Pragmatism Expanded and Explained
Talk about bona fide sophistry, the recent remarks of pundit Peter Wehner, concerning Barack Obama and pragmatism, were extremely confusing and counter-productive to a clear understanding of the topic by his readers.
His essay was hardly a paradigm of succinct explanatory rhetoric.
It was more designed to make someone really wanting to know the working definition of pragmatism go running about in circles exuding utter frustration.
He wrote, "Barack Obama is being praised for the centrists he is appointing to his Administration.
It is said that the Obama team includes "the best and the brightest," individuals driven by empirical evidence rather than political philosophy.
They [the American people] don't want ideology, according to Obama.
They want action and they want effectiveness.
Mr.
Obama speaks about his appointments sharing his bent for "pragmatism.
" Technocrats and Socratic dialogue are in, while conviction politicians and an adherence to political philosophy seem passé.
" In an apparent attempt to extol Obama's pragmatic overtures, Wehner apparently knew that his words of advocacy would be futile if his readers understood the real meaning of pragmatism.
So, it's not really that amazing that nowhere in his foregoing word salad did Mr.
Wehner even attempt to define pragmatism understandably for the reader.
Instead, he tossed the word about like a slippery loose football, mentioning 19th Century philosophers John Dewey and Charles Sanders Peirce as though they are currently household names.
Perhaps he didn't want his readers to see clearly through a fog of words, but, instead, to be blinded by what they would accept as the renderings of a presumably wise scholar.
Webster's dictionary does a much better job of explicating the definition and philosophy of pragmatism in comprehensible terms as "a practical approach to problems and affairs marked by the doctrines that the meaning of conceptions is to be sought in their practical bearings, that the function of thought is to guide actions, and that truth is preeminently to be tested by the practical consequences of belief.
" Put much more simply, pragmatism, expressed practically, means that any end result ethically justifies the means used to obtain it.
Charles S.
Peirce and John Dewey were the, supposedly, erudite thinkers who put together the working philosophy of pragmatism in the late 1800s.
The direct opposite of pragmatism is idealism, which stipulates that, in order to go from point 'C' to point 'D', there is a defined course of action that is just and right, and only by adherence to that course will arrival at point 'D' be acceptable.
Please understand that there are other more expedient avenues which may be sought to arrive at point 'D,' but, though expedient in obtaining the end result, they are not lawfully acceptable.
This was the idealistic essence of John Adams profound 1780 statement, which was enshrined in the Massachusetts Constitution, that the American republic is a "nation of laws, not men.
" In other words, the hungry penniless idealist will, in order to keep from starving, either work or beg for the needed money, as any other means of obtaining food (by stealing) would certainly be illegal and immoral.
The pragmatist, on the other hand, will look at the situation and say that following the prescribed laws would inevitably result in starvation.
So expedient thievery, in the pragmatist's mind, would provide an acceptable and ethical means of reaching a solution to the problem.
Therefore, steal the food, eat it in secret, and hope that you are not caught and imprisoned for the illicit act; for necessity is the pragmatic mother of invention and the most popular excuse for breaking the law.
The pragmatist will invariably say, if law stands in the way of an objective, go around it or break it.
That's why you never hear successful politicians declare triumphantly that they are pragmatists, unless those individuals are in positions where, like divine-right kings and queens, the legality of their decisions, orders, and behaviors are never likely questioned for fear of reprisal.
Barack Obama is in such a position where flagrant pragmatism will conveniently provide apparent solutions for going from point 'A' to point 'B.
' Nonetheless, the laws he deliberately twists, distorts, and ultimately breaks, during the process of getting to the desired end will, in effect, make the end result untenable.
The basic dilemma associated with Obama's declared agenda is that the new President probably knows that he won't be able to solve the nation's economic woes by pragmatically using the same flawed unconstitutional institutions that previous Presidents (from JFK to Dubya) have, likewise, used in passing-off their ineffectual agendas as necessary and proper.
