BUCK'S BLOG
It's Crazy, But It
Just Might Work
If
necessity is the mother of invention, then pragmatism must surely
be its father.
J.M.
Buck
“Whatcha
doing?”
“Making a thingy so everyone can have light at night without
fire.”
“Impossible! How can you have light without fire?”
“By harnessing the energy that makes the fire…”
“That’s crazy! It’ll never work.”
But it did work. As I write this blog by the light of my electric
lamp, I can almost picture the scenario that unfolded over a century
ago amidst piles of books, copper and tools. In what must have
surly looked like the laboratory of a mad scientist, Thomas Alva
Edison created his Brockton Prototype, the world’s first
electrical distribution system.
You see, Edison was one of the world’s great pragmatists.
In 1907, a pragmatist was defined in William James' 1907 treatise
Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking
as “one who turns away from abstraction and insufficiency,
from verbal solutions, from bad a priori reasons, from
fixed principles, closed systems, and pretended absolutes and
origins. He turns towards concreteness and adequacy, towards facts,
towards action and towards power."
Analysis of pragmatic thought was evaluated based on four questions:
"Grant an idea or belief to be true, what concrete difference
will its being true make in anyone's actual life? How will the
truth be realized? What experiences will be different from those
which would obtain if the belief were false? What, in short, is
the truth's cash-value in experiential terms?"
"I never perfected an invention that I did not think about
in terms of the service it might give others," Edison said
in 1882.
Recently, a reader asked me if I was an idealist, trying to right
the wrongs I see in Maui County.
I replied that I embrace certain idealistic philosophies, but
not many. Idealism is why I work so hard to maintain a certain
standard with this publication and keep trying to improve it.
But to be stuck on concepts of idealism can be very destructive,
as there is no such thing as perfection, and if there were, it
wouldn't be worth attaining because then you would have to constantly
maintain that standard in everything. As the old adage goes, “Nobody’s
perfect.” Good thing too.
For one, the idea of perfection is highly subjective. The outcome
of constantly striving for any type of “perfection”
would probably be either ending up in an insane asylum or dead
a massive heart attack. Or you would just drop dead from lack
of sleep due to too much work and stress. Or maybe you would just
freak out and take up a life of meditation in a forest reserve,
surviving off of berries and twigs, ignorant of your noxious body
odor and having all of your teeth fall out.
So, I prefer to be a pragmatist, to a certain degree, choosing
my battles carefully and trying to help solve problems where I
feel I can make a difference that will endure in the long run.
This, while striving at my own pace to achieve certain elements
of idealism.
Pragmatists are generally thought of as conservative liberals
with really wild ideas. The pragmatic philosophy should not to
be confused with rationalism or freethinking, however they could
be considered cousins, in some senses.
Many inventions that have changed the face of modern civilization,
even in small ways, have come about either by accident or are
the inventions of ordinary people who were not seeking to create
something that would change the way people do things. But when
they did decide to create their inventions, they did it knowing
that the outcome would be something to benefit not just themselves,
but many.
For example, Liquid Paper. Bette Nesmith Graham never intended
to be an inventor; she wanted to be an artist. Shortly after the
end of World War II, Graham was divorced and had a small child
to support. After learning shorthand and typing, she found employment
as a secretary. An efficient employee who took pride in her work,
Graham sought a better way to correct typing errors. Remembering
that artists painted over their mistakes on canvas, she figured
typists could do the same on paper. She mixed up some tempera
paint the color of the stationary she was using at the office,
and the rest is history.
Then there’s Swiss amateur inventor George de Mestral. You
may not know the name, but you would have to be from another planet
to not know the invention.
In 1948, de Mestral was out for a stroll in the woods with his
dog. When they came back, he and his dog were covered in burrs.
His curiosity drove him to examine under a microscope one of the
burrs that clung so tenaciously to his dog and to his pants legs.
Out of this examination came an idea for a unique, two-sided fastener.
Mestral's idea was mocked, met with resistance and even laughter,
but the inventor stuck by his idea, which is known today as Velcro.
Anyone make a positive difference in the world. Even the smallest
thing can touch many, many lives. It will never be an idealistic,
perfect world, and frankly, a perfect world would be pretty darn
dull. A completely rational word would surely be likewise as dull.
But there is always room for improvement. Room for new ideas,
no matter how off-the-wall, that can benefit humanity. Room for
people to follow those ideas, to bring them to fruition, and to
change one little facet of human existence for the better.
Now there’s an exciting, and yes, pragmatic, concept.
