“The public is a political state”
Dewey arrives at this metaphor to describe the official status of the “public” by defining it as organized system by which representatives of the larger populace are accepted as guardians of their own larger interests. These guardians attain this status through either direct or indirect political means: elections or ineffectual resistance to oppressive authority.
Blinded by Science
The author offers extensive analysis of the connection between scientific knowledge and the motivation for its uses in a way that prefigures the growth of the anti-science movement in the early 21st century. The difference being that Dewey examines the concept intellectually from the perspective of the application being ethically questionable, not the scientific knowledge itself:
“Man, a child in understanding of himself, has placed in his hands physical tools of incalculable power. He plays with them like a child, and whether they work harm or good is largely a matter of accident.”
Predicting the Future
Originally published in 1927, Dewey writes extensively about the impact that technological innovations at the time were having on the communication and the subsequent impact on public opinion engendered by this revolution in communication. Writing nearly a century before, he creates a metaphor far more applicable in the world of 21st century communication by reaching all the way back to the earliest of man’s myths:
“Our Babel is not one of tongues but of the signs and symbols without which shared experience is impossible.”
“Habit is the mainspring of human action”
The metaphor implied in this quote is one of those concepts that is self-evident upon reflection, but proves to be one of the most of the difficult to fully embrace on a personal level. It is the simple reflective chain reaction of habit that is most responsible for almost all social interaction within the public. This truth attains a moment of startling clarity as a result of the shocking simplicity which explains it: habit is behavior which by definition must be learned. The true power within that truth is the unspoken one which all successful authoritarians immediately recognize: what can be learned must first be taught.
More Fortune-Telling
On the subject of the political aspect of the public state, communication, habit and social interaction, Dewey can sometimes seem like a savant from the future who traveled to the past in order to issue his manifesto. In this case, Dewey was literally referring to steam and electricity as the engines of invasion, but without the change of so much as a single word, the metaphor applies perfectly in reference to modern mechanical marvels of the digital age:
“The invasion of the community by the new and relatively impersonal and mechanical modes of combined human behavior is the outstanding fact of modern life.”