By him actually realizing the futility of such inane endeavors, and still attempting to convince the American public of their profitability, Obama will, again, arrogantly epitomize the thoroughly pragmatic President.
Already he has, as U.
S.
President and representative of the American electorate, bowed in obeisance to the King of Saudi Arabia, the leader of the Muslim world, and has publicly declared to millions of Muslims that the United States is not traditionally a Christian nation.
Whether the new President is a pragmatic opportunist, or just plain stupid, there is no doubt that, if former President Andrew Jackson were resurrected tomorrow, his first official act would be to land a swift kick into Obama's back-parts.
Of course, the White House propaganda ministers have thrown quite a different spin on what happened in London than what "The Washington Times" declared in its scathing editorial, and what the very detailed picture taken of the incident revealed.
If Obama does think that he can succeed with such pragmatic endeavors, he knows much less about the U.
S.
Constitution and legislative history than I originally thought he did.
Anyone who has the ability to read on a ninth-grade level can readily peruse the U.
S.
Constitution and ultimately conclude that constitutional law has not been followed for quite a spell in this republic, and that pragmatism has been the name of the game without it being called that by previous chief executives.
Even FDR, after having the audacity to proclaim his New Deal constitutional (after it was declared unconstitutional three times by the U.
S.
Supreme Court), didn't have the temerity to call himself a pragmatist.
This is because he desperately wanted everyone to believe that he was an idealist, with the lofty goal of preserving the republic with his pragmatic policies, which created a dilemma in espousing non sequiturs.
You see, if organized Christianity were practiced today as pragmatically as is politics, the Beatitudes of Jesus would be practically considered as the height of hypocritical lip service.
For wasn't it one of the 20th Century Popes who, on emerging one morning from a sumptuous breakfast and seeing a mendicant kneeling on the porch of St.
Peter's Cathedral, ignored the hungry, ill-clothed, foul-smelling woman with his nose in the air and was heard to say, with a cynical smile, "We will always have the poor with us?" This Roman Catholic, Pope Pius XII, was the same Pope who did the Nazis a great favor, in 1944, by pragmatically turning away a shipload of Jewish women and children who were seeking Vatican asylum.
Pragmatic thinking usually results in tragically flawed solutions, which actually create greater problems for the future while secreting short-term benefits for a few privileged individuals.
It hardly ever serves the greater good.
As another cogent example, the typical military colonel frequently calls in his loyal first sergeant and tells him that a certain thing needs to be done, and gives the senior NCO the order to do it with the admonition, "I don't care how you get it done, just get it done.
" The sergeant smartly salutes and leaves the colonel's office with a severely pragmatic attitude.
Then he lies, cheats, and steals to accomplish the task.
When the sergeant later accomplishes the task, but is subsequently accused of lying, cheating, and stealing by those who were victims of his pragmatic methods, he confesses that his commanding officer ordered him to do it any way he could to get it done.
Nonetheless, when the commanding officer is approached and questioned about his involvement in the sergeant's activities, he only smiles and says, lying through his teeth, that he told the sergeant to follow the rules to do what he could to accomplish the task, but not to worry if he couldn't get it done.
Usually, in the end, when judgment is passed as to illegality of the end results of pragmatic processes, the proverbial sergeants get the blunt end of the stick harshly and punitively across their backs, while the colonels, at the most, merely get their hands slapped in token punishment.
This same thing occurs frequently throughout the Pentagon (military, and paramilitary intelligence agencies) hierarchy, where generals order colonels, and colonels order majors, and majors order captains, who, then, order their dutiful enlisted cadre to pragmatically accomplish unspeakable tasks.
"It all flows downhill in the federal government's scheme of things," one court-martialed convicted sergeant said while suffering hard labor at the Ft.
Leavenworth military prison.
