January 2011

Given the pragmatists’ influence on our society, should we really be shocked that our own government has periodically annulled the rights of its citizens on the grounds of alleged practicality? When Japanese-Americans were stripped of their liberty and property during World War II or when unsuspecting citizens were exposed to dangerous levels of radiation during the Cold War, weren’t those just the “felt necessities of the time”? Such is the result when principles and abstractions are viewed as mere obstacles to our collective whim.

Louis Menand’s article “The Return of Pragmatism” in the October 1997 issue was most enlightening. Suddenly it is easy for me to see how our courts and our schools have degenerated as they have.

Pragmatism (a.k.a. relativism) throws logic aside, replacing it with feelings, and all of a sudden ends are used to justify means .

The errors of pragmatism are easily avoided by applying the methods of Karl R. Popper and others. Popper devised an epistemology in the 1930s that has grown and is now widely accepted by some of the best minds of our time. The Popper approach says that theories about the world must be constantly tested via deductions. Then, a theory remains true and is strengthened as more and more deductions pass tests. (Theories are the basis of all thought and action, such as: Each morning I test some theories about my car when I turn the key in the ignition switch.)

Readers can direct e-mail to the editors at mail@americanheritage.com. The Perils of Pregmatism The Perils of Pregmatism In Praise of Saratoga Bound to Be Big Best Bessie

If a single building type can—and should—be identified with twentieth-century American architecture, it is the skyscraper. Tall buildings were the stuff of the stories told by the legions of European immigrants whose first glimpse of America was the southern tip of Manhattan Island, bristling with its towers. They remain a symbol of American corporate power. They are the way Americans describe how high Superman can leap in a single bound.

Now, 1998 is upon us, and it seems years closer to the millennium than did 1997. There’s no reason this should he the case—just as there’s no reason, strictly speaking, why the turn of the century should be celebrated in the year 2000. As Dr. Albert Shaw briskly explained to The Review of Reviews ’ readers in January 1900, the big event lay a year in the future: “A half-minute’s clear thinking is enough to remove all confusion. With December 31 we complete the year 1899—that is to say, we round out 99 of the 100 years that are necessary to complete a full century. We must give the nineteenth century the 365 days that belong to its hundredth and final year, before we begin the year 1 of the twentieth century.” Sound enough, but of course nobody listened; what is 1900 becoming 1901 compared with the enormous shift on our spiritual odometer that occurs when 1899 is replaced by 1900?

“Very early,” writes the distinguished historian John Lukacs in the introduction to A Thread of Years, his 20th—and certainly his most unusual—book, “I was inspired by the recognition of the inevitable overlapping of history and literature, that not only what a Balzac but what a Jane Austen described—indeed, what they dealt with—belong not only to the history of literature, but to the veritable history of a period: that is, of a place and a time. Bath in 1816 differed from Bath in 1803, New York in 1920 from New York in 1915, and these are matters for a historian to think about and to research and to describe. Of course, we must keep in mind how dramatic changes may obscure the essential human condition, through which continuation exists together with change. I do not mean political conditions but the human atmosphere: the mental, rather than the external, climate of how certain people were inclined, how and what they were wanting and thinking and perhaps believing.”

When Michael Elliott, who was born in Liverpool in 1947, first visited America in the early 1970s, he was deeply struck by the generosity, optimism, and confidence he found. Some twelve years later he returned as a reporter for the Economist and discovered a very different mood: All about him was talk of decline and a yearning for the years just after World War II, which, everyone seemed to think, represented what should be the normal state of things.

Olney Thayer was born in 1825 in Mendon, Massachusetts. His forebears had helped found the community in the 166Os, and like most Americans of their time, successive generations had never strayed from their home. Then came the news from California, and Olney joined the throngs headed for the goldfields. What he found there is told in a series of letters that he wrote to his family “back in the States.” They are eloquent both of the exhilaration that fueled a nation-making migration and of the cost that that exhilaration could exact. The letters, never before published, come to us through the courtesy of a great-grandnephew of Olney, Richard N. Thayer, of Cleveland.

New Yorker Jan. 23rd, 1852

Respected parents etc,