Justice, Democracy, and Liberation: Ambedkar’s Navayana Pragmatism and the Tortuous Path of Social Democracy

ABSTRACT

Democracy seems at a crossroads. The challenges of leaders with despotic tendencies, voters who are increasingly polarized, and the challenges of misinformation all align to give our hopes in government for the people and by the people a renewed skepticism. Which people? What groups? These are the questions that are increasing asked when we turn to who will vote for leaders, who gives a government legitimacy, and who we want involved in our politics from our own community. In the United States, partisans have record levels of animosity for those on the other side, seeing them as ignorant or as badly motivated on the whole. But these are the people that must be included in our democratic government, and these are the people who live side by side with opposing partisans in our communities. There is no escaping the fundamental challenge of democracy: to find a path forward to more just and satisfying states of individual and communal being among others who often and vociferously disagree with us about the contents and methods of achieving those end states. In short, democracy promises some level of discord in the present and the future as an inescapable feature. The present situation democracies find themselves in, from the United States to India and Ukraine, might make us wonder that the whole enterprise is fraught with future failure.

Yet democracy is often taken as the state that most fully instantiates liberty and freedom, and one that is the most promising path to achieve future liberty. Despite its historical and present injustices, democracy seems to many to offer a way or an opening to reconstructing itself and remedying oppressions. And democracy always seems to have its share of injustice. Abhorrent practices like slavery have bedeviled the American democracy, for instance, and concerns with systemic racism and white supremacy continue to shape our discussions about the hopes of democracy. But in efforts to solve or remedy sources of injustice, what are the obstacles we face? What are the sources of backlash, or inevitable tradeoff, when it comes to the means and forces some in the community might employ? The problem of liberation, emancipatory politics, and democratic agonism all become intertwined with the intractable reality that democracy entails ongoing disagreement among partisans that often threatens to undermine any peace or unanimity that might seem to prevail.

This article explores the intersection between freedom and democracy, but with an unusual inspiration: the critique of caste oppression offered by the Indian politician, civil rights activist, and pragmatist, Bhimrao Ambedkar (1891–1956). Being a so-called untouchable (now denoted by the self-chosen label of “Dalit”), Ambedkar acutely knew the pinch of social injustice. Being a devoted student of John Dewey during the young Indian’s time at Columbia University in 1913–16, Ambedkar also intimately knew the contours of Dewey’s view of democracy as a way of life. Using Ambedkar’s political theory as a resource, I explore the inherent conflicts we might face in attempting to fulfill the democratic project. Political theory from India is often overlooked in the West; Dalit theorists and the insights that can be derived from caste oppression are virtually non-existent in our discourses. As I argue elsewhere, Ambedkar’s thought transcends historical questions and ranges into a unique and useful approach that can be called Navayana pragmatism, a “new vehicle” of pragmatism that appropriates some of Dewey’s ideals and methods and engages orientations such as Buddhism to give an intriguing reading of political and spiritual liberation, all with a democratic overlay.¹ Here I construct my reading of what we can use from Ambedkar’s thought and our current political moment to argue for a renewed, and semi-transcendent approach to the ends and means of democratic community-making.

The Challenges of Caste, the Challenges of Democracy

One can approach democracy as a political system that avoids the violent and oppressive extremes of other ways of organizing political theory. Part of the draw of the solution of democracy comes in recognizing the problems it tries to avoid. First, there is the arbitrary or harmful application of force—including violence—upon those under the umbrella of governmental power. There are overt and covert ways of organizing and employing such force. Second, there is the problem of corrigibility. Many authoritarian forms of organizing political power do not allow for the correction or melioration of mistakes, harmful practices, or unjust relations of parties among other parties. Democracy is said to give a way to address problems while not causing new problems. It allows for widespread critique, some of which might be efficacious in remedying the problems that many identify.

Judging from the themes in much of the present discourse among many scholars and cultural critics in the West, some of the most pressing and enduring problematics are those of racism and colonialism. These merge in the critiques of past and on-going domination of non-white nations and communities by European countries and white communities. These gain specific traction in historical problems such as the oppression entailed by the slave trade and slavery in the Americas, and in the domination of millions of south Asians by British forces and entities. Liberation from the oppressive governments and structures is emphasized by such approaches, including colonial governments and the systems they spawned and left behind even after they were removed. In America, for instance, the challenges of liberation and empowerment for disempowered native peoples and for the descendants of those crushed by the institution of chattel slavery retain a pressing focus. The problematics of these sites of oppression are largely driven by the concerns of racism, although economic class often intersects with such matters. Democratic hope and realistic liberation often operate on the plateaus of recognition and remediation for such groups.

