The climate conversation is riddled with ideological battles. There are those who think climate change is the most pressing issue of our time pitted against those who don’t think it’s a big deal (if it’s even real). There are fights over ecological versus industrial forms of carbon removal. And there are those who believe that climate change can be reversed, while others have little hope that humanity will stick the landing. So, how do we move past these absolutist views and inspire action to solve the problem?
Jeffrey Howard is the Editor-in-Chief at Erraticus and the host of the Damn the Absolute! podcast. Both platforms take a pragmatic approach to ideas, challenging dogma, fundamentalism and ideological hubris. On this episode of Reversing Climate Change, Jeffrey joins Ross to introduce the principles of pragmatism as a discrete philosophical school of thought, describing the intellectual context from which it emerged and how the philosophy seeks to reconcile the competing camps of Rationalism and Empiricism.
Jeffrey explores how a pragmatic approach might break logjams in the climate conversation, explaining how pragmatists balance building an inclusive community of inquirers with taking action to solve problems in the real world. Listen in to understand how a pragmatist thinks about a climate solution like carbon capture and learn how pragmatism addresses our lived challenges, encouraging us to hold our views with humility as we work to improve life for all people.
Connect with Ross
Subscribe to the show on Substack @ rosskenyon.com/subscribe.
I also write Carbon Removal Memes and curate Climate Workers Anonymous.
Resources:
Too many things referenced for this episode! Will fix this in the future. In the meantime, here is a truncated portion:
Jeffrey Howard on Reversing Climate Change EP107
Sick Souls, Healthy Minds: How William James Can Save Your Life by John Kaag
Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking by William James
Subsistence Agriculture in the US: Reconnecting to Work, Nature and Community by Ashley Colby
On Richard Rorty on Damn the Absolute! EP001
Toward a Politics of Uncertainty on Damn the Absolute! EP002
David O’Hara on Damn the Absolute! EP007
Full Transcript
Ross Kenyon: Hello and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change podcast. I’m Ross Kenyon. I am Nori’s creative editor. Today I have with me an alumnus of the show, Jeffrey Howard, editor-in-chief of Erraticus and host of the Damn the Absolute podcast. Hey, Jeffrey. Hello, Ross. I am pleased to have been invited back to the dinner table. Yeah, it is kind of a dinner table. These conversations, try to keep them fun, try and keep them friendly. It is maybe dinner table-ish. I’ll allow it.
Well, I wanted to have you back on because you started your own podcast, which is a very enjoyable show. I’ve listened to some of it and looking forward to learning more because you are covering a beat that I find very interesting, which is pragmatism as a philosophical school of thought. So on the show, we like to talk about different approaches to climate change. If you’re listening, you certainly know this. And Jeffrey had recently started a podcast about pragmatism. So the gears start working here. I ended up reading Six Souls, Healthy Minds, How William James Can Save Your Life by John Keg and Pragmatism, A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking by William James himself.
Been listening to Jeffrey’s show, talking to Jeffrey about this for a long time. So I thought it was a good chance to have you back on. And if you like what we’re talking about, Damn the Absolute is a great podcast for digging into more. So thanks for being here, Jeffrey. Happy to be back. Happy to have you back. Well, let’s start at the beginning. Who was William James? And is it possible to trust a person with two first names?
Jeffrey Howard: I actually have three first names, but maybe, maybe not. William James, a lot of people in the United States know him as the father of American psychology, he’s a philosopher. He was born in 1842, was most prominent near the end of the 1800s, died in 1910. Some people know him for his book, The Varieties of Religious Experience. And he is the popularizer of pragmatism. Pragmatism is a school of thought or philosophy that William James actually didn’t coin the term. That he gives credit to Charles Sanders Peirce, who is not only a childhood friend from...
They both grew up in New York but also swam in a lot of the same social circles of other prominent figures such as American transcendentalists like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. But pragmatism is... As a philosophy that grew up or came to fruition around that time in reaction to a bunch of other philosophies. So, when I talk about pragmatism, I think a lot of people, they hear the word pragmatic or practical. There is some semblance of the philosophy or the philosophical understanding of it in that language.
But there’s also this notion that people have of, oh, I’m being pragmatic when I just do whatever it takes to get the thing done that I want to achieve. And there can sometimes be this very dark coloring of the term pragmatic that is just you don’t have principles. You don’t have a respect to morality. There’s sort of this very... Instrumental. Machiavellian politician quality to it that’s just like they do whatever to get something done and that’s not quite really what pragmatism is about.
Ross Kenyon: It’s funny you say that. I do not have that association when I think of someone being pragmatic or practical. Well, I think those are synonyms. Maybe they’re not. But I see them as someone who just... Want something to work and isn’t hidebound to larger principles that may lead you down some wrong paths if you believe principles over direct experience or something like that. And I’m sure you just found 19 things to challenge me on.
Jeffrey Howard: I’m glad that you don’t have that connotation. There are plenty of others who do not, but I know there are some who, if you do a Google search of pragmatic or pragmatism, it’s often in a headline about a politician who compromised on a principle or just did what was necessary to get something done. And that’s often, I think... What colors it for some people, but it really is more than that. It’s really just trying to say, hey, we are presented with problems in our environment as living organic creatures and what is pragmatic is going to be the ideas and concepts that we hold to gently or softly or loosely in our hands that then guide our actions to help us resolve those problems.
Hmm.
