Paul Murphy responds to Chapter 5—Modernist Revolts Against Absolutes (1890-1920) in Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen’s The Ideas That Made America: A Brief History.
Beyond Antifoundationalism
At the end of her chapter on early twentieth-century modernist rebellions, Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen declares that John Dewey was “arguably the most prominent and influential intellectual in the period.” This invites a historical parlor game. How do we judge prominence and influence, exactly? Our retrospective viewpoint complicates judgment, but one suspects Jane Addams, who was herself an influence on Dewey, received broader attention at the time. Herbert Spencer lived until 1903, and surely his laissez-faire individualism provided him with a greater popular following than either Addams or Dewey. If we account for later influence, we might choose W. E. B. Du Bois, whose eloquent dissection of the bifurcated nature of modern American racial identity has enabled many to make sense of their lives in the decades since.
Ratner-Rosenhagen’s estimate of Dewey’s significance reflects the pride of place she gives to Pragmatism and its challenge to “epistemological and ethical foundationalism” in the history of American ideas. In Ratner-Rosenhagen’s narrative, antifoundationalism emerged triumphant by the 1960s. The emancipationist project of that decade, what she describes as “the liberation of blacks from white oppression, women from male dominance, gay pride from homophobia,” was a phenomenon that, for Ratner-Rosenhagen, “started in ideas” that first appeared on the scene in the 1890s. This makes her chapter on “Modernist Revolts: 1890-1920” an important hinge in her survey of US intellectual history. It was during this earlier era that the door swung open on American possibilities. When self-conscious “intellectuals,” defined as younger “oppositional, anti-institutional” thinkers, initiated a revolution in American ethical thinking and national identity, they laid the basis for the emancipation achieved by the 1960s.
As if to prove her point that Pragmatism is the key to US intellectual history, Ratner-Rosenhagen prominently and triumphantly features Richard Rorty, the late twentieth-century postmodern, Neopragmatist, and self-described left-wing Kuhnian, in the conclusion of her book. She explicitly identifies his contributions to the potential progress of American liberalism with “good old American Pragmatism.” Pragmatism, by her account, freed Americans from malignant ideas such as truth, objectivity, and a universal human nature that had oppressed prior generations of Americans. In making this argument, Ratner-Rosenhagen follows Cornel West in equating postmodernism with antifoundationalism and identifying postmodernism with Pragmatism as a “continuous cultural commentary” and a liberating “evasion of epistemology-centered philosophy.”
Ratner-Rosenhagen’s story of antifoundationalist triumph is neither simplistic nor unnuanced. As Ratner-Rosenhagen makes clear, its success in the United States was neither complete nor uncontested. Despite the maddening concision required of this genre (the very short introduction to a vast topic), she gives space in her narrative to plenty of conservative critics of the liberalism born of the Pragmatic turn. William F. Buckley, Russell Kirk, Milton Friedman, and Allan Bloom all make appearances. Bloom, notably, diagnosed the problems of late twentieth-century America as moral nihilism rather than celebrating the Pragmatist triumph of 1960s liberation movements. Ratner-Rosenhagen also recognizes the persistence and resurgence of religion throughout the modern era and acknowledges the disputes among liberals concerning identity politics and the reactionary dangers entailed in rejecting universal claims to human rights. Nevertheless, even if Ratner-Rosenhagen presents the story of US intellectual history in somewhat ambivalent terms, fretting at the conclusion of her book about the lack of “shared moral grounds,” hers is primarily a tale of philosophical enlightenment achieved.
A survey must constrain itself to an accessible, quick narrative, but one might extend the parlor game about intellectual influence by asking what story emerges if one does not craft a narrative so focused on the triumph of antifoundationalism. What if Pragmatism were not the label attached to ideas about the contingent features of knowledge? What if the “new intellectual temper” that Dewey hailed in 1909 and conceived as an unalloyed embrace of science and evolution was not as singularly triumphant as he expected it to be? For Ratner-Rosenhagen, the relativism and pluralism of James and Dewey become central to the “birth pangs of modernization,” if not constitutive of it. If anyone thought beyond the constricting assumptions of the 1890s and before, they were modernist rebels. While Pragmatism was influential for an enormous range of credentialed academic intellectuals and while the progressive increase in personal freedom mattered over time, what if we emphasize the era of “Modernist Revolt” as a period of confusion rather than a revolutionary breakthrough? This shifts the story of American ideas from one of rupture to one that is perhaps more intriguing and useful: an unresolved and ongoing national conflict over moral values. Modernist revolt met conservative resistance from the start, and this dynamic, rather than the victory of antifoundationalism, offers an alternative conceptualization of US intellectual history.
