PRAGMATISM AND DEMOCRACY

"Poetry makes nothing happen," W.H. Auden wrote; and neither does philosophy, according to Richard Rorty (1931-2007), the most prominent pragmatist philosopher of the late 20^th century. Rorty's pragmatism was the culmination of a long devolution, which amounts to this: philosophically, less and less is at stake. Getting ontology and epistemology right was for most of human history considered essential to achieving one's eternal salvation, and sometimes also had drastic consequences for one's temporal well-being. When philosophy and religion were divorced in the early modern period, metaphysical orthodoxy was still usually thought to underwrite moral probity. Respectable people counted their spoons when a materialist, as well as an atheist, left their house. Kant was the last gasp of this ethical rationalism, ie, the belief that our values and duties may be deduced from the nature of things and are revealed to us rather than created by us.

Rorty described this development in his characteristically insouciant fashion in "Democracy and Philosophy," an essay from 2007:

Philosophy is a ladder that Western political thinking climbed up, and then shoved aside. Starting in the seventeenth century, philosophy played an important role in clearing the way for the establishment of democratic institutions in the West. It did so by secularizing political thinking - substituting questions about how human beings could lead happier lives for questions about how God's will might be done.

Philosophers suggested that people should just put religious revelation to one side, at least for political purposes, and act as if human beings were on their own - free to shape their own laws and their own institutions to suit their felt needs, free to make a fresh start.

Pragmatism, with its Greek root pragma or "act," marked a recognition that value-creation and meaning-making were active rather than passive processes, that values and meanings were made rather than discovered. It is the assertion that there is no higher philosophical or scientific authority than the temporary consensus of the competent, and no higher moral authority than uncoerced individual choice.[1]

In particular, social and political institutions are not justified by their supposed correspondence to the universally valid imperatives of an invariant human nature, for there is no such thing. Neither we nor our institutions have essences, Rorty maintained; we and they are instead centerless webs, continually reweaving new experiences into novel but (temporarily) stable selves and relations.

This picture may seem unsettling as well as liberating. To the comforting rationalist proposition that freedom, democracy, and human rights are mankind's natural endowments, Rorty replies that nothing [OMIT "NOTHING"]  there are no such natural endowments, that "human nature" is a metaphysical fiction. He draws out the ambiguous consequences of this radical contingency in his great essay "The Last Intellectual in Europe: Orwell on Cruelty."[2]

Many readers of 1984 have thought that Winston's interrogation was a little overdone, that perhaps Orwell was indulging a streak of cruelty occasionally in  evidence elsewhere in his writing. Others have supposed that we are meant to applaud Winston Smith's gallant, doomed determination to hold on to the sanity-preserving truth that "two plus two equals four." Rorty thinks otherwise: Orwell's lesson, he argues, is that there is no indomitable core of freedom and integrity [DIGNITY] in human beings; we are "socialization all the way down." There is no necessary victory of democracy over totalitarianism, whatever Western sentimentalists believe. "The Last Man in Europe," Orwell's sometime title for the novel, refers to decent, defeated Winston. Rorty's "The Last Intellectual in Europe" refers to O'Brien, the heartless pragmatist, a terrifyingly plausible portrait of the nihilism to which postmodern skepticism - Rorty's own creed - may lead. "The truth will make you free" was the motto of Enlightenment rationalism, with "virtuous" generally understood as well. But as Rorty acknowledges, and O'Brien illustrates, the truth will merely make us more efficient, whether for good or evil. Something other than truth is required to make us good.

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Two of Rorty's political collections featured the word "hope" in their title: Philosophy and Social Hope (1999) and What Can We Hope For? (2022). He was well aware of how difficult an achievement democracy is, and how fragile once achieved. Nor did he believe that "theory" would help much. He championed the writings of Derrida, Foucault, and others for their original perspectives on Western philosophy and intellectual history. But he denied that the new ideas would lead to "liberation" or "revolution." "People on the political left ... are often disappointed by my politics, since they see the lack of social justice in modern societies as something that can only be remedied by vast structural changes, on the scale of 'the end of capitalism.' I think that this lack can be remedied, if at all, by a series of incremental reforms. I am what Marxists used to call a 'bourgeois liberal.'"[3]