Ross Kenyon: And we’ll unpack that more and try to figure out how that plays out. I think it might be useful for people listening to understand the intellectual context from which pragmatism emerged. Why don’t you set the stage a little bit?
Jeffrey Howard: I think it’s best to go back to Rene Descartes, early modern philosopher. The pragmatists are largely rejecting what became known as Cartesianism, which comes from Descartes. Descartes, some people may know for the, I think, therefore I am, cogito ergosum. Descartes was trying to come up with a complete system that would help us to know with certainty what is true and what is not. This was more of the caricature some people have of a philosopher who just sits in their chair and just thinks up stuff and writes it down, which in some ways was true.
I know some people like that. Yeah. And he thought, if I just take each of my beliefs one at a time and doubt them, and then I can start building up this new worldview that is certain. Yeah. So, he starts looking at the senses and comes to the conclusion that our senses can deceive us that things that appear true may not actually be true. And he eventually doubts the existence of the objects in the room. He toys around with the idea that, hey, maybe there is this demon who is tricking me and the things that I think that are real and out there are not.
And eventually, he lands on, well... I’m thinking and only something that exists can think. Therefore, this is the one clear thing. And then from there, he starts building out this idea of truth that whatever is clear and distinct that cannot be doubted, that is true. And that’s this view he has of truth. It’s abstract, it’s absolute, it’s out there and we uncover it. And there’s this gap that we as humans, we have our mind and truth is when the concepts in our minds map with what’s out there in reality and there is this gap.
Ross Kenyon: Just before we close the loop on that. Is this what I’ve heard people call it something like aprioristic or rationalistic or what do you call the general Cartesian approach and its followers?
Jeffrey Howard: Yeah, that would be fair. You could say Descartes' approach is very rationalistic. In some ways, you can say it’s idealistic. These things, these terms get thrown around in similar ways that it’s experience does not change what is true. That our experience as humans is not going to have an impact on really informing what is true, that we can reason our way to it. That’s a very rationalistic approach.
Ross Kenyon: Okay, listener. So, keep rationalism in your mind because it’ll be a good anchor point for contrasting pragmatism and also some other approaches too.
Jeffrey Howard: And so, they’re reacting to that. There’s another school People have thought in the air that’s a certain type of empiricism that was popular in Britain a little bit later with Locke, David Hume where rather than getting into some that seemingly more metaphysical stuff, it’s just The thing that’s most reliable are the things that we sense. But the way they approach it is our minds are these passive receptors of sensations, things that are out there that just sort of hit us in a very atomistic way that eventually everything can best be understood on an atomistic level and then it grows out from there but ultimately everything is just atoms.
And so, empiricists in this sense would reduce things to their material that ultimately there is this deterministic, purely materialistic world that we occupy and that’s the best way to understand and most clearly get at truth. And pragmatism comes along... Before we do that... Yeah, Ross.
Ross Kenyon: Sorry, I keep doing that to you. That’s okay. I just want to give the listener like a nice nugget for it. So, Locke, Hume, this sort of British approach to, I don’t even know what you call this, metaphysics perhaps of understanding the fundamental structure of reality or epistemology. How do we know what we know? You’re saying that sensory input is important, experience is important, and maybe there’s good reasons not to trust the purely rationalistic logic or just a guy in a chair theorizing. That isn’t the right way to achieve knowledge within empiricism.
Is that kind of correct? Yeah, I think that’s a fair way to put it. Okay. Okay, so now listeners have... I’m being very deliberate here. You have rationalism and empiricism in your quiver. So it’ll make more sense when Jeffrey launches into pragmatism. I think we’re on the road there now.
Jeffrey Howard: Yeah, we can jump in. So in the book Pragmatism, William James is... He acknowledges that what he’s about to do and what I’m about to explain is very simplistic, but it’s setting it up to help make a broader point that the world can be broken up into two camps or as he says, the history of philosophy can be understood as a clash between temperaments and what he means by that is there are These two different types of temperaments would roughly map up between these rationalists and these empiricists and he is calling them the tender-minded and the tough-minded.
Now, the tender-minded are these rationalistic types who really go by these principles that are absolute and unchanging and everything They’re very intellectualizing. They’re idealistic, optimistic. The tender-minded tend to be of a more religious bent. Think of people who will say like, oh, in the end, it all works out because God is in control. They tend to accommodate more free will. They tend to focus a bit more on these dogmas and creeds that are so noble and clean and pure that they cannot be defiled by our human experience in a way.
And then the other are those tough minded who are these empiricists who are really focused on the facts. A tough-minded person might say we are meat sacks that are partially made of stardust that’s floating on this rock in the universe or something that is like, that’s all it is. They’re going to be, tend to be maybe a little bit more pessimistic about things. It’s just sort of like, well, that’s the world, you know, tough luck. They’re typically not as religious and there is that fatalism to them.
The empiricists is going to be a bit more pluralistic, that they’re not going to be as hung up on these more metaphysical or abstract ideologies of this is how the world is and this is how all these principles fit together. They’re just more of focus on what is immediately in front of us and let’s not get too caught up beyond that. Does that track so far, Ross?
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I think that makes sense. That’s a nice place to build from. So then is pragmatism just a wrecking ball that’s coming in at this point?
Jeffrey Howard: William James presents pragmatism as a reconciler or a mediator, which my own temperament, I will say I’ve probably a little bit more inclined toward the tender minded. But I see pragmatism as this moderator, this diplomat between a bunch of extreme philosophies. These people are just so fiercely hold something that is their ideology and beat everyone else over the head with and say, this is it. I have the truth. And the pragmatist is going to say, well, let’s unstiffen this a bit. Let’s see how your ideas manifest in the practical consequences of our daily lives.
