A Paradise Built in Hell by Rebecca Solnit Page A

power, and an underlying tide of human savagery. Jacobson believed in her fellow man. William James believed many things, and thought more, and the earthquake fed his thoughts, or rather touched on much of what he had been thinking.
    “What difference would it make” is at the core of his philosophy, which was practical, or pragmatic, in its concern for what the consequences of a belief are rather than what its truth is. That is to say, most philosophy is geared toward finding out the existing condition of things. James focused instead on how beliefs shape the world. Rather than ask whether or not God existed, James might try to ascertain what difference belief in God would make to how you live your life or how a society conducts itself. What is the consequence of the belief, rather than the truth of it? It is a deeply American approach, directed toward the malleability rather than the immutability of the world, toward what we make of it, rather than what it is made of. This aspect of James’s philosophy is sometimes misinterpreted as a kind of easy solipsism akin to the contemporary New Age notion that we each create our reality (a crass way of overlooking culture, politics, and economics—that is, realities are made, but by groups, movements, ideologies, religions, societies, economics, and more, as well as natural forces, over long stretches of time, not by individuals alone).
    But if we do not wholly create our worlds, they do not arise without us; we shape them, from the most intimate relationships to the most public and enduring institutions, and these conditions arise out of acts guided by beliefs. Thus it is, for example, that the founding political document of the United States opens with a belief that “all men are created equal.” The American Revolution is an outcome, in part, of that belief; subsequent revolutions have attempted to broaden who is sheltered under that umbrella of equality. The struggles of our times have been as much to change beliefs—about gender, about race—as to change policy, for the policy changes are largely an outcome of changed belief. Ideas matter. In disaster, they matter urgently, and the disaster James found himself in the middle of in April of 1906 gave him a great crucible to test his own.
    In 1905, James had delivered the lectures that became his 1907 book Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking , the book in which he asks the question quoted at the beginning of this chapter. He was intermittently ill in the first decade of the twentieth century, his last decade of life, but he was also at the height of his intellectual powers and fame, writing prolifically, lecturing in the United States and Europe, collecting honorary degrees and membership in various national academies, a revered public intellectual who weighed in on war, religion, spiritualism, psychology, and almost everything else. He had been born in 1842 in New York City to a wealthy Irish American family, the oldest of five children—the next oldest was his brother Henry, who became as renowned as a novelist. Their father was an enthusiastic dabbler in spiritual ideas, an occasional writer of books on ethics and religion, a friend of the Tran scendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson, and heir to a considerable fortune.
    William James wavered a great deal as a young man, avoiding service in the Civil War, studying art and hoping to become a painter, then studying medicine. Medicine led him to a position in anatomy at Harvard College that eventually evolved into his long professorship in philosophy and the new discipline of psychology, in which he did pioneering work. He suffered one severe depression in his early adulthood, and the rest of his life can be seen as a struggle for sufficient meaning and purpose to keep from being pulled under again, a struggle perhaps made more intense by his relief from the necessity of struggling for economic survival. (And like his brother Henry, he suffered regularly from