Pragmatic Idealism

In this essay RMS (Richard Matthew Stallman) talks about idealism and the need to be pragmatic. In everyday understanding pragmatics and idealism are often seen as something opposite but they are rather concepts in different directions. Being pragmatic means doing what works or being result oriented. Being idealistic is about having ideal goals, something which can be very hard or seemly impossible. All four combinations are possible, you can be a pragmatic idealist, a non pragmatic idealist, you can be pragmatic for not so idealistic goals or non pragmatic for non idealistic goals. For example, Stallman’s idealistic goal is to make all software respect user’s freedom and his pragmatic tool for that is copyleft. For same the same idealistic goal there can non pragmatic ways, in this case Stallman thinks it is issuing software under BSD or other permissive licenses. For the uninitiated, a copyleft license requires the user of any free and open source software to release the modification under the same FOSS license, whereas BSD and other permissive licenses don’t have that requirement.

For other goals, say earning a lot of money, a pragmatic way can be starting your own business, a non pragmatic way can be buying a lottery ticket. Though it can be particularly difficult to judge which is a pragmatic way and which way isn’t, specially if the goal is ideal. Because of being ideal very few people achieve ideal goals, hence a usual fallacy is to assume that any attempt towards them is non pragmatic. India was freed from colonial forces, slavery was abolished and recently LGBTQ community is gaining equal legal rights and social respect worldwide. There was a time when working for any of these issue would have got you labelled as someone crazy, wishful thinker and someone who is not pragmatic. But some people worked really hard on these goals and achieved them, hence they were both being idealistic and pragmatic.

Another common fallacy is to confuse pragmatism with only the things which works in short term. Demanding dominion status of India could have been seen as pragmatic compromise to complete independence but in the hindsight demanding Purna Swaraj was a pretty pragmatic decision.