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A Story
of Ideas in America
Louis
Menand (2001)
SUMMARY
(by Graham Bullock)
While the
names Oliver Wendell Holmes, William James, John Dewey and particularly
Charles Pierce are not well-known in modern America, their impact on our ways
of thinking and living has been immense. Most of us, for example, take for
granted the value of tolerance in a democracy, but as Lous Menand
comprehensively documents in “The Metaphysical Club,” it is these four men
who championed this value and helped make it a critical foundation of
American political life. Menand takes us through a whirlwind tour of 19th
century intellectual history and the events that shaped it—the Civil War, the
publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species and the 1894 Pullman strikes being
three of the most important. The century marked a heightening of the
realization that human knowledge and beliefs are and will mot probably always
be fundamentally limited and incomplete, and that in the absence of absolute
wisdom the only alternative to unending violence between groups differing
over interests and ideas is a commitment to humble dialogue and a capacity
for respectful compromise. This voice was often overwhelmed during WWII and
the Cold War in the din of ideological battle cries, but Menand maintains
that it has a newfound relevance in the 21st century, where the growing
multiplicity of existing worldviews demands a more complex philosophical
approach to the many pressing but contentious issues facing human society.
QUOTES
ON
PRAGMATISM: Oliver Wendell Holmes, William James, Charles S. Peirce, and John
Dewey…not only had an unparalleled influence on other writers and thinkers;
they had an enormous influence on American life. 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 they
understand themselves, and the way they treat people who are different from
themselves. We are still living, to a great extent, in a country these
thinkers helped to make.
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—like forks and knives and
microchips—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…[and since they] are provisional
responses to particular and unreproducible circumstances, their survival
depends not on their immutability but on their adaptability.
The belief that ideas should never become ideologies—either justifying the
status quo , or dictating some transcendent imperative for renouncing it—was
the essence of what they taught. (xi-xii)
ON TOLERANCE: The value of an idea…is simply the difference it makes in the
life of the group…We permit free expression because we need the resources of
the whole group to get us the ideas we need. Thinking is a social activity.
I tolerate your thought because it is part of my thought--even when my
thought defines itself in opposition to yours…Since we can never be certain
we must tolerate dissent. (431)
ON PROGRESS: The pragmatists wanted a social organism that permitted a
greater (though by no means unrestricted) margin for difference, but not just
for the sake of difference, and not even because they thought principles of
love and fairness required it. They wanted to create more social room for
error because they thought this would give good outcomes a better chance to
emerge. They didn’t just want to keep the conversation going; they wanted to
get to a better place. (440)
ON VIOLENCE: Though we may believe unreservedly in a certain set of truths,
there is always the possibility that some other set of truths might be the
case. In the end we have to act on what we believe; we cannot wait for
confirmation from the rest of the universe. But the moral justification for
our actions comes from the tolerance we have shown to other ways of being in
the world, other ways of considering the case. The alternative is force.
Pragmatism was designed to make it harder for people to be driven to violence
by their beliefs. (440)
Holmes, James, Pierce, and Dewey wished to bring ideas and principles and
beliefs down to a human level because they wished to avoid the violence they
saw hidden in abstractions. This was one of the lessons the Civil War had
taught them. (440)
ON THE COLD WAR: Holmes, James, and Dewey…helped to make tolerance an
official virtue in modern
America.
But the intellectual grounds for that virtue changed after 1945. The Cold
War was a war over principles. A style of thought that elevated compromise
over confrontation therefore did not hold much appeal. (440-441)
ON THE POST-COLD WAR ERA: For in the post-Cold war world, where there are
many competing belief systems, not just two, skepticism about the finality of
any particular set of beliefs has begun to seem to some people an important
value again. (441)
ON DEMOCRACY: The political system their philosophy was designed to support
was democracy. And democracy…isn’t just about letting the right people have
their say; it’s also about letting the wrong people have their say…Democracy
is the value that validates all other values. Democratic participation isn’t
the means to an end…it is the end. The purpose of the experiment is to keep
the experiment going. (440-442)
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