Pragmatism Applied

William James and the Challenges of Contemporary Life

Clifford S. Stagoll, Michael P. Levine, Clifford S. Stagoll, Michael P. Levine

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781438473383
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Pragmatismo en filosofía

William James, one of America's most original philosophers and psychologists, was concerned above all with the manner in which philosophy might help people to cope with the vicissitudes of daily life. Writing around the turn of the twentieth century, James experienced firsthand, much as we do now, the impact upon individuals and communities of rapid changes in extant values, technologies, economic realities, and ways of understanding the world. He presented an enormous range of practical recommendations for coping and thriving in such circumstances, arguing consistently that prospects for richer lives and improved communities rested not upon trust in spiritual or material prescriptions, but rather on clear thinking in the cause of action. This volume seeks to demonstrate how James's astonishingly rich corpus can be used to address contemporary issues and to establish better ways for thinking about the moral and practical challenges of our time. In the first part, James's theories are applied directly to issues ranging from gun control to disability, and the ethics of livestock farming to the meaning of "progress" in race relations. The second part shows how James's theories of ethics, experience, and the self can be used to "clear away" theoretical matters that have inhibited philosophy's deployment to real-world issues. Finally, part three shows how individuals might apply ideas from James in their personal lives, whether at work, contemplating nature, or considering the implications of their own habits of thought and action.

PART 1

ISSUES: PUTTING JAMES TO WORK

CHAPTER 1

LISTENING TO “THE CRIES OF THE WOUNDED”

Jamesian Reflections on the Impasse over Gun Control

JAMES M. ALBRECHT

On December 14, 2012, President Barack Obama addressed a nation shocked by the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, where a shooter armed with a semi-automatic rifle and pistol purchased legally by his mother, a gun enthusiast, killed twenty children and six adults, after first murdering his mother and before taking his own life:

The majority of those who died today were children—beautiful little kids between the ages of five and ten years old. They had their entire lives ahead of them—birthdays, graduations, weddings, kids of their own. Among the fallen were also teachers—men and women who devoted their lives to helping our children fulfill their dreams. So our hearts are broken today—for the parents and grandparents, sisters and brothers of these little children, and for the families of the adults who were lost. (Obama 2012)

Obama spoke eloquently of the victims and their families not only to comfort a grieving nation, but in the hope that focusing on the tragic reality of their suffering might break the political impasse on gun laws. Over the multiple occasions when he had to address the nation after mass shootings, Obama expressed increasing frustration at Congress’s failure to act (Korte 2016). When proposals inspired by Newtown were defeated in the Senate, Obama described the “shameful day for Washington” as a failure to honor the victims’ suffering: “I’m assuming our expressions of grief and our commitment to do something different to prevent these things from happening are not empty words. … Sooner or later, we are going to get this right. The memories of these children demand it” (Obama 2013). But the multiple mass shootings that occurred during the Obama administration after Newtown did not lead to any federal legislation, and the election of 2016, which gave Republicans control of all three branches of the Federal government, seems to preclude the hope for action in the near future.

This impasse over enacting more effective gun safety laws in the United States provides an intriguing test case for considering the continuing relevance of William James’s ethical thought. James’s pragmatic theory of truth entails a democratic commitment to confront moral conflicts with an experimental openness, a conscientious respect for the ideals of others, and a genuine willingness to forge consensus around shared values. In some of his central statements on ethics—such as “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life” and “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings”—James insists that moral problems require an approach that is pluralistic, experimental, and democratic: an approach that notably recognizes the tragic choices involved in all moral conflicts (the fact that some ideals are necessarily sacrificed or “butchered,” in James’s visceral phrase, in order to realize other ideals [1979, 154]), and an approach that thus requires a sympathetic and imaginative effort to understand the ideals and values of others—including and especially of our opponents in contentious social conflicts. In considering and implementing any social reform, James argues, we must listen carefully for “the cries of the wounded” to alert us to ideals and consequences to which we would otherwise be blind (158).1

In terms of gun violence, James’s views provocatively imply that we cannot effectively attend to the sufferings of the victims without also listening to the voices of those who feel threatened by the prospect of gun control. James (1982) himself applies such logic in “The Moral Equivalent of War,” where he argues that pacifism cannot hope to succeed unless it works to incorporate and redirect the positive ideals and values that militarists find in war. “Pacifists ought to enter more deeply into the esthetical and ethical point of view of their opponents,” he argues: “Do that first in any controversy, … then move the point, and your opponent will follow” (168). For James, the attempt to imagine sympathetically the ideals of one’s political opponents, and as far as possible preserve those ideals in any new consensus on actions to be taken, is both a practical necessity for overcoming the inertia of existing truths and habits, and a fundamental ethical obligation to honor the demands of other beings.

