Pragmatism and Popper’s “social technology” shorn of metaphysics cannot tell us, which means we cannot maintain a liberal society solely on the basis of fact-based social policy and a consensus about “openness.” We need solid convictions about what it means to be human so that we can discern what to be open to, for we cannot be open to everything. After all, the whole point of postwar reconstruction was to close off the possibility of a repetition of the catastrophe that wrecked the West between 1914 and 1945.