I'm also pretty certain the same scenario applies to the executive branch hierarchy of appointed public servants, especially to the scandalous incident involving "Scooter" Libby when, Vice-President Dick Cheney told him to "take off the gloves" and sock it to CIA agent Valerie Plame because of Joseph Wilson's criticism of the Bush administration's plot to invade Iraq.
Libby, in all probability, took his orders directly from Cheney, and certainly wouldn't have leaked Plame's identity to the media without having been told by his boss to do it.
Didn't Libby work for Dick Cheney? Wasn't "Scooter" Libby Cheney's henchman, oh, excuse me.
.
.
assistant, just like J.
Gordon Liddy was Nixon's pragmatic henchman during Watergate melee? Libby probably wasn't able to tie his shoes without permission.
In the end, the people who cast their ballots for Barack Obama will have to justify their votes of confidence in his glittering, but amorphous, campaign rhetoric according to the end result of his economic and political pragmatism.
American citizens in this day and age are not usually aware of the implementation of despotic laws and policies until their economic life-styles are poignantly disturbed.
To paraphrase what actor Morgan Freeman quipped, as a CIA muckety-muck, in the movie "Chain Reaction," " People don't think about what's happening around them.
They just want to come home from work, sit in their recliners, eat their microwave dinners, and watch color T.
V.
" George W.
Bush's 17 percent approval rating in December 2008 reflected his sore refusal to effectively govern, and the electorate's reaction to a gutted economy coveyed the direct opposite of the meaning conveyed by Freeman's foregoing lines.
As a result, a remarkable number of the voting age population of Americans got up from their recliners and voted.
Moreover, during the last three months of the 2008 Presidential Campaign, the cry from the masses was "anyone but someone like Bush.
" So Obama suddenly came to the forefront as a popularly packaged, but essentially unknown, political entity; and it was clearly evident from the beginning of his candidacy that some very influentially powerful people wanted him to win the Democratic nomination over Hillary, as the strange turn of events in the presidential primaries seemed to indicate.
In my opinion, the 2008 Presidential Election provided some very poor choices for the American electorate, and according to a popular biblical scripture, the voters have sown the wind and will reap (Obama's pragmatic) whirlwind.
His essay was hardly a paradigm of succinct explanatory rhetoric.
It was more designed to make someone really wanting to know the working definition of pragmatism go running about in circles exuding utter frustration.
He wrote, "Barack Obama is being praised for the centrists he is appointing to his Administration.
It is said that the Obama team includes "the best and the brightest," individuals driven by empirical evidence rather than political philosophy.
They [the American people] don't want ideology, according to Obama.
They want action and they want effectiveness.
Mr.
Obama speaks about his appointments sharing his bent for "pragmatism.
" Technocrats and Socratic dialogue are in, while conviction politicians and an adherence to political philosophy seem passé.
" In an apparent attempt to extol Obama's pragmatic overtures, Wehner apparently knew that his words of advocacy would be futile if his readers understood the real meaning of pragmatism.
So, it's not really that amazing that nowhere in his foregoing word salad did Mr.
Wehner even attempt to define pragmatism understandably for the reader.
Instead, he tossed the word about like a slippery loose football, mentioning 19th Century philosophers John Dewey and Charles Sanders Peirce as though they are currently household names.
Perhaps he didn't want his readers to see clearly through a fog of words, but, instead, to be blinded by what they would accept as the renderings of a presumably wise scholar.
Webster's dictionary does a much better job of explicating the definition and philosophy of pragmatism in comprehensible terms as "a practical approach to problems and affairs marked by the doctrines that the meaning of conceptions is to be sought in their practical bearings, that the function of thought is to guide actions, and that truth is preeminently to be tested by the practical consequences of belief.
" Put much more simply, pragmatism, expressed practically, means that any end result ethically justifies the means used to obtain it.
Charles S.
Peirce and John Dewey were the, supposedly, erudite thinkers who put together the working philosophy of pragmatism in the late 1800s.