And so the way William James puts it is saying, you want a system that will combine both things, the scientific loyalty to facts and willingness to take account of them. The spirit of adaptation and accommodation in short, but also the old confidence in human values and the resultant spontaneity, whether of the religious or of the romantic type. So he’s trying to say, look, empiricists, they are focused on facts and that’s where we need to be. However, there’s a type of empiricism that basically annihilates or ignores the things that really make us human, the values, the things that are at the heart of our experience.
The tender-minded or the rationalists tend to sort of abhor the messiness and the muddiness of experience and say, well, that can’t be true because that makes this principle that I have in my head so clear and pure sort of defile that just can’t be the way it is. And so, he’s offering pragmatism as a way to have it on both sides in the best way possible.
Ross Kenyon: He gives a bunch of examples of how pragmatism might be able to thread this needle and pragmatism, a new name for some old ways of thinking. Many of these lectures, there are examples where he’s saying, here are the two camps, here’s what pragmatism might say about them. And there’s one in particular, I wish I could, I had it totally marked, but there’s some sort of religious battle he’s having or some metaphysical battle that these camps have been established for a very long time. And it seems like his solution was, what’s the practical difference if we accept one of these over the other?
And if the answer is not much, then maybe it doesn’t matter or it collapses in on itself or something like that. Is that an accurate reading?
Jeffrey Howard: Yeah, I think so. What pragmatism, I tend to view it in one of three ways. One, you could just sort of view it as an orientation in the world that is about unstiffening theories, that is open-minded, that is not going to Out of hand dismiss an idea. There’s a philosopher I was speaking with recently, David O'Hara is a Persean scholar who talks about how someone could just say, oh, well, trees communicate with one another. And someone who may be a tough-minded person might say, well, that’s ridiculous.
They don’t think and communicate with one another. Whereas a pragmatist might say, well, hold on, let’s think about that. We’re going to be a little bit more humble about as to what that means and how they communicate and you can empirically look at the ways in which trees roots as well as their branches can communicate each other in very chemical ways as we understand and it may not be exactly Right. Right. Right. The mediating quality is trying to say, if we look for how this idea plays out in our lived experience acting as if it were true, what clarification does it have?
And alternatively, if Camp A has a presentation of the world and Camp B has one and in our experience they have the same consequences, then those ideas are either meaningless or they collapse into having the same meaning.
Ross Kenyon: That’s a great example. I’ve definitely been in seminar rooms before where the debate has ended up in a space of what does it mean to communicate or its equivalent or what does it mean to think and that’s the way of solving the problem is precisely to I have to say I found that tremendously boring. So there’s something about pragmatism that I like because I felt kind of stupid in some of those spaces because I would want to sort of get a move on. But philosophy is oftentimes, at least at the academic graduate level, Very focused on precision and small procedural points and totally understanding what’s intended by this meaning and trying to unpack that.
So there are good and bad ways of doing that too. Pragmatism in trying to be like, oh, it doesn’t really matter. What’s the difference? You might lose some of those conversations, some of which may actually be quite valuable. On the other hand, I don’t know that temperamentally I’m the right person to do that in those rooms. So I don’t know. Does that make sense or am I just a fool?
Jeffrey Howard: I think it makes sense. For me, you bring to mind my own experience with philosophy in general. I actually was as an undergrad, a minor in philosophy and Coincidentally, in William James' book, Prakritism, there’s a story he highlights that resonates with my own. He talks about there being a, as he describes, a young man at a Western college who felt that when he entered the classroom, he had to leave behind a world and embrace another world that philosophers talked about that did not really resemble reality, the one that you live.
And that’s what it was like for me. I remember in my philosophy classes that there was a lot of these... These sterile abstractions and these metaphysical wrestles that ultimately did not feel like they were addressing the problems that I was facing as a human being. And I think that’s a fair criticism of a lot of philosophy and especially the pragmatists are very critical of technical academic philosophy that over the last century, Philosophy has only become more technical and more specialized and could arguably, one could say, even more detached from our lived challenges.
And so, they’re trying to say, let’s bring it back to the common ground of shared experience and that’s where we’re going to wrestle.
Ross Kenyon: This is true. There is quite a lot of technical philosophy still being practiced. I have to admit that was not something that I... Learning that was a confirmation that maybe that wasn’t the best life path for me. But there are certainly a number of philosophers who make it a mission to be a public intellectual and to be doing things that are publicly accessible. The first person I thought of when I thought of that was Michael Sandel. And his sort of lecture series that have been online and been very famous and his book, What Money Can’t Buy.
So there’s genuine engagement with the public. I don’t know that he would qualify as a pragmatist, but I do think there are some pragmatist intellectuals that are public-facing, like Richard Rorty. I think even before I was serious about philosophy, I knew he was a big deal and was engaged in some of these discussions. Or Cornel West is also a very famous pragmatist. I don’t know. I
Jeffrey Howard: think about these and this discussion comes up a lot in academic circles, at least the ones I’m in on Twitter, where there’s this talk of wanting to bring philosophy out of the academic tower and more into the public and people have been trying this in various ways for a long time. But oftentimes what happens is in order to become more accessible and more available to the public, a lot of the challenging ideas and the heavy amount of vocabulary and literature that comes with those aren’t easily digestible for a lot of people.
