Soft-Line Ideologues Revisited: Foreign-Policy Soft-Liners are Pragmatists

Last week, there was a very interesting opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal by two influential neoconservatives: David Frum and Richard Perle.

The title was "Beware the Soft-Line Ideologues," and it has a good theme, but it gets completely twisted up by its misunderstanding of philosophy.

The theme is: the foreign-policy soft-liners, like Colin Powell, are standardly described as realists. The hard-liners, like Paul Wolfowitz, are called "ideologues," but:

"the truth is the opposite. It is the soft-liners who are driven by ideology, who ignore or deny inconvenient facts and advocate unworkable solutions. It is the hard-liners who are the realists . . ."

That's the good part. And the authors do an excellent job of making their case, by pointing out that the soft-liners evade the unbroken string of failures of their "road maps" and "diplomatic solutions."

The bad part comes after the ". . ." above. The full sentence is: "It is the hard-liners who are the realists, the pragmatists."

Pragmatism is not realism; pragmatism is the philosophy which dispenses with reality. But, you may be thinking, perhaps Frum and Perle are using "pragmatist" not in reference to the philosophy of pragmatism, but merely as a synonym for "practical." Nope. They write:

"When William James and Charles Peirce coined the term "pragmatism" 150 years ago, they meant something more than mere 'practicality.' James and Peirce were making a point about the nature of 'truth.' Truth, they argued, isn't some transcendent thing that exists beyond human experience. Truth is found right here on earth. [This is an inaccurate summary of their views, but let's pass on that.] If belief in an idea leads to positive results, then the idea is true; if belief in an idea leads to negative results, then it is false."

This is pragmatism's reversal of cause and effect. The right relationship is: if an idea is true, then acting upon it leads to positive results; if an idea is false then acting on it leads to negative results. Truth is, in Ayn Rand's words, "a recognition of reality." If you act in a way that accepts facts as they are, then you are equipped to succeed; if you act in defiance of the facts, you will fail.

But pragmatists don't recognize such a thing as facts of reality. Their primary is "experience"--a package-deal of existence and consciousness, of facts and feelings. And experience, they tell us, is a flux of changing, unpredictable circumstances. Pragmatists deny that there are any absolutes. This is because they scorn the conceptual level--rejecting anything that gets very far above the level of sensory experience.

Pragmatism is an anti-philosophy. It is the philosophic position that philosophy is hot air. It is concrete-boundedness, posing as philosophy.

Pragmatism holds--and has to hold, given its metaphysics and epistemology--that what was true yesterday may not be true today or tomorrow. According to pragmatism, we can't draw lessons (principles) from past experience because everything is always changing, á la Heraclitus.

No pragmatist could write what Frum and Perle (correctly) note in their very next passage:

"The belief that Yasser Arafat's Palestinian leadership will ever sign an agreement that permits Israel to live in peace and security has been tested over the years. The test has ended in the catastrophe of Arafat's terror war. Yet America's professional diplomats, especially those we hire to be knowledgeable about the Middle East, continue to cling to this belief despite its proven and total repeated failure. If this is 'pragmatism,' then what do the ideologues believe?"

But, in fact, the diplomats' unprincipled, concrete-bound approach is the essence of pragmatism. Look at the author's wording:

"the belief that Yasser Arafat's Palestinian leadership will ever sign ..."

"Ever"? That's a universal. For a pragmatist, there are no universals. Pragmatists never say never. In the pragmatists' view, Arafat could act one way 10,000 times in a row, then act totally differently the next time. To hold otherwise, you'd have to grasp that Arafat is an entity, an entity in reality, who has a real nature, and that his actions follow from his nature. This pragmatism denies.

Also, note the emphasis on personalities. The actual thing that is operating here is not fundamentally the personality of Arafat, but the nature of the social-political framework which put him into power, keeps him there, and constricts his choices within narrow limits. And deeper than that is the ideas of the Arab culture. And deeper than that is the ideas of the West, ideas which permit, and even encourage, the Arab culture to persist in their backward, irrational, barbaric ways.

But pragmatism denies that there is such a thing as fundamentality.

Pragmatism is not realism. Pragmatism is, in fact, inconsistent with realism. Realism (in the positive sense of that term) means acting in accordance with the facts of reality. To do that, one has to accept that facts are facts and to maintain a long-range, conceptual awareness of reality. That's the level of awareness that man requires if he is to act successfully in reality. It is only a grasp of principles, which Pragmatism scorns, that makes it possible to understand how and why "negotiating" with and "dialoguing" with dictatorships is doomed to failure.

The authors are right that the soft-liners evade the historical evidence of the failure of their approach. But that is not because the soft-liners are "ideologues," but because they are pragmatists.

Put it this way: the soft-liners are ideologues of pragmatism. They hold as their only absolute that there are no absolutes. They are rigidly fixated on the idea that everything is fluid and flexible. They are dogmatically certain that there is no certainty.

Pragmatism "goes with the flow" in ethics as everywhere else. Therefore, pragmatists find it "expedient" to accept "prevailing norms." In our culture, that means accepting the Judeo-Christian code of self-sacrifice as if it were a "given." Thus, the soft-liners', as good pragmatists, think it is practical to love our enemies. Is it any surprise that our foreign policy has been a series of appeasements?

Realism requires the acceptance of the absolutism of reality plus the recognition that abstract principles are man's means of grasping and dealing with reality.

Only in that way can the lessons of the past be learned.

Dr. Binswanger, a longtime associate of Ayn Rand, is a professor of philosophy at the Objectivist Academic Center of the Ayn Rand Institute.

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