I am depositing chapters intended to ultimately comprise a memoir (or two, if I decide to break these thoughts into (a) my public philosophy, that summarizes, condenses, simplifies, and updates by political ideas that I developed and taught during my 45 year career as a professor of political science at the University of Kansas.
Chapter 1
William James’ pluriverse
I was not an attentive student back in elementary school. Rather than listening carefully to every word my teachers said, I often gazed at maps of the solar system and the world and various renderings of the human body that were displayed on the walls of our classrooms. I was more interested in bigger questions about the universe, the world, and humans than in the basics of math and English.
The depiction of the solar system was not to scale, as a realistic model of the solar system would have shown Pluto in another county or state, and the map of our solar system failed to show the many other suns and planets in our galaxy, let alone in our expanding universe. That map provided my young mind a faulty image of the universe. Now, roughly 70 years later and after huge advances in space exploration and theoretical physics, I still have only an inkling of the composition and dynamics of the universe. And even experts proclaim that the nature of the universe continues to be mysterious – that an accurate map of it will prove elusive.
The map of the world told me that the oceans covered more of the Earth than did the land masses. Although the oceans are now expanding, at least that memory remains accurate enough, but many of my other impressions turned out to be misguided. That map showed the 48 contiguous United States at the center of the world, which I subsequently learned was an America-centric view of the world. It took years of education – including teaching Western Civilization for 5 years – to acquire a Eurocentric view of the world and then replace that with a more global perspective. Along the way, I concluded that the world was as much defined by ideas that dominate particular cultures as by the physical features that shaped each country.
It took me less time to learn that the countries shown on that map lacked permanent boundaries. Within about 5 years, the US would expand to include Alaska and Hawaii, and that helped me learn that America was less a country than an empire. But it took about another 50 years to learn that the Soviet Union was not destined to be a permanent empire, as “the Iron Curtain” that separated the Soviet empire to the East from the American empire to the West crumbled and the USSR disintegrated. With every passing year, we learn that not only do the boundaries of countries and empires change, but just about everything in our world lacks the permanence suggested by that map
A picture of a skinless human body showed where our larger bones and organs are located, but my conception of human nature was at that time derived more from my mother. She claimed that humans were fallen beings, perhaps because (despite her best efforts to raise me right) I had wayward tendencies. Since she loved me anyway, I think her notion of human sinfulness was based more on her reading of the Bible. Because my dad had a somewhat sunnier understanding of humans, mine remained confused. The various conceptions of human nature provided in the great books I later taught in my courses in the history of political thought and in Western Civilization did not clarify my understanding. Only after finally reading during my retirement William James’ Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (1902) and A Pluralistic Universe (1909) did I find a pathway to clarifying that perennial question. Even though I never have taken any courses in psychology nor have I read much contemporary disciplinary psychology (and thus I remain ignorant of how recent work in that discipline has upheld, modified, or rejected James’ views), I am confident that James’ most basic contention has held up: there is no “real” human nature. There is no universal truth about human nature to be discovered if we only look hard enough and think deeply about that perennial question. There are only the truths adopted by individual human beings. All humans have conceptions of these things based their particular interests and experiences. And the breadth of human interests and experiences suggest that our universe is better characterized as a pluriverse – that there is no ultimate reality, only an infinite number of realities that come into being as new humans are born and live and then parish.
Let’s consider first the various interests that both motivate individuals and divide people within any society. Since, as James says, every individual in the world (and perhaps in an unknown but humungous pluriverse) has their own interests, all philosophers and scientists can do is try to generate a typology that helps us classify humanities’ many interests. Some of our most obvious interests concern our values, beliefs, purposes, projects, and principles. Let me provide short definitions and illustrations indicating my meanings of each that will foreshadow what I will develop as this memoir unfolds.
