National pride is to countries what self-respect
is to individuals: a necessary condition for self-improvement.
-Richard Rorty, Achieving
Our Country
In a series of essays originally presented as the 1997 William E. Massey Sr. Lectures in the History of American Civilization, Richard Rorty undertakes the much needed task of rescuing the American Left from the anti-Americanism and theoretical navel-gazing in which it has become trapped and redirecting it towards a legislative agenda of progressive reform. He hopes to refocus the Left on the goal of perfecting America, of achieving the kind of America envisioned by Walt Whitman and John Dewey. Unfortunately, the book is marred by the general weaknesses of the Leftist critique of society and by the particular weakness of Rorty's (and Dewey's) philosophy : pragmatism. The result is a book which offers American liberalism a much needed kick in the pants, but which is spectacularly wrong headed on virtually every one of its historical assessments and its positive proposals for the future.
In his useful but overly boosterish book, The Metaphysical Club, Louis Menand describes how a group of intellectuals including Oliver Wendell Holmes, William James, Charles Sanders Peirce, John Dewey, and Jane Addams developed the concept of pragmatism, which the Encyclopaedia Britannica defines as follows :
PRAGMATISM :
school of philosophy, dominant in the United States
during the first quarter of the 20th century,
based on the principle that the usefulness, workability,
and practicality of ideas, policies, and
proposals are the criteria of their merit. It stresses
the priority of action over doctrine, of
experience over fixed principles, and it holds that
ideas borrow their meanings from their
consequences and their truths from their verification.
Thus, ideas are essentially instruments and
plans of action.
Menand argued that they adopted this belief, that the truthfulness or value of an idea resides in its social utility, in response to a desire to drain political disagreements of their ideological passion, passions which they blamed for the defining moment of their generation, the bloody Civil War. No longer would humankind come into conflict merely because different peoples believed in different truths, instead the sole test of the truth of an idea would be whether it worked in practice.
I've discussed some of the internal inconsistencies of pragmatism in that earlier review, but Mr. Rorty's continued adherence to these notions combined with his demand for progressive government highlight a particularly absurd aspect of his philosophy. Because if we accept, for the sake of argument, that ideas should be judged solely by their effectiveness, then it is necessary to judge nearly all of the agenda that progressives foisted upon us in the 20th Century to have been a failure, and, therefore, the idea that progressive politic solutions can improve society must be false. From socialism to communism to fascism to the New Deal to the Great Society, from nationalizing industries to redistribution of wealth to wage and price controls to centralized economic planning to welfare, the Left's experiments with using government to ameliorate social problems has been a complete disaster. By the 1990s such extravagant utopian versions of Leftish ideology as the Soviet Union and the Swedish model of socialism had collapsed; even the United States, which among the industrialized nations had adopted the most minimal reforms, was teetering on the edge of bankruptcy; and a liberal president, who just a few years earlier had tried installing a socialized health care system, was forced to acknowledge that "the era of big government is over." It escaped no one's notice--except apparently for Mr. Rorty's and that of some others on the Left--that the United States, with the least government, lowest taxes, and most economic freedom of any nation, also had the most vibrant and productive economy and the highest standard of living. This realization has led much of the rest of the world to try emulating the American system, a process which has come to be called globalization and which is introducing freedom to societies where it had previously been unknown--Russia, China, etc.--and expanding freedom in countries which had unfortunately flirted with statism--from New Zealand to Chile to Israel to Mexico. The few regions and nations which so far refuse to go along with the wave of globalization--the Islamic World, most of Africa, North Korea, and Cuba--find themselves falling further and further behind the rest of the world in terms of economic development. Yet, Mr. Rorty continues to believe in the efficacy of big government? What a strange brand of pragmatism he practices.
So before the reader can continue, he must dismiss Mr. Rorty's avowal of pragmatism, and consider him just as a leftist critiquing what has become of the Left. Here he is, of course, on safer ground, for if the Left has been proven disastrously wrong in its general approach, it stands to reason that you can pick them apart on discrete issues. So Mr. Rorty traces the decline of the Left first to the split between the Old Left, or as he calls them the "reformist Left" :
...all those Americans who struggled within the framework
of constitutional democracy to protect the weak from the strong.
This includes
lots of people who called themselves 'communists'
and 'socialist'...
and the New Left :
...people--mostly students--who decided, around 1964, that it was no longer possible to work for social justice within the system.
In his view, the reformist Left, which combined intellectuals and the labor and civil rights movements, had been able to achieve many good things by pushing to reform the system and make it more progressive. But the more radical New Left was so disdainful of the system that they stopped trying to squeeze what they could out of it. He compares their ideology to a religious theology, obviously anathema to a pragmatist, in the way that they perceived the system as contaminated by sin and holds that their desire to keep themselves pure, unsullied by stooping to function within the system, cost them the opportunity to continue the work of reform.
In more recent times, as the students of the New Left have moved on to pursue careers in journalism, the arts, and most importantly academia, as they have become, in Roger Kimball's felicitous phrase, "tenured radicals", Mr. Rorty says that they have largely forsaken the pursuit of economic equality in favor of an attempt to eradicate what he calls "sadism." By sadism he really means various forms of prejudice, or animus directed towards groups because of their ethnicity, race, sex, physical status, or sexual orientation. He notes that the Old Left had assumed that such feelings of animosity would automatically disappear with the coming of economic equality and the end of insecurity and selfishness, but the new "Cultural Left" assumes that American culture and the democratic capitalist system are beyond redemption, so they wait in their ivory towers for the collapse of so called "late capitalism." When they stopped believing that the system could be improved, they stopped believing in America. They are now merely spectators, rather than the agents of change that Mr. Rorty wants them to be.
