Perhaps the point of pragmatism was always that a society could be effective without attempting to describe, explain, or understand what it was doing. Understandable, given how socially-held deliberate purposes turned out in the beginning of the last century. But there is a correlative danger at the other end, perhaps.
The effective nature of shared social work continues, of course, but, again, reaching to the beginning of the last century for examples, it's possible for an effective society to be not the type of society one would want to be in, if one understood the nature of the event.