Pragmatism takes no chances and always protects the status of the pragmatist
Tortoises, terrapins, and turtles. H. Sotheran, J. Baer & co.,1872
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There is this line in the 2017 article in New York Magazine that would become David Wallace-Wells’ The Uninhabitable Earth, in which he’s listing off the many reasons humanity has been in denial about climate change for so many years, including “the fact that the country is dominated by a group of technocrats who believe any problem can be solved and an opposing culture that doesn’t even see warming as a problem worth addressing.”
That latter category has been a big concern for obvious reasons. But the former speaks to a troubling, nip and tuck optimism of climate moderates or what some are calling soft denialists, who express concern for climate change, but generally believe this is something that can be fixed with some tech and market-based solutions that will ultimately not rock the boat too much—i.e., we might drive electric cars or something, but we’re not going to stop exporting oil are you crazy.
It’s a perspective that sort of rhymes with a lot of other takes that come up on all sorts of issues, from trans rights to policing reform. I’ve always had a hard time completely wrapping my head around what this thing is, exactly. Maybe it’s just centrism or incrementalism or what Annie Lowery calls “facts man,” but I feel like it’s a broader phenomenon than that. One way I’ve been thinking about it is a certain kind of pragmatism, an affinity for all things that seem reasonable and an aversion to things that seem outside the realm of likelihood, or maybe comfort.
I guess the actual definition if I take a second to google it is “dealing with things sensibly and realistically in a way that is based on practical rather than theoretical considerations.” And there is a whole school of philosophy called pragmatism but I’m not really getting that technical here let’s just stick with the google definition today. It’s basically a person who considers a problem, looks around, and chooses the response that just seems reasonable.
Well, that certainly seems reasonable, and I guess I don’t think of this as some horrible trait in a person (though there are horrible examples of it to come), and the pragmatist is very often well-intentioned and a potential ally even. In some sense, by necessity, we all start from a place of pragmatism when encountering a new problem, before we’ve pushed ourselves beyond the knee-jerk response to take in a larger or longer view. So this is kind of a tricky thing to write about because I don’t really want to be like, ah god here’s why I hate all these guys (did I mention pragmatists are pretty much always white guys?).
But I do think they are often wrong. And I am trying to wrap my head around why this kind of pragmatism bothers me so much, and why it’s a problem, and why it’s so, so prevalent in the face of problems that demand more than mere common sense. So I decided to write down some things that I think define this type of pragmatism and why I consider it to be such a misguided outlook.
Pragmatism is a version of lacking empathy
One problem with pragmatism, is within the definition, words like “practical,” “realistic,” and “sensible” are doing an enormous amount of heavy lifting. And frequently, the judgment about whether something qualifies is based on the limited data within immediate reach of the pragmatist making the judgment. The very idea of common sense implies a kind of wisdom that lies in the near vicinity.
That doesn’t necessarily mean that pragmatism is always based in folk wisdom that everyone has access to, as frequently the pragmatist has some strain of specialized knowledge, but it’s knowledge from a fixed perspective. Too often, pragmatism is used as a tool to avoid understanding the perspectives of other people with different life experiences, for whom what is practical and reasonable may be radically different.
An example I use a lot is that for a whole set of people, ceasing air travel would not seem like a realistic course of action, unless you consider that only like 10% of the world ever flies in in airplane. Carbon offset programs may seem like a very pragmatic climate solution, unless you’re living in a neighborhood where such a program is allowing a nearby factory to pollute your air and make your family sick. What is practical to that person will be very different, and a problem like climate change requires us to, not become a climate change expert, exactly, but to listen and learn.
I sometimes think of this profile of Joe Rogan, maybe the worst example of a pragmatist, spawning an army of supplement-loving pragmatists who are sick and tired of being told they need to think about things differently. For Slate, Justin Peters writes of Rogan’s following, “The common thread is the privileging of ‘common sense’ over all other inputs in the struggle to forge a life philosophy, and the idealization of one’s own life experience over that of other people.”
This is why pragmatism so often directs outrage at irrational upstarts with their new pronouns, new racial terminology, calls for diversity, and yes, their cancel culture—a response Osita Nwanevu calls reactionary liberalism. It represents a human impulse we are all prone to, but hopefully push past: This is something different than the reality I have come to rely upon, and it feels wrong, not reasonable. Peters continues, “Because Rogan and his guests do not take identitarian critiques seriously, they just naturally assume that no one should take them seriously.”
