The Abuse of Evil

The Corruption of Politics and Religion since 9/11

Richard J. Bernstein

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780745650487
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filosofia
• Subtopic: Storia e teoria della filosofia

Since 9/11 politicians, preachers, conservatives and the media are all speaking about evil. In the past the dicourse about evil in our religious, philosophic and literary traditions has provoked thinking, questioning and inquiry. But today the appeal to evil is being used as a political tool to obscure compex issues, block serious thinking and stifle public discussion and debate.

We are now confronting a clash of mentalities, not a clash of civilisations. One mentality is drawn to absolutes, moral certainties, and simplistic dichotomies of good and evil. The other seriously questions an appeal to absolutes in politics and criticizes the simplistic division of the world into the forces of evil and the forces of good.

In The Abuse of Evil Bernstein challenges the claim that without an appeal to absolutes, we lack the grounds for acting decisively in fighting our enemies. The post 9/11 abuse of evil corrupts both democratic politics and religion. The stakes are high in this clash of mentalities in shaping how we think and act in the world today - and in the future.

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The Clash of Mentalities

The Craving for Absolutes versus Pragmatic Fallibilism

In the Introduction I spoke about the clash of mentalities. In this chapter I want to explain what I mean, and why I think this clash is so consequential. By a mentality, I mean a general orientation – a cast of mind or way of thinking – that conditions the way in which we approach, understand, and act in the world. It shapes and is shaped by our intellectual, practical, and emotional lives. Mentalities can take a variety of concrete historical forms. We never encounter a mentality in the abstract, but only in a particular historical manifestation. To fully understand a specific historical manifestation of a mentality, we need to locate its context, its distinctive character, and its sources. We need to pay careful attention to its historical particularity – although we can recognize its similarities (and differences) with other historical examples of the same or similar mentalities. Mentalities also arise at different stages in history – and their concrete manifestations can pass away. So we also need to inquire about why they arise at a certain time and why they fade away. I want to begin with a specific historical example, one that has had a great influence on the character of the United States in the late nineteenth century and the first part of the twentieth century. After examining this important example of what I call pragmatic fallibilism, I will then, in the next chapter, reflect on its more general significance – and its relevance to our current situation.

Several years ago, Louis Menand published a fascinating book, The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America. It explores the intellectual history of American pragmatism and seeks to situate this movement in the context of American history. (The Metaphysical Club was an informal discussion group of intellectuals who met in Cambridge, Massachusetts, during the 1870s to discuss philosophical issues.) Pragmatism as a philosophical movement arose in the United States just after the Civil War. This was a time when the idea of a research university – modeled on the German university – began to take hold throughout the United States. Before the Civil War, most private institutions of higher learning were colleges founded by different religious groups. The primary purpose of these colleges was to educate citizens and clergy rather than to engage in research. But during the latter part of the nineteenth century, there was a flourishing of independent scholarship in the natural sciences, social disciplines, and humanities. It was during this period that American thinkers sought do develop a distinctive philosophical orientation.

