy and democratic authority, and his rejection of dualisms claimed between fact/value, mind/body, and individual/society, which permeate critiques of participatory democracy. I show how Dewey’s rejection of Schmitt and Lippmann’s epistemological premises presents a convincing account of why full democratic participation must be seen as a necessary precondition for the critical development of both epistemic and normative values. In turning to Dewey, we see that arriving at warranted truth claims is not a passive enterprise, but necessarily constituted by the social interactions and relationships—or the substance of everyday life. Improving and committing to such truth claims, in turn, is one and the same as a commitment to robust ethical democracy. In Section 4, I conclude by applying and defending the continued relevance of Dewey’s democratic epistemology and his defense of ethical democracy to current scholarly debates on the pathologies of the post-truth moment, especially in the context of rising polarization.

II. Schmitt, Lippmann, and the quest for true authority

The claimed antinomy between truth and democracy presents a variation on both Lippmann’s and Schmitt’s response to the problem of subjective pluralism, as well as the normative limitations of bare ontological facts and the question of authoritative meaning left unresolved by post-Kantian philosophy. As Schmitt writes, “Modern philosophy is governed by a schism between thought and being, concept and reality, mind and nature, subject and object, that was not eliminated even by Kant’s transcendental solution. Kant’s solution did not restore the reality of the external world to the thinking mind.” ⁹ This purported schism between external world and thinking mind, and normative values versus empirical reality came to underwrite their critiques of robust participatory democracy on epistemic and normative grounds. Lippmann’s works from the late 1920s through the early Cold War era reveal how he grappled with the limitation of facts and expertise in the context of moral authority and meaning-making, and presaged his insistence on a neo-Catholic, neo-Platonic contemplation of truth for truth’s sake and a theological faith in freedom against totalitarianism as human destiny. Schmitt offered a prescriptive turn to the sovereign’s determinate decision-making and his famous friend-enemy distinction to square the circle of epistemological indeterminacy. Dewey, as we will see, ultimately challenges both Lippman’s and Schmitt’s epistemological premises and their respective accounts of how normative values are created (or identified) in political life. In so doing, Dewey offers a viable basis for his defense of robust ethical democracies.

The characterization of Schmitt by some contemporary scholars as offering lessons for radical democracy suggests the juxtaposition with Dewey may be less startling than it might appear on first blush. ¹⁰ Both authors grappled with the failures of liberalism as political reality, as the inadequacies were starkly evident after World War I on both sides of the Atlantic. Pace Lippmann, they saw as logically and metaphysically untenable liberalism’s myth of an ahistorical individual with a sanctified domain of negative freedom to be protected through a universalistic, rationally defensible rights regimes. Most notably, Schmitt’s rejection of liberalism cannot be understood independent of his rejection of technology or his “economic-technical thought” and positivism—a parallel to the genealogy Dewey traces between the rise of capitalism, liberal orthodoxy, and elite “responsibly administered” democracy. ¹¹ Akin to their rejection of classical liberalism was a shared intellectual trajectory that began with Hegel in their early thinking into their late 1920s work which addressed the dualisms that arose in the evolution of early-modern philosophy and science. Both identified with Descartes the internal subjectivist turn and an atomized individual, and from the Copernican turn, the rise of the scientific method that, both argued, culminated in the philosophy of Kant—which sought universality and certainty in the noumenal realm of morality and certainty in the organization of the empirical world through an imposition of cognitive order. ¹²

Despite Schmitt’s warranted reputation as the 20th century’s most thoroughgoing critic of liberalism ¹³ and the type of truth-based legalism ultimately championed by Lippmann, we should see also the important convergences with Lippmann, especially in their respective accounts of the perils of subjective pluralism run amok. Like Yack today, along with Schmitt in his own time, Lippmann saw subjective pluralism intensifying in a liberal democracy, in which representatives aggregate subjective biases and let them play out without independent consideration of truth. Lippmann emphasized the empirical chaos that results when private and isolated consciousness is invariably pitted against an external and objective reality—a dualism captured in the title of Lippmann’s first chapter of Public Opinion, “The World Outside and the Pictures in Our Heads.” Lippmann underscored our predisposition to cling to subjective interests, desires, and falsehoods, which rendered cognitive valuation processes in and through social interactions—of the type Dewey ultimately championed—merely modern chimeras. ¹⁴ What resulted was the creation of stereotypes—based not on direct experience, but “stored up images, the preconceptions, and prejudices which interpret, fill them out, and in their turn powerfully direct the play of our attention, and our vision tself.” ¹⁵