And so a lot of things get lost. And so a lot of academic philosophers are like, no, no, no, no, no, no. That’s not what that idea means. Like you just ruined what is actually being communicated here. And so I will challenge my own comment of what I made a moment ago of there can be a lot that is lost in trying to almost water down these really important discussions that happen in philosophical circles. But we should at least acknowledge that. There’s some super detached ways in which philosophy is done, especially when it’s done in a way of, oh, I’m just trying to describe the way the world is.
Whereas a pragmatist would say, and especially Rorty would put it, he wants philosophy to be edifying that we do philosophy as a way of changing the world and improving life. Our place in existence. Meliorism is a central theme in pragmatism that’s just we want to improve things, make it just a little bit better, help us to solve a few more problems that you can’t just describe the world because when you’re trying to describe the world, you’re doing it in a way that is trying to achieve certain aims and pragmatists are just focusing on what are our pressing needs?
How can we use philosophy to help us solve those problems?
Ross Kenyon: The idea that in describing the world a certain way, there are unstated assumptions that lead one to certain conclusions, that strikes me as a sort of postmodern idea about how language is not neutral, that these are domains for power to be exercised in often invisible, mendacious, not so nice kinds of ways. Do I even want to go this way though, Jeffrey? Do
Jeffrey Howard: you want to? We could. I mean, I could offer a few thoughts on the neopragmatist viewpoint, which is mostly around Rorty, which is after the linguistic turn because the classical pragmatists are focused on experience whereas... Postmodernism is really looking at language and how questioning whether language actually maps the language in our head corresponds with reality and what that means. So, we could go that route.
Ross Kenyon: Well, are we ready to... At some point, we have to get the climate change. So, does it make sense to go from classical to the neopragmatist? I guess we already were talking about Rorty and West and others. So, maybe this is a good place to go this far.
Jeffrey Howard: I can touch on Dewey just a touch because he’s sort of what’s often considered the decline of pragmatism and then it has a re-emergence with Rorty and some of the other neo-pragmatists near the 1970s, 80s.
Ross Kenyon: Let me like put a cap on my last question so the transition makes sense. Okay. But I understand that pragmatism’s relationship to postmodernism and this focus on language is at least partially the term where pragmatism went from a classical pragmatism into a sort of neo-pragmatist oeuvre. This is my layman’s understanding. Is that correct?
Jeffrey Howard: Yeah, there is. So I’ll add, after James, who was the big popularizer of classical pragmatism, he dies 1910. You have John Dewey, who was an even more prolific writer and he was a truly public intellectual who wrote on education, philosophy. He wanted to bring philosophy into society. And so he’s a social activist who a lot of pragmatist ideas manifest in He’s who I think of with the progressive era. John Dewey, I think, is the first person I think of. Yeah. I mean, a lot of his ideas and pragmatist Jane Addams as well with the Settlement House Movement who are philosophy needs to help improve people’s lives.
And so, that’s more of that tail end of the classical pragmatist era where eventually around World War II, pragmatism starts to fade in popularity. Bertrand Russell and his... Push and philosophy sort of takes over and it’s not until you have what is considered the linguistic turn around the mid-1900s and after that, then you have someone as you mentioned Richard Rorty who basically takes John Dewey’s work and some of the postmodernists like Derrida and focuses on language and the practical consequences of language as a way of moving philosophy forward.
Ross Kenyon: Okay, so we’re getting close to contemporary pragmatist thought. Yeah, we’re like pretty close to kata-ish. Yeah, we’re pretty close to it. So like the very basic postmodern definition, if you’re listening and you’ve heard people use this term and maybe aren’t super familiar with it, similar to what I said about power operating through language, neutrality is a myth. Meta-narratives in general are myths. Some are useful. So, no, I see that’s a pragmatic connection right there. So, okay, I’m going to try to put the cap on some of these concepts so we can play with them and understand how they interact.
Mm-hmm. Postmodernism, as we were just talking about, is about how power operates through language, about how neutrality is a myth, that metanarratives are a myth too. And when I think about pragmatism, I think of it as a set of ideas about what actually works. And so the connection there is clear for me of what a neopragmatist would do with postmodern insights about language. Which is, if I have a goal in mind, how do I use language through which power is operating to achieve some of these goals that I have?
So it isn’t taking language for granted anymore. And I don’t know, I feel like I’m struggling on this. Is that connection there?
Jeffrey Howard: Yeah. Yeah, it is. I would offer, maybe this will help, but thinking of, as you’re putting it, language is not something that we have concepts in our head that map with this reality out there and we just have to find the exact precise language that a neopragmatist would say, that’s a road we don’t need to go down and it’s probably a detour. Languages are used for a community of people to obtain certain ends. We’re trying to get after that each language and the language, not just like, oh, I speak French or German, but language in a broader sense, just a symbol that is spoken.
We’re just going to view it as language causes us to respond to our environment in certain ways. And each language has its own set of rules and objects that we work with that are specific to a context. A neopragmatist like Richard Rorty, although some others disagree with him, would say that the mental languages that we have, we don’t have a way of knowing whether or not they correspond to reality that is out there. That’s this. Right. Convince other people and communicate with one another to help solve the problems we face in our environments.
And that is the best we can do is having a justified belief that informs what we’re going to do. Wow, that was a very good explanation of that. Okay, I think we have enough concepts in play to hopefully that’s more helpful than confusing. I hope as well. I think so. Some of this stuff... If not, have your audience send angry emails at me and maybe I can direct them to other helpful resources.