These problems are undoubtedly large and pressing for democracies around the globe. But another challenge for the democratic project, one not totally in accord with the narratives of colonialism and anti-colonialism, as well as race and racism, also demands attention. This is the battle against caste. Caste (varna) is a complex concept and contested historical phenomena,² but simplifying matters, one can say it denotes a hierarchy of valuation based upon birth. In the south Asian context, castes are delineated into the main categories of brahmins (priests), kshatriyas (warriors), vaishyas (merchants), and shudras (servants). One is identified as a member of a caste because of the birth of their parents previously into that caste. Despite some modern attempts to disassociate varna as quality from caste, one does not see shudras by quality being born in families that have historically been Brahmin and so forth. One’s occupation is traditionally predicated on their assigned caste, and there is a essentialism in almost all notions of varna and caste.

More importantly, one’s value and worth are predetermined by one’s birth caste. Who is important and who is of lesser importance are all determined by complex caste rules. Even more to the point, the system of caste rests upon a crushed bottom level, the avarna or “untouchable” castes. These groups are excluded from the upper echelons and lower levels; below even the servant and agricultural classes, one finds those whose mere presence is religiously polluting. These “untouchables,” or Dalits (the Marathi, and self-chosen, word for “crushed”), were segregated from other castes in village life, forced to do menial and undesirable tasks, and abused fiercely by any other caste individual who desired to do so. The segregation and abuse of the putative “lower” castes and Dalits continues today, in much the same way that racism exists even after chattel slavery has ended. It is a practice based upon humiliation, disrespect, and violence at many levels.³ As Anand Teltumbde details,⁴ there are over 320 million Dalits in India, most of whom suffer at some point from economic lack, physical segregation, and harassment and physical harm. If, as Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “an injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,”⁵ then caste oppression in India and in its diaspora represents a mass of human suffering that should not be ignored.

The uniqueness and perniciousness of caste comes from its connection to religion. While group stratification can be found in a range of cultures, the specific challenge hundreds of millions of Dalits and scheduled classes face in India stem from a specifically Hindu framework. Building on texts—and common interpretations of these texts—ranging from the Rig Veda to the Laws of Manu, caste is inscribed in deep ways upon the world and society. The doctrine of karma and rebirth also underwrite caste; actions have consequences, it is said, and those consequences adhering to one’s self do not end at death. Rebirth must be guided by something, and past karma fulfills that role. One is born into a caste without any choice in the matter, in this life or the previous one. Caste rules also channelize marriage unions, leading Meena Dhanda to define caste as “a category of social belonging, attributed because of birth within a group, itself placed amongst a historically shifting hierarchy of groups, subject to economic, political, and status rewards for continued allegiance, and losses or penalties for transgression of group boundaries maintained by endogamy (marriage restricted to individuals of the same caste).”⁶ There is no escape from one’s positioning as an instance of that caste; agency or works will not save you from the burden of caste.

Isabel Wilkerson has provocatively argued that caste and racism, as well as antisemitism, all share many similarities.⁷ All evoke and enable a hierarchy that crushes the autonomy of individuals and groups, and that becomes second nature and habitualized such that meaningful liberation is often hard to accomplish. While such critiques are undoubtedly useful—perhaps most so in bringing Western attention to caste through the frequently accepted vocabulary of racial oppression—the metaphysical and practical differences matter. Caste is important because it points out a way of spelling out the problem of democracy, as well as the path to a solution to this problem, in ways that augment the readings of systemic racial oppression often engaged in emancipatory philosophy. Casteism is not based on skin color or race, nor is it predicated on the dominance implicated by Western colonialism. One can see the friction the anti-caste narrative creates with the anti-colonial narratives so foregrounded by those pursuing social justice in the West; when lawsuits alleging caste discrimination in silicon valley were filed in California courts and when the California State University system moved to add caste to its discrimination policy, some south Asian intellectuals and Hindu-affiliated advocacy groups in America decried these moves as “Hinduphobia” and as marginalizing a group (south Asians) already confronted with racism and the legacies of colonialism. Proponents of the inclusion of caste into Western discrimination policies reply that it is both possible to be an oppressed individual (e.g., an “upper” caste member of the diaspora in the West) and practice this invidious form of discrimination. As can be seen by the debates of caste discrimination in the West, the terrain of social justice, race, and caste is hotly contested.⁸ I bring up these instances from America not to settle issues, but to show how the anti-caste narrative jars with received views of what constitutes oppression and what practices should guide emancipation.

