I am sick to death of white man pragmatism
An ode to human nature
I move in a world of relentless, bland, unbending white man pragmatism. It binds me like swaddling cloth; it smothers me like cotton batting. “We have to be reasonable,” they say. “Don’t get so emotional,” they drawl, with a heavy weight of disgust on that penultimate ‘o’, a fraying at the bottom of their vocal cords, a touch of glottal ash.
White man pragmatism makes statements like, “We know global warming is real, but we have to rationally consider the pros and cons of different actions. We don’t want to hurt the economy.”
White man pragmatism looks at an egg line of women giving brutal testimony about the latest celebrity abuser and says, “I believe in due process. Everyone is innocent until proven guilty.” White man pragmatism will buy his next book, watch his next movie, play his next song.
White man pragmatism does not believe in humility. It knows, axiomatically, that whatever makes it comfortable makes it good.
Whatever makes it uncomfortable might be bad, but not in the way that we mere flies might think, trembling at the edges of its web. Genocide, for example, is not in itself a bad thing to the white man pragmatist. The people who insist on dragging it to light—particularly the ones who insist on showing all the dead babies—they are bad. The deaths, pragmatically delegated to footnotes and caveats, are a casualty of war, of “self-defense,” even. The visuals, on the other hand, should be condemned with that devastating flick of of a Rolex-clad wrist and a sneer. We, the “unserious,” are now the unseen.
Or take the disruption of every climate system and massive ecocide, not to mention the inevitable creation of billions of climate refugees and uncountable human and non-human suffering. Every time a voice raises itself above the soothing tones of an ASMR video, the white man pragmatists are there, ready to hose us down with exclamations about our impropriety, our exaggerations, our alarmism. If that doesn’t do the trick, they’re quick to remonstrate that nothing will get done with such pessimism, that we must have “hope.” What that hope entails, apparently, is building the next bitcoin server farm, investing a few more billion dollars in generative AI that erases with every search every gain made by the adoption of green energy. If we’re lucky, they might stop talking about the moon or Mars long enough to suggest some vague technological solution that will save us from our human-made disaster at the last possible moment.
What I have realized over the last few years about the sober intellectual class, the white men who aren’t in thrall to Trump or Musk or their legion of white man supremacist minions, is that by and large they will agree with a coarse-grained picture of the major challenges facing the world. They’ll admit that the “war” in Gaza is tragic and that human-made climate change is real and worsening. They might even be able to acknowledge, in a general sense, that capitalism as practiced in the west might be overflowing its banks at the moment and needs some reining in. They will admit these things, but their white man pragmatism is so predominant in their thinking that they seem incapable of taking premise A and following it to the perfectly logical conclusion B. They leap and jump and obfuscate to find any reason why premise A needs absolutely zero meaningful response from them or any of their class.
I should be explicit and add that many women and non-binary people and non-white people are white man pragmatists to the bone. Oh they had to swallow it, for sure. And sometimes it stings when the white men pragmatists step on something that has direct personal value to them (reproductive rights, say, or DEI). Nevertheless, these non-white-men preach the gospel of white man pragmatism because they have married in—they have subordinated their own interests to those of the system of white male supremacy in the hopes that even though they might lose rights as a class, they will still gain as individuals. In other words, they’re not like other girls. And they do not like other girls. They do not—this might be the tragedy—even like themselves.
I’m thinking of the parade of blondes that the Trump administrations sends up to the podium to repeat talking points with an air at once pedantic and uncomprehending. They’re the popular girls who would kick you when no one was watching but cry to the teacher because you threw the ball too hard.
You did throw the ball hard. You’re still throwing the ball hard. Because it’s not fucking right. Murdering tens of thousands of children and journalists and poets and doctors and elders and mothers and fathers and ancient olive trees is not fucking right. Deporting and detaining non-citizen students indefinitely because they spoke up against genocide when the white man pragmatists obfuscated and looked away is not fucking right. Collaborating with a fascist authoritarian government in order to abet their deportation and detention of their own students as Columbia (my alma mater, to my shame) has done is not fucking right! Auctioning off the last of the world’s forests—rightfully indigenous land—to lumber companies while we are actively blowing through worst-case climate scenarios and we already have the technology on hand to get to net zero carbon is so single-mindedly nihilistic it’s like we’re being governed by a crew of comic book villains. Go to Mars, you idiots, please! We’ll all pay for the trip, and gladly.
White men pragmatists, do you think these things aren’t related? Are you beginning to feel a little alarmed by the defunding of science and medical research because, well, you might need cutting-edge cancer treatments one day? But you can’t stretch your empathy to see how that connects to the genocide in Gaza, and to indigenous land rights, and to the punitive, racist immigration policy pursued by every single presidential regime since Clinton? You “believe” in climate change, but you don’t want your stocks to go down if governments forced companies to pay the costs of their pollution? Buddy, I’ve got news for you: Your 401k won’t matter if the habitable land on this planet decreases by forty percent. Your Bermuda time-share will be, quite literally, underwater.
