Pragmatism & Amerikkka Uber Alles

[Terrance]

When I turn on the Tube or page through popular magazines
here in the States, I often hear or read the term
"rationalization." Talk show and arm-chair psychologists
seem to like the term.  What they mean by "rationalization"
is not always clear, but I think that the term
"rationalization" surfaced sometime between W.W.I and W.W.II
(?). Back then I think they used the term to denote some
mental process or mechanism by which we humans unconsciously
put a better face on our conduct or experience than the
facts warrant. In other words, we excuse ourselves to
ourselves by introducing a purpose and order into that which
we are privately or secretly ashamed. Sometimes historians
and cultural critics use the term rationalization when
discussing history and culture. 


TRP, as a series of recent critical essays on Pynchon and
the 1960s make evident, was influenced by Pragmatism.
Pragmatism was particularly suspicious of "rationalization"
and "historical rationalism."

I suggest Dewey's Reconstruction In Philosophy

Jeffrey S. Baker, in his Amerikkka Uber Alles: German
Nationalism, American Imperialism, and the 1960s Antiwar
Movement in Gravity's Rainbow, Critique, Summer 1999, VOL.
40, NO.4, 323-341, picking up on Tony Tanner's recognition
that Pynchon (in Entropy, for example) provides metaphors of
classic epistemological dichotomy-Theory or Callisto and
Practice or Meatball, says:

Tanner's analysis points up a radically pragmatic political
agenda for social change ( as reflected in the Beat's
anarchic rhetoric), as well as a pragmatic suspicion of the
theoretical and an affirmation of the experiential or
particular. Both of these impulses embody a radically
democratizing Emersonian politics that characterizes nearly
all of Pynchon's major writings. Baker.C.323

And

Across his body of writing, Pynchon has advocated a turning
away from recognized authority and affirming a
democratization of power based on the individual's intrinsic
worth, the same ideas that drove 1060s coalitions such as
Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Philosophically,
SDS based much of its politics and ideology on the pragmatic
writings of C. Wright Mills, William James, John Dewey, and
Ralph Waldo Emerson. 

I often complain that there is too much Dewey in Education.
Strange thing for me to say, especially if you know me,
which you don't, but what I mean by that is not the
Affirmation of the Experiential, but rather the affirmation
of the experiential at the expense of Dewey's
objectives-Democracy and Quality in education. We live in a
Semantic epoch, the Sophists have the ball, it's their
court. We cannot hope to define our terms or find agreement
in the meaning of words. The Sophist disregards all sense so
that he may murder an argument and blame it on the author's
presumptions which he presumes, round and round, wagging
their fingers while they spin their opponents around like a
william F Buckley, now a Gore Vidal doll on strings. In the
end, they will silence themselves by subverting even their
own court and tossing the ball into the play of meaningless
language. But that's another matter, what's relevant to our
discussions is Pragmatism and Nazism. I suggest Baker's
essay. 

BTW, for the pragmatists, intelligence is in constant
process of forming. To act, to live, to remember. Retention
requires constant alertness or the  "paying attention to"
and the observation of consequences. As some Stoic taught
(sorry to name drop), there exists in the young a healthy
appetite for knowledge, open-mindedness, a will to learn,
and courage to readjust to a changing environment, but these
characteristics of Boy -scouts and youth in all nations are
also easily molded and or destroyed. 

 Dewey claimed that Historical rationalism, in contrast with
the experimental, re-adjusting mind, turned to Reason and
employed it with a certain carelessness, conceit,
irresponsibility, and rigidity-in short Absolutism. Just
like the rationalizations that psychologists noted in
individual behavior, the historical rationalism used Reason
as an agency of justification and apologetics. It taught
that the defects and evils of actual experience disappear in
the rational whole of things. In other words, things APPEAR
evil merely because of the partial, incomplete nature of
experience. As Bacon noted, Reason assumes a false
simplicity, universality, and uniformity, and opens for
science a path of fictitious ease. 

"This course results in intellectual irresponsibility and
neglect:--irresponsibility because rationalism assumes that
the concepts of reason are so self-sufficient and so far
above experience that they need and can secure no
confirmation in experience. Neglect, because this same
assumption makes men careless about concrete observations
and experiments.  Contempt for experience has had a tragic
revenge IN experience; it has cultivated disregard for fact
and this disregard has been paid for in failure, sorrow, and
war. German rationalism was apologetic
.it discovered
profound meanings due to the necessary evolution of absolute
reason. The modern world has suffered because in so many
matters philosophy has offered it only an arbitrary choice
between hard and fast opposites: Disintegrating analysis or
rigid synthesis; complete radicalism neglecting and
attacking the historic past as trivial and harmful, or
complete conservatism idealizing institutions as embodiments
of eternal reason; resolution of experience into atomic
elements that afford no support to stable organization or
the clamping down of all experience by fixed categories and
necessary concepts
"	---Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy