I enjoyed Lee Siegel's review of Louis Menand's book The Metaphysical Club (Cold Verities; The chilly ethics of American pragmatism, October 2001). Summing up American pragmatism as the belief "that truth is social and constructed rather than transcendent and objective," he shows how Menand's study of pragmatism has been "weakened by his practice of it."
Menand observes that "the year James introduced pragmatism was also the year the American economy began to move away from an individualist ideal of unrestrained competition and toward a bureaucratic (i.e. pragmatic) ideal of management and regulation." He sees this "progress" as being hampered by yet another battle of ideas, the Cold War. Siegel laments that the individualist ideal has, by now, "almost entirely vanquished the values of regulation and restraint" (this seems like nonsense given the current level of government intervention into the lives of ordinary citizens) and wishes for some "adversarial certitude" in support of the latter (showing his liberal, although not relativist, bent). But Menand will have none of certitude, identifying pragmatic rejection of it with democracy itself, ignoring the fact that "the very basis of American democracy lies in the words 'we hold these truths to be self-evident.'" So Siegel rejects Menand's pragmatism and relativism, but holds onto his liberalism. He seems not to understand that the very essense of liberalism is precisely the rejection of (non-objective) moral values as a basis for law (and the attempt to substitute in their place supposedly more "scientific" ethics constructed by human reason).
But even conservatives, who mostly still respect moral values, often follow (liberal) Holmes in stressing the precedence of experience and tradition over logic and ideology. While liberals fear religious certitudes, conservatives fear irreligious ones such as secular humanism, rationalism and totalitarianism. But there's nothing wrong with certitude, as long as it is based in the truth. If one's unprovable axioms are correct, then one's whole system will make sense and be logically sound. The danger of certainty, logic and ideology come only when they are based on falsehoods.
"Declaring themselves wise, they became fools." To unbelievers (or believers in falsehoods), the Truth appears to be nonsense, they don't understand it. God hides the truth from them. The successes of Western values like liberty, reason, science, individualism and capitalism are due to the correctness of the West's (admittedly unprovable) Judeo-Christian axioms, which must simply be accepted by faith.
Steven P. Sawyer
Like Edmund Wilson before him at the New Yorker, Menand's "fine, beautiful mind...appears to be in the grip of a fertile obsession" (in Wilson's case, it was socialism). Menand describes how Oliver Wendell Holmes' experience of the Civil War caused him to see life as a Darwinian struggle and to view "postures of moral certainty" with disgust. He believed moral certainty always leads to violence and must therefore be avoided. Because moral values are not objective, he concluded, the law cannot be based on them. This led to his famous dictum: "the life of the law has not been logic: it has been experience." For Holmes, this meant the law must change over time with customs and conventions of the people. Both Menand and Wilson follow Holmes in asserting "the superiority of skepticism and experience as moral criteria over belief in unprovable 'objective' standards."
While Wilson's 1962 book Patriotic Gore began with the Cold War and worked backward to the Civil War, Menand does just the opposite. They both believe these are kindred episodes where "principle" (i.e. intolerance) triumphed over pragmatism (i.e. pluralism, experimentation, functionalism). Interestingly, Menand takes a pragmatic view of ideas as well. "Ideas are to be judged by the use they serve, not by their inherent intellectual or moral worth." This explains why he leaves out any discussion of ideas contrary to his thesis that certitude leads to violence. Purveyors of pragmatism include Holmes, Charles Sanders Peirce, William James (these four formed The Metaphysical Club in 1872, a casual discussion group) and John Dewey (a later adherent to the philosophy), while moral absolutists discussed are MLK Jr., Reinhold Niebuhr and Mahatma Ghandi.
Before the Civil War, the South had retained "an old belief in objective truth, in timeless good and evil, in an ordered cosmos ruled by God and knowable to the mind," while the North, fueled by massive immigration, urban growth, industrialization and "Jacksonian empowerment of the multi-ethnic masses," had taken on a secularist, skeptical and relativist mentality (this may explain why northern writers took to abolitionist utopianism, as a "gratifying alternative" to that mentality).
The ethical chillyness derives from the fact that the pragmatists rejected any objective standards of truth, beauty and justice, claiming these are only a matter of personal taste, like picking an entre at a restaurant. Yikes! Here we have "the ruin of all value," as M. Stanton Evans says in his book The Theme is Freedom.
Although Menand tries to claim that progressivism was based on pragmatic rejection of idealism, Siegel calls him on it. "...the history of labor in America is the story not of pragmatic nuances but of bloody challenges to unrestrained capital and its political cohorts. These challenges were driven precisely by ideas; and these ideas were drawn from the ideology of Marxism. In fact, it was Dewey's pragmatism that was successfully mounted on the iron girders of Marxist thinking - by his former student at Columbia, Sidney Hook."