Let us take our lead from a thinker who is often left out of our stories about democracy, and about pragmatism—Bhimrao Ambedkar. Born a mahar (a Dalit caste), Ambedkar knew all too well about the exclusion and oppression caste proffered. Unlike most of his countrymen, both higher caste like Gandhi and his fellow Dalits, he traveled to America for an education around the time of World War I. The importance of his American experience cannot be underestimated. It was at Columbia in 1913–16 that he first heard Dewey’s philosophy in the pragmatist’s classrooms. He even sat in the same moral and political philosophy seminar as did Hu Shih in 1915–16.⁹ What Ambedkar saw in Dewey, and noticed in caste, was the importance of communication and integration among societal groups in the democratic project. For instance, we can see these themes in a 1936 speech that is infamous for being so incendiary that the upper caste Hindu reformers who selected Ambedkar to be their Presidential Speaker canceled the entire conference so his message would not be heard.

What was the substance of his intended speech, soon after published by Ambedkar as “Annihilation of Caste”?¹⁰ It foregrounded the challenge that caste as a social hierarchy, one fixed by birth and underwritten by the doctrine of karmic debt, posed to a deep democracy. Caste proscribes what one can do, who can touch whom, and what jobs you are allowed to take. It structured life and experience. This structuring was really a strangulation, at least of most channels and aspects of interaction among people and groups of people. For instance, Ambedkar paraphrases some parts of his favorite book, Dewey’s Democracy and Education, and reworks them into an argument for caste as anti-democratic in this 1936 text:

Caste destroys the ability of groups to freely interact. Untouchability, for instance, literally posits the proximity or contact of some individuals as religiously polluting to self and valued objects. It is a problem because it is fundamentally anti-democratic, in addition to the suffering it causes.

In other words, the problems of caste and social stratification reveal the deep sense of democracy animating both Dewey and Ambedkar’s political philosophy. It is a sense of politics that goes far beyond institutions and governments and into the habits we have of interacting and communicating with our fellow community members. It clearly speaks to this deep notion of democracy as a way of life. Caste, Ambedkar summarizes, is bad because it prevents “social endosmosis”: “This is fraternity, which is only another name for democracy. Democracy is not merely a form of Government. It is primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience. It is essentially an attitude of respect and reverence toward fellowmen.”¹² Caste, like racial and gender discrimination, compromises the ability of groups to freely interact; it is an attitude that precludes the sort of fellow-feeling or fraternity that animates a community in the deepest democratic sense.

Ambedkar’s engagement with caste points to a larger challenge—that of the problems facing the creation of democratic communities in general. Whether it is racism, sexism, or casteism, the challenge to democracy is in the creation of harmful and contingent dividing lines between individuals and groups that cannot easily be undone. The question that is asked deals with freedom, namely, one of free and meaningful interactions between the constituent parts of a society. Can individual personalities flourish and grow as a member of a larger range of groups? Ambedkar noticed this when he read Dewey’s own enunciation of it in his 1916 Democracy and Education. There, Dewey wrote (and Ambedkar later underlined in his copy) these lines:

For this deep sense of democracy, the individual must be made to matter. In the group that surrounds them, and that partially constitutes them, as well as among the interactions with other groups. Even though Dewey does not use the idiom of personality from his early years, one sees a similar valorizing of the maximal flourishing of the socially created organism. Individuals are members of specific groups, yet they retain the capacity to interact with other groups. How much are these connections made, or enabled? How often are they suppressed?

Caste, along with other forms of oppression, creates hardened formal or informal barriers that bar such interaction. Ambedkar’s thought obviously focused intently on caste, an emphasis we can learn from in our current pursuits of social justice. But beyond this alteration, we see the more general point he was getting at, and that can inform our accounts of democracies. Democracy—taken as more than a decision-making procedure—implies increasing the quality and quantity of connections among individuals composing (and comprised by) groups that must coexist together in action and sometimes location. The pursuit of democracy then becomes realizing the habitual and legislative moves that reduce the efficacy of such barriers and that enhance the existing (even if minimal) connections between groups. Democracy is about associated life, and the problem of caste highlights one of the many possible ways to destroy community among coexisting individuals. The problem of caste—Ambedkar’s problematic—is the problem of democracy, especially if we look beyond the tradition-bound roots of caste and instead see it as it is: a forceful, and contingent, way of demeaning and separating individuals that interact and who ought to form a common life together.