Humanism, Not Pragmatism
Even as Dewey, William James, and myriad other reformers and social scientists embraced contingency and multiplicity, a rear guard of conservatives resisted, including figures such as Irving Babbitt, a Harvard professor of French literature, and the critic and Nation editor Paul Elmer More. Babbitt and More were sophisticated conservatives who did not track with the religious conservatism of their day. Darwinian evolution was less momentous to them than it became for religious fundamentalists in the 1920s. They shared in the historicism that treated the Bible and other religious texts as products of human ingenuity and that revealed a person’s ideas, even a period’s “intellectual temper,” to be products of the time in which one lived.
This was of a piece with a tradition of knowledge based on the close scrutiny of texts, and with “humanism,” which was a relatively new term in the early twentieth century and could mean the intensive study of classical texts independent of religion. Antifoundationalism might, indeed, be an important idea, but the persistent opposition to it and the fights over the revolutionary moral implications of intellectuals’ outlooks seem today the more salient characteristic of the era. Antifoundationalism might have appeared victorious in the liberationist moment of the 1960s, but it is less so from the vantage point of the twenty-first century. As antifoundationalism recedes, humanism may prove the more crucial legacy of the early twentieth century.
What most appalled conservatives such as Babbitt and More, as advocates of the “new humanism,” were reforms that displaced the morally accountable individual with a “social” perspective. The scientific language favored by Pragmatists and Progressives evacuated moralistic judgments of individual character from discussions of public policy. Conservatives such as Babbitt and More vigorously opposed this move. If we shift the lens from Dewey and James to Babbitt and More, the period of “modernist revolt” seems less a crucial step towards cultural and moral relativism than the beginning of the debates over morality and values that we have come to think of as the “culture wars.”
Ratner-Rosenhagen linked Dewey, the great proponent of science as a means of rethinking every field of human endeavor, to the rebellious abolitionist John Brown and the radicalism of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. “Dewey’s labors,” she writes, “like Brown’s and Darwin’s before him, would greatly influence many Americans’ notions of free will and determinism, truth and falsehood, and the possibility for a shared morality in a pluralistic universe.” By fatally undermining the notion that fixed essences were the building blocks of the organic world, Darwin had, in Dewey’s account, repudiated a view of reality that held a stranglehold on thought for centuries. The commitment to science as a way of thinking as well as an ethical code led to a wave of experimental social reform touching most areas of American life. A vibrant cultural pluralism that embraced the nation’s new ethnic and racial diversity resulted.
Ratner-Rosenhagen views James and Dewey as facilitating a philosophical liberation that opened new possibilities for conceiving human freedom. Religious liberals promoted the World’s Parliament of Religions at the Chicago World’s Fair, Pragmatists and Progressives sought to address the “excesses and weaknesses” of industrial life, Addams established a social laboratory at Hull House to foster cooperative ideals, and Boasian anthropologists and reformers such as Ida B. Wells challenged racism. At the root of all these efforts were the key ideas of relativism and pluralism, and they were, in turn, founded in “the proposition that truths are no more, but also no less, than experimental efforts to enable human beings to purposefully negotiate a variable universe.” For Ratner-Rosenhagen, the chief products of modernist revolt can be traced to a revolution in American thought.