Ross Kenyon: That sounds good. Email Jeffrey rather than me if you can. Okay, climate change. We have a number of camps that are at loggerheads at various times. You have fights over, within carbon removal, we’ve spoken about ecological versus industrial methods of carbon removal, which is more important, which one will last, permanence, affordability, economy, environmental justice concerns. Those are all at play. So that’s an ongoing fight there. There’s also an even more basic example is people who think climate change is a big deal or those who don’t believe it at all or don’t think it’s a big deal.
There’s also fights between people who think climate change can be reversed or mitigated and those who really don’t have hope that humanity is going to stick the landing. So why don’t you choose at least one of those, Jeffrey, and see if pragmatism can help us break through the logjam.
Jeffrey Howard: Yeah, there’s an example or metaphor that William James uses in his book Pragmatism talking about pragmatism being the common corridor that all these different camps share in a hotel that they all have to go through and that common corridor is common experience. And so, with each of these camps and although he’s speaking to metaphysical camps, I think we could find An analog with a lot of these different movements or perspectives you talked about that they have to go through that common corridor. And I think what happens is there’s a lot of, for lack of a better term, ideological commitments that each of these camps have that they are trying to make their policy proposals fit into these ideologies.
And a pragmatist is going to flip that around in a very different way. A researcher named Ashley Colby who does a lot of work in subsistence farming in the United States and that’s in urban, rural, suburban settings. And in a lot of her research, what she found is people approaching the challenge of either a lack of food or maybe a lack of healthy food being available and subsistence farming is In the broadest sense is a solution to that. And she found in her case studies that it started from a need presenting itself, this need around food.
And so people started to make these small urban gardens, or maybe they would have chickens and all these different things. And it was just, they’re trying to create food and it started to become this phenomenon that would start to grow and a lot of people either they’d get interested in it as a concept. Maybe there are some people who are interested in, oh, well, I’m waiting for capitalism to collapse and I want to get out of this capitalist system and therefore we need to do... These local non-capitalistic gardens and all this stuff and they’re approaching from this very ideological place that for them, this all connects to this idealistic absolute system and view about the world.
And she found that in talking with people, very rarely is it that people would come together around a shared absolute view about the world and how it works. It was more of here’s this need and we’re going to address it. And more and more people would come in. And I think this is a wonderful project or commentary because it shows that rather than trying to have this purity test of, hey, we’re all these people who have the shared political ideological view and we’re going to go do this thing.
It is very much informed by addressing the need of more sustainable food. And eventually she found that, yeah, you start to get more and more people who connect that to their political ideological viewpoint. But it’s interesting because I could look at some of these instances of maybe community gardens. And someone creates an elevated garden on the piece of grass between their sidewalk and the street, one to help provide for themselves and their family. But then they decide, you know what, I’m just going to open this up to whoever who wants it.
And they make a small sign and then other people see it and more people start doing it. And someone could come along as an ideologue or more absolute in their view and say, oh, well, see, this is communism in practice. And they elaborate why. But someone else could come in and say, well, actually, this is voluntary action. And as a free market perspective, I’m seeing... Voluntary sort of an anarcho-capitalist activity happening like all these different camps are trying to see something that works and they want to appropriate that into their ideology in a way that reinforces this untouched in a way absolute view of the world.
Ross Kenyon: That’s such a funny twist there at the end. So rather than just seeing it as some basic neighborliness, it’s either approached as a radical libertarian sort of project or a communist one. But then again, I guess my framing of this too as being neighborliness, that’s not neutral either. That’s part of the point too, right? Isn’t that its own kind of ideology of smallness?
Jeffrey Howard: Yeah, a pragmatist is not going to see anything as value neutral, but what they’re trying to do is make things better. And I think most of us have these experiences, and I’m sure Nori has had these in the environmentalism space where people who may be a little less pragmatic, and I could be wrong here, but who are more committed to Yeah. Carbon capture, carbon removal. This sounds fascinating. Okay, let’s see how this works. And then from there, you can start trying to fit it into, move one step further into the abstract realm and see how it fits into all the other considerations that we have to think about that.
It’s not just carbon capture or carbon removal isn’t occurring in a vacuum. It’s something that affects carbon. The way communities form, it’s something that affects how people build social capital with one another. It affects equity issues. It affects social justice issues around inclusion. Pragmatists are very much wanting to be as inclusive as possible because they realize none of us has an absolute and total view of the world. We have a very partial one. And that means we need to include as many viewpoints as possible at the table.
So we can have a much more complete understanding of experience and then we can have more ideas and potential solutions to work with. And that is one of the major reasons why a pragmatist is trying to hold ideas loosely that they don’t want creeds and dogmas to get in the way of improving life for all of us.
Ross Kenyon: Okay, that makes sense. Though I do want to offer what I imagine is one of the most common objections to pragmatic ways of thinking, which is when you say something like, I want this to work, a very obvious rejoinder is works for whom? So I could imagine two pragmatists Disagreeing, perhaps, on what it means to work. I could imagine a pragmatist who thinks equality is the highest good, and I could see a pragmatist who thinks freedom is the highest good. One, are they even allowed to Yeah.