- Values are things we think we ought to have to live a good life. Values can range from the most general (like having fun and amusement, experiencing entertainment and excitement, having money, status, recognition, becoming educated, having a job as a creative laborer, and exercising power over others) to more specific manifestations of such abstract values (such as having a substantial retirement fund, being a member of an exclusive country club, receiving an award for some community service, getting a law degree, being a jazz musician (or in my case, being a college professor), going to a Taylor Swift concert, and becoming the preeminent ruler of a particular community
- Beliefs are generalizations we think to be true, and they can range from a general (and often misguided or false) conviction like “men make better leaders than women
”.to more specific (and likewise often misguided or false) beliefs like “Donald Trump’s acquiring a fortune as a businessman indicates he will make a good political leader” - Purposes are our chosen goals, and they can be modest like my finishing and distributing this paper before 11/`5/24 or they can be ambitious like
Trump now seeking reelection because as president he would be empowered to pardon the crimes he committed after his loss to Joe Biden on November 3, 2020. - Plans are how we think we can achieve a chosen goal. While purposeful goals can be very enduring, our strategic plans can change quickly when they fail to work as intended. Trump’s initial plan in the 2020 election was to win a plurality of votes in enough states to win a majority of electoral votes. When he came in second to Biden in both the popular vote and the electoral vote totals, he and his advisors adopted a second plan: to challenge in court the accuracy of the vote counts in those states where the initial compilations of popular votes showed Trump losing by fairly slim margins. When the lawsuits filed by Trump’s team failed, a new plan was concocted to have state officials having the authority certify and forward to Congress the electoral votes in their state. The most famous implementation of this third plan was Trump’s asking Georgia’s Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have” in order to win Georgia’s 16 electoral college votes. When such plans also failed, Trump adapted a fourth plan: to prevail on his Vice President Mike Pence to set aside those electoral votes from states where the popular votes were contested in order to give state legislatures the opportunity to invalidate the contested popular vote and submit alternative slates of electoral ballots that reflected the wishes of Republican state representatives who had majorities in state houses.
- Projects are the larger tasks people want to accomplish such as Trump apparently wanting to turn American democracy into an authoritarian populist system to any of his more specific projects like having Hillary Clinton and Liz Chaney imprisoned for challenging and betraying him,
- Principles are things we think are “the right thing to do” or stand up for, even if they reduce the stockpile of things we value, even if they undermine what we want to believe, even if they contradict our purposes or reduce the odds of accomplishing our plans and projects.[1]
This characterization of human interests may seem obvious, but it was not the prevailing understanding prior to James’ seminal contributions to pluralism. Previous thinking on the nature of the universe, world, and humans were mostly monistic. Monotheistic conceptions of God (and Yahweh and Allah) assumed that a single Supreme Being was omniscient and omnipotent; he had created and controlled the universe. As the Enlightenment arrived during the 18thcentury, God’s role was often viewed as diminished, only to be replaced by other singular natural forces. A century earlier, Newton had found that natural laws such as those involving gravity and momentum governed the universe. Rousseau thought that “the General Will” – what most people in a community really want – was (or at least should be) the monolithic basis of social and political life on Earth. A century later, Marx thought economic motivations, structures, and modes of production, exchange, and distribution were the predominant motor force of world history. And Darwin claimed that humans were mainly propelled by an instinct to sexually reproduce and thus achieve immortality by passing their characteristics onto their progeny, even if mutations occurred that resulted in the evolution of the species.
While Newton, Rousseau, Marx, and Darwin were Europeans and while European philosophical thought had long searched for – and often claimed to have achieved – universal understandings about monistic causal forces, America’s individualistic culture prompted resistance to such worldviews and encouraged American philosophers to propose alternatives. William James (1842-1910) was a famous professor of psychology at Harvard who became more interested in philosophy toward the end of his career. As a psychologist he had focused on the mental states of individuals and noticed the astonishing diversity in how individuals felt, thought, and behaved. Humans have different interests based on having different values, beliefs, purposes, projects, and principles. And these arise out of our genetic differences and a wide array of environmental influences. The universe, the world, and various humans are not defined by some single value or belief. Indeed, neither the universe nor our world contains a vast array of interests that individuals find or choose among during their lives. Rather individuals attain their own interests from their own capabilities and experiences.
Humans experience many things that they regard as having positive value, being valueless, or having negative value for themselves and/or others. We experience health and illness. We experience energy and listlessness. We experience joy and sorrow. We experience enlightenment and confusion. We experience trust and fear of others. We experience success and failure. The list of such thoughts, feelings, and outcomes – as well as their opposites – is extensive and perhaps endless.
These thoughts, feelings, and outcomes are seldom as dichotomous as suggested in the prior paragraph. When humans say that they are “OK,” they are normally giving expression to feeling somewhere intermediate between the things they regard positively or negatively. And while it is common for people to seek peace and avoid war, some people have thought that participating in destructive war is heroic, as bringing forth human courage or at least as necessary for a lasting peace. As a psychologist, James observed that humans usually sought the positive, tolerated the intermediate, and avoided the negative. So perhaps there is some divine or natural “goodness” that helps individuals sort through the extent to which our particular interests, values, beliefs, purposes, projects, and principles contribute to living a good life.