However, there are alternative ways to approach the key period from 1890 to 1920 that capture how divisions over ideas and moral norms emerged. In this era, the beginnings of a recurring pattern of “culture wars,” chiefly concerned with what Pragmatists took to be the philosophical basis of emancipation, emerged. We might shift from Pragmatism to humanism as the key thematic intellectual force starting in the late nineteenth century. The meaning of the word remains blurry because various intellectuals claimed it for different purposes. The ideas associated with it were diverse, and the intellectuals who articulated them ranged from professors of literature to ministers and theologians to journalists and philosophers. Nothing perhaps better illustrates the sometimes confusing and often contingent nature of the labels we attach to ideas than the fact that humanism could simultaneously designate pragmatism and its opposite. The young, Oxford-trained scholar and protégé of William James, F. C. S. Schiller, propounded a form of Pragmatism that he called “humanism.” Pragmatism shows, Schiller argued in Humanism: Philosophical Essays, published in 1903, that pure reason is a figment of the imagination and psychologically impossible. Actual reason is “permeated through and through with acts of faith, desires to know and wills to believe, to disbelieve, and to make believe.” The “reconciliation” of “a reason which is humanised and a faith which is rationalised” is unavoidable.[1] “Pure intellection,” Schiller declared, is a “logical fiction.” Instead, “in reality our knowing is driven and guided at every step by our subjective interests and preferences, our desires, our needs, and our ends. These form the motive powers also of our intellectual life.”[2]
Babbitt criticized Schiller’s “so-called humanism” in his essay, “What Is Humanism?,” the first chapter of his defense of classical learning, Literature and the American College (1908). He linked Schiller to James and criticized both for their relativism and abandonment of standards.[3] By contrast, James embraced Schiller’s use of “humanism” and appreciated his attack on the correspondence theory of truth, which he related to the assumption that all experience must rely on some “absolute support,” a metaphysical foundation transcending experience. “But is this not the globe, the elephant and the tortoise all over again?” James declared, evoking primeval origin stories and articulating the antifoundationalist premises central to Pragmatism. “Must not something end by supporting itself? Humanism is willing to let finite experience be self-supporting. Somewhere being must immediately breast nonentity…. Why should anywhere the world be absolutely fixed and finished?”[4] There was more than a simplistic notion of relativism at work in this thinking, but since neither Charles Sanders Peirce nor Dewey was completely enamored of James’s version of the general trend of thought nor his name for it, the terms of debate were in flux. Nonetheless, many Progressive thinkers scorned humanism at the time for its indelible link to the old-fashioned and deadening tradition of classical Greek and Latin instruction that had formed the backbone of the college curriculum prior to the emergence of the modern university. For them, humanism was the old fogey targeted in their modernist revolt.
As pioneering psychologists, Dewey and James led the way in rejecting the older faculty psychology upon which Babbitt and More based their own social criticism. Faculty psychology had posited the mind as composed of discrete elements (or faculties), such as the “understanding” and the “will,” in a tradition that could be traced to Aristotle.[5] The emergence of modern social scientific disciplines, such as psychology, were of a piece with the educational reforms associated with university reformers such as Harvard’s Charles William Eliot who began the process of eliminating classical requirements and opening up the curriculum, allowing for the proliferation of new fields of study and creating the modern research university. In this context, “humanists” were defenders of a widely loathed classical curriculum and the rote methods of instruction that went with it, as well as an antique understanding of the mind (an older paradigm, as Thomas Kuhn would say). Humanism was the opposite of the progressive and rebellious. To men such as Dewey, humanists stood for the archaic and obsolete.
Babbitt, by contrast, hailed the wisdom of ancient Greece not as antiquated nostalgia, but rather as the guide for modern behavior. He and More railed against soft-hearted “humanitarians” who substituted a diffuse and intrusive compassion for firm moral judgments. Babbit and More defended “dualism,” which to them meant the recognition of a higher, non-material realm normally veiled from human consciousness. It was, nonetheless, still perceivable. More located access in moments of ascetic spiritual withdrawal, Babbitt in works of great intellectual or artistic imagination. For both, faculty psychology provided the idea that will, conceived as a part of mind, impels action. A thinker such as Jonathan Edwards would suggest that a converted Christian benefited from the indwelling power of grace that could mold a good will and thus moral actions. To James and Dewey, loyalty to such views of human nature was unfathomable. Modern experimental psychology conceived the brain as a sensing organ guiding the organism to adaptive responses. While James and Dewey adopted a non-judgmental view that allowed one to think in new ways about social problems, Babbitt and More, by contrast, hearkened to a paradigm focused on moral judgment of the individual. They might talk of dualism, but their thought could have more than a trace of prevenient grace.