Lippmann rejected most famously the impossibility of the masses as “sovereign and omnicompetent” citizens, because they are ill-equipped to navigate political issues and processes that require a professional, salaried class to take them on full time. ¹⁶ Lippmann called for deference to the objective expert, who could divide and conquer small-scale problems to guide political activity. In their “economic-technocratic” thinking, to borrow Schmitt’s term, they created ordered categories and understandings of slippery facts and complex policies through particular, cumulative acts, not itself through omnicompetence, even at the level of the state. They “translate, simplify, generalize” but they do not have a “policy” ¹⁷ or normative claims, either according to personal ideology or public benefit. ¹⁸ But they are not powerless, as the future suggests that “the relevant facts” will increasingly “elude the voter and the administrator.” ¹⁹ Lippmann asserted that experts and bureaucrats only aggregate objective facts to hand over to an executive or “man of action” who “decides on matters of policy presented in a form ready for his rejection or approval. ²⁰ As with Schmitt, for Lippmann representation was not a divining of the public interest, but simply an identification by the public with what has already been decided by the sovereign official.

Lippmann’s “disenchanted” liberal democracy by the time of his Public Opinion and The Phantom Public critiqued Rousseau’s vision of popular sovereignty and authoritative will formation, which could no longer be claimed by the individual, the majority or the legislature in the classic Lockean liberal democratic schema. Instead, the myth of a popular will was nothing but the diffusion into the power structures of civil society by “manufacturers of consent.” ²¹ Lippmann’s interwar work on economic freedom in The Method of Freedom redirected this critique of fictive will-formation from the public to the state itself. Enthusiasm for planning after the World War I experience could not translate into a regime of normal politics. The very priorities for production—or some reference to a “common good”—were no longer clear-cut as during war. ²² Aligning public opinion with the state’s production goals, without a clear, common external threat—a manufacturing of consent through other means—would require indoctrination through propaganda and curtailment of civil liberties. That is, a general will and common good had to be manufactured through an external enemy or in moments of exigency.

Schmitt’s 1919 Political Romanticism also highlights the perils of a retreat into subjectivity as the basis of a created world versus concrete reality and ultimately concrete political forms. There is no “ontological thought” and in its stead, is “the state of eternal becoming and possibilities that are never consummated to the confines of concrete reality.” ²³ The romantic reality and occasio that springs from the mind of the subject is the limitless antithesis of a decision that limits possibilities. As Schmitt writes, Romanticism is destroyed by “a legal or a moral decision,” even a rejection of the anthropological claims of evil human nature which entails a stance and not esthetic material for creating alternative realities. ²⁴ Like the endless talk that marked parliamentary democracy in Weimar, the Romantic’s vision of boundless esthetic play was antithetical to concrete decisions with real stakes. Romanticism is instead consummated, and the difficulties of playing off “several realities,” shifts to the “higher third factor”—an abstract entity like humanity or the ego—and “become one with the true and the higher,” though still unmoored by concrete forms.

Both Lippmann and Schmitt accepted the baseline premise of pragmatic conceptions of truth from William James and Charles Peirce. ²⁵ James’ explication of truth was famously captured in his claim that “Truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, is made true by events. Its verity is in fact an event, a process, the process namely of verifying itself, its verification. Its validity is the process of its validation….The true, to put it very briefly, is only the expedient in the way of our thinking, just as the right is only the expedient in the way of our behaving. ²⁶ But, Schmitt takes aim at the British Pluralists and their elevation of this notion of truth as a prescriptive ordering principle in the domain of the political. ²⁷ He saw James’ philosophy as the political theology of Laski’s pluralism, as directly opposed to the centralized authority of the state. ²⁸ Taken on its face, this treatment of truth might be seen as congenial to the ‘truth’ that underwrites Schmitt’s concept of the political. Schmitt in fact commends the British Pluralists’ starting point in concrete political realities, not abstractions. Truth happens to an idea through representation and decision—not through the inaction of contemplation or debate—and right an expedient to our way of acting, specifically in the constituted normative order. But the division of authority in Pluralists’ conception of individuals and associations was the analog of Weber’s warring gods and indeterminacy opposed to the possibility of political form. As Schmitt writes, “Whether there is any total social ethics whatsoever is unclear in both Cole and Laski; the former speaks vaguely of an apparently all-encompassing ‘society’ [English in the original], Laski of ‘humanity’” ²⁹ —a higher abstraction that fails to capture the promise of its diagnosis of social and epistemological conflict. The competing loyalties demanded by social groups threatens both the concrete—and not abstract order of “humanity” or otherwise—of the individual but the normative demand for loyalty to the state. ³⁰

