pragmatism

Pragmatism - Consider consequences of acting on a belief – beliefs are adapted to a particular context. This in contrast to believing that eternal ideas work everywhere for an idealist.

Knowledge is social for pragmatism. It was heavily influenced by science – which is an open dialog. They were also influenced by the emerging science of statistics. Many truths turned out to be probabilities, not certainties.

The Group By Alan Ryan The Metaphysical Club Louis Menand (from New York Review Books - edited)

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 560 pp., $27.00

Pragmatism was in part a reaction to the Civil War as it was experienced by the young Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. and by his teachers, friends, and intellectual antagonists in mid-nineteenth-century Cambridge. The "problem," to which the philosophy of pragmatism seemed eventually to supply a solution, was the problem of conviction. The idea that the nineteenth century was the century of a crisis of faith is familiar enough. Yet pragmatism was a solution to a somewhat different crisis of faith. It was not the loss of conviction but a surfeit of it that pragmatism addressed. In Menand's account of the thinking of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey, pragmatism aimed to wean us off religious and ideological convictions—convictions of which the social, political, and moral beliefs of most people are subspecies. The problem of belief to which pragmatism provided an answer was not the familiar Victorian problem of a loss of faith, but the problem of an excess of faith.

John Maynard Keynes memorably expressed his anxiety about the malign impact of ideology when he wrote, "Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are usually distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back." Holmes would have agreed, save that it was not so much academic scribblers that he had in mind as the abolitionists whose passionate desire to see an end to slavery had finally provoked the Civil War that killed many of his closest friends, all but cost him his life, and took from him every vestige of a faith in fixed principles for whose sake we might feel duty-bound to get ourselves killed.

The problem, then, might be expressed as that of discovering some way in which we can be in command of our ideas rather than vice versa. The goal is to think clearly, and without illusions—not that we should be disillusioned, since that is the substitution of one obsession for another, but that we should understand how thinking organisms come to have the ideas they do, and should learn to live with that knowledge. Another way of making the point, and one that Menand himself employs, is to observe

that what these four thinkers [Holmes, James, Peirce, and Dewey] had in common was not a group of ideas, but a single idea —an idea about ideas. They all believed that ideas are not 'out there' waiting to be discovered but are tools—like forks and knives and microchips—that people devise to cope with the world in which they find themselves.

In Menand's view, the pragmatists achieved the emancipation of our thinking from outdated straitjackets by an insistence on the social and collective quality of thought:

They believed that ideas are produced not by individuals but by groups of individuals—that ideas are social. They believed that ideas do not develop according to some inner logic of their own, but are entirely dependent, like germs, on their human carriers and the environment. And they believed that since ideas are provisional responses to particular and un-reproducible circumstances, their survival depends not on their immutability but on their adaptability. The belief that ideas should never become ideologies—either justifying the status quo or dictating some transcendent imperative for renouncing it—was the essence of what they taught.

…………….. If we are to believe that ideas really are the instruments with which we confront the demands of the environment, we should see thinkers thinking in order to understand the ideas being thought. If history is philosophy teaching by examples, the history of pragmatism is—at any rate in part—the biography of an exemplary group of energetic, public-spirited, high-minded, and confident thinkers who felt they owed a duty to themselves and the world at large to rethink their relationship to their environment.

………. The reality of the war had taught him (Holmes) unwelcome lessons about the consequences of big ideas, and the near cynicism with which he later approached even his work on the Supreme Court reflected his determination that he would never again be the victim of large and dangerous certainties.

…………….. Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. was a Unionist, and deeply hostile to the abolitionists; the abolitionist contempt for the preservation of the Union struck him as only slightly less wicked than outright treason would have been. The abolitionists were as difficult to deal with as any group consumed by moral fervor.

The young Holmes became an abolitionist as the result of an intoxication with Emerson

……... he went to war. He was almost killed in his first battle, at Ball's Bluff in October 1861, when a ball struck him above the heart; he was wounded in the neck at Antietam, missed Fredericksburg because he narrowly escaped death from dysentery while the battle was on, and was then shot in the foot in May 1863. Although he was a staff officer when he returned to duty in January 1864, he then took part in the ghastly, grinding campaign in which Grant slowly destroyed Lee's Confederate forces. With hindsight, that campaign seems to be a dress rehearsal for the horrors of World War I, and Holmes loathed the experience.

