Pragmatist-in-chief

A colleague expressed surprise the other day at the claim of William James biographer Robert Richardson (which he heard during break, like me, on the radio) that President Obama is a Pragmatist, not just in the way of most successful politicians (where the word simply means flexible and expedient) but in the philosophical sense.

Richardson was passing along the view he and I had both just heard espoused at Harvard in August, by the historian James Kloppenberg. Haven't read his book Reading Obama yet, but Obama's speech at the Tucson memorial sure breathed the air of "What Makes a Life Significant"-- one of the premier popular texts representing Jamesian pragmatism as a commitment to ideals requiring fidelity, courage, and endurance. We won't all get to the mountaintop, personally; but we as a people, as a species, we can. That's Pragmatism.

"Against Depression"

If you're gonna be against happiness, must you then be for depression? Hope not.

Psychiatrist and author Peter D. Kramer is a forceful proponent of judiciously-deployed psycho-pharmacological intervention to minimize mental suffering. He first made his case in Listening to Prozac. And in Against Depression he called out those who defend pathological unhappiness as a boon to civilization, thinking of all those works of creative genius by all those sad, anguished, tortured, self-abusing artists, writers, musicians et al through the ages who, it's been speculated, might not have been so creative if they'd been blissfully medicated instead.

Kramer's clear: clinically-diagnosed depression is an illness no less than tuberculosis or AIDS. Who would ever defend not treating that, just so the rest of us could reap the artistic effluvium (and to hell with the artist herself)?

Much depends on where we draw the ever-shifting line between "normal" sadness and mental illness.

I do like Kramer's rationale for Obama's Nobel.

frightening

Meanwhile, back in the "real" world...

Doonesbury 9.27.09

Cosmos

Obama's and Appiah's cosmopolitanism...

Kwame Anthony Appiah's excellent 2006 book of the same name was in my holiday reading stack, a perfect complement to James's Pluralistic Universe. Interesting to note that Appiah, like Obama the son of an African father and western mother (from England, not Kansas), had nothing to say about Obama three years ago. Another measure of how startlingly sudden was our pragmatist-in-chief's arrival onto the world scene.

Opening minds

A conscientious young liberal of my acquaintance, a "rising 9th-grader," told me yesterday that he makes a point of listening periodically to local talk radio troglodyte Phil Valentine. Exposing himself to narrow and intolerant thinking (if you want to call it that) will better inform his own burgeoning progressivism and balance his own perspective, he supposes.

According to Jonathan Haidt (as related by Nicholas Kristof), that's a well-intentioned but unpromising strategy. Listening to Limbaugh and other shouting ideologues, on whichever end of the spectrum, does not create sympathy for their views in those not predisposed to sympathize.

A study by Diana Mutz of the University of Pennsylvania found that when people saw tight television shots of blowhards with whom they disagreed, they felt that the other side was even less legitimate than before... we often form judgments through flash intuitions that aren’t a result of a deliberative process. The crucial part of the brain for these judgments is the medial prefrontal cortex, which has more to do with moralizing than with rationality...

“Minds are very hard things to open, and the best way to open the mind is through the heart,” Professor Haidt says. “Our minds were not designed by evolution to discover the truth; they were designed to play social games.”

So what should my young friend do to expand his openness to those with a different point of view? Don't tune in to the loudmouths. Take a quiet conservative to lunch.

Are We There Yet, Martin?

"MLK helped pave the road to the White House for Obama, but it will take more than Tuesday's inauguration to fulfill King's dream." -Joan Walsh, salon.com.

Right. It will take a recognition that we are and always have been a polyglot society. If we're going to judge Americans by the contents of their characters, we've got to stop being so fixated on their blackness and whiteness - and their redness and blueness. All of our ancestry is "mixed." We still seem pretty mixed up about that.