Conservatives and Pragmatists would agree that humans are rational creatures and should, when behaving rationally, act on what they know to be true, but Pragmatists complicated our notions of “belief” and “truth,” in large part by devaluing them. “Truth” is simply a term we apply to a proposition that has been tested, found to work, and therefore is useful, nothing more. Pragmatists came to understand that what we believe is not necessarily premised on what is true, even in this Pragmatic sense. For Dewey, belief receded into the background. The mind was simply one of the organism’s instruments for understanding and adjusting its relation to the environment. As the organism adapts successfully, it evolves, with consciousness only a sophisticated and evolved functionality. An idea is an organism’s plan of action or hypothesis, retained and reused if it leads to successful results. Truth is merely our label for a plan that succeeds in resolving a problematic situation. “Ideas were the instruments of an organism,” Bruce Kuklick observed of Deweyan instrumentalism. “They were true when they enabled it to survive well, to navigate experience, and to link organism and environment harmoniously.”[6]
As opposed as the conservative humanists were to the pragmatists in political and social terms, they breathed the same climate of ideas. In that realm, unorthodox notions about self and knowledge were hard to avoid. Their viewpoint was both old (they were students of various ancient religious and moral systems, including Hinduism and Buddhism as well as Greek and Roman philosophy) and new. Babbitt stood for a “new” humanism and often defended his critical position as the product of reason and experience. Moreover, both Babbitt and More accepted the revolutionary implications of what More called “historism,” a movement that Friedrich Meinecke identified as historicism in Die Entstehung des Historismus (1936) and called “one of the greatest intellectual revolutions that Western thought has experienced.” The new historical approach, which blossomed in the nineteenth century, held that everything in the past, all values and institutions, must be understood as the products of a specific time and place and must be understood only in terms of the past, using historical methods and making no metaphysical appeals outside of history.[7]
Even as Babbitt and More opposed pragmatism, they did not shrink from the implications of this new set of ideas. Two hundred years ago, More noted in 1903, truth was “something fixed and unalterable.” For those in the past, “Religion had been established once for all by a perfect revelation; and as in religion so in culture, the forms of art and literature had received their final form.” Modern thought, however, no longer allowed for such certainty. The historic sense was “that perception of growth leading through ceaseless change which tends to give everything a value relative only to its time and circumstances, that feeling for the past as something different from the present and subject to different laws—all this was destined to act on the authority of the classics like a dissolving acid.”[8] Progressives hailed science as the basis for a new study of society, promising transformative change. Babbitt and More proposed to preserve an older tradition of thought even as they cast about for a new language in which to present it. They realized modern life required a new mode of thinking.
The exclusion of the humanists from our histories is understandable. James’s and Dewey’s hostility to Babbitt and More was self-evident. One suspects, too, that liberal-minded historians have not found them particularly interesting, grounded as they were in foundationalist thinking. For this reason, they do not fit into Ratner-Rosenhagen’s necessarily abbreviated account. Babbitt and More represented the “genteel tradition,” a Victorian ideology of culture premised on ideas of the mind long dispatched. Although Babbitt was a colleague of James at Harvard and More edited the Nation between 1909 and 1914, they would have been the first to admit their voices were marginal. Both men also maintained a focus on matters of collegiate curriculum, the status of criticism in English departments, and the broader world of letters that was often distant from broader public debates. Even so, they crafted a critical language that their supporters loyally duplicated in the 1920s.
Babbitt was the more combative of the two; More the more insistent ideologue. Babbitt re-fashioned Victorian-era injunctions to self-control as a classical doctrine of moral discipline grounded in timeless truths, none more important than the “law of measure,” which he phrased as “nothing too much.” Both he and More studied Eastern religious traditions in the 1890s, and More wove a defense of philosophical dualism throughout the wide-ranging literary criticism he produced in the 1900s and 1910s, often evaluating literary texts in terms of the philosophies that informed them. They insisted, lifting phrases from Ralph Waldo Emerson, that humans possessed a nature distinct from other animals and so were subject to a “law for man” as well as a “law for thing.” Much like Emerson, about whom they were ambivalent, a person intuited the higher law, a permanent reservoir of values that could be articulated in art, literature, and philosophy. Through discipline and study, a person can cultivate this part of the self, which functions as an “inner check” on the more instinctual drives, or, in Babbitt’s variation on the popular vitalist philosopher Henri Bergson’s élan vital, which impelled evolutionary progress, the frein vital, which countered it.[9]
The conservative humanists and progressive-minded thinkers were clearly at odds, but it is important to see on what they differed and on what they agreed. “Modernists,” in Ratner-Rosenhagen’s terms, were seeking liberation, and yet Babbitt and More, and perhaps many other conservatives, were modern in their own fashion, even as they retained certain older paradigms. Perhaps, then, we should see modernity as less about progress than continuity, less decisively scientific and streamlined, and better envisioned as a palimpsest that reveals a weird amalgam of ideas, some scientific, others not at all. The conservatives saw their disagreement with the pragmatists in a consistently moral light. To Babbitt and More, progressive thinkers were attempting a moral reformation of American society that would do away with individual moral judgment and ignore the ancient imperative to moral self-discipline.
