"Instead of thinking of our own dispositions and habits as accommodated to certain institutions we have to learn to think of the latter as expressions, projections and extensions of habitually dominant personal attitudes."
John Dewey - Creative Democracy - The Task Before Us
John Dewey - Creative Democracy - The Task Before Us
Gonna be a wet blanket for a moment.
If we think about this with regards to our political, cultural, and social institutions, we might want to consider the kinds of "habitually dominant personal attitudes" expressed through the ongoing creative project of democracy. (2/n)
If we think about this with regards to our political, cultural, and social institutions, we might want to consider the kinds of "habitually dominant personal attitudes" expressed through the ongoing creative project of democracy. (2/n)
By "habitually dominant personal attitudes," Dewey doesn't mean something so banal as the treatment of racism as a "personal problem," but the ways that our habits form what Dewey calls our personal character which directs us towards specific modes of transaction. (3/n)
Put another way, he's talking about the ways our attitudes, embodied in habit, structure the ends we seek in all of the relations we adopt with the world. This encompasses everything from our religious faith to our identities to the very ways we move our bodies. (4/n)
In short, it is experience. Our institutions are expressions of our experience in the world and attempts to hold firm and reproduce our ways of experiencing in the world such that they maintain those ways of experiencing. The question here is "whose experience?" (5/n)
Moreover, "whose experience of democracy," and what the meaning of that experience is.
And here, I'm going to be blunt: our "democracy," and I doubt Dewey would call it such, is a projection of white supremacist experience and the hardening of habits to maintain it. (6/n)
And here, I'm going to be blunt: our "democracy," and I doubt Dewey would call it such, is a projection of white supremacist experience and the hardening of habits to maintain it. (6/n)
To wit, you can define white supremacy however you like as the context of white supremacy doesn't quite matter for Dewey on this point: what matters is that our institutions are projections of white supremacy as experience, which it seeks to maintain at all costs. (7/n)
And, insofar as it seeks to maintain white supremacy as experience through institutionalization, which includes the fundamental rejection of other experiences as the ground for the development of institutions, we will never live in a democracy no matter the president. (8/n)
Because the institutions themselves will not admit of the experiences of the marginalized BECAUSE they are projections of the habitually dominant personal attitude of white supremacy.
You need only look at how close this election is for confirmation. (fin)
You need only look at how close this election is for confirmation. (fin)
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