Jeffrey Howard: Yeah, that’s a great question. I like to think of an analogy to maybe address this because there are some pragmatists like Charles Peirce who has this view that truth is what we arrive at the end of inquiry, meaning we have all these people inquiring together from different viewpoints and perspectives and eventually we all competent inquirers are going to converge upon the same But the thing is, we don’t get there until the end of time. So it’s sort of this infinite horizon we’re moving toward. But we do see generalities and patterns that even though the universe or the world is constantly changing and it’s not static, there are things we can rely on.
And that’s a person view of it. James, on the other hand, might take a slightly more pluralistic view that There’s a plurality of truth. So this metaphor I think about is envision there’s this massive table with all these different dishes and plates of food on there. And you are standing near it and there’s this gap between you and this dinner table. And you’re looking at it and you go, oh, well, that looks like the salad I made the other day. That looks like a dish I grew up eating.
That looks unfamiliar, but I think that’s a tomato on there. And you’re looking at it trying to piece together everything. What matches with your own experience, a pragmatist is then going to approach the table and each person, you want them to come to the table and they’re going to try out some of the food. You’ll find out which foods are nutritious for you, which ones taste better than others. But the thing is, what might be nutritious for me is Might not be nutritious for another person or what might taste good to me might not taste good to another person.
Maybe I have an allergy. Maybe I’m not able to produce a certain nutrient, etc. And so at this table, we have these community of inquirers who their experience is eating the food or seeing someone else eat it and realize, oh, that seems poison because it killed John, Kathy and Susan. I’m not going to touch that. And so that’s where that’s in that experimental process. That pragmatists are trying to meet that there is this realm in which there’s some individual considerations to account for. But there’s also seems to be a lot of generalizable patterns and things that we can find.
And so the pragmatists are trying to remain open to the views of other people. Does that clarify maybe a little bit?
Ross Kenyon: It does somewhat. And in aggregate, it makes sense. I’ve read books like Scott E. Page’s work on complexity theory and about diversity within organizations. And I do think given how many ways there are to look at problems in general, the more frameworks you hold individually or within an organization trying to achieve something, You know, there are dysfunctional versions of that for sure, both individually and collectively. But in general, I think that it often makes for a much more robust organization, society, or even just personal intellect.
So that makes sense. But I don’t know where it gets us on the smaller scale. Like if you and I disagree, how do we solve problems? Or is it that we should zoom out and trust our neighbors more, broaden the conversation? How do we disagree with each other?
Jeffrey Howard: So Charles Peirce is trying to get us to always expand that community of inquirers. And so although you and I may have a conversation, it’s not just you and me. In fact... Within yourself, there’s sort of a community that already exists of past selves or even different parts of yourself, right? You think of all the time people say, oh, well, part of me wants to go to the gym, but this other part of me just wants to watch another episode of this Netflix show, or this part of me wants to do this other thing.
And so even though it’s just you and I, there are all these other things. Right. Right. Right. The hope is that by bringing as many members of the community into this, that we can have arrive at a more reliable idea of what works. But ultimately, we’re moving forward all the time and what we think is true and maybe you and I settle on something such as carbon removal and Is a great idea. But we have to hold that tentatively because as we have more experiences, we may find out that is a suboptimal solution to addressing climate change.
So sometimes it may not offer the most clarity, but it’s an improvement upon me coming to the table and saying, here’s what my environmentalist Bible says. And you come to the table with yours and say, this is what mine says. See, and we’re trying to Beat each other over the head with it and these sort of resembling religious wars and it’s not the best way to go about solving things.
Ross Kenyon: I think in general that is wise though I can also again see dysfunctional versions of it in particular the classic joke a camel is a horse drawn by a committee. Have you ever heard that one? I have. So like I can imagine, you know, you have too many stakeholders in some cases and instead that ends up hobbling the design or the outcome because everyone had to be consulted and taken into account in certain ways that may not have been appropriate or may not have been justified. And then everyone ended up worse off as a result.
I’m sure you’ve been in meetings where everyone has to have their say and you’re like, oh, okay, like this is None of this helped anything. So I guess, what do we do with something like that? Or is that just the risk of having a giant collectivity of Or what did Peirce call it? What did you say? A community of inquirers is a very important term for him. So then the question I suppose also just goes back to at least Plato of who’s making decisions in groups and how are you drawing these lines around who gets to be an inquirer or not?
I don’t know. Do pragmatists talk about that or am I just failing?
Jeffrey Howard: Yeah, it’s a difficult one. This is something I’ve spoken with a handful of people about is... This democratic ethos that is central to pragmatism, a lot of people may not know this, but very much at the heart of what pragmatism is trying to do is trying to be as inclusive and reflective of everyone else’s experiences as possible. But you’re right, there can be this notion of too many cooks in the kitchen or... It takes so long to deliberate that the time to act is past. And I think a pragmatist could look at that and say, well, there are certain times in which we can’t just sit down and have a million people have a Zoom call.
Sometimes the best outcome is going to be having certain people interact. Offer insight on one thing. Another tension I think that is aware to a lot of people listening would be that of, and it’s a tension in democracy in general, is that between the populace and alleged experts and that do expertise. Experts have a privileged perspective on their respective fields. And in some ways, that might be true. But in other ways, there are ways in which an expert is going to be blind. And that is why we want to bring other people to the table.
And I think some of these conversations happen a lot in circles around equity and representation, where if everyone at the Boardroom table is of the same racial background, same elite college education, list off a whole bunch of traits and they’re the same. You are going to miss out on a lot of knowledge and perspectives that will actually help solve problems that you could not have solved otherwise. And so, I don’t have a simple answer. All I can say is pragmatism is very closely connected to action and there’s an acknowledgement that Deliberation is great, but there is a degree at which you have to say we need to act.