Humanism as Modernist Movement
In their heyday, progressive intellectuals and cultural radicals, inspired by the knowledge and authority of scientific theory, talked of a “new morality,” which could mean a relaxation of repressive attitudes toward sexuality and narrow definitions of gender roles but, on a deeper level, suggested that previous ways of thinking about individual moral responsibility were wrong. Pragmatists such as Dewey advocated moral relativism, which derived from the conviction that moral rules were merely social conventions but also from the recognition that morality changed as society evolved and new technological capacities emerged. A new culture and society should not be held back by the moralism of the old. The New Humanists, such as More and Babbitt, objected.
To them, Pragmatism left progressives unable to assign responsibility for personal failings and therefore free to restlessly innovate ill-conceived reform programs. In their terms, the Progressives lacked standards; they repudiated permanent truths. Progressive thinkers, including the Pragmatists, might well have agreed. They were indeed advancing different moral values. As social democratic reformers, they wanted to weaken the assumption that law, morality, and economic principles were rooted in nature or in timeless and universal truths. Progressives saw that the values at the heart of Victorian morality, such as self-reliance, freedom, and responsibility, informed an individualism that constituted a stubborn barrier to progressive change in America. In place of strict Victorian moralism, many social scientists proposed a language of organisms seeking positive adjustments to an environment with the aim of achieving a better life. The older philosophies, by contrast, precluded an outlook that was “social,” a pervasive Progressive value that signaled a recognition of human interdependence and an insistence on interconnection as a moral norm.
Babbitt and More were therefore dismissive of authors who depicted human beings as only products of their environments. More believed Henrik Ibsen and Maxim Gorky displayed the failings of modern literature because they “lost the sense of community in the moral or spiritual world” and then “turned to that animal nature which is common to all men, though more or less held in repression.” The “Parisian professors of naturalism,” More declared, “sought nature in the gutter and never in the clear stream.” In assessing modern literature, More looked to its moral implications. Emile Zola’s characters “found no central faculty, no mystery of creation, inexplicable and inexpressible in its action, no freedom of will, no character properly speaking, but only sensual desires working through material organs, and these desires were commonly filthy.”[10]
Progressives preferred an ostensibly morally neutral social scientific language of adjustment, functionalism, and efficiency. Ratner-Rosenhagen quotes Walter Lippmann on the progressive reformer’s approach to “life”: “We have to deal with it deliberately, devise its social organization, alter its tools, formulate its method, educate and control it.” Even as they evacuated the public sphere of certain types of moral judgment, however, cultural modernists introduced a new set of moral values, such as open-mindedness, tolerance, and pluralism, and new terms of moral opprobrium, such as “puritanical,” narrow-minded, intolerant. For conservatives, by contrast, truth had a moral meaning and constituted the basis of cultural authority.
Both sides understood the cultural debate to be about morality, even if the Pragmatists, by advocating pluralism and a consequentialist ethics, self-consciously evaded moral talk. Both also proceeded from a secular viewpoint, at least in the first two decades of the century. While More gradually became a sort of Christian apologist, Babbitt remained insistently secular, although increasingly accommodating followers who were ready to dispense with humanism and simply embrace Christianity as an alternative to science. By the 1930s, liberal Deweyans and like-minded thinkers insisted the issue was science versus religion—an impulse derived from the evolution debates of the 1920s and the advent of new religious viewpoints, such as Reinhold Niebuhr’s Christian realism and Roman Catholic Thomism in the 1930s.[11] By the 1920s, a significant number of thinkers sympathetic to the “new humanism” agreed, notably T.S. Eliot, who insisted humanism required Christian faith as a source of ultimate authority and increasingly conceived the modern cultural conflict as between science and religion.[12] One might call Eliot an anti-modern modernist for his proclaimed allegiance to classicism, royalism, and Anglo-Catholicism, but one might also simply say modernism and modernist revolts are complex and do not lead in one direction.