William James first popularized the expression “pragmatism” in a famous address that he delivered at the University of California, Berkeley, in l898. In his address, “Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results,” James generously acknowledged his debt to Charles S. Peirce, “one of the most original contemporary thinkers,” and James refers to “the principle of practicalism – or pragmatism as he called it when I first heard him enunciate it at Cambridge in the early ’70s” (James 1977: 348). James first heard Peirce discuss his pragmatic principle at meetings of the Metaphysical Club. James introduces “Peirce’s principle” with a metaphorical description: “the soul and meaning of thought, he says, can never be made to direct itself towards anything but the production of belief, belief being the demicadence which closes a musical phrase in the symphony of our intellectual life.” James tells us that “beliefs, in short are really rules of action; and the whole function of thinking is but one step in the production of habits of action” (James 1977: 348). In 1898, Peirce was barely known as a philosopher (except to a small group of admirers such as James). Peirce, the son of a famous Harvard mathematician, was a scientist and a logician, but his intellectual curiosity spanned the entire range of human disciplines. As James’s popular version of pragmatism spread, Peirce was so appalled and outraged that he renamed his own doctrine of meaning “ ‘pragmaticism’ which is ugly enough to be safe from kidnappers” (Peirce 1931–5: 5. 414). There is a famous quip that pragmatism is the movement that was founded on James’s misunderstanding of Peirce. Peirce and James were lifelong friends – although at times their friendship was a stormy one. Another young member of the Cambridge circle who joined the discussions of the Metaphysical Club was Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., who later became one of the most famous justices of the United States Supreme Court. John Dewey, born in 1859 (the year of publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species), was 20 years younger than James. He came from a background that was very different from that of Cambridge intellectuals. He was born in Burlington, Vermont, the son of a shopkeeper, and was educated at the University of Vermont. Dewey was among the first American philosophers to get a Ph.D. degree at the newly founded graduate school, Johns Hopkins University. Peirce briefly taught at Johns Hopkins when Dewey was a graduate student. When Dewey joined the faculty of the University of Chicago in 1890, he was already a great admirer of James. Dewey claimed that James’s magnum opus, The Principles of Psychology, had an enormous influence on his own intellectual development. And James himself was enthusiastic about the philosophical orientation being developed by the “Chicago School” centered on Dewey. In one of Dewey’s most important books, Experience and Nature, Dewey praised Holmes as “one of our greatest philosophers,” and quoted a long passage from Holmes’s essay on “Natural Law.” Holmes admired Experience and Nature – a book that shared his own conception of experience and existence. With his typical charming wit, Holmes wrote: “Although Dewey’s book is incredibly ill written, it seemed to me . . . to have a feeling of intimacy with the universe that I found unequaled. So methought God would have spoken had He been inarticulate but keenly desirous to tell you how it was” (quoted in Menand 2001: 437).

One of Menand’s major contributions was to show how the origins of the pragmatic movement could be understood as a critical response to the horrors and excesses of the Civil War – the war that split the nation. Menand focused attention on four persons, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., William James, Charles S. Peirce, and John Dewey, although he also discussed many of their contemporaries. Menand made a bold claim about the influence of these four men. He declared:

Their ideas changed the way Americans thought – and continue to think – about education, democracy, liberty, justice, and tolerance. And as a consequence they changed the way Americans live – the way they learn, the way they express their views, the way in which they understand themselves, and the way in which they treat people who are different from them. We are still living, to a great extent, in a country these thinkers helped to make. (Menand 2001: p. xi)

What is the bond that unites these very diverse thinkers? Menand affirms that they shared a common attitude toward ideas.

What was that attitude? If we strain out the differences, personal and philosophical, they had with one another, we can say that what these four thinkers had in common was not a group of ideas, but a single idea – an idea about ideas. They all believed that ideas are not “out there” waiting to be discovered, but are tools . . . that people devise to cope with the world in which they find themselves. They believed that ideas are produced not by individuals, but by groups of individuals – that ideas are social. They believed that ideas do not develop according to some inner logic of their own, but are entirely dependent, like germs, on their human careers and environment. And they believed that since ideas are provisional responses to particular situations, their survival depends not on their immutability but on their adaptability. (Menand 2001: p. xi)

This “single idea” did not develop in an intellectual vacuum. It emerged in response to the violent extremism of the American Civil War. These thinkers were reacting against the entrenched opposition, the absolute certainty by the opposing forces of the righteousness of their cause, the sheer intolerance toward those who held opposing convictions – an intolerance that frequently set members of the same family against each other. This rigid mentality led to bloody violence. It was a mentality in which there were stark oppositions, a black-and-white world in which there was no possibility of compromise or negotiation. Holmes fought in the Civil War and was seriously wounded several times. James had a brother who nearly died in the war. Dewey was a young child during the war, but his father fought in the war. (Peirce, however, dreaded the draft. Through his father’s influence, he secured a position in the US Coastal Survey and managed to avoid conscription.) But the consciousness of the Civil War shaped an entire generation. Menand’s thesis is that the pragmatic thinkers undertook to develop a more flexible, open, experimental, and fallible way of thinking that would avoid all forms of absolutism, stark binary oppositions, and violent extremism. And in their individual and collective way of doing this, they helped to reshape the ways in which Americans thought and acted.