The direct opposite of pragmatism is idealism, which stipulates that, in order to go from point 'C' to point 'D', there is a defined course of action that is just and right, and only by adherence to that course will arrival at point 'D' be acceptable.
Please understand that there are other more expedient avenues which may be sought to arrive at point 'D,' but, though expedient in obtaining the end result, they are not lawfully acceptable.
This was the idealistic essence of John Adams profound 1780 statement, which was enshrined in the Massachusetts Constitution, that the American republic is a "nation of laws, not men.
" In other words, the hungry penniless idealist will, in order to keep from starving, either work or beg for the needed money, as any other means of obtaining food (by stealing) would certainly be illegal and immoral.
The pragmatist, on the other hand, will look at the situation and say that following the prescribed laws would inevitably result in starvation.
So expedient thievery, in the pragmatist's mind, would provide an acceptable and ethical means of reaching a solution to the problem.
Therefore, steal the food, eat it in secret, and hope that you are not caught and imprisoned for the illicit act; for necessity is the pragmatic mother of invention and the most popular excuse for breaking the law.
The pragmatist will invariably say, if law stands in the way of an objective, go around it or break it.
That's why you never hear successful politicians declare triumphantly that they are pragmatists, unless those individuals are in positions where, like divine-right kings and queens, the legality of their decisions, orders, and behaviors are never likely questioned for fear of reprisal.
Barack Obama is in such a position where flagrant pragmatism will conveniently provide apparent solutions for going from point 'A' to point 'B.
' Nonetheless, the laws he deliberately twists, distorts, and ultimately breaks, during the process of getting to the desired end will, in effect, make the end result untenable.
The basic dilemma associated with Obama's declared agenda is that the new President probably knows that he won't be able to solve the nation's economic woes by pragmatically using the same flawed unconstitutional institutions that previous Presidents (from JFK to Dubya) have, likewise, used in passing-off their ineffectual agendas as necessary and proper.
By him actually realizing the futility of such inane endeavors, and still attempting to convince the American public of their profitability, Obama will, again, arrogantly epitomize the thoroughly pragmatic President.
Already he has, as U.
S.
President and representative of the American electorate, bowed in obeisance to the King of Saudi Arabia, the leader of the Muslim world, and has publicly declared to millions of Muslims that the United States is not traditionally a Christian nation.
Whether the new President is a pragmatic opportunist, or just plain stupid, there is no doubt that, if former President Andrew Jackson were resurrected tomorrow, his first official act would be to land a swift kick into Obama's back-parts.
Of course, the White House propaganda ministers have thrown quite a different spin on what happened in London than what "The Washington Times" declared in its scathing editorial, and what the very detailed picture taken of the incident revealed.
If Obama does think that he can succeed with such pragmatic endeavors, he knows much less about the U.
S.
Constitution and legislative history than I originally thought he did.
Anyone who has the ability to read on a ninth-grade level can readily peruse the U.
S.
Constitution and ultimately conclude that constitutional law has not been followed for quite a spell in this republic, and that pragmatism has been the name of the game without it being called that by previous chief executives.
Even FDR, after having the audacity to proclaim his New Deal constitutional (after it was declared unconstitutional three times by the U.
S.
Supreme Court), didn't have the temerity to call himself a pragmatist.
This is because he desperately wanted everyone to believe that he was an idealist, with the lofty goal of preserving the republic with his pragmatic policies, which created a dilemma in espousing non sequiturs.
You see, if organized Christianity were practiced today as pragmatically as is politics, the Beatitudes of Jesus would be practically considered as the height of hypocritical lip service.
For wasn't it one of the 20th Century Popes who, on emerging one morning from a sumptuous breakfast and seeing a mendicant kneeling on the porch of St.
Peter's Cathedral, ignored the hungry, ill-clothed, foul-smelling woman with his nose in the air and was heard to say, with a cynical smile, "We will always have the poor with us?" This Roman Catholic, Pope Pius XII, was the same Pope who did the Nazis a great favor, in 1944, by pragmatically turning away a shipload of Jewish women and children who were seeking Vatican asylum.