Most significantly, both the humanists and pragmatists conceived the basis of modern life in terms of ideas. They both turned to ideas as the basis of reform. The turn to a society based on ideas was, from a certain perspective, the reform they most promoted. Modern life required a “point of view” or “world-formula.”[13] In “The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy,” Dewey contended that knowledge was not defined by fixity but rather the “mutual interactions of changing things.” This was the basis of the “new intellectual temper” that Ratner-Rosenhagen highlights.[14] For Dewey, that temper was modernist—nature vouchsafed no timeless values, as conservatives suggested—but it was also intellectual in a particular way. Both the Pragmatists and conservatives appreciated that ideals were a matter of conviction, not necessarily of reason. We simply hold them as matters of faith. All the same, both wanted to believe that intellectuals might shape beliefs and ideals. Dewey hoped a new temper premised on scientific inquiry, or the method of intelligence, might test one’s deepest convictions. Babbitt and More expected that immersion in great art and the classics might instill beliefs (a method Dewey dismissed as authoritarian in nature).
Ratner-Rosenhagen streamlines her progressive narrative, highlighting the rebels’ focus on forecasting a future of moral freedom, but the “modernist revolt” conceived as a turn to ideas—as a claim of authority by intellectuals—was actually more of a joint production of progressive and conservative intellectuals. In modern life, both argued, one’s “point of view” or worldview was of immense moment, as was the epistemological question of the grounds of knowledge. Intellectuals, whether they fell on the progressive or the conservative side, whether they rejected certain precepts or embraced them, treated religion, politics, and moral thinking in terms of ideas. Babbitt and his like-minded peers often conceived their advocacy of the new humanism in martial terms, as an ongoing conflict of ideas in which Babbitt was their general. Debates about public issues acquired a new background framing in the intellectual history of Western civilization. Pragmatism’s turn to how ideas actually played out hides the very centrality, even faith, in this idea as a core belief.
When More assessed the moral viewpoint of “humanitarians”—the progressive social reformers inspired by the Pragmatic turn—he traced the problem back to ideas as well, to Romanticism and specifically Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the French philosophe who propounded a natural religion that assumed the innate goodness of human beings. The progressive “social” outlook, along with a philosophical naturalism that rejected the ancient identification of morality with a higher, “human” self, became, in his view, merely a contemporary fruit of this philosophy. More attributed the “revolution of the eighteenth century” (what some had started to call the “Enlightenment”) to a series of intellectual transformations, stretching back to English Deism, with Rousseau at the nexus. “[W]e shall find that the guiding principles and the original dynamic impulse of the age came from England, that the translation of these into a homogenous social law was the work of France, and that their conversion into a metaphysical formula was finally accomplished by Germany.”[15] It was the type of sweeping pronouncement on the role of ideas in Western civilization that marked a very characteristic type of writing about modern culture in the early and mid-twentieth century.
Progressives would tell a different story, as, for example, in the Columbia University philosopher John Herman Randall, Jr.’s influential The Making of the Modern Mind: A Survey of the Intellectual Background of the Present Age (1926). Although not uncritical, Randall defined modernity in terms of a faith in science. “All modern philosophies are this-worldly, rather than other-worldly; they are humanistic in their emphasis, and social in their ideals,” he wrote.[16] Modern progressives, it should be noted, could easily identify humanism with their philosophy, as did Schiller and, to a degree, Randall. English freethinkers assumed the label “humanism” in the late nineteenth century, as did American Unitarian ministers, who, beginning with John Dietrich in 1915, used the term to describe a non-theistic religious viewpoint. These religious thinkers proposed a non-theistic, scientific religion in the “Humanist Manifesto” of 1933 (a document signed by both Randall and Dewey) and supported a journal entitled The New Humanist.
John Herman Randall, The Making of the Modern Mind: A Survey of the Intellectual Background of the Present Age (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1926).
