On David Frum and Pragmatism

This will probably be the last post I'll ever make about David Frum. Neither he nor his views are important enough to spend much time on. But recently, and more than once, it's been suggested that Frum is really just a huckster, looking for a buck he couldn't earn honestly. Perhaps, I don't know him well.

But, it's at least worth considering that he - like David Brooks and similar creatures - is really nothing more nor less than what he appears: a Progressive with a conservative pastiche. People do, after all, come to believe a philosophy that drives their values and choices. The Pragmatism of the sort oozing out of Frum, Brooks, and others is a great facilitator of that. It makes it easy to embrace the opposite of what you once believed and never feel you've contradicted yourself at all.

But that change of viewpoint is almost always very superficial. That's one of the signs of a Pragmatist, since it enjoins us not to have any fundamental beliefs. To have them is, according to the Pragmatist, a sure sign of 'rigid', anti-empirical, dogmatic thinking.

So, they are led ultimately - despite the Pragmatist's disavowal of a 'rigid' law of cause and effect and denial of all 'ultimates' - to embrace the beliefs of those whom they entirely disagreed with earlier. That's the nature - despite the Pragmatist's claim there is no such thing as 'a' nature - of the beast.

By all means, a healthy skepticism (i.e. a policy of avoiding hasty judgments and a willingness to embrace new evidence) is wise. In my view, though, an open mind is like an open trash can - people tend to put garbage in it. Better to have, as Rand described the alternative, an active mind.

To have no firm beliefs is, sooner or later, to be open to all comers, regardless of the strength (or lack) of their arguments. Too often, that leads to the lazy-minded refusal to make judgements about truth and falsehood, good and bad.

Keep that up long enough and you wind up becoming David Frum.

Is Obama Lying or Just Deluded?

Commentators to Jacob Sullum's article at Reason.com try to analyze whether Obama is a liar or just self-deluded. I've made some efforts along those lines myself and confess I have no set-in-concrete conclusion.

True, he does lie from time to time (ok, often), but do they rise above and beyond the usual politician's dissembling? Only his hairdresser knows for sure.

What we can say with certainty is that he is a Progressive and a Pragmatist. Both those philosophies make distinguishing between fantasy and reality very difficult, since Pragmatism implies there is no such distinction and Progressivism provides a moral motivation for not feeling compelled to make the effort.

So, the search for the real Obama continues...

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Constitution Destroyer

Thomas Bowden offers a superb essay in The Objective Standard on Oliver Wendell Holmes' 1905 dissent in Lochner v New York and its legal aftermath.

Sound like a snooze fest? Far from it. For anyone interested in one of the major steps that led to the modern Court's abandoning the Constitution, it's a must read. Twice. At over 11,000 words of careful prose, that's no small effort, but it will be well rewarded.

Bowden discusses the details of the case and why the Court decided as it did, including the reasons for Holmes' dissent. That mere 617 word legal dissent [pdf warning], as much as the case itself, influences the law even today and stands as a clear historical marker in the Progressive destruction of objective law and the Constitution.

What Bowden doesn't discuss — it's not his purpose — is how Holmes' view grows out of his general adoption of Pragmatism. In many ways, Holmes anticipated James and Dewey, and injected that deadly philosophy into mainstream legal thought.

His Pragmatism is shown clearly by such statements as: “General propositions do not decide concrete cases,” and “Every opinion tends to become a law,” and the reshaping of law is the “natural outcome of a dominant opinion.” It's made even more obvious by his view that, as Bowden puts it, "a proper constitution averts disaster by providing an orderly mechanism for embodying in law the constantly shifting, subjective opinions of political majorities."

Given the ultimate success of that view, it's not surprising that Holmes could say with impunity later in life: “All my life I have sneered at the natural rights of man.”

All this may sound remote from the day-to-day onslaught of statism we're currently battling. But consider that HR 3200 (the 'Health Care' bill), Cap and Trade (which will come back alive after that issue is settled), and many similar Congressional rapes would not likely have gotten as far as they have if Congress knew SCOTUS would strike them down at once.

Consider, too, that relationship between basic ideas and the law the next time you hear some Progressive argue, in essence, "anything goes if the majority favor it." That's the ghost of Holmes talking*.

The view that there are no unchanging basic principles, and therefore no basic inviolate rights — and therefore any decision democratically arrived at to usurp them is perfectly fair — is Pragmatism applied to the law.

Given how thoroughly Pragmatist the Court in the past century has become, it isn't hard now to see the effects of abstract legal philosophy on daily life. The Court's Kelo decision to do nothing in response to her home being stolen for the 'good of the community' is just one recent example.

We have Oliver Wendell Holmes to thank for much of that.