I believe that Menand is essentially correct in the way in which he approaches the historical situatedness of the pragmatic movement. We tend to think that philosophers are somehow completely divorced from history – as if they were simply engaged in a timeless conversation with each other across the centuries. There have been philosophers who have characterized philosophy in this manner, but the pragmatic thinkers rejected this ahistorical conception of philosophy. Dewey, for example, always maintained that philosophy is (and ought to be) responsive to the deepest conflicts of its own time. Menand has written the type of intellectual history that reflects Dewey’s own understanding of the cultural rootedness of philosophical speculation, and he presents a far more dramatic and vivid understanding of role played by this movement in reshaping the mentality of American life. There is another virtue in Menand’s approach. He helps us to see that when the pragmatists critically attacked absolutism, when they sought to expose the quest for certainty, when they argued for an open universe in which chance and contingency are irreducible, they were not concerned exclusively with abstract metaphysical and epistemological issues. They were addressing profound ethical, political, and practical questions that ordinary people confront in their everyday lives. They were haunted by the memory of the way in which the conflict of absolutes led to so much bloody violence. They wanted to develop a new way of thinking – a new mentality – that would be an alternative to, and would overcome, all forms of entrenched ideological extremism.

In all the pragmatic thinkers there is a sustained multifaceted attack on what Dewey called “the quest for certainty.” It is not just ideologists and fanatics who claim to live by absolute certainty. Dewey thought that this quest had been one of the most basic goals of the Western philosophical tradition. Dewey related this quest for certainty to a quest for security, an attempt to flee from the contingency, uncertainty, and ambivalence of everyday life. Many traditional philosophers had tended to valorize what is eternal, fixed, unchanging, and necessary, and to denigrate what is changing, becoming, contingent, and perilous. But there is no “escape from peril,” from the vicissitudes of existence. Furthermore, we are neither playthings of forces that are always operating behind our backs; nor can we ever completely control our destinies. Dewey, like the other pragmatic thinkers, sought to expose the arrogance of those who think that they can anticipate, manipulate, and control all unexpected contingencies. All the pragmatists rejected doctrines of mechanical determinism that allow no place for genuine human agency and freedom. But they were just as relentless in their critiques of gratuitous voluntarism – the belief that we can initiate significant changes in the world simply by willing them. The important pragmatic task is to develop those ideas – and even more important – those flexible critical habits and practices that will enable us to cope with what is unexpected and unpredictable in a reflective intelligent manner.

Dewey coined the phrase “the spectator theory of knowledge.” He argued that many traditional and modern philosophers were dominated by ocular metaphors, and that they tended to approach knowing as a form of passive seeing, or contemplation. Integral to the change in mentality that he and the other pragmatists sought to develop was the intellectual experiment of situating human beings as agents, not as passive spectators – agents who are always already undergoing and shaping their experience in transactions with their world. Dewey, like the other pragmatists, was skeptical of radical utopian “solutions,” and he was suspicious of the idea of total revolution. But he was committed to ongoing radical social reform. Throughout his long life, his central concern was the character and fate of democracy. He felt that the greatest threats to American democracy were internal ones – threats in which the public was being manipulated by powerful special interest groups. He was concerned about “the eclipse of the public” – the eclipse of an informed public where there is open communication, debate, and deliberation. Dewey warned about the threat to democracy that resulted from the growth and spread of the “corporate mentality” – a mentality that has taken on global dimensions in our time.

The business mind, having its own conversation and language, its own interests, its own intimate groupings in which men of this mind, in their collective capacity, determine the tone of society at large as well as the government of industrial society. . . . We now have, although without formal or legal status, a mental and moral corporateness for which history affords no parallel. (Dewey 1930: 41)

Democracy, according to Dewey, does not consist exclusively of a set of institutions, formal voting procedures, or even legal guarantee of rights. These are important, but they require a culture of everyday democratic cooperative practices to give them life and meaning. Otherwise institutions and procedures are in danger of becoming hollow and meaningless. Democracy is “a way of life,” an ethical ideal that demands active and constant attention. And if we fail to work at creating and re-creating democracy, there is no guarantee that it will survive. Democracy involves a reflective faith in the capacity of all human beings for intelligent judgment, deliberation, and action if the proper social, educational, and economic conditions are furnished. When Dewey was celebrating his eightieth birthday he presented a talk entitled “Creative Democracy – The Task Before Us,” in which he outlined his vision of a true democratic society:

Democracy as compared with other ways of life is the sole way of living which believes wholeheartedly in the process of experience as end and as means . . . and which releases emotions, needs, and desires so as to call into being the things that have not existed in the past. For every way of life that fails in its democracy limits the contacts, the exchanges, the communications, the interactions by which experience is steadied while it is enlarged and enriched. The task of this release and enrichment is one that has to be carried on day by day. Since it is one that can have no end till experience itself comes to an end, the task of democracy is forever that of creation of a freer and more humane experience in which all share and to which all contribute. (Dewey 1988: 229–30)

Dewey understood that at times of deep uncertainty, anxiety, and fear, there is a craving for moral certainty and absolutes. At such times there can be a desperate search for metaphysical and religious comfort. But this is precisely what we must resist. For such comfort is based on illusions. Furthermore, as Peirce had already emphasized, such an appeal to absolutes blocks the road to open inquiry and genuine thinking. The pragmatists exposed and sharply attacked the seductive but misleading appeal to absolutes, certainty, specious foundations, and simplistic oppositions. But their main positive achievement was to develop a viable critical and fallible alternative.

Hilary Putnam, a leading contemporary philosopher who strongly identifies with the pragmatic tradition, claims that pragmatism is a “way of thinking” that involves “a certain group of theses, theses which can and indeed were argued very differently by different philosophers with different concerns.” He summarizes these key theses as

(1) antiskepticism; pragmatists hold that doubt requires justification just as much as belief . . .; (2) fallibilism; pragmatists hold that there is never a metaphysical guarantee to be had that such and such a belief will never need revision (that one can be fallibilistic and antiskeptical is perhaps the unique insight of American pragmatism); (3) the thesis that there is no fundamental dichotomy between “facts” and “values”; and the thesis that, in a certain sense, practice is primary in philosophy. (Putnam 1994: 152)

Peirce consistently challenged the idea of epistemological and metaphysical foundationalism that he took to be so basic for many philosophers – the dream or nightmare of discovering once and for all an incorrigible foundation that could serve as a basis for building the edifice of knowledge. There are deep philosophical, religious, social, and psychological reasons for this search for solid foundations and incorrigible truths. Descartes, more than any other thinker, vividly portrayed what he took to be the grand Either/Or that we confront: Either solid foundations and indubitable knowledge Or a swamp of unfounded and ungrounded opinion. I once called this “the Cartesian Anxiety” (Bernstein 1983: 16–24). Descartes’ search for an Archimedean point is much more than a device to solve metaphysical and epistemological problems. It is the quest for some fixed ground, some stable rock upon which we can secure our lives against the vicissitudes that constantly threaten us. The specter that hovers in the background of the journey of the soul that Descartes undertakes in his Meditations is the dread of chaos and madness where nothing is fixed and determinate, where – to use his own chilling metaphor – we are in a sea where we can neither touch bottom nor support ourselves on the surface. This anxiety has haunted intellectual and popular thinking right up to the present. It can take many different forms. And indeed, I believe that those today who claim religious or moral certainty for dividing the world into the forces of good and the forces of evil are shaped by this Cartesian Anxiety. For they are claiming the type of certainty for their moral and political convictions that Descartes claimed for his indubitable foundation. They also make use of the grand Either/Or when they attack their opponents. For they claim that the only alternative to solid foundations and moral certainties is to be lost in a quagmire of relativistic opinions.

Now what is distinctive about the pragmatic thinkers is that they rejected this grand Either/Or. The exclusive disjunction: “absolute” certainty or “absolute” relativism is specious. We need to exorcize the Cartesian Anxiety, or, to switch metaphors, engage in a form of philosophical therapy that will release us from its constraining grip. Beginning with Peirce, the pragmatists sought to develop the idea of fallibilism as a genuine alternative to the Cartesian Either/Or. Fallibilism is the belief that any knowledge claim or, more generally, any validity claim – including moral and political claims – is open to ongoing examination, modification, and critique. Peirce originally argued that fallibilism is essential for understanding the distinctive ch...

Table of contents

• Cover
• HalfTitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• Preface
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Chapter 1: The Clash of Mentalities: The Craving for Absolutes versus Pragmatic Fallibilism
• Chapter 2:The Anticipations and Legacy of Pragmatic Fallibilism
• Chapter 3: Moral Certainty and Passionate Commitment
• Chapter 4: Evil and the Corruption of Democratic Politics
• Chapter 5: Evil and the Corruption of Religion
• Epilogue: What is to be Done?
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index