Eternal Pragmatism - Part 1

Politically I have consciously been an independent since I was in high school (I was Republican before I knew better). As it is the first rule of politics that you have to pigeon hole yourself I defined myself as a conservative. However, over time I began to dislike some of the inherent policy associations connected to "conservative" so I appended it with pragmatic. So now I consider myself a pragmatic conservative. That has enough lack of definition to allow me to give my opinions on any topic without someone trying to argue with me over how I labeled myself.

I dislike the necessity of labeling, but I have found if you don't give someone a starting point it makes conversations harder. So thus I am labeled.

I have been thinking about the pragmatic label. As it is true with most words it gets used a lot of different ways. Some good and some bad. It really depends on the perspective of the person using it. What works isn't always clear. Things might look like they are working for a while, but if you don't understand the system you are working with you can run into real problems.

DDT for example. It was the obvious choice in the 40's and 50's. It led to the eradication of malaria in large regions and was an effective crop insecticide. The creator of it even won a Nobel prize. However, by 1962 it was found to have a laundry list of bad effects on people as well as nature. It was eventually banned in 1972 in the US for agricultural use.

So the pragmatist would say in 1950 that we should use DDT, but looking back we see that that wasn't necessarily the best idea. Lack of understanding the full ramifications of our actions led to a lot of damage.

Just because it looks like a good idea in the short term doesn't make it a truly good idea. Short term pragmatism, taken to the extreme could also be considered hedonism. So what we really want to strive for is long term pragmatism, or eternal pragmatism.

Eternal pragmatism requires understanding the fundamental reality of existence. Knowing what works and what doesn't, not just in time-spans of days or years, but for lifetimes and beyond. This brings about an interesting quandary though. You could have more short term pragmatists looking at eternal pragmatists and tell them they are being idealists or just being dumb. But in fact they don't have a long enough perspective.

So how do you become an eternal pragmatist? Well, that's for part 2.