The most proclaimed ancient philosopher, Plato (c.427-348 BCE), taught that there is an essential monistic “form of the good,” which lesser forms of reality only partially exhibit. (For Plato, real beauty exists as an ideal “form,” and even the most gorgeous woman cannot match that ideal.) But he did not claim to know the good or provide a definition of it. Contemporary philosophers seldom claim that the world exhibits some particular value as universal and absolute. Even particular individuals seldom seek or attain a single interest. When I experience joy over something, I am likely to experience sadness soon afterward, if only because I fear that what produced my joy will disappear or produce some negative experience for me. What I regard as joyful or fulfilling, you may regard as sad or useless. And how I name a positive feeling (e.g., delightful or thrilling) may be different from the name you give to a similar feeling (e.g., joyful or pleasant).
In short, the universe does not contain universal values that we regard as absolutely positive. We often name differently the experiences we regard as valuable. In the world that humans inhabit, only individual valuations and experiences – while variously aggregated into community decisions – matter for all practical purposes. After millenniums of searching for and/or proclaiming to have found universals that apply to all humans, liberalism arose at the beginning of modernity (usually dated to the 17th century) with the understanding that only individuals exist.[2] Individuals do not live in a universe or a monistic world having ultimate values and common meanings for a good life. Instead, we live in a pluriverse characterized by a bewildering variety or interests and experiences. Our pluriverse contains many religions and political philosophies (often called ideologies today), and while religious and political belief systems often have deep meanings and provide clear guidance for individuals who hold them, they belong to specific individuals and not to the larger communities with which humans identify. But James did not refute our beliefs in the existence of God, political communities (like nations), or nature, because our beliefs in God, country, and/or natural laws greatly affect the other things we value or believe.
When my mom had breast cancer, she prayed to God for a return to health, she thought (or perhaps imagined) that God instructed her to have faith in her survival, and as she survived for another 25 years, her faith grew, not only regarding her survival but in the existence of God. But God apparently failed to answer the prayers of millions of other women who died of such cancer. Many of them came to doubt the existence of a good God, who failed to use his powers to cure them. As we shall see in Chapter 3, even the most acclaimed American political philosopher of the 20th Century, John Rawls, lost his faith in God and became an atheist when he observed firsthand the horrors of World War II and when he could no longer conceive of how the Christian God that he had worshipped could have tolerated that savagery.
James’ pluriverse provides the context for contemporary thinking about human, social, and political life. The human quest for “the good life” is complicated by humans having many interests and diverse experiences. Theories of morality proclaim how individuals should order their interests and learn from their experiences. When I was in high school, I was interested in becoming a good golfer and thought I could learn to be one if I played on the school’s golf team. While I made the team, I never played well enough to participate in matches against other schools or even get the attention of better players who might guide my development as a golfer. So, after one season as a frustrated golfer, I made the moral decision to quit and spend subsequent springs playing tennis instead. Moral decisions affect only the individual who makes them, as they have negligible effects for others. Neither the coach nor any of my golfing teammates complained that my quitting was harming them or the team. But because I was a better tennis player than golfer, I experienced less frustration on the courts than on the links, and attained more satisfaction from my contributions to the tennis team than my lack of contributions to the golf team. Thus, this moral choice was confirmed by my experiences.
Notice that this example also illustrates James’ second great contribution to American philosophy, as he is now more remembered for his pragmatism than his pluralism. Pragmatism is an approach to achieving a good life that takes were we are as the starting point for thought and action. After experiencing frustration as a golfer, I could have doubled down on that interest and done all I could to become the Jack Nicklaus who dominated my imagination. I could have doggedly pursued my ideal and invested all my time, energy, and other resources into perfecting my golf stroke and learning the intricacies of the game. But because I accepted James’ pluralism, I understood that a single-minded pursuit of that ideal would undermine my attention to the many other interests I had. I made the pragmatic decision to experiment with a different sport; maybe I would never be a great tennis player but perhaps if I invested enough of my time, energy, and other resources in tennis, I could become better at tennis than golf.
This example illustrates some of the key elements of pragmatism: take stock of how things are going and identify the problems that cause negative emotional states; abandon the quest for a particular ideal end-state that produces frustration because that ideal is not attainable; imagine a different purpose that could make life better; turn that purpose into a project by investing in it; learn from one’s experiments; if the new project fails to produce the values one seeks, be prepared to abandon it as well. Life is a continued search for interests, beliefs, purposes and projects that lead to a better life. But remember that having a good life can only be had by living a principled life. Each person acquires their own principles and failing to live up to one’s own principles leads to a guilty conscious. That is not a good companion to take on ones’ life journey.