In what follows, I consider how such Jamesian principles might be applied to the partisan impasse on gun control. How might the ideals and values that make gun ownership for some Americans a precious and fiercely protected right be better honored and incorporated in proposed reforms? How would such a Jamesian effort to forge consensus differ from strategies already being deployed by the political Left—whether it be the adoption of a centrist rhetoric on gun control, or a more partisan attempt to influence the minds of voters by promoting an unabashedly progressive rhetorical “frame”? Though my treatment here of so complex a problem can only be suggestive, I hope to show how a Jamesian approach might indicate a practical path forward on the issue of gun control. But my ultimate goal is broader: I hope this exercise in applying James’s ethics will point beyond the issue of gun violence, in order to highlight how pragmatism’s commitment to an experimental process of inquiry and reform offers a democratic alternative to the partisan dogmatism that besets American politics. In the wake of the most divisively partisan presidential election in recent memory, one that revealed the stark cultural polarizations in U.S. society, a Jamesian ethic of experimental and sympathetic openness to the principles of one’s political opponents may seem naïvely idealistic—or more urgently relevant than ever.

THE PROBLEM AND THE POLITICAL IMPASSE

The scope of the gun violence problem in the United States can be captured in statistics all too familiar to anyone who regularly follows the national and local news (Everytown for Gun Safety 2012). More than 30,000 Americans are killed every year by firearms: about two-thirds of these deaths are suicides, the rest homicides. Nonfatal shootings are estimated at an additional 78,000 per year. On average, over fifty women per month are shot to death by their intimate partners in the United States, while seven children and youths die from gunshot wounds every day. The majority of gun suicides are middle-aged white men, while African Americans (especially black men) are disproportionately likely to be the victims of gun homicide. In 2010, the rate of gun homicides in the United States was a whopping twenty-five times higher than the average rate in other high-income countries—five times higher than in Canada (with the next highest rate) and almost one hundred times higher than in such nations as the United Kingdom and Norway. While mass shootings account for a small fraction of gun-related deaths, the list of major shootings during the Obama presidency, and to date under the Trump administration alone—Fort Hood, Tucson, Aurora, Sandy Hook, the D.C. Navy Yard, Charleston, Roseburg, San Bernardino, Orlando, Las Vegas, Sutherland Springs, Parkland, and Santa Fe—invokes the terror that gun violence routinely visits upon American communities. The number of guns per capita in the United States has roughly doubled since 1968 (Horsley 2016): the over 300 million guns estimated to be in circulation today equal almost one gun for every person in the nation. Yet, while gun production and sales have boomed in recent years, the percentage of gun-owning households (about 30 percent) has declined significantly since around 1980, revealing a pattern in which an increasing number of guns are owned by fewer Americans.

In the face of this violence, federal efforts to regulate guns have hardened into a political impasse. The past fifty years have witnessed a pattern of increasing partisan division in which periodic federal reforms—the Gun Control Act of 1968, the Brady Handgun Violence Protection Act (1993), and the Federal Assault Weapons Ban (1994)—have been countered by measures designed to roll back their provisions or preclude future measures. The Firearm Owners Protection Act of 1986 reversed certain Gun Control Act restrictions on the interstate sale of guns and ammunition, and prohibited the federal government from maintaining a registry of firearms owners and sales; and when the Assault Weapons Ban was due for renewal in 2004, Congress allowed it to lapse. Supreme Court decisions in the District of Columbia v. Heller (2008) and McDonald v. the City of Chicago (2010) struck down municipal bans on handguns, reversing decades of precedent in ruling that the Second Amendment guarantees an individual right to bear arms. Below this struggle at the federal level, state laws have moved in opposite directions (Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence n.d.). Some states, most notably California, have instituted tougher regulations, including universal background checks, permanent records of firearm sales, and bans on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, while other states have significantly loosened gun laws—Missouri offering the most radical example (New York Times Editorial Board 2016). Many states have passed preemption laws that limit the ability of local governments to enact gun regulations, passed “stand your ground” laws that make it easier to claim self-defense in a shooting, and significantly loosened regulations governing the carrying of concealed weapons. These divergent state laws largely follow the Blue State/Red State cultural divide in our nation—with California, Illinois, Hawaii, and Northeastern states having the strictest regulations, and Southern, Midwestern, and interior Western states having the loosest.

