Richard Rorty’s Unpragmatic Pragmatism
Part 1: Criticism of the Left by the Left
by Craig Bernthal
VDH Private Papers
In 1998, Richard Rorty, America’s most famous living philosopher, published his short book, Achieving Our Country. It is worth a second look, given the 2004 election, because it sets forth a perceptive critique of the left, from the left, while at the same time offering a philosophy which virtually assures the continuing political impotence and confusion of those who subscribe to it. That philosophy, Rorty’s version of American Pragmatism, provides as accurate a description of leftist orthodoxy as one is likely to find.
Rorty would like to eliminate what he calls selfishness, sadism, and the sense of sin from American culture. “Achieving our country,” a phrase Rorty borrows from James Baldwin, requires the establishment of a casteless and classless society. These political conditions, however, are merely instrumental to Rorty’s ultimate goal: “the creation of a greater diversity of individuals—larger, fuller, more imaginative and daring individuals.”
Rorty praises the New Left for what it has done to eliminate sadism. He gives it credit for ending the Vietnam War and making American society “a far more civilized place than it was thirty years ago”; and although Rorty sees some problems with the establishment of departments of women’s studies, black history, migrant studies, gay studies, Hispanic-American studies, overall, he believes they have helped victims “of socially acceptable forms of sadism by making such sadism no longer acceptable.” Rorty clearly sees teachers as the most powerful cultural force for the elimination of sadism: “By assigning Toni Morrison’s Beloved instead of George Eliot’s Silas Marner in high school literature classes, and by assigning stories about the suicides of gay teenagers in freshman composition courses, these teachers have made it harder for their students to be sadistic than it was for those students’ parents.”
The New Left, however, has largely failed to combat selfishness. As Rorty puts it, “the rich are still ripping off the poor, bribing the politicians, and having almost everything their own way.” That the Left has been able to make little progress in this regard is due to three debilities:
1) Self-destructive anti-Americanism. National pride is a necessary condition for self-improvement, and although the United States has much to feel ashamed of (Rorty lists the importation of African slaves, the slaughter of Native Americans, the rape of ancient forests, and the Vietnam War.), pride must outweigh shame. What can America take pride in? The ultimate freeing of the slaves, the Civil Rights Movement, the unionization of labor in the first half of the century, women’s suffrage, winning the Second World War, and even winning the Cold War. (Rorty styles himself as a “red-diaper anti-communist.”)
2) The self-mesmerization of the academic left with political theory, especially that of Michel Foucault. “The Left still wants to put historical events in a theoretical context. It exaggerates the importance of philosophy for politics and wastes its energy on sophisticated theoretical analysis . . .” Leftists become spectators rather than agents of change, as they were in the early 20th century.
3) Practical ignorance, especially of economics: If capitalism and its attendant evils are to be replaced, what are they to be replaced with? The New Left, Rorty admits, offers no answer because it has no idea: “The Sixties did not ask how . . . to reach a consensus about when to remodel a factory rather than build a new one, what prices to pay for raw materials, and the like. Sixties leftists . . .seemed to be suggesting that once we were rid of both bureaucrats and entrepreneurs, ‘the people’ would know how to handle competition from steel mills or textile factories in the developing world, price hikes on imported oil, and so on. But they never told us how ‘the people’ would learn how to do this. The . . . Left still skips over such questions.” (Rorty sheds no light on these issues either, and one might forgive him that, given the limited purpose of his book, if he did not seem to assume at every turn a mercantile economy which can only achieve justice by distributing a fixed pie rather than increasing the size of the pie.)
Unfortunately, Rorty is merely dealing with the symptoms of a disease for which he is a virulent carrier. The disease is the idea that “truth,” in the sense understood by most people, does not exist. The basic article in Rorty’s philosophy, one that is virtual orthodoxy in humanities and social sciences, is that Western metaphysics and religion, from Plato to Kant, is bankrupt, as are Christianity and Judaism. There are no transcendent ideas of right and wrong, rather, all goals, all human aspirations, are arbitrary. Given Rorty’s utopian goals for America, one might be surprised at this, but he doesn’t balk at acknowledging how his philosophy undercuts his ideals:
“For [Walt] Whitman and [John] Dewey, a classless and casteless society—the sort of society which American leftists have spent the twentieth century trying to construct—is neither more natural nor more rational than the cruel societies of feudal Europe or of eighteenth-century Virginia. All that can be said in its defense is that it would produce less unnecessary suffering than any other, and that it is the best means to a certain end: the creation of a greater diversity of individuals—larger, fuller, more imaginative and daring individuals. To those who want a demonstration that less suffering and greater diversity should be the overriding aims of political endeavor, Dewey and Whitman have nothing to say” (italics added). Neither does Rorty.
What is the problem with the notion that ideas of right and wrong and therefore, what goals a society should pursue, are essentially arbitrary? First, from a philosophical perspective, this kind of relativism leads almost immediately to the lack of coherence which Rorty regularly demonstrates in Achieving Our Country and his other books. Second, from the standpoint of practical politics, who wants to follow anyone on a quest which is merely personal and arbitrary? Why not spend one’s life like Zonker Harris, pursuing the perfect tan? How Rorty’s philosophical theory undercuts both his criticisms of the Left and ability to offer anything better will be the subject of the second half of this article.
©2004 Victor Davis Hanson
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