Pragmatism can be applied not only to advancing the good life of individuals but also to how political communities should be governed. Anyone experiencing frustrations should be free to express their unsatisfied interests; groups can organize and present their concerns and proposals; the various group interests must be organized into larger partisan (party) organizations. Party officials and governing officials must struggle in choosing how to represent the overall public interest: do they represent their group and/or electoral constituents? their various advisors offering expertise about particular proposals? their own independent judgment? their personal interests or those of their family and friends?
Pragmatism is democratic in the sense that it rejects authoritarian governance based on a leader’s own interests, intuition, and power. Instead, it is a process what is open to all points of view; its decisions on proposals try to balance different interests and be legitimized as reflecting various public interests.
Pragmatism is conservative in the sense that public decision-makers must be highly skeptical of dogmatic pursuit of ideals that are unrealistic. They must be accountable to all citizens; if policy experiments fail, they should be reformed or cancelled. If a partisan regime has presided over too many failed policy experiments, it must be held to account and possibly replaced. Since policy experiments may have unexpected (negative) consequences, citizen feedback should spur improvements. But only time will tell the adequacy of a policy experiment or a series of smaller incremental policy changes.
Pragmatism is liberal in the sense that the interests of all citizens are given equal respect and consideration. But given the pluralism of interests affected by public policies, final decisions must be made by majority rule, because that decision-making rule best results in achieving the public interest (understood as “the greatest good of the greater number of affected individuals).
Pragmatism is also liberal in accepting liberal moral philosophy. Like liberals, pragmatism’s social experiments will respect individual rights. Pragmatists think individuals can and should make their own life choices, and the freedom to make such moral decisions is a key component of a liberal society. In contrast, unliberal moral philosophies, such as Christian national authoritarianism, claim that some authority should dictate the morality that each individual in a Christian nation must follow (presumably for the good of everyone in it). During the 50 years since the Burger-led Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade, impregnated women had a constitutional right to have an abortion. When the Roberts-led Supreme Court ruled otherwise in their June 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson decision, they gave states the authority to take away or restrict the right of women to control their own reproductive choices. The majority of those on the Roberts court apparently thought that the mere fertilization of a woman’s egg immediately produced a living human being and that such unborn humans have rights that must be weighed against the rights of future mothers. The majority of the court also thought that the various state governments, not the federal government, were better positioned to weigh the rights of the unborn against the rights of women. That transformed what had been regarded as a moral decision to be made by a mature woman into an ethical decision dealing with relationships among humans (assuming for the moment that a fetus is a human). By criminalizing the actions of those who participate in abortions, ethical decisions became political decisions, and decisions that ignore the right to life of the unborn became subject to legal penalties to be applied by state governments.
The moral choices that Americas often make seem poor to others, leading to widespread fears that we are a nation in moral decline. Americans often choose to smoke knowing that such decisions negatively affect their health. Americans often choose to gamble knowing (or perhaps not recognizing) that the odds are against them and they might lose money needed for other live-enhancing decisions. Americans often devote their time and resources to various entertainments and amusements such as spectator sports, attending rock concerts, and following the lives of celebrities that provide short-term stimulation and enjoyment while distracting us from making long-term investments in things that promote future success in the major projects that we might pursue to live good lives. Hoping to end or at least curtail the poor moral choices that Americans often make, more conservative people want all humans to be more accountable for their poor moral choices or to empower authorities to curtail the private liberties that are so plentiful in a liberal society.
Ethics deal with our relations with others with whom we are acquainted or come into contact, but ethical decisions do not prompt legal sanctions. The ethical choices that Americans make often seem as poor as our moral choices. We often deceive and exploit others in ways that betray the ethical virtues of being truthful, helpful, kind, and tolerant. Many humans seem to take a “delicious pleasure” in misleading, mocking, and abusing others with whom they interact, including their spouses and others in their families, their friends, and those strangers whose behaviors we find strange or offensive. Such poor ethical choices are modelled for us in the movies and other media. Donald Trump modelled such behavior as our former president and he continues to model poor ethical behavior in his efforts to combat those who seek to hold him accountable in our court systems for his legal lapses and to regain the presidency during the current campaign.