Freedom and the Achievement of Democratic Community

Democracy on this deep reading depends on intergroup communication and respect. It also, according to the pragmatist approach I’ve developed here, depends upon and leverages shared interests among in-group and out-group members. Of course, the real world is not as perfect as the ideal demands. Injustice and oppression become everyday events, and the question of liberation becomes imperative. But what do we mean by freedom? What do we become free from, and what are we free to do? And, at what cost are we to achieve this freedom? What do we do if the freedom of some is incompatible with the freedom of others or if the freedom of some degrades the interconnection of other agents and groups? There is, of course, a complex terrain of metaphysics associated with common notions of freedom and free will, as Mark Fagiano discusses.¹⁴ Here, however, I focus on the political aspects of freedom even though I acknowledge that these aspects are not without their own metaphysical entanglements. Politically, thinking of the freedom of all is a tall enough order, even without considering the metaphysical groundings of individual action or of the justification of the freedom of each agent. All of the political questions about freedom still bedevil us with the difficulties attending to the idioms of freedom and liberation. We need a way to think about such matters without leaving out matters of freedom, without getting impractically lost in the metaphysical debates, or without overemphasizing a sense of freedom that sacrifices too much of communal unity.

The aspirations of communal unity just hinted at—perhaps what the deep democrat hints at with their idea of shared interest and seamless flows of communication—appears to be in tension with freedom, at least if the latter value focuses on the individual’s ability to do whatever she or he wants. But group homogeneity also seems undesirable as an ideal, not to mention unrealistic as a hope in diverse and agonistic societies. There is a sense of dialectical balance that needs to be struck, not only between freedom and unity but also between the individual and the group. It’s this realization that became particularly evident in the approach of Ambedkar to democracy, one that he built directly on themes he heard in Dewey’s classes while he was a student at Columbia. In the fall term in 1914, Ambedkar heard Dewey opine about the importance of individual attitude and habit in the pragmatist’s class, Philosophy 231: “Psychological Ethics.” During the fall and spring terms in 1915–16, Ambedkar heard Dewey explore the interactions between individual psychology and group custom in his Philosophy 131–132 sequence on “Moral and Political Philosophy.” Much more can be said on the content of these courses,¹⁵ but here it is enough to note the larger theoretical point of interest: group customs inform and form individual behavior and attitude, and individual attitudes compose the reality of group activity and force. One cannot fully separate the individual from their group, and one cannot simply talk at the larger levels of groups and systems without acknowledging the experience and point of views of individual agents. Balance was the keynote of Dewey’s sociology around 1915, one that was moving beyond the individual-focus of the 1908 Ethics and onward through the evolving group and transactional foci of Democracy and Education and the 1932 Ethics.

The sort of account of justice and democratic liberation that Ambedkar foregrounds out of these themes is useful for addressing caste, but it is also useful as an approach to freedom and community formation in general. Dalit experience and Dalit thinkers are too often left out of more general accounts of democratic theory, so using Ambedkar in this fashion ought to be a welcome move. Like Dewey, Ambedkar did not place much hope in certain foundations for democracy or for normative approaches to ethics. There would be no categorical imperative for Ambedkar with which to criticize caste oppression. But Dewey inadvertently gave Ambedkar two valuable intellectual resources to appropriate and adapt to the context of caste oppression: the idea of personality and the set of values of liberty, equality, and fraternity. These conceptual moves can help us with our contemporary problems of polarization and division in democracy. Let us ruminate on what sort of account of emancipation in democracy would engage under such a hybrid approach.