Pragmatism favors what is convenient over what is necessary
This is probably the biggest problem when it comes to climate change pragmatism, the way that it demands that we make decisions from a position of what seems achievable, instead of beginning with what is necessary and moving backward to figure out how we get there. In some cases, the former is a strategic approach; in fact, strategic might be another term that could be used for what I’m calling pragmatic. Strategic meaning only taking action if there is a known path for how it will move you toward where you want to go. There’s something admirable about doing what you can with what you have.
The problem is that it frequently sandbags your efforts, doling out action in tiny doses that will not bother most people, and may feel like steps in the right direction, but ultimately will never get you to a destination that, in the case of a problem like climate change, is non-negotiable. This happens all the time in philanthropy and nonprofits, as some huge, difficult campaign or piece of legislation comes up, but stoic leadership steps in to say, why take this on when there’s a good chance we will have nothing to show for it, and instead can just do this smaller campaign that is a more popular, less offensive to those in power, and ends in demonstrable progress. But in some cases, demonstrable progress is, in execution, indistinguishable from failure.
Pragmatism takes no chances, in service of protecting the status of the pragmatist. Again, let’s look at another terrible example of pragmatism, which is Joe Manchin who I will never reference without also pointing out that he literally shot a piece of climate legislation with a gun. Manchin, also infamously, recently said to a utility trade group when discussing the Biden administration’s pledge to cut carbon emissions in half by 2030, “I know there’s a change coming, OK? But I’ve always been very, very cautious about this. … I’m concerned that they’re setting a very aggressive timetable.”
Now, this is giving Manchin way too much credit for being a good faith actor, which he’s certainly not as a senator who has weekly meetings with oil and gas lobbyists, but he’s essentially saying the timeline that scientific consensus says is needed to avoid catastrophe is too fast for comfort. It’s just not reasonable. Emily Atkin in Heated called this a “new iteration of climate denial” that’s being embraced beyond the GOP, insisting on a slower timetable for action. “Spoiler alert: we all want a less aggressive timeline,” she tweeted. “Climate change doesn’t give a shit about what we want.”
Pragmatism relies on a linear theory of change
The theory of change behind pragmatism, and one that may seem beyond critique, is that A+B=C. There is an isolated, distinct problem, there is a set of solutions, and if you pick the right one you will solve it. If you pick the wrong one, or you try to take into account too many other tangential, unrelated problems, you are only working against your own cause. But this is an oversimplified view of social change.
Maybe the king of this brand of pragmatism is Matt Yglesias, who has made the most lucrative career out of being wrong about everything since Chris Cillizza. Yglesias vilifies climate activists who view climate change as a justice issue that overlaps and shares the same root causes with many other social problems. He particularly hates the Sunrise Movement, mainly because they consider broader issues of inequality and racial and economic justice to be inseparable from climate change (a stance that not only appreciates the systemic nature of climate change, but also allows people to engage with an otherwise abstract problem).
Amy Westervelt and Georgia Wright wrote a great opinion piece on Yglesias’s bad climate takes for Hot Take (Emily Atkin also took on the topic). Here’s a key part:
His persistent cries for Sunrise to “be reasonable!” and impassioned pleas for pragmatism are part of an overall argument to keep the climate movement focused only on technology and energy sources, not the root causes of the problem, which all really boil down to injustice and inequality. This fundamental ignorance of intersectionality is nothing new – it’s the same tired critique used by white moderates throughout the decades to maintain power and silence the powerless, and yet he parrots it like it’s revolutionary. (If climate change was really as simplistic and siloed as Matty would have us think, wouldn’t it be solved by now?)
Pragmatism is only ever right for a brief window and then it is always wrong
OK maybe not always wrong, but usually. And the reason is that pragmatism is time delimited, meaning pragmatic judgments involve an assessment of facts based on what makes sense, right now. And crucially, it underestimates how much that reality might change not that long from now. Thus, pragmatists are destined to be wrong, because the passage of time means the preposterous becomes commonplace and the commonplace becomes preposterous. This is really easy to see in topics like our understanding of gender fluidity, which has changed what we consider to be common sense.
