260930: Left-Humanism v. Pragmatist Utility
Responding to James Taylor Foreman's "Michael Levin's Pragmatism Solves the Postmodern Problem", I write:
Part of the reason pragmatism hasn't caught on, in our current moment, is because there is significant humanist and left-adjacent opposition to notions like utility, goal-directedness, economic value, and efficiency.
Pragmatism is a philosophical system founded on economic metaphors like "cash-value" and "paying rent." It is obsessed with the utility of its abstractions.
Personally, I think there is nothing anti-humanist about having goals. Show me an organism that doesn't have goals! To pursue goals is to be alive. In this way, pragmatist philosophy is well-aligned with biology, ecology, ethology, evolution, and so on. As you note in your conclusion, we should expect true ideas to surface & persist over time—they will be selected for precisely because they are true (that is, because they are useful).
But this is the tension. Perhaps there is another way in: one which stresses pluralism, epistemic modesty, incommensurability. These are central to both American pragmatism and left-humanism (the dominant ideology of academic humanities).