Although he had thoroughly lost his faith in the easy controllability of events, Holmes did not lose his faith in the professional skills of soldiers— and, in due course, the professional skills of lawyers. It was large statements of moral principle that he had come to despise, with their accompanying willingness to send other people off to get killed for the sake of their implementation. The professional who thinks as far as required for the sake of what has to be done next became a model for a serious approach to the world. It was, in fact, one of the standing concerns of pragmatism to defend professional expertise against philosophical hot air. (Many generals – Shinseki, Zini, etc, Navy and Army War colleges were amng those ignored or purged by the Bush43 true believers who “could not imagine” that their views were not true) Plumbers, mechanics, laboratory scientists had ways of arriving at reliable information about the way things work and the way they go wrong, but philosophers worrying about the materiality of mind or the ideality of matter were wasting their time. Critics of pragmatism have always complained that pragmatists don't take truth seriously, but this has always been wrong. Pragmatists have never impugned the scientist's search for experimental truth, or the novelist's search for psychological truth. The only intellectual discipline they attacked was their own, philosophy; and what they attacked was the pretension of philosophy to stand in judgment over whatever else humankind was thinking and why. …….The world to which Holmes returned was not only wracked by uncertainty whether the cost of the Civil War in lives and money was remotely worth paying, but unsettled by the impact of science on old certainties, especially the impact of Darwinian evolution.

………………By 1865, Agassiz exemplified something other than the easy hypocrisy of someone who deplored miscegenation but enjoyed the sexual attractiveness of mulatto girls; he also exemplified an extinct form of science. Darwin's account of evolution rested on statistical evidence, and appealed to the sheer improbability of any mechanism other than evolutionary pressure accounting for the various kinds of flora and fauna that collectors in the field came up with. Agassiz stuck doggedly to his belief that species first existed as ideas in the mind of God …..

What the pragmatists concurred in was that however things turned out ultimately, human thinking had two crucial properties. One was that it was social rather than individual, and the other that we carve up reality as we need to, not in some fashion that reality itself simply dictates to us.

(end of article)

a case study to illustrate the pragmatic approach to a current problem often discussed in terms of moral absolutes:

Abortion – is in some views a moral absolute.
Either (A) the absolute right of a woman to control her body
or (B) the absolute certainty that the definition of "life" starts with one cell - so any abortion is murdering a "baby". This level of certainty (B) is facilitated by the visceral impact of pictures of bloody babies.
Certainty (A) comes from believing women are free individuals and that the state or family should not tell she and her doctor that their absolute moral rules apply to her.
Pragmatists would look at her particular circumstances -andprobably trust thejudgment of herandher doctor who are close to the situation.

Laws against abortion can satisfy the moral urges of prohibitionists (as in other moral imperatives imposed on other humans – alcohol, drugs, etc). Historically, in the real world most women decide how many babies to have based on whether they believe they can support the babies – food, jobs, health care.

Pragmatically - Abortion laws in history have not generally reduced the overall frequency of abortions – they have just killed many women by making them less safe..

The book The Pill chronicles similar effects when birth control information was illegal. Starving children, miserable families and lots of dead women.

Pragmatic consequences of laws making abortions illegal:

In many countries, a large proportion of maternal deaths is due to illegal or clandestine abortion: Ethiopia— 54%; Argentina— 35%; Chile— 36%; Zimbabwe— 28%. The estimated number of women worldwide who die from clandestine abortion ranges from less than 100,000 to as many as 200,000 women a year. Most clandestine abortions are performed by non-professionals or are self-induced. And for every woman who dies from an illegal abortion, many more suffer serious (and often lifelong) health problems— among them haemorrhaging, infection, abdominal or intestinal perforations, kidney failure, and infertility.