The idea of personality was not one that interested Dewey much by 1915. It was largely a relic of his neo-Hegelian days, which had peaked around 1890. This is an important realization about the contingency and historicity of theoretical approaches we may see in thinkers like Dewey and Ambedkar: the thinkers think over time, and their thought has a history. And the intersection of those thought processes with the thought of others does not occur in a linear fashion. In Ambedkar’s case, he was enamored by Dewey’s idea of personality up to the end of his life in the 1950s; he even beseeched a Dalit student in London to copy out Dewey’s 1888 essay, “The Ethics of Democracy,” as late as August 1954;¹⁶ Ambedkar complains to the student that he had lost the important essay. It is this essay that makes Dewey’s early point that democracy was more than a voting process, and that it ensconced and protected the personality of the agents partaking in the association. Even though Dewey in 1915 did not talk much of personality, Ambedkar was reading the Dewey of his older books, frozen in time, who did foreground that concept. This adds further context to the fact that Ambedkar would often speak of the struggle against caste oppression as a “battle for the reclamation of human personality which has been suppressed and mutilated by the Hindu Social System” after his time at Columbia.¹⁷ In “Annihilation of Caste,” Ambedkar complained that caste divisions not only destroyed group communication but that it also degraded the uniqueness of individuals by forcefully relegating them to fill specific tasks and occupations even when their desires and capacities might orient them elsewhere. Democracy means the liberation of human personality, and human personality was conceptual shorthand for the rich flowering of individual capacities that vary so much even within castes dubbed “untouchable.” Freedom meant the freedom and ability to be yourself, in occupation, projects, and valued pursuits.

But the coordination of this freedom with the other interests and needs of the democratic group was also important. This points to a larger conceptual question: How can you judge progress toward democratic endstates? It is at this point that we can draw a lesson from Ambedkar’s engagement with Dewey. While the American was busy leading his students through the West’s vacillations from individualism to collectivism, he discussed a range of topics and thinkers. Some, like Fichte, on whom Dewey lectured for five sessions, did not seem to make much of a mark on the young Indian thinker sitting in the philosophy seminar room. But in the spring of 1916, Dewey summarized the thought of the French revolution by referring to its famous slogan: “the moral standard, aim, as a common good,” Dewey opines, is “the notion consequently of the control of the individual in the name of the common good. Liberty, equality, fraternity, and the name fraternity means common good.”¹⁸ This is the first time we know of with certainty that Ambedkar heard this slogan.

This triumvirate of values did not mean much to Dewey. He did refer to them in his 1888 essay “The Ethics of Democracy” as connected to democracy’s realization of human personality, but they disappeared faster than his use of the term personality over the next two decades.¹⁹ But for Ambedkar, these terms struck a chord. He would write them into his “Buddhist Bible” (The Buddha and His Dhamma, 1957) that he left his millions of followers with at the end of his life, and he would make sure they were included in the preamble to the Indian constitution he shepherded into existence in the 1940s.²⁰ For Ambedkar, the trio of values became the keystone to his pragmatist view: they served as semi-transcendent values that offered a fallibilistic flexibility that was foreign to the Vedic tradition of sanatan (eternal) philosophy and dharma (morality) that he targeted in his anti-caste philosophy. They also transcended any given situation in origin; they could be applied to any new conflict or problematic political situation to illuminate a path forward toward more democratic and just forms of community. He would even connect them to Dewey’s early emphasis on personality, arguing in an unpublished work drafted later in his life: “Once the sacredness of human personality is admitted the necessity of liberty, equality and fraternity must also be admitted as the proper climate for the development of personality.”²¹

Taking these three values seriously means taking the balance among them as being constitutive of justice. This was Ambedkar’s commitment, at least, and it offers a workability that may go beyond evocations of “growth” and “equilibrium reaching” that might be used to explicate Dewey’s deep sense of democracy. On this account, liberation occurs in a democracy only in relation to the equal treatment of all. Equality holds its own challenges in interpretation, but the important point is this: the liberty of one that effaces the equality of value among many is not the sort of freedom that constitutes a just state. Conversely, pursuing equality among groups—such as caste groups—must not destroy the freedom of others. Equality and freedom are related, but sometimes they offer a tension to our efforts to achieve social justice. They must be balanced in process and goal. Casteism, as well as racism and sexism, are problematic because they harm aspects of the freedom and/or equality of specific individual personalities. Oppression throws off the normative balance among these guiding ideals essential for a deep democracy.