And that’s why we can’t just deliberate forever around what are the best solutions to climate change. We need thousands and thousands of small experiments everywhere happening. And we need to have everyone communicating and talking to one another and sharing their knowledge. And with all that happening, we can start to coalesce around the ideas that tend to work the best.
Ross Kenyon: Framing this is a bit challenging and it might be a limitation of the left-right paradigm that I’m imposing upon it. So, okay, set that aside. That’s totally possible what’s happening now. I like the idea of subsidiarity. I think it’s important. I think there’s good reasons that both the right and the left appreciate it in their own ways. And I like the idea of an experimental orientation against having extremely fixed ideas about How things should look and how they should apply for not merely your street or your community, but for hundreds of millions or the entire world.
I think in some case, like another old joke is the best way to disqualify someone for the presidency is if they want to be president because they think that they should lead hundreds of millions of people. You’re like, yeah, there’s just an amount of hubris built into that assumption that should disqualify someone in some way. But okay, this is a long way of saying, does pragmatism have a politics beyond this sort of meta-political decision-making diversity helps us see better approach? Like, are there conservative pragmatists, even though its DNA is clearly progressive from where it emerged from intellectually?
Yeah.
Jeffrey Howard: That is a fantastic question. I would say if you look historically at those who have been involved in pragmatism or are informed by it, there does tend to be a very social democratic bent to it. There’s not an essentialism that is pragmatism. William James talks about pragmatism as being a method, that there aren’t specific aims or goals or values really that make up pragmatism, that it’s more of a tool we have. And so, as soon as we solve one problem, there are a new host of problems that show up and that may require a different politics.
At least that’s my view of it. And so, although I think it’s reasonable to say pragmatism tends to have this at least left of center perspective where most pragmatists I know are, that is not to say that there aren’t Some conservative pragmatists and again, for a pragmatist experience and existence or reality are constantly changing and evolving and we are continuing to have to reassess our views. So one example I might offer is... At one point, maybe in the United States, it could be true and useful to take the view that the federal government is a bigger threat to our well-being than, say, a foreign country or than, say, corporations.
But time may go by, and as the world changes, it may actually be more true or true at a later point to say the greater threat are... The powers that are concentrated in corporations or somewhere else. The point I’m just trying to make is there’s not something that I can say is politically essential about pragmatism. All I can say is that historically, when we look at the people who’ve been informed by it, it is manifest as a rather progressive looking type of politics.
Ross Kenyon: Oh, that’s a good example. I really like that one, actually, especially if you are looking back to maybe the documents of the founders or you’re reading the Federalist Papers or something like that, or the Anti-Federalist Papers for that matter, or you’re seeing like Thomas Jefferson is making assumptions about the kind of society he would like America to be, which is small landowners who are farming and living on their land. And that’s sort of Does that map on to the market economy of 2020, 2021 of America? Are we talking about the same thing or in making an ideological extractable vision from Jefferson and applying it on?
Has that misled us in some way? Is that kind of what you’re saying?
Jeffrey Howard: I think so. Theorists and thinkers including those who are quote unquote under the umbrella of the founding fathers that there’s this unchanged like they found this truth and we need to hold to that and their original intent and a pragmatist is going to say What’s in those documents and in their views are a lot of accumulated truths and wisdoms that have produced some very useful results. However, the world continues to change. We continue to find new ways of doing things, new ideas come out, and we need to...
Be open to revising and changing those and that what was true 100 years ago may not be true today. I think to pull it from a political lens into more science, I think of centuries ago, the geocentric worldview reigned and that was what was considered true. And there were a lot of useful things that we could do with that view. A lot of astronomy, navigation, there were even social and moral political ramifications for that were quite useful. However, the heliocentric worldview came around and suddenly we could solve a lot more problems and do a lot more things with that view.
And that took over. And perhaps we’ll have another even more useful view of... And I think that’s how we need to view politics is that we can’t just say, oh, well, I’ve got it. Like this anarcho-communistic view that I have explains it all. We need to manifest this. And it’s like... Hold that gently and let’s see what actually works. And it’s trying to get us away from these totalizing ideologies and trying to bring us back to human needs, which require us to interact face-to-face, to know one another, to exchange, to be good faith actors.
Peirce talks about the process of inquiry is an act and a process of love that I do not want to exclude someone from that table of conversation because that is an unloving thing. And we miss out in our pursuit of trying to improve the world by excluding somebody. And so politically, we need to keep that discourse as open as possible so we can find better ways of addressing the challenges we face as humans.
Ross Kenyon: Great stuff. Yeah, it’s so much to wrap your head around. And then you end up in this spot of needing the wisdom to know of all the things you’ve read, all the societies you’ve studied, which principles apply and when. And I don’t have a great model or understanding for how to do that. I certainly don’t have one that I could articulate. It’s very much intuitional and Almost pre-linguistic for me of knowing when to favor one over the other. I think maybe a way I can cut myself some slack is by saying the mere willingness to do that is maybe on the correct road to applying pragmatic thought in a marginally responsible kind of way.
Is that okay?