The conservative humanists and the liberal humanists aligned in seeing modernity as determined by ideas, a view to which conservatives have adhered more consistently throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first centuries. They more persistently assert that “ideas have consequences” and readily attribute great moral significance to philosophical worldviews, such as “secular humanism.” As much as pragmatists refused to ascribe a moral meaning to truth and rejected the conservative humanists’ insistence on permanent truths, their dispute was less about epistemology and more about specific reforms. The Deweyan appeal to science and adjustment could have the effect of obfuscating the moral values latent in the Progressive project, but by broadening the scope of intellectual history beyond the now-conventional focus on James, Dewey, and the pragmatists, we begin to glimpse a more accurate story of modernist revolts.[17]
The Incomplete Modernist Revolt
Ratner-Rosenhagen ends her chapter with a discussion of Randolph Bourne, one of the generation of Young Intellectuals who attempted to reimagine an American literature capable of advancing progressive emancipationist and pluralistic goals. Bourne died of influenza shortly after the end of World War I, but his memory burned brightly into the 1920s, due not only to his advocacy for a cosmopolitan culture but also for his lonely challenge of John Dewey’s embrace of the Wilsonian war effort in 1917. The problem Bourne identified, according to Ratner-Rosenhagen, “was his former mentor’s wielding pragmatic instrumentalism instrumentally only, using it to concede power to the is of global conflict rather than to the ought of fostering global peace and more democratic values at hand.”
Like other scholars, Ratner-Rosenhagen does not fault Dewey’s Pragmatism for his support of a savage war that did not, in fact, lead to democratic reconstruction, but rather its grave misapplication.[18] In “Twilight of Idols,” however, Bourne was less sanguine. He attributed the failure of Dewey and the progressive and labor intellectuals aligned with him to an inability to define values. He wrote witheringly of the “young men being sucked into the councils at Washington and into war-organization everywhere.” These men possessed “creative intelligence,” a Progressive buzzword. They knew how to apply “scientific method” to “political and industrial problems.” Tellingly, he credited the limitations of these young, highly adept intellectual workers to the shift in higher education away from “classical studies” to training in “political and economic values.” For all their “technical aptitude,” they lacked a “philosophy of life,” they did not aspire to “democratic goals.” Lacking a “poetic vision,” this well-trained “younger intelligentsia” opted to join the misguided “national enterprise of war.” [19] They failed “as value-creators, even as value-emphasizers”.[20] Bourne declared, “To those of us who have taken Dewey’s philosophy almost as our American religion, it never occurred that values could be subordinated to technique.” Dewey, in Bourne’s view, had assumed a consensus on values that did not exist. He had meant to start with values, but he had failed to clarify how those values are created.[21] Babbitt and More, who found Wilson’s democratic aspirations anathema during the World War I era, were noticeably cooler to the war than Dewey.[22] Their conservative humanist critique of Pragmatism is not quite the same as Bourne’s. Nevertheless, their ideas echoed his turn to vision over technique and Bourne’s insistence on the power of the classical tradition to provide a foundation for modernist action.
Widening the scope of analysis of “modernist revolt” suggests the precarious and contingent nature of the ideas that made America and the increasingly important role of the intellectuals who deployed them. Noticing the contested use of humanism as a term provides a more comprehensive view of the emerging divisions among Americans. Many of these divisions had to do with the role of intellectuals and the formation of values. In the first decades of the twentieth century, humanists of all varieties persistently foregrounded the question of values in a way many liberals and progressives did not, which, along with the contested and often confusing conceptualization of “humanism,” contributed to their marginality.
By the last decades of the twentieth century, a philosophy premised on antifoundationalism and anti-essentialism would require, in Richard Rorty’s terms, “intersubjectivity,” “unforced agreement,” and “reciprocal loyalty.” These were all features of grounded communities that liberal individualism and modernity tended to erode. Many humanists and progressive-minded intellectuals, eventually including even Dewey, sensed these limitations at the time, contemplating whether a shared faith or intellectual synthesis existed that could foster consensus in a world built around ideas, and not permanent truths. No such synthesis was forthcoming, either from Pragmatism or humanism. Overall, there was a revolt, as Ratner-Rosenhagen contends, but unlike her progressive narrative of Pragmatic triumph, the “culture wars” that the modernist moment initiated have continued to rage. No peace has ever emerged from the rebellion.
About the Author
Paul Murphy is completing a study on humanist thought and the roots of modern American cultural divisions entitled “The Dividing of the American Mind: The Search for a New Humanism and the Debate over the Role of Intellect in the United States, 1900-1950.” He teaches at Grand Valley State University in West Michigan.
Notes
[1] F. C. S. Schiller, Humanism: Philosophical Essays (1903; reprint, Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries, 1969), 6-7.
[2] Schiller, Humanism, 10.
