Word: pragmatist
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Moynihan feels free to accept or reject liberal programs on the basis of their practicality. For this reason, he can work with Richard Nixon, who is also a pragmatist, though a conservative one. Both Moynihan and Nixon have questioned whether money alone is the answer to the nation's education problems or whether integration alone is an ultimate panacea for racial ills. This position, of course, can be an excuse for doing nothing at all, but Moynihan is as persuaded as Nixon that the country cannot be run from Washington, and he vigorously supports the President's call...
...have incorporated a huge amount of social justice into our legal fabric. But we have no coherent-or generally received-philosophy of government and law to match our actual performance. Here is a classic example of social facts outrunning social theory. This is a strong point for the pragmatist; he may say, with pride, the less theory, the better the practice. But it may also be said that pragmatism has come to the end of its rope...
...Puritan ethos was a stimulus to striving and hard work; no wonder that it gave way to its secular descendant, pragmatism-the uniquely American philosophy articulated by C. S. Peirce, Dewey and William James. Americans are the exemplars of pragmatism, of rational humanism. The pragmatist, of course, does not deny the existence of evil-although he likes to call it something else. But he optimistically assumes that it exists in institutions rather than men, and can therefore be legislated away. Thus evils, in the American experience, have always been seen as concrete problems that could be dissected and analyzed-like...
...Kenneth Towery, does not agree. The agency's mission, according to Towery, is to compete against the Communists. "I want to beat 'em down," he says, "and I don't care whether it takes the liberal or conservative viewpoint to do it. I'm a pragmatist." He adds: "Frankly, there are people in this agency who are soft on Communism. But we will not have any trouble as long as they do what is expected of them...
...Aquarius? Certainly Voltaire, with his brisk faith that enlightened common sense could solve all problems, is hardly the voice to which we tune our orgiastic electric guitars. Quite the contrary. Emancipated from religious "superstition," living in a world where science is the final arbiter, we have inherited the pragmatist's Utopia that Voltaire more or less prescribed-and thanks just the same, we know all too accurately the price we have paid...