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Instant Karma:

Essay by Jeff Gomez / www.dontcallhome.com

"We wake up one morning and find ourselves in a new place, and then we build a ladder to explain how we got there. The pragmatist is the person who asks whether this is a good place to be. The nonpragmatist is the person who admires the ladder."

--Louis Menand
"An Introduction to Pragmatism"

1.

In Christopher Nolan's 2000 film Memento, Guy Pearce plays Leonard Shelby, a man who-due to a head injury-cannot make new memories. Because of this condition, approximately every ten minutes whatever knowledge is in Shelby's head is lost and his mind is washed as clean as a freshly scrubbed blackboard. To deal with his problem (which Leonard acknowledges is "almost impossible" to live with), he has come up with an intricate system of mnemonic devices, such as writing notes to himself, establishing rigorous habits and routines, as well as getting a large number of tattoos to remind him of crucial facts.

One of Leonard’s tattoos reads CONSIDER THE SOURCE. Because Shelby has no way of holding onto the information he's acquired (as he describes it to another character early in the film, "I don’t know if we’ve ever met before and the next time I see you I won’t remember this conversation”), he has to constantly gauge each situation he finds himself in. He must "act on instinct"; he’s forced to read and figure out each moment of this life during the momentary flashpoint it exists in.

Leonard Shelby has neither the luxury nor the capacity to rely on a past experience to guide him. Because his present is constantly disappearing, he is a man who "seizes the day" simply because he has no other way to live. Six times an hour he has to start all over again in terms of relationships, knowledge, happiness, joy, pretty much everything. As he tells another character who asks what’s it like, he replies it feels “Like waking. Like you always just woke up.” This would be fine if Leonard could remember where he’d gone to bed.

Shelby’s condition leaves him open to the easy manipulation of others (the kind of numerous double-crosses which figure prominently in the film), and because of this Leonard has to constantly "consider the source" of every piece of information he comes across. Since he can never be sure of the reality of any situation, Leonard must minutely examine, weigh and analyze everything that he's presented with. Nothing can be taken at face value, not even the faces that speak to him.

2.

Even though pragmatism is often called a philosophy, or is lumped together with other schools of philosophic thought, pragmatism is neither of these things. Pragmatism is instead a set of tools devised to serve as an antidote to philosophy, invented because-when applied to real life-philosophy is found to be, more often than not, woefully insufficient.

The original pragmatic thinkers-19th century intellectuals like Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and Oliver Wendell Holmes-came up with the concepts of pragmatism so that decisions could be made in a down-to-earth fact-based fashion which would actually have the power to change a person's life (i.e. Would my life be better if I believed in God?), rather than having these decisions be based on a set of philosophical precepts which could never be proven and thus weren’t of much use to anyone except academics (i.e. Does God exist?).

For a pragmatist, there is no Right and Wrong; these kinds of absolute concepts are as ephemeral as a ghost. Instead-in pragmatic terms-what is Right and Wrong must be constantly decided with an eye toward a particular situation, as life evolves or as problems arise.

For instance, Is it wrong to lie? A moralist would quickly reply, "Yes, of course it is." (Some would even claim it's a sin.). Whereas a pragmatist, to the question of Is it wrong to Lie?, would blithely respond, "It depends." What it depends on is the situation. Would it be better to lie? Would lying help?

Using these methods, pragmatists spend a lot their time weighing decisions, asking themselves questions, sorting out their preferences and constantly deciding Yes or No. While the nonpragmatist leads his life according to an unshakable set of rules (or, again, for the religious, a set of commandments), the pragmatist instead "acts on instinct," dealing with every situation as it comes.

The character of Leonard Shelby in Memento is the perfect example of this, if not the exact physical embodiment of the pragmatic ideal. Not only doesn't Shelby follow a standard set of preset beliefs, but he literally can't.

3.

Having to judge every decision may sound exhausting, and if we all had to live like this every second of the day, it would no doubt wear us out before breakfast. Even Shelby is cut some slack in this regard since, in addition to being able to recall all of his memories from before his accident, he still knows "the feel of the world": how a wood table will sound when he knocks his knuckles against it, what a glass dish will feel like in hands (these are, he says, "the kinds of memories you take for granted"). Just like Leonard, we also know from habit the qualities of the physical world. But we have something else; we’re able to bypass the nearly constant decision-making of pragmatic thought in another way: we rely on trust.

When the weatherman tells us how hot it is, we trust him rather than feeling the need to stick our head out the window for assurance. When a friend tells us it's raining where they are, we don't automatically call three other friends for corroboration. We take facts on faith as being facts because we have placed trust in the person relaying the information.

For Leonard Shelby, however, trust is impossible. Since trust is based most often on precedent (i.e. you said you'd be there for me in the past, and you were, thus we've built up trust), without a past or a proven record of reliability, there can be no trust. If you’ve just met someone, you cannot trust them right away, and yet for Leonard-as he tells a woman he just spent the night with, “The next time I see you I won’t know that I’ve met you before”-every person in his life is a stranger.

The film exploits this weakness in numerous ways, most notably when the characters of Natalie and Teddy each manipulate Leonard by tricking him to do something he normally wouldn’t do if he had all the facts (the real facts). So, in addition to having to pragmatically weigh each decision in terms of right and wrong, Shelby is also burdened with the task of constantly choosing between information that’s true and false. While some people (including our current president) may think that life can be boiled down to such clear-cut Boolean terms, in reality things aren't that simple. So rather than living in a morally black-and-white world, Shelby must make his way through a world of murky grays (a metaphor perfectly symbolized by the film's "cool" palette of blues and beiges); he must make pragmatic decisions and judgments as situations occur. He doesn’t have much of a choice not to.

4.

Talking to Natalie about his wife’s death, Leonard says, “I don’t even know how long she’s been gone. It’s like I’ve woken up in bed and she’s not here because she’s gone to the bathroom or something. But somehow I just know that she’ll never come back to bed.” Because of his condition, he is not just cut off from resolution (he later wonders, “How can I heel when I can’t feel time?”); Shelby is also is cut off from perspective. For Leonard, context doesn’t exist.

If hindsight-in the maxim Maugham famously coined-is 20/20, then Leonard’s condition has left him blind. Or rather, he is spectacularly myopic; he can only see what’s placed directly in front of him. There is no waiting out a decision to see if it was the right one because, by the time the results arrive, he will have forgotten what it was he was waiting for. It’s not for nothing that Leonard’s preferred piece of photographic equipment is a Polaroid instant camera; even if he drops off his film at a one-hour Fotomat, by the time he picks up his pictures he will have long forgotten who or what he had taken pictures of. He needs instant photos because Leonard’s is an instant life.

Without the ability to view anything in perspective-relationships, incidents, people-Shelby has to act in the moment. He cannot live his life in a “means to an end” fashion-weighing current decisions against a later payoff-because for Leonard the means must exist simultaneously with the end; for him the future is as blank as one of his undeveloped Polaroids.

Leonard Shelby is forced to eschew perspective and hindsight in a way that we’re not; we may opt to act pragmatically from time to time, gauging situations and making decisions based on our temporal surroundings, but Leonard must live like this every second of every day of his life. He doesn’t have the ability not to. Whether he likes it or not, he is indeed the ultimate pragmatist.

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