The Enemy within Part Two

The second primary enemy that endangers freedom is pragmatism.

During the Presidential elections we heard several speeches in which Barrack Obama proclaimed himself to be a pragmatist, even boasting and reveling in it.

While Americans disagree on many moral, political, and economic issues, there are those who believe the way to address these issues is always through moderation and compromise. Barrack Obama promises change and says he can bring this nation together and mend our differences through pragmatism.

As a School of philosophy pragmatism was founded by C.S. Pierce and William James in the late 19th century. According to its founders, pragmatism is primarily a way of addressing philosophical questions.

William James wrote, “Pragmatism does not represent any specific substantive doctrines; rather it is distinguished by its method of clarifying ideas, clarifying in practical terms by tracing the practical consequences for accepting one idea over another.” In other words, the meaning of any truth depends entirely on its practical effects. Pragmatism’s roll is not to discover truth; rather it is to act without regard to independent reality.

Pragmatism, however, fails to answer this one very important question: don’t we need truth, which is the understanding of the external reality, in order to understand the practical consequences of our actions?

The facts that identify pragmatism:

Pragmatism says truth is whatever one wishes for as an outcome. Truth is therefore the expedient which allows its practitioners to forget or remember history for whatever is convenient at the moment. It allows them to remember or forget facts, depending on their usefulness to justify their behavior.

The pragmatist might say truth may not be the same for everyone. It depends on one’s circumstances and perceptions. What’s true today may not be true tomorrow. Therefore pragmatism is a short term perspective manifested as in the moment thinking. Pragmatism resists identifying facts by their essential nature. There is really no right or wrong way. There is only emotion and what’s expedient. This disregards independent reality and separates one’s behavior from the consequences. This is why causality is irrelevant and revisionism of the past and of the facts is so prevalent.

Pragmatism is held by its practitioners as a virtue; be practical, be agreeable, be expedient. However this insidious doctrine of pragmatism suggests conforming to an alternative code of ethics—that one’s behavior is devoid of absolute standards of right and wrong or good and evil. Pragmatism is, in other words, a code of non-ethics.

Another way of putting it, pragmatism is the intensional language of abstraction—of advertising, the politician, the diplomat. It is guiding behavior disassociated from independent reality and without the use of extensional facts.

One’s perceptions should be investigated by means of “reason and logic” of the extensional facts to identify the facts of reality. Pragmatism is the antithesis of reason, it is the practice of deceiving one’s self to the true nature of reality. In essence pragmatism is the lack of essence.