Richard Rorty "is the figure most responsible for pragmatism's revival in America today." While Hook tried to blend pragmatism with Marxism, Rorty tries to blend it with poststructuralism.
"Holmes's experience of the world's first modern war [Civil War]...turned him against abstract idealisms...Embracing Darwin's account of a universe in flux, Holmes came to believe that the best antidote to the absolutist claims of certainty that had led the nation into war was a sober recognition of the limited, culture-bound nature of all knowledge. The first sentence of his first law review article revealed the distance that separated him from antebellum intellectuals: 'It is the merit of the common law that it decides the case first and determines the principle afterwards.' Intended to "make it harder for people to be driven to violence by their beliefs," it was also "a daring venture to replace timeless principles with experimental methods, comprehensible procedures, and open participation in decision making as the legitimating creed for democratic institutions." Menand shows how this Big Bang, the pragmatist "'idea about ideas' unleashed a cultural shock wave" that rippled through society, especially affecting the Protestant middle and upple classes and "defined modern liberalism from the Progressive era to the Vietnam war...this book by an English professor is history in the grand style...in addition to Holmes, Peirce, James, and Dewey, Menand directs a host of supporting characters, from Louis Agassiz and Jane Addams to Alain Locke and Randolph Bourne (Dewey's student and brilliant cultural critic, gave up on pragmatism during WWI, seeing its relativism and inability to support value creation). In showing how ideas mattered in the lives of the individuals who expounded them, and in the collective life of an industrializing nation, Menand proves himself a master intellectual biographer. Very little of his story will come as news to specialists. The emergence of a pragmatist modernism from the ashes of transcendentalist idealism has long been a preoccupation of intellectual historians."
Blake sees 2 weaknesses; "first, a failure to engage seriously the critics of pragmatism who wrote from all sides of the political spectrum from WWI through the Cold War; and second, the absence of any discussion of those figures in the pragmatist community who formulated a sustained critique of free-market political economy."
Bourne, along with Catholics and other religious thinkers at the turn of the century, "insisted that a culture without foundations in faith would drift into moral chaos. Other conservative intellectuals similarly condemned a secular-pragmatist culture for its moral relativism. On the left, Lewis Mumford, Dwight Macdonald, Paul Goodman, and C. Wright Mills were among the many radical intellectuals who followed Bourne in arguing that instrumentalism had elevated a cult of efficiency and technology over humanistic values."
"The pragmatist idea of a 'social self'...inspired Progressives' proposals for sweeping social reforms intended to remake American culture and personality alike. But by the late 1930s, [even] liberals witnessed the consequences in Europe and the USSR of schemes for the creation of the New Aryan Man or the New Socialist Man and came to believe that human freedom resided in that part of the self that lay 'beyond culture,' in Lionel Trilling's memorable words. Not surprisingly, pragmatism had little to offer liberals in search of a refuge from culture, and these thinkers found their sustenance elsewhere - in existentialism, psychoanalysis, and theological new-orthodoxy." Although Menand blames pragmatism's eclipse on 'wars of principle' Vietnam and the Cold War, "the reaction against the perceived moral thinness of pragmatism had set in before 1945, even among liberals."
Blake scolds Menand for exploring only certain political effects of the pragmatist Big Bang (e.g. ethno-racial diversity, free speech) while ignoring others (e.g. "Robert La Follette's 'Wisconsin Experiment' and the gritty NY liberalism that anticipated the New Deal). "Menand takes pains to place his heroes in the context of the Civil War, but neglects the equally important context of the transatlantic debate on the relationships among pragmatism, corporate capitalism, and the modern liberal state...In that debate, Marxists, Populists, and Social Gospelers pressed hard against the Anglo-American fetish of laissez faire and limited government. They found allies of a sort among the college students who followed Dewey's summons into social science and social work, and among middle-class intellectuals like the editors of the New Republic, who thought pragmatism authorized the state to undertake creative solutions to mass suffering and powerlessness. Some of the work those Progressives accomplished no doubt limited the ability of corporations to impose their will on the general population; other reforms seem, in retrospect, to have enhanced the power of professionals and experts at the expense of ordinary citizens."
Blake is basically in favor of Menand's project to revive [liberal] pragmatism, but sees little hope in its success. He characterizes the current generation as "see[ing] no horizon beyond today's market fundamentalism" and believes the attempt to revive it while cutting it loose from its "historic roots in social-democratic aspiration may energize the academy with the promise of cultural innovation, while producing only the faintest echo in civic life. One name for that popgun burst is neoliberalism." In other words, he wants to see not only a revival of pragmatism, but also of collectivism and the defeat of laissez faire. Prospects for the latter two projects seem dim to him at present (we can only hope).