[3] Irving Babbitt, Literature and the American College: Essays in Defense of the Humanities (1908; reprint, Chicago: Gateway Editions, 1956), 17-18.
[4] William James, The Meaning of Truth: A Sequel to “Pragmatism” (1969; reprint, New York: Greenwood Press, 1969), 91-92.
[5] In his study of American selfhood in this era, Daniel Walker Howe stressed the centrality of faculty psychology, a set of ideas he believes as influential in American social thought as Calvinist theology, Lockean liberalism, or civic republicanism. Daniel Walker Howe, Making the American Self: Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). On the importance of faculty psychology in American college and university life, see also Lawrence Veysey, The Emergence of the American University (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), 22-23; Julie A. Reuben, The Making of the Modern University: Intellectual Transformation and the Marginalization of Morality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 19; and Lewis Perry, Intellectual Life in America: A History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 37-38, 80-81.
[6] Bruce Kuklick, Churchmen and Philosophers: From Jonathan Edwards to John Dewey (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985), 245.
[7] Frederick Beiser, “Historicism,” in Oxford Handbook of Continental Philosophy, eds. Brian Leiter and Michael Rosen (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 155, 157-158, 174.
[8] [Paul Elmer More], “Classics and the Historic Sense,” Independent, Jan. 8, 1903, p. 105. This essay continues themes developed in one the previous week. See [Paul Elmer More], “Classics and the Teachers of Them,” Independent, Jan. 1, 1903, pp. 47-48. More’s biographer Arthur Dakin considered the first published essay as possibly written by More but could not state so authoritatively. More was literary editor of The Independent at the time.
[9] For a reliable brief analysis of new humanist thought, see J. David Hoeveler, Jr., The New Humanism: A Critique of Modern America, 1900-1940 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1977), 31-49. For an even more succinct summary, see C. Hartley Grattan, “The New Humanism and the Scientific Attitude,” in The Critique of Humanism: A Symposium, ed. C. Hartley Grattan (1930; reprint, Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1968), 15-16. For Babbitt’s early formulation, see “What Is Humanism?,” in Literature and the American College, 1-21; and later formulation, see Irving Babbitt, “Humanism: An Essay at Definition,” in Humanism and America: Essays on the Outlook of Modern Civilisation, ed. Norman Foerster (1930; reprint, Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1967), 25-51.
[10] Paul Elmer More in New York Evening Press, Oct. 8, 1904, and Independent, March 5, 1903, respectively. Arthur Hazard Dakin, A Paul Elmer More Miscellany (Portland, ME: Anthœnsen Press, 1950), 17, 23.
[11] Andrew Jewett, Science Under Fire: Challenges to Scientific Authority in Modern America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2020).
[12] T. S. Eliot, “Second Thoughts on Humanism,” in Eliot, Selected Essays (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1950), 429-428.
[13] James used the term “world-formula” in Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking (New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1907), 50.
[14] John Dewey, The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy and Other Essays in Contemporary Thought (1910; reprint, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1965), 6, 1.
[15] Paul Elmer More, “Rousseau,” in Shelburne Essays: Sixth Series: Studies of Religious Dualism (1909; reprint, New York: Phaeton Press, 1967), 215.
[16] John Herman Randall, Jr., The Making of the Modern Mind: A Survey of the Intellectual Background of the Present Age (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1926), 563.
[17] Andrew Jewett has recently elucidated the major and broad-based political and ethical project entailed in “scientific democracy” in the first half of the twentieth century See Andrew Jewett, Science, Democracy, and the American University: From the Civil War to the Cold War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012); and Andrew Jewett, Science Under Fire: Challenges to Scientific Authority in Modern America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020).
[18] Robert Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), 195-212; Casey Nelson Blake, Beloved Community: The Cultural Criticism of Randolph Bourne, Van Wyck Brooks, Waldo Frank, & Lewis Mumford (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 157-180.
[19] Randolph Bourne, “Twilight of Idols,” in The American Intellectual Tradition, Vol. II: From 1865 to the Present, 7th ed., eds. David A. Hollinger and Charles Capper (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 199.
[20] Bourne, “Twilight of Idols,” 201.
[21] Bourne, “Twilight of Idols,” 199.
[22] Thomas R. Nevin, Irving Babbitt: An Intellectual Study (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984), 120-122; Arthur Hazard Dakin, Paul Elmer More (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960), 166-167.