One example I can think of locally is our mayoral frontrunner in Boston, Michelle Wu, who as a city councillor in 2019, when the MBTA was considering public transit fare hikes, ran an editorial in the Boston Globe rejecting the fare hikes, but also calling for public transit to instead be free. This was a ridiculous, pie-in-the-sky notion to many pragmatic commentators and political opponents, a stunt that Wu couldn’t possibly be serious about. Just two years later, nearly every mayoral candidate in a packed field is running on some form of transit fare elimination, and the state just started a three-month pilot to make a high-ridership bus route free to all.
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All of these complaints basically boil down to one critical flaw—pragmatism bases what is possible on what is right here, right now. Call it a lack of imagination, which pragmatism does not put much stock into. But if everyone is making judgments by looking at the current reality, then success is measured against only what has already been done. And things more or less stay the same.
That gets to another, more sinister side of pragmatism. On one hand, it may have admirable goals, but merely fails at achieving them. On the other, pragmatism often provides cover for those intentionally holding back change, because the way things are now actually serves many pragmatists quite well.
There’s a reason the ideas pragmatists puts forward are remarkably similar to the ideas reactionaries put forward. One day, cancel culture is the concern of the pragmatic liberal, the next it’s the battle cry at CPAC. Carbon capture is the realistic solution of the climate moderate, then it’s the solution of choice for ExxonMobil. Whether they share the same intentions or not, they yield the same outcomes, or lack of outcomes. Pragmatism really wishes it could make the world a better place, we all do obviously we are all on the same team here, but pragmatism just can’t do it. Pragmatism has to be reasonable. Pragmatism always has a lot to lose.
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Links
- When I first got back into journalism about 10 years ago, one of the first stories I covered regularly was the Divest Harvard campaign, which was run by highly impressive 20 year olds who would go on to become leaders in the movement (and one state senator!). Just last night, Harvard announced it would fully divest its $41 billion endowment. It’s a big victory.
- Doreen St. Félix on Michael K. Williams.
- California’s carbon offset program is full of loopholes, including allowing polluters to take credit for forests that have already burned down and forests that have been protected for years. “We have documented over $400 million worth of credits issued that we think don’t help the climate.”
- About half of Americans planning to move say natural disasters were a factor in their decision.
- A Boston startup wants to launch a bunch of small satellites to improve radar storm detection which sounds useful and also like a Bond villain’s cover story.
- Texas’s voting restriction laws and abortion laws are working in tandem to secure GOP minority rule.
- Jia Tolentino on SB8.
- Adam Serwer on the Supreme Court’s use of the shadow docket. “…an ideal arrangement for a party that has not won a majority of the votes in a presidential election since Tobey Maguire was Spider-Man, and that sees the popular majorities that vote against it as composed of illegitimate semi-citizens who have no right to govern.”
- This reality show where activists compete on TV to secure funding for their work is disgusting and everyone hates it and it should never see the light of day and also it’s kind of how most philanthropy works.
- Harvard now owns ONE THIRD of the Boston neighborhood of Allston, and residents don’t entirely know what they’re going to do with it. But it will probably become “a playground for folks who are mostly white people who have a lot of money” and/or “a neighborhood populated entirely by pharma bros.”
- Stories from New York restaurant workers on 9/11. “Someone suggested the owners might not approve. ‘I was like, ‘Fuck off! I don’t care.””
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Watching
The Night Manager. I’m on a mini-series kick lately and boy did I sleep on this one.
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Listening
Eso Que Tu Haces, Lido Pimienta
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Thursday was ~*my wife*~ Jamie’s birthday and for the second year in a pandemic-era tradition I made a charcuterie board so elaborate that it strains the bounds of pragmatism. One day I will do a complete wild card and write a newsletter on how to make your dream charcuterie board and it will be the most popular thing I’ve ever written. A teaser, the secret is the Three Vs: variety, visual impact, and a very large bill at Whole Foods.
I think this year’s may have surpassed last year’s in terms of presentation, and there were some new finds in the mix like this chocolate vinegar which was very good. I’m comforted to know that I have two backup careers, which are charcuterie board making and dog photography. You can hire me to do both but my rates are exorbitant. For a VIP like you, I will give a discount.
Tate
PS last night I had a dream I was moving into an apartment with Phil Collins