They say there are only our own personal “values” that reflect our interests, prejudices, and desires.

This idea seemed to explode onto the American scene in the 1960s, with the moral code,  “If it feels good, do it.” But its roots lie farther back in American history.

After the Civil War, American philosophers (centered at Harvard) began to build the intellectual and moral system that produced the Clinton/Baby Boomer ethos, the kind that is never “judgmental” and disputes the meaning of the word “is.”

The abandonment of both religious and philosophical absolutes was a worldwide phenomenon. The American style of relativism came to be called “pragmatism.”

Though there were a variety of “pragmatisms” around the turn of the century, a book by William James, Pragmatism, published in 1907, captured most of their common elements.

The new, acclaimed book by Louis Menand, a group biography of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., philosopher William James, mathematician Charles Sanders Pierce, and philosopher and educator John Dewey, traces the development of modern relativism, which has so changed America .

All of these men came from families that had long abandoned anything resembling orthodox Christianity; at best they followed a religion-in-general kind of spiritualism. Many of their fathers had replaced religion with science, but these sons lost their belief in the certainty of anything.

Their most fundamental belief was that ideas should not control people, but that people controlled 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.”

Under the influence of Darwin and evolution, they believed that “ideas do not develop according to some inner logic of their own, but are entirely dependent, like germs, on their human carriers and the environment. And they believed that since ideas are provisional responses to particular and unreproducible circumstances, their survival depends not on their immutability but on their adaptability.”

Holmes: A War-Shattered Generation

Menand claims that it was the Civil War and the anti-slavery crusade that convinced this generation that ideas were dangerous if they were regarded as fixed and absolute. The abolitionists, fanatical believers in the immorality of slavery, drove the nation into a war that killed over six hundred thousand people. The young men who lived through the war didn’t ever want a commitment to ideas to do that again.

This seems clear in the case of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. “He had gone off to fight because of his moral beliefs, which he held with singular fervor. The war did more than make him lose those beliefs. It made him lose his belief in beliefs.”

Holmes’ upbringing in Unitarian Boston also prepared him to lose any belief in beliefs. His father’s generation had given up orthodox Calvinism and embraced the Unitarian idea that even Scripture provided no authority for beliefs. Holmes came under the influence of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who took the sanctity of the individual to an even farther extreme.

Holmes was thrice wounded as a Massachusetts volunteer in the war, and he was always proud of his war service – because he had done his job well, but not because he had done it in the service of a noble cause.

He did not ever want to enlist in another cause or fight for any belief. “The lesson Holmes took from the war can be put in a sentence. It is that certitude leads to violence.”

Holmes and his generation developed an animus against “ends” and a commitment to “means” that would characterize the 20th century. This way of thinking is typical of our vast, impersonal, bureaucratic organizations.

James: Pragmatism

Menand’s argument about the effect of the Civil War is engaging but unconvincing. Holmes was the only one of these four who was directly involved in the war. (They were all born around 1840 except for Dewey, born in 1859.)

William James endured a strange upbringing under a father who had been the black sheep of his family until saved by a religious conversion experience. Henry James, Sr. (father of philosopher William and novelist Henry James, Jr.) embraced Swedenborgianism, a mystical religious movement begun in 18th century Denmark . It was a precursor of what we call “New Age” religion today. It involved crystals, magnets, mesmerism, hypnotism, psychic healing, and occult therapy.

William James loved it. “He was fascinated by mental states that suggested the existence of an extrasensory realm. He used hypnotism regularly in his work as a psychologist; he experimented with almost every drug he could lay his hands on….”

His father had believed that his religious beliefs would do away with the monogamous family. Society should leave the individual “free to follow the divine afflatus of his passion whithersoever it carried him,” he wrote in 1848, hoping that “a day will come when the sexual relations will be regulated in every case by the private will of the parties,” and “law will declare the entire freedom of every man or woman to follow the bent of their private affections, will justify every alliance sanctioned by these affections.”

James retained a sentimental attachment to religion and was uncomfortable with the materialism of Darwinian evolution. Nevertheless, the faith that he embraced was polymorphic, i.e., whatever religion felt good was the right one for you. In short, whatever “worked” was true. This was the idea behind the philosophy that James called “pragmatism.”

Peirce: “Deconstruction”

Mathematician Charles Sanders Peirce also lived an outlandish personal life, and was the most erratic genius of the Metaphysical Club. He suffered from a neurological disorder for which he used opium, to which he became addicted. Then he turned to ether, morphine, and cocaine. He was also an inveterate womanizer. Near the end of his life, he was homeless and dependent on the charity of his students, particularly James.

