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Customary Reflection and Innovative Habits

The most effective—indeed, the only—way to make the future different from the past is, in the judgment of pragmatists such as William James, John Dewey, and George Herbert Mead, to remake the present. As Dewey notes, “present activity” is the only phase of human conduct really under our control (MW 14.184). For just this reason, we must be mindful of the past and solicitous about the future as well as attuned to the present: “Memory of the past, observation of the present, foresight of the future are indispensable. But they are indispensable to a present liberation, an enriching growth of action” unfolding in the here and now (MW 14.182). Dewey goes so far as to assert: “We do not use the present to control the future. We use the foresight of the future to refine and expand present activity” (MW 14.215). But insofar as we do refine and enlarge such activity, we ineluctably reshape the future. Thus, the most compelling reason to imagine the future is to reimagine and, thereby, to mobilize the resources requisite for remaking the present. More often than not, this requires us to wrest the maimed present from the deeply sunk talons of a vicious past. The future toward which we are driving is, in however an attenuated and inconspicuous form, always somewhat of a piece with the present through which we are moving.