When it came to specifying those injustices, there was little concrete difference between Rorty and the rest of the American left, at any rate for most of his life. He was a sharp and detailed critic of economic, sexual, and racial inequality, more so than most theoretical leftists in the English and comparative literature departments. But eventually, as "woke" thinking and rhetoric infiltrated the American left, Rorty responded critically, observing that "one of the contributions of the newer [i.e. the radical-academic] left has been to enable professors, whose mild guilt about the comfort and security of their own lives once led them into extra-academic political activity to say, 'Sorry, I gave at the office.'" [DISSENT] Even more pointedly, in his fullest political statement, Achieving Our Country (1998), he made a prediction that was to achieve posthumous celebrity on Election Day 2016:

At that point [ie, when the working class realizes that the professional class cannot or will not help them], something will crack. The non-suburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for -- someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots. ...[4]

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If God or human nature or Theory could not ground hope, what could? Rorty's usual answer was solidarity. Somehow - it is still not clear how - we are capable of feeling the pains and pleasures of others. To ascribe this capacity to our moral imagination does not go far to explain it. But its existence and importance are undeniable. Hume and Adam Smith called this faculty "sympathy" and based their theories of morality on it. Godwin and Shelley likewise; and Shelley's affirmation in A Defense of Poetry is particularly eloquent: "The great instrument of moral good is the imagination ... a going out of our own nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action, or person not our own." Rorty tweaks this formulation: what we identify with, he thinks, is suffering, the distinctive capacity of sentient beings and our profoundest claim on one another's sympathy. To be human is to be capable of being humiliated. Democracy depends on "the ability to see more and more traditional differences (of tribe, religion, race, customs, and the like) as unimportant when compared with similarities with respect to pain and humiliation - the ability to think of people wildly different from ourselves as included in the range of 'us.'"[5]

The creation of democratic solidarity is hard work, Rorty insisted. It begins with some such sentiment as "My family member or neighbor shouldn't have to live like that," then proceeds, often only after many epochs of nation-building experiences, to a sentiment like, "No American [Frenchman, Jamaican] should have to live like that," and eventually - far in the future, alas, at the rate history is going - to universal solidary: "No human being should have to live like that." And because this process involves enlarging our moral imagination rather than making any new discoveries about the nature of the Good or the Just, the agents of progress will be primarily novelists, poets, and investigative journalists rather than philosophers or political theorists.

Rorty was an insistent gradualist, with no patience for loose talk about revolution and no interest in Marxism, much less Marxism-Leninism. But he was nevertheless a utopian, able to envisage a society beyond the restrictions of class, which seems to be an unsurpassable mental limit for most of those who call themselves liberals, as he did. "Looking Backwards from the Year 2096" (1996), a puckish but also earnest survey of three centuries (two past and one future) since the country's founding. (Part of the essay's joke - and also its seriousness - is the title's echo of Looking Backward (1889) by Edward Bellamy, one of the greatest of utopian novels.) In this essay he identified "the apparent incompatibility between capitalism and democracy" as the bane of American history and speculated on how the country might someday escape it:

Here, in the late twenty-first century, as talk of fraternity and unselfishness has replaced talk of rights, American political discourse has come to be dominated by quotations from Scripture and literature, rather than from political theorists or social scientists. Fraternity, like friendship, was not a concept that either philosophers or lawyers knew how to handle. They could formulate principles of justice, equality, and liberty, and invoke these principles when weighing hard moral or legal issues. But how to formulate a "principle of fraternity"? Fraternity is an inclination of the heart, one that produces a sense of shame at having much when others have little. It is not the sort of thing that anybody can have a theory about or that people can be argued into having.[6]

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For all his ambivalence about philosophy as an academic enterprise, Rorty's purely philosophical writing is consummately professional. Surprisingly for a celebrity, a model public intellectual invite [INVITED] to pronounce on virtually very [EVERY] subject virtually everywhere, he seemed astonishingly well-versed in the latest scholarly work in the philosophy of mind and philosophy of language. But his political writing is pitched almost defiantly in the voice of an amateur, a citizen speaking to citizens, almost an enactment of his egalitarian ideology. Along with John Dewey, his pragmatist forebear, Walt Whitman was perhaps Rorty's favorite figure in American [INTELLECTUAL] history. It was Whitman's generous vision of American possibilities in Democratic Vistas that Rorty tried to keep alive in what he recognized was an age sorely [SADLY] lacking in solidarity and fraternity.

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George Scialabba's The Sealed Envelope will be published by Yale this winter.