SOURCE: "John Dewey, Spiritual Democracy, and the Human Future," in Crass Currents, Vol. XXXIX, No. 3, Fall, 1989, pp. 300-21.

In the following essay, Rockefeller—writing from the perspective of the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, as well as the student revolts in China—enumerates several concepts from Dewey's social agenda as a desirable antidote to spiritual and social oppression.

The human race faces the urgent challenge of creating a global community marked by economic opportunity, equal justice, freedom and respect for nature, or its survival as a species is in doubt. The obstacles to achieving community locally as well as internationally are great, for almost everywhere peoples suffer from moral confusion, bitter social conflicts, fragmentation of experience and knowledge, and the deterioration of the environment. In the poet's words, the center no longer holds. There is, then, an urgent need for ideas with integrating...