How Pragmatism Kills Enterprises and Nations

The most amazing thing about the Lucent swindle is how stupid it was. Rich McGinn doubled his income for two or three years at the height of the swindle. But what he lost was at least another decade as the CEO of what would still be, except for the swindle, a great and profitable enterprise. How could a man smart enough to hold his own when talking with Nobel Prize winners, and not only because he was their boss, do something so unbelievably stupid?

The answer, I see now - after thinking about Tara Smith's lecture at the 2008 OCON - is Pragmatism. "Pragmatism," Charles Sanders Peirce wrote in 1903, "is the principle that every theoretical judgment expressible in a sentence in the indicative mood is a confused form of thought whose only meaning, if it has any, lies in its tendency to enforce a corresponding practical maxim expressible as a conditional sentence having its apodosis in the imperative mood." Or, in the form that McGinn may have learned and followed, that ideas have no meaning beyond "if I do x I experience y." And if indeed I do x and experience y, then according to Pragmatism the idea is true - it "works." Thus Pragmatism takes Kant one step farther. Kant allowed that there is a reality which is a source of our conscious experience; he only asserted that our knowledge is limited to and by the nature of that experience, so that we humans may never know, except perhaps by faith, rather than by reasoning from the experience of our senses, what that external reality truly is. According to Pragmatism, the only things that we can know at all are our experiences and actions. The pragmatist holds that it is meaningless even to talk about reality as something external to consciousness, or about our experience as being a result of something external to our own thoughts and actions. Therefore the pragmatist denies that one can meaningfully account for the regularities of our experience by induction or deduction of principles - of conceptual knowledge - about what reality (which to the pragmatist is a meaningless idea anyway) is and how it works.

So how does Pragmatism look from my own (hopefully Objectivist) perspective? From the perspective of my own integration of Objectivism with the available scientific knowledge of our day, it looks like Pragmatism strikes directly against, and if permitted to, destroys, Man's evolved means of survival: his conceptual faculty. Pragmatism destroys Man's species-specific ability to preserve and enhance our lives by discovering and using conceptual, principled knowledge. Pragmatism makes smart men stupid. Rich McGinn and the Lucent swindle is just one case in point.

Unfortunately, American schools have been inculcating Pragmatism into the American mind for the last half-century or more. Thus Pragmatism dominates American culture and American political life today, as no bad idea had ever dominated both the culture and the politics of any place in the Western world, at least since the Dark Age of Christian domination in both. Yet, except for critiques of Pragmatist John Dewey's destructive heritage in the field of education, I cannot recall any previous discussion of Pragmatist ideology, and of its wider effects, at any Objectivist conference before. Objectivists sometimes assume that because dishonest ideas are philosophically unimportant, they must also be existentially impotent - and Pragmatism is perhaps the most monumentally dishonest ideology in the entire history of philosophy. Yet Pragmatism is so pervasive in contemporary American culture and education that Tara Smith spent a good third of her lecture telling her listeners how to confront it, not even in society and politics, but in the ideas and habits inculcated by American education and culture into the minds of her (Objectivist!) listeners.

It is now a quarter-century since the graduates of the Pragmatist curricula that Ayn Rand wrote about in "The Comprachicos," and Leonard Peikoff spoke about in "Why Johnny Can't Think," reached middle-age and began to take control of American institutions: legislatures and courts and defense and police agencies and universities and corporations. And, looking at the results of their actions, one cannot miss the destruction brought about by Pragmatism.

Pragmatism in America is the source of policies and actions that have given American voters and leaders their current world-wide - and well-deserved - reputation for anti-intellectualism and stupidity. CEOs who destroy titanic enterprises by one unprincipled scheme or another are just the tip of the Pragmatist iceberg. In international policy and in war, it is American Pragmatism that brought America's and Mankind's worst enemies, the Islamists leaders of Islamic Republics, into power in Afghanistan and Iraq. In the Schools of Education and in the Philosophy Departments of America's universities, Pragmatism has given us professors who cannot tell the difference between religion and science: teachers who teach teachers to inculcate anticonceptual, anti-intellectual stupidity in American children. And when those children reach the universities, fields that require principled conceptual thought - like engineering and science - are mostly beyond their reach. America's high-technology industries depend for nearly all of their graduate-level high-technology workforce on people who immigrated to American universities from schools less ravaged by Pragmatism than ours. Republican presidential candidate McCain's proposed reduction or suspension of their immigration amounts to a plan for national suicide by Pragmatism.

And there is worse. Kant's agenda was to limit knowledge to make room for belief. Pragmatism is Kant on steroids: it reduces conceptual knowledge to zero, and gives religion all the room in the world. Pragmatism is the ultimate handmaiden of theocracy. And today, unfortunately, it is this combination of Pragmatism and theocracy that has become America's de-facto national political ideology.

If you are an American, as I am, be very afraid of American Pragmatism. And if you are also an Objectivist, or at least an advocate of America's previous, pre-Pragmatist, secular, Enlightenment-based original principles, then damn it and do something about it. The The Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights: Activism website, is a good place to start.