Taken as a whole, these developments constitute a weakening of gun laws over the past twenty years (since the 1994 Assault Weapons Ban). The gun rights movement’s success at weakening regulations has been undergirded by two larger political trends. Perhaps most significant is the evolution of the National Rifle Association (NRA), since the Goldwater-Reagan transformation of the Republican Party, into a powerful lobby that opposes almost all gun regulations and has turned guns into an enormously effective wedge issue for recruiting blue-collar voters to the anti-government ideology of the GOP (Burbick 2006, 75–99). Concurrently, Democrats have shown a reluctance to advocate gun control measures for fear of electoral backlash at the hands of the NRA and its members (Henigan 2016, 3, 11–12). There have been signs of a shift in this political calculus. After the shooting in Roseburg, Oregon, President Obama (2015) rejected the notion that it is inappropriate to “politicize” gun violence, proclaiming his determination to respond to such tragedies by pushing for more effective gun laws. Congressional Democrats have at times shown uncharacteristic boldness: in response to the June 2016 Orlando shooting, Democrats used a Senate filibuster to force votes on two gun safety measures, and then staged a sit-in takeover of the House floor to protest that body’s inaction on gun violence. Despite such efforts, Orlando, like Newtown before it, failed to result in any Congressional action (Steinhauer 2016; Herszenhorn and Huetteman 2016).

This partisan impasse was also on full exhibit during the 2016 presidential campaign. Hillary Clinton (HillaryClinton.com 2016) advocated for new gun safety measures—such as closing the background check loopholes for online and gun show sales and prohibiting persons on the FBI’s Terrorist Watch List from purchasing firearms. Donald Trump responded by accusing Clinton of wanting to abolish the Second Amendment—an accusation that was tinged with a threat of violence when Trump remarked that perhaps “the Second Amendment People” would have their own means for stopping a President Clinton (Corasaniti and Haberman 2016). This prospect that the debate over guns might result in political violence felt all too real when right-wing militia groups were reportedly arming themselves in preparation for a possible Clinton victory (Zucchino 2016). With Trump in the White House and Republican majorities in both the House and Senate, the federal government seems predictably unwilling to take any meaningful action on guns. In the wake of the worst mass shooting in U.S. history, the October 2017 massacre in Las Vegas, Congress declined to take up proposed legislation outlawing “bump fire” stocks (that convert semi-automatic weapons into fully automatic ones), which the shooter used to murder 58 people and injure more than 700. Indeed, the only significant action on guns Republicans took during the first year of the Trump administration was to pass legislation reversing an Obama executive order designed to prevent mentally ill persons from obtaining a firearm (Korte 2017).

As this chapter goes to press, the Parkland, Florida, school massacre has unleashed a remarkable wave of student-led activism that seems to be shifting the political landscape in ways other mass shootings have not. Florida’s Republican governor, Rick Scott, has supported raising his state’s legal age for purchasing firearms and strengthening rules that prevent people with mental health issues or histories of stalking or domestic abuse from obtaining guns (Mazzei and Bidgwood 2018). On the federal level, President Trump has ordered the Justice Department to issue regulations banning bump stocks (Shear 2018)—but at the same time has endorsed the NRA’s preferred solution of arming public school teachers and employees with concealed weapons (Davis 2018), and Republicans have so far resisted reinstating a ban on assault weapons. Only time will tell whether the momentum created by the student response to Parkland signals a lasting shift in the nation’s response to gun violence.

The current positions in the gun debate have been forged in the crucible of this political impasse. The Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence (n.d.) describes gun violence as a public health crisis that can be tackled on two fronts: making it harder for those with criminal intent to obtain guns, and limiting the violence—mostly suicides and accidental deaths—involving guns purchased without criminal intent. To address the first challenge, Brady advocates extending background checks to the secondary market of private gun sales—not just at gun shows, but over the Internet and through gun-trafficking sales facilitated by “straw purchasers”—sales that, comprising up to 40 percent of the gun sales in America, constitute a “massive loophole” in the current system. This central policy initiative should be supplemented, Brady argues, by heightened anti-trafficking efforts aimed at “bad apple” gun dealers (whose sales “account for 60% of crime guns”), by requiring gun owners to report stolen guns, and through “smart-gun” technologies that would render stolen guns unusable. Deploying a rhetoric clearly intended to distinguish law-abiding gun owners from criminals, Brady argues that the second challenge, of unsafely stored guns in the home, “isn’t a gun problem” at all, but “a responsibility problem” analogous to drunk driving and second-hand smoke—public health threats caused by adults using legal products irresponsibly—and proposes it should be addressed through “major public awareness and education campaigns” about “responsible attitudes and behaviors based on the real risks around guns in the home.” Such efforts can be supplemented through legal measures such as child access prevention laws, alre...