I've spent some of this long, blazingly hot weekend huddling inside, playing inane computer games while I listen to people read old philosophy lectures on YouTube. One that grabbed my attention was Bertrand Russell's lecture on Pragmatism, which he published as an essay in 1907. Russell was in many ways a pragmatist himself, but he could not go all the way with them. The Pragmatists discarded any hope of our knowing the capital T metaphysical Truth of the universe. Russell resisted this, not because he thought he knew much about the Truth, but because he very much feared that abandoning our search for the Truth would have terrible effects in the real world.
Here's a brief summary of Pragmatism as formulated by William James and John Dewey; I have more here if you want to know more about Pragmatism's creators.
The Pragmatists held that the real measure of an idea's value is not whether it is "true" in some absolute sense. What we care about is, what good is the idea? How does it benefit us to hold it? Ideas, said James, are tools that we use to get on with our lives. It is easiest to see what this means in science. Science rests, ultimately, on all sorts of unprovable notions like causality and the unity of physical law across time and space, but we mainly just ignore all of that because science clearly works. Even when we know that some theory is imperfect, like Newtonian mechanics, we still teach it in school if we find that it is useful. The real truths of the universe are far deeper and weirder, but when it comes to putting a man on the moon, none of that matters. As my late father-in-law once said, "I believe in science because when I flip the switch, the lights come on."
The Pragmatists had a complicated relationship to religion. They were not strong believers themselves, but they sometimes used their approach to truth to defend religious belief. If believing in God and Heaven makes you happy, and causes no trouble for either your day-to-day life or anyone else's, then why not believe? (Russell hated this; one of the founders of the modern British atheist movement, he despised James' work on religion, and he all but accused James of pandering to the common belief to get a better reception for his books.)
The Pragmatists were proponents of democracy and human rights. Since they held to no absolute political principles – no blood and soil nationalism, no divine right of kings – they all thought that people should be ruled according to their own desires. The best government, they thought, is the one that most improves people's lives. And because they did not think any belief was known sufficiently to justify forcing it on anyone, they all believed in freedom of thought, speech, and assembly. Dewey coined the term "pluralism" to describe his belief that we should be as tolerant as possible toward any belief or social system.
As I said, Russell was quite close to Pragmatism in many ways. Here is a bit of his famous essay, The Will to Doubt:
None of our beliefs are quite true; all have at least a penumbra of vagueness and error. The methods of increasing the degree of truth in our beliefs are well known; they consist in hearing all sides, trying to ascertain all the relevant facts, controlling our own bias by discussion with people who have the opposite bias, and cultivating a readiness to discard any hypothesis which has proved inadequate. These methods are practised in science, and have built up the body of scientific knowledge. Every man of science whose outlook is truly scientific is ready to admit that what passes for scientific knowledge at the moment is sure to require correction with the progress of discovery; nevertheless, it is near enough to the truth to serve for most practical purposes.
But.
Russell was active in politics throughout his life, and his experience led him to think that the Pragmatists' wishy-washy liberalism was insufficient to really promote human flourishing. Russell often took on unpopular causes. During World War I he was jailed for his pacifism, and he was later fined for demonstrating on behalf of Indian independence. He was an early proponent of gay rights. He was also a proponent of world government, one of the authors of the world constitution that was proposed by an association of like-minded dreamers in 1968. Meanwhile his criticism of Soviet communism got him expelled from several left-wing groups. He was attacked by Noam Chomsky for arguing that while American dominance of the world was far from ideal, it was better than either Soviet dominance or an anarchic war of all against all.
So Russell was an expert on holding unpopular opinions, and on the other people who held them. Reading the Pragmatists, he had a strong sense that they were putting the truth up for a vote. If all that matters is what "works," then any mass society will end up promoting the views that seem sensible to the majority. And that, as Russell knew from personal experience, easily slides over into oppressing people whose ideas seem like threats to a working system. Russell had written a book on German politics, and twice in his essay on Pragmatism he mentions that some of James' statements could have been made by Bismarck.
What motivates people to take unpopular positions in public, even at great personal cost? Russell thought they did so because they believed they had had a glimpse of the Truth. Not truth as approximation, or truth as tool, but Truth as moral imperative, as something higher and better than what is debated in Parliaments or newspapers. People like Gandhi and Martin Luther King were not Pragmatists. They laid their lives on the line to fight injustice because they believed with intensity in the Truth. Abandon this, Russell implies, and the world will be a much worse place, with too much compromise and too little real devotion to the good. The philosophical arguments in his essay did not impress me much, but his fear of losing the passion of the activist and the revolutionary shines out.
The Pragmatists did not live in a political vacuum any more than Russell did. However, their experience pointed in a different direction. The movement's founders had lived through the American Civil War, and they reacted against that slaughter by becoming intensely suspicious of intellectual passion that might lead to murder. To people like William James and his friend Oliver Wendell Holmes (a Supreme Court Justice), anyone who believed passionately in the certainty of his political vision was inherently suspect as a likely architect of future bloodshed.
But while it may be true that the first generation of pragmatists espoused a rather bland majoritarianism, that is not true of the next generation. John Dewey was every bit a Pragmatist in his rejection of absolutes ("the ultimate nature of things – God, the Universe, Man, Reason" as he cataloged them) but much more interesting politically. In fact his politics were very similar to Bertrand Russell's. In his famous essay on Pluralism, he argued that accepting “heterogeneous elements” was essential to democracy, and he himself embraced and advocated for progressive causes like women's rights and racial equality.
I understand what drove Russell to question Pragmatism. It feels like surrender. We must give up the quest, not only for the Truth about God, but final theories in physics, true justice in society, permanent peace between nations, and many other things we would like to have. It feels right that a passionate advocate for a better world should question this surrender.
But it still might be the best, most honest description of human reality.
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