Pragmatism's Discontents: What Social Entrepreneurs Can Learn from Abraham Lincoln

I've been thinking about what to write to honor our 16th president, who was born 200 years ago today. Honest Abe has had a lot of buzz this year; in part because of the bevy of similarities (real and manufactured) between him and our current upstart president, and in part, I think, because we Americans tend to look to him when we feel the ground shifting beneath our feet.

A wonderful post by Change.org's Immigration blogger Dave Bennion got me thinking about Lincoln's pragmatism. Pragmatism is something that President Obama shares with Lincoln, and was one of the things that drew me and many others to his candidacy. I wrote about how the spirit of pragmatism - working together to fix common problems without getting caught up in ideological battles - was deeply embedded in the average Millennial change-maker's outlook.

Social entrepreneurship is, in many ways, a pragmatic field. This is particularly true for those of us who look towards market-solutions to poverty as a way forward. For most that I've run across, that interest is driven less by an ideological rejection of philanthropy or even social wealth redistribution but instead because the market seems like a more effective vehicle for reducing inequality and creating new opportunity.

But Dave's post "The Complicated Lincoln and Our Post-Racial Society" reminds us that pragmatism has pitfalls. He quotes Lincoln explaining his believe in the physical differences between the "white and black races," and affirming that he does not believe in full equality in terms of interracial marriage or public office. He affirms that Lincoln was against slavery but that "he would have preferred to let slavery exist where it long had, but felt his hand forced by the course of events." Lincoln (and more importantly, society) needed a more committed and ideological abolitionist movement as part of the public voice. Similarly, I believe "social entrepreneurs" need critics to force us to answer the question "are we really changing the structure that perpetuates the problem?"

The point is not to compare Lincoln's moment to our own, or relate slavery to social entrepreneurship in any way. The point is to be reminded that as the field of social enterprise grows, sometimes the conversation will need to be framed in terms of rights. At his keynote at the Skoll World Forum in 2008, Paul Farmer said:

We need to be aware that each of the terms and concepts and tools we’ve developed can be used to deny the destitute access to goods and services that sometimes should be rights, not commodities. Does anyone really believe that a mother loves her newborn more if she had to pay some sort of users fee for prenatal or obstetrics care?

Sometimes the disruptive solution will come from innovators within a field that can take a new approach to scale. Other times, however, it will take pressure from outside and systemic reorganization. Lincoln's birthday is a reminder of just how high the cost of that change has been, but also an affirmation of our capacity for progress.