If this was all that Mr. Rorty had to say about the Left it would be possible to agree with him, but throughout his discussion of the problems of the New Left and the Cultural Left he also gives them great credit for the "good" things that they accomplished. For the New Left this chiefly consists of getting America to quit Vietnam, for the Cultural Left it is the imposition of standards of political correctness on campus and their gradual encroachment upon much of society. At this point it is fair to ask what remains of the author's earlier claims of pragmatism. By what conceivable measure can it be said that the consequences of the North Vietnamese takeover of South Vietnam and of the Khmer Rouge takeover of Cambodia were desirable? What useful results flowed from the way in which student radicals and their intellectual fellow travelers tore apart American society in the late 60s and early 70s? Who has benefited from the identity politics that the Cultural Left espouses? Is America a less hateful society today, when blacks, women, gays, etc. are taught that they are oppressed by straight white Christian males, or is it not the case that these groups are being inculcated with hate? Are affirmative action quotas that deny jobs to certain qualified candidates on the basis of race, sex, sexual orientation, or whatever other reasons any less repulsive when they are applied to groups which have historically succeeded in American society than they were when applied to those who were less successful? Is it really acceptable to discriminate against someone because their grandfathers and great grandfathers succeeded? And more importantly from a pragmatist's standpoint, does this kind of discrimination work? That is, does it lessen the tension between the races and the sexes and does it give us higher quality students and employees? Well, the answers to all those questions seem fairly obvious, don't they?
There's another more curious way in which Mr. Rorty's supposed pragmatism deserts him; that's in his complete disdain for conservatism. Despite his earlier disavowals of the possibility of arriving at any objective truth, there's one thing he knows : conservative beliefs are false. Thus, although he does differentiate between the various strains of Leftism, bending over backwards to include them all in "the Left" generally and to give them credit for being at least a part of the progressive reform movement, he makes no similar allowances for the Right, leading him to the following unintentionally hilarious comparison :
A hundred years from now, [Irving]
Howe and [John
Kenneth] Galbraith, [Michael] Harrington
and [Arthur]
Schlesinger , [Woodrow]
Wilson
and [Eugene V.] Debs, Jane
Addams and Angela
Davis, Felix
Frankfurter and John
L. Lewis, W. E. B. DuBois
and Eleanor
Roosevelt, Robert
Reich and Jesse
Jackson, will all be remembered for having advanced the cause of social
justice. They will be seen as
having been 'on the Left.' The difference between
these people and men like Calvin
Coolidge, Irving
Babbitt, T. S. Eliot, Robert
Taft, and
William Buckley will be
far clearer than any of the quarrels which once divided them among themselves.
Whatever mistakes they made,
these people will deserve, as Coolidge and Buckley
never will, the praise with which Jonathan Swift ended his own epitaph:
'imitate him if
you can; he served human liberty.'
Now, you can see that the rather motley crew of characters he's cited on the Left would appeal to someone who thinks that government should pervade our lives, but to cast them as servants of liberty is downright delusional. On the other hand, the men of the Right whom he chooses are each of them heroes to anyone who believes in a limited role for government. In fact, Mr. Rorty himself, perhaps unintentionally, acknowledges the difference when he later says that :
Nobody has yet suggested a viable leftist alternative
to the civic religion of which Whitman and Dewey were prophets. That
civic religion
centered around taking advantage of traditional
pride in American citizenship by substituting social justice for individual
freedom as our
country's principal goal.
If it is an honor to be able to say that you "served human liberty", as indeed I believe it is, then what honor accrues to those who renounce it? If the extension of liberty is the yardstick by which the future will measure us, then the names of men like Coolidge and Buckley will be hallowed.
Meanwhile, Mr. Rorty is right that Leftism is, at its quintessence, the pursuit of radical egalitarianism, the attempt to use the machinery of government to redistribute wealth in order that all men end up with an equal share of the economic pie. This is a vision which has appealed to many men in many places and in many times, but it has generally, with the brief exception of the Depression and post-Depression years, not found much favor here in America, because it represents the considered repudiation of individual freedom in favor of societal equality. But it should be maintained as a political ideal and a party ideology, for mankind has always been powerfully conflicted over which we desire more, freedom or security. It is incumbent on the Left to continue to offer a clear alternative, even if its ideas are in decline. But it is terribly dishonest for the Left to continue to use the language of liberty even as they pursue policies and programs that are antithetical to freedom.
Richard Rorty has performed a real service in these pages, in summoning
all of the factions of the Left back to their first principles, the achievement
of a utopian America in which all men are not merely created equal but
in which government guarantees that they end up equal. However, it
would have been a more helpful book, and more intellectually honest, if
he had acknowledged more forthrightly that the Left chooses equality rather
than freedom, and that when measured by his own pragmatic standards Leftism
and egalitarianism have proven, to say the least, disappointing, particularly
when compared to conservatism and the individual freedoms that the Right
espouses. The inescapable comparison is of America in the 60s &
70s to America in the 80s & 90s--who would choose the former?
Instead, the book seems intended to speak only to fellow Leftists and even
then only to those who have become spectators; who are equally dismissive
of the ideal of freedom; who think that Angela Davis and Robert Reich will
be remembered (let alone remembered favorably) a century from now; who
believe that globalization is evil; who too believe that it is possible
(and desirable) to purge Man's soul of all forms of prejudice; who believe,
in effect, that Man is self-created. One hopes and prays that's a
limited audience.
(Reviewed:08-Jan-02)
Grade: (D+)