*"[Pierce, James, Dewey, and Holmes] helped put an end to the idea that the universe is an idea, that beyond the mundane business of making our way as best we can in a world shot through with contingency, there exists some order, invisible to us, whose logic we transgress at our peril." Louis Menand, in his book, The Metaphysical Club

David Brooks Reaches A New Gray

David Brooks' reasoning powers have long been pretty much kaput. But now he has really outdone himself.

After noting several stark differences between the hippies of New Left of the 60s and the Tea Party movement activists, such as "One was on the left, the other is on the right. One was bohemian, the other is bourgeois. One was motivated by war, and the other is motivated by runaway federal spending. One went to Woodstock, the other is more likely to go to Wal-Mart." he immediately turns around and says "But the similarities are more striking than the differences."

Uh, it would be hard to find a starker difference than 'one favors liberty, the other collective slavery.'

His reasons only make his position look more ridiculous. Scattered among lesser gems is this 40 carat whopper:

"The core commonality is this: Members of both movements believe in what you might call mass innocence.

Both movements are built on the assumption that the people are pure and virtuous and that evil is introduced into society by corrupt elites and rotten authority structures."

"Because of this assumption, members of both movements go in big for conspiracy theories."

Right. It's just a conspiracy theory that Federal spending is out of control far beyond already horrendous historical norms. It's just a wacky theory that the Feds have already nationalized two-thirds of the auto industry. It's delusional to believe they already corrupted the financial markets with bailouts, stimuli, and interfering in executive compensation issues. A person is mentally askew if he believes they're trying to complete their control over all health care and insurance.

Still, set all that aside. What's most interesting here is that his brain is so awash with pragmatic, middle-of-the-road mush he would simply wash away the clear black-and-white differences between the 60's New Left and the '10s New Right to declare the Tea Party movement morally suspect.

And why? Because the latter wants radical change (in this case in the direction of freedom), just like the New Left did in the '60s (in the direction of statism). In short, what they have in common is a passionate – and more or less consistent — attachment to a philosophy. To a Pragmatist, such a thing is anathema regardless of the actual content of the philosophy.

And how does he defend this position? By invoking an all-too-common conservative notion that is both misanthropic and inherently self-contradictory:

Conservatism is built on the idea of original sin — on the assumption of human fallibility and uncertainty. To remedy our fallen condition, conservatives believe in civilization — in social structures, permanent institutions and just authorities, which embody the accumulated wisdom of the ages...

The doctrine of original sin is not equivalent to a belief that humans are fallible or lack omniscience. It's the belief that we are innately evil, or (in weaker versions) that humans have an in-built tendency toward evil.

The concept of "sin" (actions which violate a moral law) is closely related to that of "evil." But the concepts of good and evil can only be meaningful when one has a choice. Alleging we are born evil, therefore, entails a contradiction.

So, basing one's advocacy of "permanent institutions and just authorities, which embody the accumulated wisdom of the ages" is illogical (not to mention ahistorical, considering how often that alleged wisdom has been wrong).

Folks, this is the inevitable mental and moral dead end of living by the philosophy of Pragmatism. It makes you dumb.

Is Obama a Pragmatist?

Jonah Goldberg discusses Obama's recent claim that:

"I am not an ideologue," President Obama insisted at his truly refreshing confab with the Republican caucus in Baltimore last Friday. When he heard some incredulous murmurs and chuckles from the audience in response to the idea that the most sincerely ideological president in a generation is no ideologue, he added a somewhat plaintive, "I'm not."

It's such a loaded word, it would be helpful to have a definition of "ideologue."

If it means "dogmatist" then Obama is a mixed case. He's dogmatic about Progressive ideology (i.e. philosophy), but pragmatic about how he applies it. It's no accident that Dewey was one of the foremost developers of both Progressivism and Pragmatism. Far from being antithetical, they're complementary. (One refers to content, the other to a method.)

If it just means someone who has a philosophy, that's true of everyone. It couldn't be otherwise. If it means having a consistent, coherent, or comprehensive philosophy... these days that's true of very few on all points of the political compass. Pragmatism, in the technical sense of that term, is the overwhelmingly dominant philosophy of our day, and half the cause of most of our problems. (Progressivism is the other half.)

Finally, the word "pragmatism" does NOT mean "practical," in theory or practice. Dewey would have shuddered at the idea, and – in fact – a pragmatist (i.e. someone who doesn't use a conscious, consistent philosophy to guide his or her actions) is the most impractical creature on Earth. Such a person is continually buffeted by winds internal and external, his emotions on the one hand, the beliefs of others on the other.

All those confusions over important words are a major source of countless unnecessary debates. In too many cases, that confusion is no doubt deliberate. The last thing a pragmatic Progressive would want is clear definitions.