Pragmatism and its discontents

By Philip Zelikow

I co-teach a seminar for graduate students in American history.  Coincidentally, the week of the President’s inauguration was the week we studied and discussed Louis Menand’s wonderful book, The Metaphysical Club. Menand traces the evolution of a distinctive American public philosophy — pragmatism — through the lives and times of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., William James, John Dewey, and their associates. That same week, my class heard a new American president decisively align himself with this same philosophy of "pragmatism." And this from a president steeped, more than any other, in the style of legal reasoning Holmes exemplified. This from a president who sent his daughters to the Lab School at the University of Chicago, a school that John Dewey founded. 

Barack Obama must know all this. He may well have read Menand’s book. He has evidently thought deeply about pragmatism as a public philosophy. He practically put on a pragmatism jersey when he announced that "the question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works…."

We should take the philosophical point seriously, as I believe the President does. At its essence, pragmatism is an argument about the way to think. It rejects preconceived certainties and invites endless, restless skepticism. Carried into political life it is a philosophy that insists on pluralism, even "a pluralistic universe" (William James) and readiness to challenge sweeping generalizations. Why? Because ideas only acquire real meaning in the context of acting on them — and the context for action constantly changes. 

Pragmatists are not indifferent to issues of good and evil, though this was a theme that eventually divided James and Holmes. But it is a philosophy uneasy with ideologies of all kinds, wary of turning ideas into rigid prescriptions, carving grooves for thought so deep that other ways of thinking disappear from view. From the perspective of a pragmatic thinker like Obama, the Bush administration is to be derided not so much because all of its ideas were wrong but because he found its style of thinking closed-minded, which then produced all the predictable pathologies of zealotry mixed with mediocrity.

So the words I would whisper to the new President after his triumphal procession through the capital are not that "all glory is fleeting." Instead I hope he remembers that "pragmatic thinking cuts both ways." 

No one comes into office believing they will be closed-minded. They grasp articles of faith as expedients for urgent problems and then become invested in what they then say and do.  It is natural to condemn the ideological blinders of your political enemies. The truly seductive certitudes are the ones that come from your political allies. They usually come garbed in a compelling historical analogy or a shimmeringly "scientific" generalization.

For instance, the current belief in the healing power of a gigantic stimulus package is substantially faith-based. Once one gets past the need to revitalize automatic stabilizers (like unemployment compensation) and give state and local governments appropriate access to credit, the relevant science and the historical analogies, when probed, are not so deep. Just a few months ago, the International Monetary Fund’s economists acknowledged that, "Perhaps surprisingly, the empirical literature on the effects of fiscal policy does not provide a clear answer to the simple question of whether discretionary fiscal policy can successfully stimulate the economy during downturns." The new chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, Christina Romer, knows this all too well. 

The evidence for predicting success is especially wispy, or worse, when the issues of fiscal sustainability and impact on global availability of capital are factored in. Meanwhile the enormous political engine of the stimulus juggernaut is sucking intellectual, political, and financial oxygen away from the more urgent financial policy solutions, which themselves could call on a further trillion dollar scale set of federal investments, and away from the equally urgent obligations to lead a much more global approach to the crisis.

Or, to give another example, in his first substantive foray in Arab-Israeli policy, President Obama announced that humanitarian aid should flow into Gaza. But, he said, it should flow only to the Palestinian Authority. But the Palestinian Authority has no writ in Gaza. President Obama also said, the aid should flow through pipelines managed by the international community and the same Palestinian Authority. Such an arrangement was negotiated in 2005 — I played a small part — and it collapsed long ago. So this too already has a faith-based aura. The laying on of hands — even George Mitchell’s good hands — will not do.

Whatever one’s view on these specific issues, the President was profoundly right to call on a rich, older, and skeptical tradition of American political thought. His commitment to pragmatism means a willingness to challenge ideological certitudes of all kinds, not just the ones voiced by your foes. The president should exercise that skepticism soon. Haven’t we just learned from painful, recent experience in Iraq that trillion dollar commitments are not easily hedged?