For Schmitt, an abstraction like “humanity” could not satisfy the need for a constituted normative order; pluralism and ultimately liberalism, which built on the conflicting claims to authority and truth claims, had to be answered by the authority of order and the bare, existential reality of persistent human conflict and enmity—or as Lippmann diagnosed, the manufacturing of a will through existential conflict. As Schmitt writes in the Concept of the Political, “In the absence of a pivotal authority, anybody can refer to the correctness of the content…To answer questions of competence by referring to the material is to assume that one’s audience is a fool.” If authority is not self-generated from the truth of content nor authoritative interpretations from self-validating legal norms, then following Hobbes, Schmitt asserts that “authoritas, non veritas facit legem.” ³¹ In complicating Hobbes from an understanding thoroughly underwritten by “the natural sciences” and “in the intensity of the scientific approach,” Schmitt finds “the specific reality of legal life inherent in legal form” in the “the concrete decision, one that emanates from a particular authority.” ³² As Heinrich Meier argues, this understanding of the political must be understood as theological and implicating a conception of self-knowledge dialectically realized via a true enemy. ³³ If the concrete order, not the subjective un-reality of the Romantics or the deliberation undertaken in parliamentary democracies, is created by the personified sovereign—the concrete representation of authority who can decide on the exception—the political is the domain of normative meaning and knowledge.

Ultimately, Lippmann found the obliteration of the self in the Buddha and impersonal nature of judges who contemplate truth as the model and basis of legal and political authority ³⁴ —the precise inversion of Schmitt’s basic claim that only a represented and concrete authority can decide the truth behind a political and legal order. Natural laws were “transcendent” and “not someone’s fancy, someone’s prejudice, someone’s wish or rationalization, a psychological experience and no more. It is there objectively, not subjectively. It can be discovered. It has to be obeyed.” ³⁵ As Dewey would write specifically with regard to Lippmann’s turn to the judiciary as the locus of governmental authority, the elite and insulated branch of government was duly remote from the workings of the public, which approximated Lippmann’s ideal turn to an objective, ahistorical authority. While Lippmann maintained a place for the expert in practical affairs, moral authority thus had a new lodestar in political life: leaders—and judges—who saw truth itself outside of action and experience.

By the mid-1930s, Lippmann found his concern over the totalitarianism could only be answered by theological faith among individual believers in transcendental truths and their authority, which could commit them to liberty against totalitarianism. He turned again to the ideal of disinterestedness, as embodied by natural laws and natural rights, which should be obeyed and appreciated not a representation of a public or personalized will—but as true. Lippmann claimed, moreover, that democracy and political participation by the public does not satisfy our realm of interests “in all kinds of other things, in order, in its rights, in prosperity, in sights and sounds and in not being bored. In so far as spontaneous democracy does not satisfy their other interest, it seems to most men most of the time to be an empty thing.” ³⁶ As Melvin Rogers notes, “his point is it that democracy does not exhaust the realm of what people find meaningful.” Nor is it a space where they are “most authentically human.” ³⁷ Lippmann instead attributes to Kant a liberal faith in freedom as human destiny, who presented the logical apotheosis of this crisis of science and moral meaning. Without the demonstration of the existence of God, Kant insisted instead in the “belief in God, freedom, and immortality” without which “there was no valid and true morality. So he insisted that God must exist to justify morality…. For Kant’s proof of the existence of God was nothing but a plea that God ought to exist…” ³⁸ This faith was the same he praised in the Founders who believed they were “defending rights” as “practicing obedience to God.” ³⁹ “How will you affirm that freedom is better than tyranny,” Lippmann asks, “if you are not able to affirm that it is the destiny of man’s nature that he should be free?” ⁴⁰