Because we live in a pluriverse where citizens have different criteria about when the line between acceptable and unacceptable ethical actions and words has been crossed, we often accept such border crossings that are encountered in the movies and media. In these contexts, dubious ethical choices can be deemed both entertaining and/or provocative of our restrictive ethical values. Since the passing of the upright George Washington, the dubious ethics of politicians have always been on public display. Today, voters seem increasingly tolerant of the dubious ethics on display by contemporary political leaders. While most voters may be turned off by Trump’s particularly offensive ethics,[3] those who are part of his base are willing to give him a pass, perhaps because they agree with or at least accept some of his more dubious proclamations and actions or because they hope his reelection will further their partisan interests. In any event, dubious ethics merely violate social norms and break no laws that justify imposing legal penalties. Still, when politicians exhibit dubious ethics, voters should take note and consider whether such ethical shortcomings reveal character flaws that raise deep concerns about their ability to be good and just political leaders.
Jurisprudence deals with relations of people as leaders and citizens of a political community and addresses questions of whether the ethical decisions by some are so injurious to others (or, in conservative jurisprudence, to a larger community)[4] that they should be regarded as unconstitutional (if they violate the most basic principles of the community) or illegal (if they violate statutory or administrative laws). Constitutional laws and court ruling based on constitutional provisions supersede statutory or administrative laws because the process that created them are more rigorous or demanding than those used to generate ordinary laws and regulations. Changing the written American Constitution is especially difficult because Article V of our Constitution requires many supermajorities for a proposed constitutional change to become a constitutional amendment as binding as the provisions adopted by the framers of the original Constitution and ratified subsequently by the citizens of various states. Court rulings based on interpretations of the Constitution have always been more contentious than those based on statutory law, as revealed by the political conflicts arising out of the Roe v. Wade and now the Dobbs v. Jackson Supreme Court decisions.
Thus, throughout most American history, the courts have been reluctant to expand federal authority by overturning long-held understandings of constitutional law. But during the last century, a jurisprudence of “judicial activism” has encouraged federal court judges to find justifications for expanding the role of the federal government in regulating business and corporate practices, integrating the schools, providing more public goods and services, and other uses of federal authority based on changing economic and social conditions. Most citizens have experienced these new interpretations of what the Constitution allows (and even mandates) to be beneficial to improving their lives – as surveys reveals widespread support for such things as anti-trust laws, banking regulations, environmental protection laws, a greater role for the federal government in providing public health, public transportation, and a safety net for individuals who are unable to provide for themselves.
In addition to constitutional law, legislatures pass statutes that provide public policies and programs and administrative agencies make decrees and regulations that the policymakers in these institutions claim serve public interests, the common good, and justice. Since in a pluriverse, these claims are not universally accepted, laws are usually controversial. As will be shown later in this memoir, such controversies are best resolved by democratic political institutions and processes, rather than by force and violence.
The rest of this memoir addresses our moral, ethical, and political decisions and places such decision-making in the context of our living in James’ pluriverse. We must make personal, social, and political decisions as we are pulled in various directions by the diversity of values, beliefs, principles, purposes, and projects that are possible for us to choose, and these choices are shaped by the social circumstances in which we live and by our individual mental, physical, and emotional capacities. But in the end, we affirm, modify, or discard the interests we have chosen on the basis of our experiences and the extent to which we find these experiences to be gratifying. Thus, James was not only a major formulator of the pluralism discussed in this chapter, he was also an influential pragmatist.
James provided a philosophical basis for claiming that humans living in his pluriverse are poorly served by adopting and pursuing rigid religious or political values and principles. Instead, humans can better pursue a good life if they pay attention to the things that contribute to human suffering, acquire knowledge about the causes of such suffering, formulate hypotheses based on available knowledge about how various reforms might lessen our sufferings, and evaluate how well these reforms work based on human experience. To move humanity toward better lives, such democratic experimentation is much better than following authoritarian plans.
[1] There is nothing inherently correct in this list of human interests, in my definitions of them, or in the examples I provide. But the categories of interests provided is drawn from vast literatures in political thought. For example, to define principles, I simply appropriate the subtitle of one of Michael Sandel’s many books, Justice: What is the Right Thing To Do? (2009).
My characterization of Trump’s interests is simply drawn from following the news.
[2] Rene Descartes, the French mathematician and philosopher, is usually credited with announcing the beginning of modernity and liberalism, when he proclaimed that because “I doubt, I must think, and because I think, I must exist.”
[3] While Trump regularly engages in what I and most others regard as ethical transgressions, I will not devote space to listing them all here.
[4] For liberals, communities are simply collections of individuals and their interactions. Communities have no holistic purposes or characteristics beyond those provided by the individuals who comprise them.
Paul Schumaker 