The abortion need in Western Europe is about five to 10 times lower than in Central and Eastern Europe (which include the former Communist bloc countries). This pattern results from more efficient use of contraceptives among married couples. In Central and Eastern Europe, the contraceptives used by both the married and the unmarried are often of poor quality.

In Denmark, contraceptive services are free and universally available, even to teenagers, resulting in a dramatic drop in teen abortion rates. Pregnancy rates among Danish teenagers are now less than half those in the United States.

A leading Conservative Southern Baptist questions the veracity of the GOP and "Culture

of Life" issues:

Pro-life? Look at the fruits

by Dr. Glen Harold Stassen

I am a Christian ethicist, and trained in statistical analysis. I am consistently pro-life. My son David is one witness. For my family, "pro-life" is personal. My wife caught rubella in the eighth week of her pregnancy. We decided not to terminate, to love and raise our baby. David is

legally blind and severely handicapped; he also is a blessing to us and to the world.

I look at the fruits of political policies more than words. I analyzed the data on abortion during the George W. Bush presidency. There is no single source for this information - federal reports go only to 2000, and many states do not report - but I found enough data to identify trends. My findings are counterintuitive and disturbing.

Abortion was decreasing. When President Bush took office, the nation's abortion rates were at a 24-year low, after a 17.4% decline during the 1990s. This was an average decrease of 1.7% per year, mostly during the latter part of the decade.(Clinton years)

Enter George W. Bush in 2001. One would expect the abortion rate to continue its consistent course downward, if not plunge. Instead, the opposite happened.

Three states have posted multi-year statistics through 2003, and abortion rates have risen in all three: Kentucky's increased by 3.2% from 2000 to 2003. Michigan's increased by 11.3% from 2000 to 2003. Pennsylvania's increased by 1.9% from 1999 to 2002. I found 13 additional states that reported statistics for 2001 and 2002. Eight states saw an increase in abortion rates (14.6% average increase), and five saw a decrease (4.3% average decrease). Under President Bush, the decade-long trend of declining abortion rates appears to have reversed. Given the trends of the 1990s, 52,000 more abortions occurred in the United States in 2002 than would have been expected before this change of direction.

How could this be? I see three contributing factors:

First, two thirds of women who abort say they cannot afford a child (Minnesota Citizens Concerned for Life Web site). In the past three years, unemployment rates increased half again. Not since Hoover had there been a net loss of jobs during a presidency until the current administration. Average real incomes decreased, and for seven years the minimum wage has not been raised to match inflation. With less income, many prospective mothers fear another mouth to feed. Child poverty fell about 4 million during the Clinton years – and increased over a million under Bush43 - a few million under Reagan.

Second, half of all women who abort say they do not have a reliable mate (Minnesota Citizens Concerned for Life). Men who are jobless usually do not marry. Only three of the 16 states had more marriages in 2002 than in 2001, and in those states abortion rates decreased. In the 16 states overall, there were 16,392 fewer marriages than the year before, and 7,869 more abortions. As male unemployment increases, marriages fall and abortion rises. Minority unemployment record low during Clinton – huge rise under Bush

Third, women worry about health care for themselves and their children. Since 5.2 million more people have no health insurance now than before this presidency - with women of childbearing age over-represented in those 5.2 million - abortion increases.

The U.S. Catholic Bishops warned of this likely outcome if support for families with children was cut back. My wife and I know - as does my son David - that doctors, nurses, hospitals, medical insurance, special schooling, and parental employment are crucial for a special child. Every mother, father, and child needs public and family support.

What does this tell us? Economic policy and abortion are not separate issues; they form one moral imperative. Rhetoric is hollow, mere tinkling brass, without health care, health insurance, jobs, child care, and a living wage. Pro-life in deed, not merely in word, means we need policies that provide jobs and health insurance and support for prospective mothers.

(Glen Stassen is the Lewis B. Smedes Professor of Christian Ethics at Fuller Theological Seminary, and the co-author of Kingdom Ethics: Following Jesus in Contemporary Context, Christianity Today's Book of the Year in theology or ethics.)

In Texas Bush43 had less medical coverage for kids than any other state. A big cut in oil taxes left not enuf $ for CHIPs program which provided health care for kids.