My problem with pragmatism is thus: if you decide that action cannot succeed, you will not take action, which means it will not succeed, which means the status quo remains unchallenged and supreme.
I can come up with a million reasons why something will not work. It isn't hard. Most of them will even be plausible! Likely, even!
And so, it takes significantly less energy to decide that fighting won't work, so why try, it's a waste of energy/resources/blah blah blah.
This is an op, friends.
1/
You've been acculturated into believing several "facts" that, quite frankly, are less factual than you think.
Things like "change is never quick" and "politics is always about one step forward and two steps back" and "human nature is fundamentally violent, rapacious, and everyone wants to murder you"
Another is that your best bet when deciding what to do is to...try to see the future?
It's absurd on its face, right? But that doesn't stop "serious, mature" people from trotting it out.
2/
"Now see here: I've thought about this and have read summaries of the literature produced by white Western capitalists on this subject, and [beneficial action/effort] is actually *~impossible~* and *~could never succeed~* so you shouldn't even try it" literally comes out of people's mouths so frequently it should be on a sign people can point to to save them the trouble.
But - and I remain flabbergasted that I have to say this - *you cannot predict the future*.
3/
Pragmatism is *predicated* on the idea that some people are so smart they're literally *Seers* and *Oracles*. They couch it in rhetoric about "probability" and "likelihood" and (always, always) Hobbsian ideas about "human nature" - but it's still casting the bones.
They elide/erase that humanity exists because of a series of *extremely unlikely* occurrences in both nature and society that, had a pragmatist been in charge, would have *never happened*.
4/
"It seems *extremely unlikely* that a single-celled organism could evolve into a sentient ape" they would opine.
Indeed, pragmatists put Semmelweiss in an insane asylum for asking them to wash their hands. They supported chattel slavery for a half century, despite widespread opposition to it amongst regular people, "because abolishing it is disruptive and impossible!" Most scientific breakthroughs came from extremely un-pragmatic efforts. The light bulb took hundreds of failures.
5/
Pragmatism is a *destructive ideology*, not a worthwhile way to use your brainpan.
As I always have to, I need to distinguish it from *practicality*. Practicality takes a goal and lays out the steps, resources, and likely challenges it will face as you work to achieve it. Then it requires you to create likely solutions to those challenges ahead of time and secure those resources.
Then you *do the thing*. Despite the chance of failure.
Pragmatism just says "don't do eeet". End of story.
6/
None of this applies to shit like "I will jump off a cliff and fly!!!!" Bro, I gotta predict you will not fly.
Because like most pernicious and hard to dislodge ideologies, Pragmatism is a deformed version of something very useful: knowing what is realistic and what isn't.
If your project is to, say, breed a kind of puppy that produces fusion power, I can confidently say you will not succeed. As an example.
When you weaponize that common sense into Oracular certainty, it's Pragmatism
/fin
John
Tael 🔜 AC26