I am tired of you. I am tired of every white man pragmatist who’s just sitting here in the boiling water, even acknowledging that the water is, you know, maybe a bit uncomfortable? And yet you seem to prefer death—of yourself and everything you claim to love and value—over examining the status quo and declaring it unfit for human life. Because that’s the truth. Our status quo is unfit for human life, human dignity, human flourishing, human existence. It’s also unfit for whale life, for octopus life, for redwood life, for cicada life, monarch butterfly life, for garden lizard life, for apple tree life, for heirloom corn life, for crab life. It might be provisionally fit for Monsanto corn life and cockroaches. Is that what you want? A world with desperate humans, cockroaches, and billions of ears of tasteless corn the color of margarine?
I do not want to spend another second of my life trying to convince a white man pragmatist that something is wrong. The trouble is that they have all the power. But they would have significantly less power if the rest of us didn’t cede them so much of the argument. I understand: we’re overworked, exhausted, struggling, often in imminent danger, traumatized. Nevertheless, why give them ground they don’t deserve, if only in our own minds? There is nothing wrong with alarmism if there really is a fire spreading. There is nothing wrong with outrage and anger when we see a genocide happening in real time. There is nothing inherently anti-semitic in criticizing Israel. You are not “unserious” if you’ve begun to suspect that the Democratic party of the US will never, ever do anything to genuinely alleviate human suffering. Why not? Because they are also white man pragmatists who believe in the status quo, and our status quo is human suffering. Our status quo is cruelty. Our status quo is the superiority of certain parts of humanity over others, and of all humanity over the rest of the planet. But we are the planet. We are a miracle, a sentient ball of stardust, and we are turning ourselves to ashes.
And if you think the planet will survive this, even if we don’t? It might not. Look at Venus—a once-livable planet that’s now a hell-furnace of runaway greenhouse gasses. I hope it isn’t likely, but it’s entirely possible for us to destroy this planet—not just the life that has adapted to the climate conditions of the Holocene, but all potential life that could come after us. Our beloved blue ball has about a billion more years left before the sun will heat up and destroy complex life. But we might knock her out long before she has to go.
These are the wages of white supremacy and its intellectual defenders. I don’t know when we planted the seed that’s borne this destructive fruit—certainly by the time Columbus set foot on Hispañola, certainly by the time Europeans were buying humans by the boatload on the Gold and Ivory Coasts. But you can see the same destructive impulses, the same logical games as far back as the Roman empire. People like to talk about our current problems of runaway destruction being part of some generalized “human nature,” but that strikes me as another kind of white man pragmatism, a denial of the vast majority of humanity’s presence here on our beautiful blue ball. Have people always fought one another? Of course. Have humans moved around and taken resources from other human and non-human animals without thought for the common good? Absolutely. But the scale, the weaponization, the sheer lack of any human brake to our objectively self-annihilating mode of existence strikes me as fundamentally distinct from previous (and some contemporaneous!) modes.
What makes it distinct is white man pragmatism: a highly sophisticated social-philosophical framework which has evolved in lockstep with white supremacy in order to circumvent our human nature. It’s there at every moment to tell us that the core within us—that which cries out with empathy at the sight of a beheaded child, of grieving family, of bleached coral reefs, of degraded sacred lands, of unmitigated poverty (on a scale unprecedented in human history), and gluttonous wealth (on a scale unprecedented in human history)—is what must be discounted and ignored. It keeps us so marginalized, so poor, so unconnected to our history and our planet and our very bodies that we repress ourselves and attempt to ask for things that they might find reasonable in the ways that they deem appropriate. And then we get sicker, more desperate, more exhausted, and we die. Our needs are not met. Our natures are ignored.
Calling our actions as a human species today “human nature” is like calling the growth of a metastatic cancer “human behavior.” Perhaps technically true, but a shallow truth that obfuscates a deeper one.
If I can think of one revolutionary act that we can all do right now, without any infrastructure, without any funding, without any central organization, without even any hope, it would be this: Stop ceding ground. Stop ignoring what you feel. Stop trying to package your own survival into a shape that fits their pragmatism. Stop, even if you still have enough stolen resources to live comfortably. Stop, even if you’re not a member of the groups being targeted today. Stop believing in the system. Reject the status quo.
I’m sick of white man pragmatism, but I am not and will never be sick of us. I long for a world that will be kind to itself. I long for every one of us to reclaim our human nature.
Thinking about how a former friend classified my frustration with her silence over Palestine as a “trauma response.” As in, it’s not valid, for that reason. I just….