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chapter 7 Pragmatism and the “Facts” of Religious Experience: The Model for a Synthesis One fall morning in 1908, the nineteen-year-old Harvard undergraduate Walter Lippmann answered a knock at his dormitory door. To Lippmann ’s astonishment,standing outside was a white-bearded Harvard professor, perhaps the most famous writer and thinker of his generation, who told Lippmann that he had come to congratulate him for an article that Lippmann had written for a student magazine. In the article, Lippmann had attacked cultural elitism and defended the values of working people, and it had clearly impressed the social justice–loving William James, the philosopher, psychologist, and author of The Varieties of Religious Experience, which laid out James’s pragmatic and empirical reasons for embracing religion and personal spiritual experience. After taking a walk through HarvardYard—where they chatted about socialism , faculty politics, and the latest lectures James was preparing—the young national-columnist-to-be and the philosopher-psychologist decided to make the walks a weekly ritual on their way to tea at James’s home. Lippmann, according to the biographer Ronald Steel, responded eagerly to James’s passion for social reform,commitment to experimentation,abhorrence of dogma,and deep sense of personal morality.When James died in the summer of 1910, he was the subject of Lippmann’s first signed article of journalism out of college.Lippmann eulogized James as “perhaps the most tolerant man of our generation,” who “listened for truth from anybody, and from anywhere, and in any form.”1 Journalists are a decidedly nonintrospective, unphilosophical lot. But if one were going to identify a philosopher whose worldview captured the spirit of modern,American journalism,it would have to be James,the “father” of American pragmatism and the figure who refashioned the weighty and abstract philosophical doctrines of the nineteenth-century European “Filosofs” into a prac07 .102-114/Unde 1/15/02, 9:41 AM 102 Pragmatism and the “Facts” of Religious Experience 103 tical, optimistic, can-do process of analyzing life choices uniquely suited to the American way of thinking. This also makes James—who did so much to synthesize the philosophy, psychology , and the emerging social sciences of his time—the ideal thinker to formulate an intellectual basis for today’s journalists who might hope to reconcile the skeptical and practical demands of their profession with the seemingly ineffable aspects of individual religious experience. Although James’s conclusion —that the “truth” of religious experience has a basis in fact and that God’s impact on human lives can be empirically verified—is hardly beyond dispute, his determination to ground his reasoning in the language of common human experience and the practicalities of everyday life makes him accessible to journalists who follow a methodology, like James’s, that frames subjective experience in the language of objective “fact” and portrays the expressions of human emotion as an important measure of reality. It always is a risk to suggest to modern journalists, who tend to be ahistorical , that they might find a model in history that could help them resolve some of the problems in today’s journalism. But James, despite living almost a hundred years ago, was as modernist in his thinking as any journalist living today and can be credited with articulating the intellectual and philosophical mindset that journalists still draw on to interpret the world. The ideas in The Varieties of Religious Experience (recently listed by the Modern Library near the top of the most important books of the twentieth century) seem as fresh and original —despite James’s somewhat Victorian way of expressing himself—as they did when he delivered them as a series of lectures at University of Edinburgh between 1899 and 1901. I also must confess to my own satisfaction while writing a book about the connection between journalism and religion in discovering the symmetry between James’s pragmatic philosophy, with its great appeal for journalists, and James’s advocacy for the place of religion in a pragmatic worldview. On the one hand, James reflected many of the attitudes of the most skeptical of modern journalists: he shunned the organized church; he scorned credal and absolutist attitudes about religion; he respected personal experience that put a premium on real world learning; he was suspicious of moralism and self-righteousness; and he had little use for what he called “second hand” philosophies based on superrationalistic or highly theoretical thinking. On the other hand, James applied this respect he held for...

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