metaphysical club

[Joseph Tracy]

I  recently finished Menand's The Metaphysical Club exploring  American philosophical development towards pragmatism in the 1800s particularly William James, Oliver Wendell Holmes, John Dewey and Charles Pierce but bringing in lots of other players from Emerson to Agassiz to Henry Adams to  Jane Addams  and Darwin. Interesting cross section of human lives  and ideas at a time when Academia and philosophic discourse had a more direct and powerful role shaping society. Aways so much one doesn't know. OW Holmes was shot or badly injured 3 times in the Civil War witnessing some bloody massacres of the ineptly led Union forces. Emerson stayed frequently at his house growing up. These guys knew each other,  ate and drank together, corresponded, were deeply affected by the  horrors of this war.

One of the things that I had sort of inferred but with little historical detail was the strained philosophic alliance that shows up between Calvinism, statistics and Newtonian mechanist science. Same kind of weird in my mind as Vibe sending Kit to Yale.  Weird because they were asserting that only belief in this deterministic  divine/natural order gave any meaning to moral choices and at the same time they were in a tradition that claimed every person was predestined to salvation or damnation( I mean how much credit do you get for being prediestined to make a good moral choce?).

As far as bias toward a moral or cultural order, It  seems like it doesn't matter if the order comes from the will of the creator, the cause and effect mechanics of a hierarchical physics, the 'superior' races, the pure platonic forms or statistical norms -the familiar order and ideas that someone was born into has to be the true and self-evidently natural order of the universe.  
It was and is boring and  discordant with the gritty industrial realities of the period and Dewey, James etc. were bored by it back then. They had the temerity to try to think in novel ways and the effects were significant, but the animosities still follows similar lines, euro v color, militarism v egalitarianism,  Money v idealism, creation v evolution. 

Menand is a talented historian, who with economy  draws out essential biographical detail and substantiates their impact on the lives of his protagonists through quotes from letters and other source materials. What I don't care for in Menand is the presumption that the modern form of democratic capitalism that emerged bears the sound balance of this discourse and has produced a science and social design that remains benignly serviceable to humankind.  This presumption undermines the importance of  interdisciplinary intellectual discourse as it enters the 21st century. Whether the pragmatism of the last century is really pragmatic  as a global pattern is hardly a settled question. 

Well OK, this last paragraph was written about 2/3rds into the book. By the end Menand's take on the legacy of these thinkers is more equivocal. He does show the downside of OW Holmes pragmatism and his unwillingness to defend any constitutional right because these rights are not inherent in nature or natural law. 

There is still much of the same kind of cultural confusion today that these thinkers faced, much of it stemming from the legacy of inherited bullshit.  Most  of today's mainstream thinkers have not even absorbed the implications of what they say they believe: anthropogenic global warming, the end of the age of cheap energy,  the environmental and  economic un-sustainability of wasteful and extractive multinational corporate capitalism. To put these issues front and center is to be relegated to the periphery.   Though I do think Bill Moyers has a rare knack for getting away with it as much as anyone has.  

One of the great appeals of Pynchon for me is a sense that he has absorbed the implications of these realities and also thought deeply and  with plenty of comic relief about the historic origins of  both these contemporary  issues and more ancient culture wars.