Schmitt was able to overcome the dualisms of Kantian philosophy through the material representation of regulative ideals by the sovereign, who could dictate meaning and normativity as more than rational abstractions. The realization and knowledge of a true existential conflict could satisfy, in Lippmann’s terms, “a conception of the world of which the great climax was a prophecy of the fate of creation in terms of his hopes and fears,” and the groundwork for normativity itself. This is the realm of the ontological realized in the ultimate fear of violent death, and the real established through the sovereign decision. In short, the political as grounded through existential threats—of the kind Lippmann saw as spurring a unity of will during World War II—could create meaning and a satisfying and valuable truth about oneself and the order in which one lives. The framework of political theology turns the truth of this conflict and duty to the order established by sovereign authority into an article of faith—not in the destiny towards liberal freedom as Lippmann implored, but in the duty to existential survival and the dignity and meaning conferred by the conflict with an enemy that was itself imbued with value. It is an authoritative decision that itself constitutes a concrete order and true reality for meaningful political action.

III. Dewey and the authority of truth

Dewey’s treatment of truth and inquiry crystallized in 1929 with his Quest for Certainty, which was published in the same year as Lippmann’s A Preface to Morals and Schmitt’s “Neutralizations.” Each of these works took on the legacy of Weber and Kantian and post-Kantian philosophy and the limits of economic and technological thinking and science (traditionally construed) for meaning-making and political life. A key moment in Dewey’s Quest for Certainty turns on the Scientific Revolution, and the bifurcation between epistemological and moral truths that tracked the divergent paths taken by his contemporaries. As Dewey writes, the problem of modern philosophy is “the supposed need of reconciling, of somehow adjusting, the findings of scientific knowledge with the validity of ideas concerning value.” ⁴¹ Beyond claimed divisions between reason and emotion, or cognitive processes and subjective bias, Dewey’s understanding of inquiry and truth or “warranted assertions” ⁴² —and ultimately of democracy—extended to the full domain of experience to include emotions, values, factual and scientific discoveries, and the necessity and potential pitfalls of social interactions.

Though Dewey believed epistemic improvements were intrinsic to the democratic promise and its bases, as recent commentators have noted in bringing Dewey into the fold of epistemic democratic theory, ⁴³ he was decided not a scientistic technocrat with a blind faith in the power of scientific method as the path towards truth. ⁴⁴ Dewey’s claims regarding epistemic improvements should, instead, be understood in tandem with his broader defense of ethical democracy and what Robert Westbrook aptly termed his “democratic epistemology.” ⁴⁵ Dewey was adamant that science cannot yield certain, absolute truth—in the moral, political, or natural world writ large—and that the value of democracy and the basis of its authority was not predicated simply on producing more epistemically valuable outcomes. ⁴⁶ While Dewey is also rightly seen as an important forerunner to contemporary theories of deliberative democracy, ⁴⁷ his radical conception of democracy required more than a reformation of deliberative procedures, or ceding politics to a moral or epistemological relativism conditioned either by rhetorical pleas or cultural particulars. What Putnam and other pragmatists rightly emphasize in Dewey’s democratic commitments is his belief that “the key-note of democracy as a way of life” in Dewey’s oft-cited terms, is “the necessity for the participation of every mature human being in formation of the values that regulate the living of men together: which is necessary from the standpoint of both the general social welfare and the full development of human beings as individuals.” ⁴⁸

IV. Truth, polarization and Deweyan democracy today

The foregoing treatment of the three thinkers demand that we ask specifically what we expect of truth claims in political life and what they have to do with our democratic commitments. Today, the issue presents itself in part as the persistence of deeply anti-rational commitments, conspiratorial thinking, the violent rhetoric of demagogues and increasing tribalism and polarization. We have reason to question how “truth” can remain above the fray of conflict in the flawed play of liberal democracies. The Capitol Hill riots, conspiracies around election fraud, and vaccine misinformation suggest that polarization and mis- and dis-information can fuel deadly and violent consequences; the utopian vision of democratic cooperation and cohesion as a necessity for more informed truth assertions and acceptance itself may be a chimerical prospect or one best suited for the seminar room. ⁸⁶ The long tradition of sovereigns, experts, judges, and philosophers commanding and dictating order from above, including the proclamation of truths and normative meaning, should have inured us to manipulation and a public out of touch with basic truth claims. Moreover, we may be resigned to a postmodern attitude towards truth—of contingency all the way down—that may be claimed as complicit, even if indirectly, in truth’s contemporary precarity.