Like his father, Peirce was a genius mathematician, but never steady enough to hold down a job. He was the most recondite and least-published member of the Metaphysical Club. (Ironically, his most famous essay was entitled “How to Make Our Ideas Clear.”) Peirce believed that the entire universe could be understood mathematically, especially in terms of statistical probability. All natural and human phenomena are just statistical averages, just as the temperature of an object is the measure of the average energy or motion of the molecules in it and the weather is the result of an incalculable number of small, random movements.

Peirce believed that his theory could be applied to human affairs. Menand tells the fascinating story of how he used his theory to help prove in court that Hetty Robinson (later Hetty Green, the famous Wall Street miser) had forged a signature on a will.

Peirce was probably the most influential of these men on American intellectuals, because he believed that the entire universe was just a collection of statistics or “signs.” “Things themselves are signs,” Peirce tried to explain.

“For Peirce, knowing was inseparable from what he called semiosis, the making of signs. ... If you look up a word in the dictionary, you find it defined by a string of other words, the meanings of which can be discovered by looking them up in a dictionary, leading to more words to be looked up in turn. There is no exit from the dictionary. Peirce didn’t simply think that language is like that. He thought that the universe is like that.”

This is the gist of what is called “postmodern” or “deconstruction” theory in today’s universities.

Dewey: Academic Rent-Seeking

Holmes applied this way of thinking to the law and helped to develop what is called “Legal Realism” – the idea that the law is merely the tool of powerful interests in society (whites, men, the wealthy). John Dewey, the youngest of the set and probably the most influential among ordinary people, absorbed all these ideas and applied them to our schools, in what came to be called “progressive education.”

“Dewey thought that ideas and beliefs are the same as hands: instruments for coping. An idea has no greater metaphysical stature than, say, a fork.” Thus there was no point in teaching ideas in schools. It was better for students to simply do things, to experience things, and teach themselves.

“Dewey regarded the tendency to ascribe a special status to the mind and its ideas as a reflection of class bias.”

Ideas Are Masks for Self-Interest?

The progressive idea that ideas are masks for self-interest may best be applied to the pragmatists themselves.

The ideas of these men may have been due to the experience of the Civil War or to simple confusion and the influence of psychotropic drugs. But they may have been due to what economists call “rent-seeking,” i.e., these academics and intellectuals were trying to use political power to make valuable what very few people wanted. In order to stay in business, they had to show that their theories, ideas, and words were applicable to a world being transformed by science and engineering.

These men laid the foundation for what we call “social science.” William James helped to invent modern psychology, cutting it loose from religion and philosophy and making it “scientific.” Theology was the reason that almost every American university was founded; by the twentieth century almost none of them emphasized it. Menand explains that this was a challenge to philosophy: “If the mind could be studied scientifically, and if what could not be studied scientifically was not knowledge, what exactly was the research program of philosophy? The institutional bias toward hard data gave psychology the advantage in its claim to be real mental science. Philosophy had to redefine itself or run the risk of going the way of theology.”

Economists followed suit. Simply put, most academic economists favor socialism because it provides more work for economists. “American social science essentially created itself as a discipline by reacting against the laissez-faire views associated with Sumner and Sumner’s philosophical master, Herbert Spencer.” Menand shrewdly notes that the modern social scientists wanted to prove that intellectual experts could manage the economy. “Professions come into existence because there is a demand for expertise. The expertise required to repeat, in every situation, ‘Let the market decide’ … is not great.”

Professional self-interest was also behind what we call “academic freedom.” The American Association of University Professors, like the American Medical Association and the American Bar Association, came into being not primarily to protect “free speech,” but to make sure that professors controlled the university.

Menand observes, “Professions are democratic in the sense that they are open to anyone with talent, but they are guilds in the sense that they protect their members from market forces with which all nonprofessionals have to compete. ... Professionalization is a system of market control.”

In what serves as an epitaph for his whole story, Menand concludes, “And the most remarkable thing about this deal was that American society – with, to be sure, many reservations and regrets along the way – bought it.”

The Inadequacy of Pragmatism

Menand is aware that pragmatism is an inadequate philosophy. Pragmatism was a philosophy for the peaceful and prosperous years of the “Progressive” era. But it had little to offer to men facing the great moral challenges of the 20th century, the struggle for racial equality in the civil rights movement and the struggle against communism in the Cold War.

Interest in Holmes, James, Peirce, and Dewey had begun to revive when the Cold War ended. Perhaps it fit the peaceful, prosperous years of Bill Clinton, who lived by their philosophy. But the attacks on America of September 11 have shown again that there are absolutes of right and wrong, that we can (and most Americans, outside of our universities, do) know what they are, and that they are worth living, fighting and dying for.

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