The US was founded by Enlightenment thinkers. The epitome of this was Isaac Newton's conception of the universe. The apple that falls from the tree, the moon that orbits the earth and the earth that orbits the sun? They are all governed by a universal law of gravity that applies in your orchard, in the orbit of the earth or sun or in any part of the universe.
As it turns out, though, universal truths are hard to conjure up. Plus they are pretty cool but not always practical. For most of what is going on in our lives, local truths are sufficient. It is more pragmatic to simply find a solution to this problem I now face than it is to search for universal truths. To be pragmatic is now so … well, pragmatic that we don’t even think of it as a worldview. It is just the way things are. Which is one way you know that it's a philosophy we use rather than examine.
A philosophy is never just a way we see the world. It’s how we shape it. Enlightenment thinkers overthrew the old world of priests and kings and replaced it with scientists and democracy. Pragmatists didn’t just say, “Well, don’t try to solve all the world’s problems, just focus on this problem here.” They created universities that had majors and areas of focus that didn’t pretend to be inclusive of all problems and solutions but instead focused on one area. Don’t look at all of science; focus on biology. Don’t study all of biology: choose either microbiology or macro-biology. Pragmatists didn’t just focus on the problem at hand. They focused on one small area of the world’s problems and reality. And we created the institutions to support that sort of focus, that sort of fragmentation of the world, that sort of specialization.
Louis Menand defines pragmatism as the belief that beliefs are instruments that we use to get what we want out of the world and not absolute abstractions that are out there somewhere that we have to discover. A belief is like a fork. It works or it doesn't. It doesn't exist as an abstraction floating out in space with Newton's law of gravity.
The word pragmatism wasn't found in print until 1898. William James, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Charles Pierce, and John Dewey did the most to define pragmatism. Pierce was perhaps the first person in the world to testify in court on probability - statistics and probability being the tools for making sense of a world with uncertainty. Unlike Newton's universal laws that held in all instances, pragmatists embraced the notion of probability. Oliver Wendell Holmes described himself as a betabilitarian - willing to make bets on particular beliefs. These beliefs didn't have to always be true, much less universal. It was enough that acting on them would enhance your probability of being right. James wrote about the cash value of an idea, what it was worth to hold it. It's no wonder that corporations were soon filled with pragmatists.
The modern university was the first obvious place where pragmatism emerged. William James was at Harvard and helped to change education in a way that that quickly spread beyond Harvard, it becoming an idealized model of higher education that universities everywhere try to emulate to this day. Corporations, too, became places that employed graduates from the universities and specialization became more important as R&D became more important. Edison was of the generation that could tinker their way into inventions like lightbulbs. The generation of inventors at Bell Labs around the time of WWII were among the first who had to know scientific principles before they could make products like satellites, laser beams and transistors. This required an odd tension between general principles and local problem solving. Their products became so sophisticated that what was true of one generation of computer chip, say, might not be true of the next. Different materials meant different design requirements and nobody stopped to develop a universal design but instead focused on getting a new or next generation product out. Ideas - like products - could be successful at one point and obsolete the next.
Pragmatism is the philosophy of knowledge workers. Like Enlightenment thinking before it, it won’t be replaced. It’s a fabulously effective worldview. It’s just not enough. It won’t be replaced but it will have to be supplemented.
One of the key differences between how a knowledge worker thinks and how an entrepreneur thinks is this. A knowledge worker asks, “How do I do this?” An entrepreneur asks, “Who could do this?” If you’re trying to create some whole – a product, a company, a market – you can’t possibly know all that is involved. You have to bring together a collection of people and coordinate their actions into some larger whole. They might be pragmatists but you have to think about the system you’re creating. And we’ve seen that in the entrepreneurship of the 20th century, this emergence of more people gaining ever bigger rewards for creating systems (companies) that employed teams of knowledge workers.
What might be different in the 21st century? The teams the entrepreneur is assembling have to – themselves – adopt systems thinking, look at emergent phenomena, interactions, and the unintended consequences that emerge from best efforts. Systems dynamics are too complex to yield to the analysis of one person. One of the many things that it’ll mean to popularize entrepreneurship? We’ll need to popularize systems thinking, using it to supplement pragmatism for entire teams
No comments:
Post a Comment