When I’m in China, conversations with friends and colleagues often begin with their asking about the name of my university: Why is it called “The New School?” Most are not familiar with the university, but when I mention the name of John Dewey and the intellectual spirit associated with the university’s founding in 1919, there’s an immediate connection. Dewey traveled and lectured in China beginning in 1919, just as The New School was being established, and just as Chinese intellectuals were engaging in unprecedented forms of public engagement and education.

For Chinese intellectuals and students today, 1919 invokes the stirrings of the “New Culture Movement” and the foundations of the Chinese revolution more broadly. The New Culture Movement is closely associated with what became known as the “May Fourth Movement,” so named for the student protests in Beijing on that day in 1919 to reject the humiliating outcome of the Paris Peace Conference. The protest was over the terms that allowed Japan to retain territorial concessions that had been negotiated before the war by a discredited president of the fledgling Republic of China. (The Qing dynasty had fallen in 1911-12.) But the May Fourth Movement was less about geopolitics and much more about the vibrant intellectual pursuit and experimentation with new ideas–anarchism, Marxism, socialism, and much else.

John Dewey arrived in China just a few days after May 4, 1919, and would spend the next two years teaching and lecturing at Chinese universities. Dewey had been invited by his former student at Columbia, Hu Shih, by then a prominent leader in the New Culture Movement. Hu, like others in the movement, advocated the wholesale rejection of Confucian culture and practice–first and foremost the educational precepts that stressed the close engagement with Confucian and other classical texts. In its place, Hu and those who would become the presidents and chancellors of China’s leading universities adopted many of Dewey’s ideas about education and its roles in constituting citizenship, democratic practice, among much else.

Several scholars have examined closely Dewey’s China lectures and his writings from China there in 1919-1921. What impressed Dewey perhaps most was the self-organization and mobilization under way in Chinese society at the time. As he wrote (pp. 97-8) in one of several essays during his time in China,

American children are taught the list of ‘modern’ inventions that originated in China. They are not taught, however, that China invented the boycott, the general strike and guild organization as means of controlling public affairs.

Dewey’s lectures were generally well received, in part because so many of the competing intellectual and ideological camps in China at the time could read his texts as supportive of their positions. But Dewey’s call for gradual reform over radical social change was seen as insufficient in the eyes of many among his audiences. Indeed, Dewey rightly predicted that Bertrand Russell’s arrival in China in the fall of 1920, to deliver lectures on Bolshevism, would far eclipse Dewey’s in their popularity. Mao Zedong never attended Dewey’s lectures, but would have been quite familiar with Dewey’s ideas from the intellectual circles in which he traveled the early 1920s. Many years later, Mao would proclaim that “Practice is the sole criterion of truth”– a quotation that “Maoists” in the 1960s would repress (along with Dewey’s ideas). Deng Xiaoping strategically revived Mao’s slogan in 1978, and it became one of the mantras of his developmentalist reform program that followed. Dewey’s works are widely read on Chinese campuses today.

In my research, I work with military veterans who served in Iraq. For them, this Veterans Day was not a day for parades, but for political action and protests. It may be that many service members find themselves questioning the strategies and tactics of Pentagon privately, but these veterans represent the minority of active duty and former service members who publicly criticize the military.

Protesting in this way has caused them difficulties. Speaking against the military is taboo. Breaking the “code of silence” to talk about abuse and brutality among their fellow service members is a betrayal.

Thinking about the polarizing discourse around the military, I wonder how discussions about means and ends in war can ever achieve any depth. Our portrayal of those who serve in the military remains split between, on the one hand, blanket condemnation of the savagery of men who glorify killing and domination, and, on the other, unqualified, unabashed reverence for the honor and sacrifice of those who serve.

The veterans who I work with struggle between these two extremes. In the US, national discourse has taken an uncomfortable swing toward the latter depiction – any criticism of service members is impolitic, for the left and the right.

But the idealization of soldiers denies the much more ambiguous experience of the men and women who serve.

We should not confuse the economic and personal need that leads many men and women to enlist with the idealism of sacrifice. We should not forget that service members are flawed, just like the rest of us.

That sometimes they act bravely, and other times they act out of fear; sometimes with compassion and other times with cruelty; that they, like anyone, operate in an arena of uncertainty and ambiguity.

Somehow we never fail to be astounded by the My Lais and the Abu Ghraibs, and we insist that they result from bad apples, since it is easier to believe that there are clearly friends and enemies, the good and the bad, right and wrong.

“The distinctive characteristic of practical activity, one which is so inherent that it cannot be eliminated, is the uncertainty which attends it.”  This, as John Dewey wrote in The Quest for Certainty, leads us to construct a fortress of the very things that threaten us with this uncertainty. War is perhaps the most practical of activities, even if we believe it to be irrational.

For military service members today, the “rules of war,” an almost satirical attempt to impose a degree of order in the chaos that is the field of war, can no longer be defined by the strictures of battle lines and uniforms. War has come to better reflect the reality of conflict, where friend and enemy cannot be reduced to an easy dichotomy.

Yet, the desire for certainty remains strong. The film, The Hurt Locker, might have avoided the politics of war, but it brilliantly captured the intoxication of war – both in the physical rush of adrenaline and the psychological security of holding a meaningful role in the world.

It is certainly simpler to construct the world into friends and enemies, heroes and villains. Military service members are certainly not alone in this endeavor. What prevents us from seeing that we’re building the fortress of righteousness out of very wrongness that threatens us?

For me, the issue is not whether the ends justify the means, but how we might live with the uncertainty that there never is an end.