Pragmatism

If someone were to ask me, 'What do you believe?', I would reply: 'It depends'.

It depends on the circumstances on to which I must project beliefs.  It's not that I lack principles - existential relativism itself embodies the principle of being relativistic, or at least, underlying principles that manifest in the intellectual habit - it's more that beliefs change with the situation.  They have to.  Relativism a consequence of evolution.  It is evolution.  Evolution is progressive.  It is not regressive because those who have regressed are not here to report back.  We change with the environment to survive, implying that we adapt to What Works.  Not necessarily Whatever Works, since we have moral agency, aesthetic sense and discrimination, but the survivor is a pragmatist - and pragmatism is, in itself, a philosophical principle.

Pragmatism is not the same as moderacy.  An Islamic terrorist is a pragmatist, just of a particularly ruthless kind.  In his view, terrorism is What Works.  However, there is a relationship between pragmatism and moderacy, in that an evaluation of What Works must take account of viability, and viability in turn reflects - among other things - the present environment as well as an imaginative understanding of the present dynamics that will shape the future.

Things become 'isms' when What Works is abandoned for Whatever Works.  Progressive becomes progressivism.  Conservative becomes conservatism.  Social becomes socialism.  In much the same vein, pragmatism can be a coinage for weakness and accommodation.  In other words, natural approaches involving adaptation and insight that, in the past, healthy, normal people would pursue because they are What Works have become dogmatic creeds in which an Ideal or Object is posited and Whatever Works is acceptable to achieve the Ideal or Object.  This happens because people lose touch with reality.  They live in bubbles - what we call civilisation, a situation in which there is no immediate appropriate reciprocation for one's actions and omission, with the result that the mind abandons reality.  Virtual reality is not a new concept, it has existed for as long as civilisations have existed.