But we can also arrive at a better framework for translating Dewey’s democratic prescriptions for inquiry in a deeply polarized landscape. Lippmann and Schmitt offer only two failed prescriptions in understanding a path forward (or an entrenchment of existing realities). If there is a sovereign dictation of truth from above, it can only be seen as inherently polarized or an article of faith; the turn to experts and judges in the hopes of appealing to a supra-empirical truth has obvious limitations when experts and officials themselves are the source of distrust and conspiratorial thinking. ⁸⁷ Dewey’s claim is that we must commit instead to the techniques that have already been proven successful in solving problems and determining truths—in the natural sciences, no less in politics on issues of collective values and workaday problems—as the best solutions possible for achieving a commitment to truth claims specifically. What Dewey shared with Schmitt at least on this score was the need for popular action to realize and appreciate concrete realities. But Dewey emphasized the need to cultivate a “scientific attitude” for democracy, because “it is the only assurance of the possibility of a public opinion intelligent enough to meet present social problems.” ⁸⁸ As Dewey fully recognized, manipulation was a self-evident possibility; but it could not be claimed as a permanent condition or symptomatic of the democracy itself. And this was a realization—an “emancipation” ⁸⁹ —because we know that we cannot find nor coerce truths from above.

Research in polarization and information acquisition continues to demonstrate, as Dewey himself early understood, that interpretation of facts, weighing evidence, considering the opinions and claims of others are not processes segregated from preexisting beliefs, social context, or emotive factors writ large—either for those whom we deem to hold warranted beliefs or those who fall prey to misinformation. ⁹⁰ That emotive factors are inflamed and manipulated most pointedly in a polarized political landscape should not be surprising. ⁹¹ Policy prescriptions rarely underwrite political polarization with the same persistence as attitudes and feelings towards opponents and their differences, and perceived threat to identity or status. ⁹² Social isolation and a perceived loss of group membership that may underwrite conspiratorial thinking and polarization can lead to changes at the neural level, which affect decision-making, and thinking, among other effects. ⁹³ Innate intelligence or access to factual information alone are neither markers nor remedies for more enlightened decision-making or logical reasoning—and can in fact be inversely correlated in the backdrop of existing motivated reasoning. ⁹⁴ Those who believe in climate change, for example, are equally likely to disbelieve experts and the legitimacy of their expertise on the basis of whether or not their research tends to comport with their preexisting beliefs on climate change—and not on the fact-finding procedures, methods, institutional qualifications, or peer review process, etc. ⁹⁵

But these facts should not suggest that a normative elevation of friend-enemy distinctions or that a standard of objectivity in inquiry elevated into a metaphysical insistence on a fact/value distinction. Nor should it suggest that rhetoric, power, and appeal to unmediated emotions ought to dictate the domain of politics. As influential studies in deliberative opinion polling demonstrate, interpersonal interactions and dialogue can lead to cooperative problem-solving across diverse inquirers and shifts in seemingly entrenched attitudes. Discussions and interactions with those holding divergent views on climate change, for example, ⁹⁶ have been found to create a cascade of changes in political beliefs, trust in scientific expertise, and attitudes towards perceived out-groups. ⁹⁷ More broadly, interpersonal contact, beyond the context of reason-giving or sharing of competing claims, can lead to changing attitudes towards out-groups, and increased social capital and trust. The longstanding contact hypothesis has suggested the durability of personal contact as a baseline for reducing exclusionary attitudes or bias towards out-groups. ⁹⁸ Moreover, interpersonal contact may have the most salutary effects vis-à-vis polarization when they are grounded in “non-judgmental exchange of narratives”—not in sharing reasons supporting particular stances—but establishing sympathetic and personal interactions. ⁹⁹ That is, interactions need not be a matter of only exchanging diverse viewpoints or reasons behind different political issues, but simply listening to another’s personal story, or having firsthand exposure to individuals who may ultimately hold divergent opinions on political issues. In fact, scholars note also that if pre-motivated and inflamed rhetorical debate on contentious issues of matters of political and constitutional essentials is the only, primary source of interaction, it can reinforce or even create antagonistic perceptions of both opponents and opposing views. ¹⁰⁰ This “backlash” effect appears to be intensifying on social media, insofar as exposure to out-party content can lead to increases in polarization. ¹⁰¹ As such, we ought to take seriously the potential that deliberation on matters of deep political and moral concern alone in our inescapably non-ideal discursive environments may paradoxically invite more entrenched motivating reasoning from participants. Subjecting such reasoning to further critical examination requires challenging the deeper psychological, interpersonal and environmental factors that preexist the polarization of debate. This may never lead to a fundamental change in someone’s comprehensive moral doctrines, but may in practice create be a baseline for norms of inquiry and a “scientific attitude.”

