The Pragmatism Fallacy

Anthony Dick

The consensus forming in anticipation of Barack Obama’s ascendancy is that, with apologies to Code Pink, pragmatism is the new black.

The trouble with the new wave of pragmatists is that they do not recognize, or else they refuse to acknowledge, their own ideological underpinnings. This is not entirely their fault. Try as they might to escape the old ideological categories they decry, they face an insurmountable obstacle: It’s impossible to eschew ideology in order to “just do what works,” because any understanding of “what works” depends on the antecedent questions of what our policy goals should be and which instrumental policies are most likely to succeed in the world — both of which are heavily ideological questions.

When people praise a policy or a politician as “pragmatic,” they’re often simply praising themselves for being open-minded. They are projecting a false pretense of objectivity, premised on the conceit that they are utterly free of ideology while their opponents are mired in prejudice. In fact, a so-called pragmatist’s support for a policy indicates only two things: that he agrees with the policy’s goal, and that he believes the policy is likely to achieve the goal in an efficient way. But these are precisely the controversies at the core of every old ideological dispute: Which goals should we strive for? And what is the best way to achieve these goals? Pragmatism as a catch phrase does not displace those ideological questions, but does a great deal to obscure them. It is, to borrow from Kant, a vain delusion and a chimerical vision of mankind. Which, on second thought, might explain its popularity in the age of Hope and Change.