The most interesting aspect, arguably, to this scheme of semi-transcendent values that I have enunciated in Ambedkar’s pragmatism is fraternity. This is the value that captures the shared interests, unity, and mutual respect that democratic accounts given by Dewey and Ambedkar push to the foreground. This is the value that also places freedom or liberty into tension. The value of fraternity, however, seems to often be consigned to the status of an endpoint—something we achieve after we instantiate freedom and equality among caste groups, say. In a work authored late in his life, “Riddles in Hinduism,” Ambedkar clarifies the relation among these three values: “some equate democracy with equality and liberty.” These values are “no doubt the deepest concern of Democracy. But the more important question is what sustains equality and liberty?” Ambedkar answers “What sustains equality and liberty is fellow-feeling” or “what the French Revolutionists called fraternity.” Ambedkar continues, “Without Fraternity Liberty would destroy equality and equality would destroy liberty. If in Democracy liberty does not destroy equality and equality does not destroy liberty, it is because at the basis of both there is fraternity. . . . Fraternity is therefore the root of Democracy.”²²

The unique status of fraternity as an end-in-view and as a sort of means in this approach is important to note. Ambedkar, like Dewey, had significant reservations about the Marxists and communists of his day. In an unpublished manuscript authored in the 1950s titled “Buddha or Karl Marx,” Ambedkar mixed praise of Marxism with what divides it from the socially engaged form of Buddhism that he was developing and proselytizing to his fellow Dalits as an attitudinal form of escape from the strictures of the caste system. “We welcome the Russian Revolution,” Ambedkar writes, “because it aims to produce equality. But it cannot be too much emphasized that in producing equality society cannot afford to sacrifice fraternity or liberty. Equality will be of no value without fraternity or liberty. It seems that the three can coexist only if one follows the way of the Buddha. Communism can give one but not all.”²³ Ambedkar thought that the Buddha relied on means that emphasized respect for the targets of oppression and one’s own liberatory message, and thereby allowed one’s means to be held in check by considerations of fraternity. “The Buddha’s method was different,” Ambedkar argues. “His method was to change the mind of man: to alter his disposition: so that whatever man does, he does it voluntarily without the use of force or compulsion.”²⁴

Ambedkar’s Navayana pragmatism makes clear to us the role of fraternity and fellow-feeling not only in the ends of democracy, but also as limiting factors in the means used to achieve the sort of liberation or endstate that we desire. Ambedkar did not place much stock in violent force and coercion, since it would only destroy the freedom of those it targeted, and since it would mitigate against fraternal feeling between oppressed and oppressor. Ambedkar harshly criticized the Hindu elements in India that he saw as responsible for caste oppression, but even then he made room for messages of love (indeed, ahimsa became a principle of “love all”) and fraternity as limiting factor in our pursuits of justice. There is a lesson here for the tumultuous battles in American social circles—can we find a way to achieve freedom and equality while still forming community with those who disagree with us, and even those who serve as today’s oppressor? Democracy will never be without heated disagreements over values, policies, and even basic facts. We must learn to pursue our ends while maintaining the possibility for fraternity among our communal enemies. Ambedkar preached this strong path for his followers, and his philosophy can show us the tensions we must navigate now. If justice is a balance among freedom and values like equality and fraternity, we must carefully consider how we achieve the desired liberty and at what cost to community unity. Emancipation must be guided by, and even limited with, the value of democratic fellow-feeling and its possible realization.

Freedom, Tragedy, and Democratic Community

What emerges from this inquiry is a historically informed reconstruction of a sort of pragmatism—Navayana pragmatism, specifically—that takes seriously the pragmatist prohibition of transcendental ideas and the need for strong democratic critique. Ambedkar has modeled such a pursuit for us in the divided West, facing the challenges of religion and populism that so often threaten more divisions than creative unifications. On such an approach the goal of democracy is community building, the enhancing of connections due to need, interests, and coexistence in shared geographies. It largely eschews the use of force as war between individuals or groups within a society calls into question the very existence of a unified community itself. Such force is also less than useful, since it leads to spirals of destruction and retribution that are hard to control but easy to predict. Democracy, in most of its forms, is eminently communicative because this is the essence of community—the interchange of desires, thoughts, and positions over channels of interaction. From another way of looking at it, democracy integrally relies on the arts of rhetoric or persuasion as one of the most viable means of getting one’s (or one’s group’s) message across. When one cannot use force to make another individual act or believe as one does, an agent must turn toward communication aimed at persuasion to do so. The connective urges of democracy come to the forefront in citizens talking, arguing, and changing each other through the act of communication. Some of this persuasion will be aimed at individuals in similarly situated groups, but some of it will be oriented toward those in formal power. Activism is a form of persuasion as much as interpersonal debate.

Democracy is a matter of habits, as well as institutions, all which ought to be optimized as far as possible to enhance the connections among and between individuals and groups. This is deceptively easy to command in a normative fashion, and very difficult to instantiate in a practical manner. What this position that Dewey and Ambedkar lead us to is simple: at the end of day, we ought to make or forge community with those we now dub our enemies. How can one balance effectiveness with such demands in highly polarized communities given this normative framework?