Pragmatic thinking usually results in tragically flawed solutions, which actually create greater problems for the future while secreting short-term benefits for a few privileged individuals.
It hardly ever serves the greater good.
As another cogent example, the typical military colonel frequently calls in his loyal first sergeant and tells him that a certain thing needs to be done, and gives the senior NCO the order to do it with the admonition, "I don't care how you get it done, just get it done.
" The sergeant smartly salutes and leaves the colonel's office with a severely pragmatic attitude.
Then he lies, cheats, and steals to accomplish the task.
When the sergeant later accomplishes the task, but is subsequently accused of lying, cheating, and stealing by those who were victims of his pragmatic methods, he confesses that his commanding officer ordered him to do it any way he could to get it done.
Nonetheless, when the commanding officer is approached and questioned about his involvement in the sergeant's activities, he only smiles and says, lying through his teeth, that he told the sergeant to follow the rules to do what he could to accomplish the task, but not to worry if he couldn't get it done.
Usually, in the end, when judgment is passed as to illegality of the end results of pragmatic processes, the proverbial sergeants get the blunt end of the stick harshly and punitively across their backs, while the colonels, at the most, merely get their hands slapped in token punishment.
This same thing occurs frequently throughout the Pentagon (military, and paramilitary intelligence agencies) hierarchy, where generals order colonels, and colonels order majors, and majors order captains, who, then, order their dutiful enlisted cadre to pragmatically accomplish unspeakable tasks.
"It all flows downhill in the federal government's scheme of things," one court-martialed convicted sergeant said while suffering hard labor at the Ft.
Leavenworth military prison.
I'm also pretty certain the same scenario applies to the executive branch hierarchy of appointed public servants, especially to the scandalous incident involving "Scooter" Libby when, Vice-President Dick Cheney told him to "take off the gloves" and sock it to CIA agent Valerie Plame because of Joseph Wilson's criticism of the Bush administration's plot to invade Iraq.
Libby, in all probability, took his orders directly from Cheney, and certainly wouldn't have leaked Plame's identity to the media without having been told by his boss to do it.
Didn't Libby work for Dick Cheney? Wasn't "Scooter" Libby Cheney's henchman, oh, excuse me.
.
.
assistant, just like J.
Gordon Liddy was Nixon's pragmatic henchman during Watergate melee? Libby probably wasn't able to tie his shoes without permission.
In the end, the people who cast their ballots for Barack Obama will have to justify their votes of confidence in his glittering, but amorphous, campaign rhetoric according to the end result of his economic and political pragmatism.
American citizens in this day and age are not usually aware of the implementation of despotic laws and policies until their economic life-styles are poignantly disturbed.
To paraphrase what actor Morgan Freeman quipped, as a CIA muckety-muck, in the movie "Chain Reaction," " People don't think about what's happening around them.
They just want to come home from work, sit in their recliners, eat their microwave dinners, and watch color T.
V.
" George W.
Bush's 17 percent approval rating in December 2008 reflected his sore refusal to effectively govern, and the electorate's reaction to a gutted economy coveyed the direct opposite of the meaning conveyed by Freeman's foregoing lines.
As a result, a remarkable number of the voting age population of Americans got up from their recliners and voted.
Moreover, during the last three months of the 2008 Presidential Campaign, the cry from the masses was "anyone but someone like Bush.
" So Obama suddenly came to the forefront as a popularly packaged, but essentially unknown, political entity; and it was clearly evident from the beginning of his candidacy that some very influentially powerful people wanted him to win the Democratic nomination over Hillary, as the strange turn of events in the presidential primaries seemed to indicate.
In my opinion, the 2008 Presidential Election provided some very poor choices for the American electorate, and according to a popular biblical scripture, the voters have sown the wind and will reap (Obama's pragmatic) whirlwind.
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