Among individual inquirers, even small-scale tests or nudges, like banners on Facebook posts, or tests prompting critical thinking, may allow us to destabilize existing habits—and ask us to recalibrate or reaffirm our ways of thinking. ¹⁰² If we follow the prescriptions of Dewey, we must look at which habits of information consumption or of thinking more generally are warranted. We can be nudged to pursue different types of inquiry, like following through on our opinions to articulate how we arrived at them and our understanding of the consequences of our beliefs on contentious issue like undocumented immigration. ¹⁰³ Beyond such interventions into individual habits of inquiry, Dewey’s ethical democracy entailed a broader recognition that all facets of everyday life—including neighborhoods, friends, schools, news consumption, social media activity, and workplaces—must be understood as contributing to the ways we think, act, and develop our sense of self. The contemporary precarity of truth cannot be understood—let alone addressed—without recognizing the constitutive role of these factors within our culture, broadly understood. The deeply segregated social environment in U.S., and selective interpersonal contact, is often taken as the backdrop—not the subject—of intervention. ¹⁰⁴ The broader imperative from a Deweyan standpoint is expansive, “all-consuming” reform and not acquiescence to these seemingly entrenched social factors as an inescapable “true reality." This backdrop must be understood as the very context in which “truth” claims are given meaning and made meaningful in everyday habits and action. Per Dewey, the pathologies in inquiry and ‘truth’ are not symptomatic of democracy’s shortcomings, but of democratic deficits within a society.

These findings may not seem radical or unexpected in themselves, but reaffirm that democracy as Dewey envisioned it, is not at odds with truth—but its most urgent safeguard. This reading of Dewey can also take us towards a response to the issues at play in Lippmann’s quest for moral meaning in transcendental truths and Schmitt’s turn to sovereign decisionism. Even if we achieved rational agreement, or had access to unbridled truth, Dewey argued much like Lippmann and Schmitt, we would not find an end to the political process or a good in itself. In his speech, “Philosophy and Democracy,” Dewey spoke explicitly of the limitations of truth, and the need for practical action to orient us in our attempt to make sense of experience. He argued

… no knowledge as long as it remains just knowledge, just apprehension of fact and truth, is complete or satisfying… Even if a man had seen the whole existent world and gained insight into its hidden and complicated structure, he would after a few moments of ecstasy at the marvel thus revealed to him become dissatisfied to remain at that point. He would begin to ask himself what of it? What is it all about? What does it all mean? And by these questions he would not signify the absurd search for a knowledge greater than all knowledge, but would indicate the need for projecting even the completest knowledge upon a realm of another dimension–namely, the dimension of action. ¹⁰⁵

This turn to action and collaboration would never satisfy a desire for certainty, especially in a world riven with contingency, but that fact need not be a source of drift and despair. Uncertainty too requires faith, not in an “supreme and total reality” beyond what our faith may ultimately warrant, but in basic capacities for intelligence of the “common man." As Dewey writes, “Every other form of moral and social faith rests upon the idea that experience must be subjected at some point or other to some form of external control; to some ‘authority’ alleged to exist outside the processes of experience. Democracy is the faith that the process of experience is more important than any special result attained, so that the special results achieved are of ultimate value only as they are used to enrich and order the ongoing process. Since the process of experience is capable of being educative, faith in democracy is all one with faith in experience and education.” ¹⁰⁶ Democratic faith is neither dogmatic, nor wedded to unattainable truths, which, in any case, cannot direct or motivate us in our actions. It requires faith in experience as an ongoing, interactive and social processes, capable of intelligent progress and growth, which define Dewey’s vision of robust participatory democracy. Moreover, a claim that the local or any institution, whether the news media, schools, unions, or the townhall may unequivocally serve a social good congenial to the pursuit of truth is simplistic and naïve—and not the prescription Dewey championed. Instead, the role that these relationships and institutions may play, and the need to foster critical inquiry to assess them, suggest the radical requirements for more engaged and active inquiries that ground our truth claims altogether. Ultimately, the basic—and radical rehabilitation—of democracy as an ethical ideal as Dewey envisioned, in the practice of critical inquiry and social action, suggests a normative and practical framework for moving past the claimed antinomy between democracy and truth.