To put a point to this dilemma, imagine the following situation. One’s children go to a public school. The COVID-19 pandemic strikes and masks are recommended by the recognized medical authorities. Resistance mounts from a vocal minority of parents and activists that opposes mask “tyranny” in the context of a particularly vicious surge of the virus. One’s children—and those they interact with outside of school with compromised immune systems—are put at risk if these advocates win the day and most children are unmasked during a pandemic surge. How ought one to argue to such people? How is one to depict the position of such opponents in their own appeals to others? What is gained, or lost, if one respectfully depicts those opponents who viciously and uncharitably depict your side—and if they win the specific policy debates? What this is getting at is the concern that following the demand to make community with one’s enemies may render one unsuccessful in shaping the actual fate and course of the communities in question. It is another way of worrying that democracy is a tragic path, one that cannot predictably lead to success. In other words, does democracy undo itself?

This tragic aspect to the quest of democracy concerned thinkers like Ambedkar, and it ought to concern us. As Dewey himself maintained, we give up too much if we give up the motto that democratic ends require democratic means. This is when the trio of semi-transcendent values that Ambedkar’s Navayana pragmatism leans so heavily on—liberty, equality, and fraternity—assume so vital of a role. They remind us that what we are seeking can easily be lost in the seeking of it. Fraternity, in particular, maintains the curious status of desired end (a state of fellow-feeling and respect) and as a means-limiting concept. In its latter role, it reminds us of the simple fact that some paths to “victory” over partisans only sets up more embittered partisan opponents in the future. In other words, the normative guide of fraternity implies that our pursuit of democracy should be sustainable and constructive, and not simply a quest to eliminate enemies or to disempower them. It foists the significant burden of persuasion on us—ideally and practically, we must seek ways to bring those who disagree with us into our camp, or into some sort of uneasy agreement with us. In some cases, the tragic aspect shines through: we must often learn to live with losses, with those whom we do not agree with calling the shots.

What calls for this tragic recognition of our limited powers and justification to do what we think is right is the idea that there ought to be a balance among liberty, equality, and fraternity. No one value should trump others, especially in the long term, and the pragmatism of achieving all requires we be smart about focusing on the realization of one of the ideals. I think that this struggle to balance valued ideals lies behind Alain Beauclair’s ruminations over social intelligence and what he dubs “social stupidity.”²⁵ He rightfully points out that Dewey’s ideal of social intelligence will never be fully instantiated; in our times of increasing populism, positions and movements that many consider extremely benighted will gain ascendance and popularity. What does a proponent of social intelligence do in such situations? Beauclair notes three options, all worrisome. Creating countervailing movements seems promising, until we consider the stubbornness of the psychology animating our foes. Resistance probably will only entrench them in their positions. Another option of creating conditions for more intelligence down the road is also not ideal; humans, according to Beauclair’s analysis, will not always succumb to such programs presuming a rational world. The third option is that of infiltrating and undermining one’s putatively irrational opponents. Perhaps this is promising, and perhaps one’s side will “win,” but the risks of reaction and retrenchment voiced in the previous options remains. Why? Because such an aggressive strategy seems to give into the view that politics is war, and that democracy is winner take all. The position that I have extracted from Ambedkar’s Navayana pragmatism, one that focuses on balancing liberty, equality, and fraternity, recognizes that the achievement of ideals is not wholly justice; a just state means a sustainable instantiation of these three values among all community members, friends and foes alike. This realization lies behind Ambedkar’s late evocation of the value of love in his engagement with Buddhism, and it also tempers our hopes for quick or decisive success in the democratic project. Regardless of contemporary populist movements in politics that one might consider particularly unhelpful, the challenge will always remain—we must make community with those who agree with us and those who we find detestable in our de facto communities. Short of exclusion or violence—strategies with their own unbearable drawbacks and low success rates—we must rely on the hope and dream of persuasion to change people and systems. Thus, the path of justice and practical freedom in a democracy is tortuous and can never yield to a certain victory; disagreement is part and parcel of pluralistic communities that enable future divergences of opinions, and trust in ever-better communication and an abiding sense of the democratic tragic are perhaps the only things that can see us through this journey—or at least our part of the larger project.

NOTES

WORKS CITED