Jeffrey Howard: Yeah, I think so. I... I have my own views on a lot of things. My hope is that I hold them with enough humility to be open to more useful ideas. And I have my hunches that I feel are informed by a lot of other viewpoints and other people’s experiences as well as my own as to... I hold those, but I hope... That I’m not holding them as these unchanging creeds that are absolutely true because I cannot name a single viewpoint in my life that I’ve always held in the exact same way and has never been revised by experience.
And I think that’s true for each of us if we’re being really honest with ourselves. So we can act according to our principles and knowledge, but let’s remain open. That’s the best I can offer.
Ross Kenyon: That seems pretty fair to me. And I would hope that’s true of most people listening. I mean, if you’ve been listening to the podcast for a long time, I think the kinds of approaches that brought me into Nori are things that I often wrestle with quite seriously now. So you can probably tell that just from the choice of guests or what we’re talking about. And I think life would be pretty dull if you weren’t willing to reevaluate as new information comes in. It’s one of those reasons why whenever a politician changes their mind and they get called a flip-flopper, they could have also learned something and changed their mind.
It doesn’t mean that they’re unreliable unless it’s more important to you to have ideological consistency rather than intellectual growth and humility. I think the latter is more important, though maybe the partisan system encourages the former more. This might be too far afield, Jeffrey, but I suspect you agree. Yeah.
Jeffrey Howard: I do. I think I paid you this compliment when I was on last time. And I genuinely think the approach your podcast takes feels very pragmatist to me in the sense of there is not a single unifying ideology that seems to be informing or maybe filtering ourselves. Through every single guest that you’re really trying to offer as many viewpoints as possible. And people who come on are showing something that works in some way. And you’re helping to minimize the jumps people take to, oh, what’s their political orientation?
What’s their philosophical orientation? Ideology on X, Y, and Z, and it’s just trying to keep it in a much more needs focused space, at least the dozens of episodes I have listened to. So that is my, from a pragmatist, that is the deepest compliment I think I could give you is I think you have a very pragmatist approach to trying to combat the many challenges we face with climate change and all the other attendant environmentalist issues.
Ross Kenyon: Thank you, Jeffrey. I appreciate that. And if I embody any of that, it’s because I’m making up for being a little bit of a jerk and a firebrand in my younger days and thinking I’m you. You and me both. Yeah. Ooh, I used to have all the answers and I’m so much smarter than everyone. And I’m like, I don’t know, the more I read. Yeah. I’d much rather talk to someone who was thoughtful than saw eye to eye with me a lot of cases.
And also I think it makes for better radio and it’s just more fun. And I’m sure you know you’re doing your own show too. And also, now that we’re talking about it, if someone enjoyed this conversation, would they enjoy your show, Damn the Absolute?
Jeffrey Howard: I would hope so. A little explanation or overview of the show, although it is centered around pragmatist orientations of ideas, it really is trying to offer up a variety of guests who are offering ideas that I think are worth considering that I think could be really fruitful for addressing a lot of problems. And there is a fair amount of pragmatism in there and there are some introductions of pragmatism from guests that I think people will find worthwhile. If they don’t find my elaboration as fruitful, which I understand I get so wherever you can get it.
But we’re really just trying to bring on ideas that we hope are worth considering that can really improve experience and existence for as many people as possible.
Ross Kenyon: That’s a noble goal. Maybe why don’t you tease them a little bit? What kind of guests have you had on? What kind of conversations are on now or coming soon?
Jeffrey Howard: Yeah, let me offer up a few guests here. So our first episode was actually on Richard Rorty, who we’ve talked about and it’s covering his book Achieving Our Country, which is really looking at leftist thought in the past century and what that looks like and what that can look like going forward. I’ve recently, I mentioned David O'Hara, who speaks about Charles Peirce, and I think he offers a beautiful presentation of what pragmatism can mean, especially as an act of love. That’s an episode that will be coming out in the next couple of weeks.
We also have an episode on politics of uncertainty, where what does it look like to build a political worldview where Embracing and maybe even celebrating and acknowledging the uncertainty of life is your starting point. So rather than starting from values of equality or freedom or some of these other broadly liberal values, you start from everything’s uncertain. Uncertainty is actually a good thing to value what might a politics look like. So those are just a few episodes to tease, I suppose.
Ross Kenyon: I’m intrigued by all of those and I’ve either listened to them or will soon. So you should check it out. Go listen to another podcast. Stretch your brain a little bit. You’ve heard enough of me. If you’ve been listening for a while, you’ve got enough. Go listen to Jeffrey for a while. Yeah. Well, Jeffrey, thanks so much. And then also we should steer people to Eraticus, which is the online publication that you curate.
Jeffrey Howard: Yeah, Eraticus, we are the producers of the podcast Damn the Absolute and we have a variety of essays in a similar spirit that are just trying to offer up ideas that we hope will have a real world impact in somebody else’s life that are not just merely interesting.
Ross Kenyon: Well, terrific. Links to all of those things are in the show notes. Please go check it out. Support our lovely podcast alumni as they come on and share updates with what they’re doing. And thanks so much for being here, Jeffrey. Thanks again, Ross. It’s always a pleasure, my friend. Yeah, that was a lot of fun. We got into some good territory. And if you like the show, thanks for listening. And you can help the show a lot by rating and reviewing us on iTunes, now called Apple Podcasts.
If you open up the podcast app on your iPhone, pull up the show, give us five stars if you think that we deserve it, write us a nice review. It helps a lot in getting this content to more people. Hey, and thanks so much for listening. It’s been more than three years now. I’m so grateful you’re here with me. So thank you so much.
