Maybe modern pragmatists, calling themselves Progressives, just have a different slant on authority, on individual rights, on property, on the US Constitutional limits of government power over the states and individuals. All together, now, let’s all say… “Who really knows?” Well, this is how I look at it:

It seems to me that diversity, enfranchisement, individualism, civil rights, Bill of Rights, US Constitution, collective subjective — all these concepts/Ideals support the principle that the liberty to exercise free enterprise as close to the natural inclination that those human activities move within the consented order represents (over time) the will of the people deciding amongst themselves how to live together — that’s pragmatic. but at the grassroots level, perculating upward. That’s what Edmund Burke might say is practical. I say that.

Another important consideration revolves around Karl Popper’s Law of Unintentional Consequences, which often gets unaccounted for in the state controlled, top-down, expert and special interest group agenda-setting legislation. which becomes the kind that serves to get a politician elected, not what actually works (an important pragmatism principle). After all, isn’t pragmatism all about the collective subjective, what’s good for all? Something that feels good still has to pass the “reality test” — outcomes matter, right? Experience counts. History has clues to consider when making decisions. Wouldn’t you say, Edmund Burke might have had that in mind? I do.

If Progressives, who are pragmatists, want to control that human activity, then liberty is diminished deliberately to create some desired equality or fairness, as if those issues hadn’t been accounted for in free enterprise already. Outcomes aren’t the same, because everything can’t be equalized or tweaked by some offset — I mean, just consider carbon offsets, for goodness sake. It’s ridiculous!

Differences in race, ethnic customs, language can be tolerated and celebrated, but not equalized unless tyranny forces it. Ambition and luck might be part of the inequality that exists, but we can’t very well ask humans to be humans without these inequalities. Our equality is somewhat checked with our voting privileges and other rights before the law. Class envy suspiciously allows a politician to push self-interest instead of common interest.

Just look at our present political condition. There’s the outcome. A real, citizen-informed, literate, press-educated bunch, aren’t we? We’ve been divided, and we’ve been conquered. Pragmatism works ! The Progressive approach — change we can believe in — controlled change, fast change, expert-advised change, legislated change without worrying about knowing what is being voted on. Legislation without representation. Wish all we had to worry about was taxes! I agree with Edmund Burke’s pragmatic ideas.

It’s interesting you mention the connection to anthropologists, because I think that is exactly right. Whenever I teach that Burke (instead of your Burke :) ) in anthropology I take pains to say something like, “You’ve heard he’s a conservative, but you might want to tread carefully — when you look at him closely he’s saying things a lot of anthropologists end up finding themselves saying too.” I guess that comes down to the fact that on the whole relatively few thinkers of that era were interested in giving *any* primacy to existing social convention. By contrast anthropologists are, like Burke, deeply invested in arguing for its importance.

So the rightness of longstanding positions or traditions is not a permanent rightness which must be secured against change. It’s that there is some rightness in them because they are organic products of a people’s experience of history, which it is wrong to change instrumentally, from outside of those traditions.

The problem with making Burke a simple rallying figure for post-1950 American conservatism is that most American conservatives haven’t really had any ideas at all about what might constitute progress, or they took the position that the United States circa 1928 or so had achieved a kind of omega state of progress. Or worse yet, they found Burke appealing for a narrow instrumental reason, namely, that he seemed to be a useful defense against civil rights. (As James Baldwin once said to William Faulkner on the subject of race and rights in the South: you don’t mean “go slow”, you mean “don’t go”.)

When you read Burke looking for a systematic account of what actually causes an organic, rooted society to change progressively, you won’t find it. Nor generally will you find it in similar kinds of later arguments: it’s pretty hard to figure out concretely what Jane Jacobs thought was “good planning”, save that she thought that such a thing could exist. Frankly, in this sense, there’s a Burkean feel to a lot of contemporary anthropological practice: anthropologists often defend the “what is” (or more often, the “what just was”) of the social worlds they study, while conceding that they ought to change progressively in a way that is native or appropriate to them. But I do think it’s important to understand Burke in these terms. He was not defending actually-existing society against all possible change, just against a kind of transformative project that he saw as “external” to actually existing society.