Studies in a Dying Culture

[Deepening Democracy in Global Contexts, Chapter One]
Achieving Our Country, Achieving Our World: Baldwin, Rorty, and Social Hope
Judith M. Green, Fordham University

If anything shows up the ideological nature and ultimate uselessness of pragmatism, this review does, first, by exposing the selective attention, nostalgia, myth-making and wish-fulfillment upon which Rorty’s social vision rests, and second, inadvertently, by exposing the ultimate illogic embodied in the reviewer’s own commitment to Deweyianism and left-wing Catholicism.

Rorty castigates the academic left (the inheritor of the New Left of the late ’60s) for abandoning the positive patriotic social vision of radical reformism and economic issues in favor of cultural issues and an ideology of national shame. This of course, is a result of the radicalism of the late ’60s, most notably the anti-war movement, which Rorty praises and then forgets. Marxists and academic leftists are castigated as purists and metaphysicians, spectators rather than active collaborators in reform movements. (Rorty scorns “participatory democracy” as well.)

Green demonstrates that Rorty is himself a spectator and grounds his nostalgic Whitman-Deweyesque left-liberal reformism on a fantasy, refusing to face up to the repressed truth Baldwin demands in the phrase Rorty purloins.

There is an epistemology that accompanies Rorty’s political program, a rejection of the correspondence theory of truth, in other words, rejection of objective knowledge in favor of subjective consensus.

. . . Rorty rejects not only “objectivity, ” but any conception of truth or social knowledge that could trump or ought properly to guide individual judgment about what to do and to become, other than democratically achieved universal consensus. Thus, America’s history, identity, and future are what “we” say they are, a reflection of our image of our country. It is the responsibility of intellectuals to evoke a desirable image through inspiring stories that attract action-guiding consensus, reflecting our fears and inspiring transformative action guided by our hopes.

While Green points out a number of discrepancies in Rorty’s take on history and politics, she fails to note affinities between Rorty and the multiculti academic left of which he is a part. Rorty can accuse the academic left of abandoning traditional economic and labor issues in favor of cultural and identity issues all he likes, but Rorty himself is a quintessential expression of the disintegration of the universalist rationalism of earlier times. Although not of the same cohort, Rorty’s own philosophy (and its effect on the younger intellectual generation) is a symptom of that very yuppification of the ’60s social movements that became the cultural left he decries. Rorty criticizes the postmodernists for philosophy-addiction and theoretical preoccupation with social “sin” rather than construction of a practical political platform. Green does point out that Rorty’s politics don’t have the practical grounding he preaches.

Rorty’s social hope depends upon forgetting and denial–forgetting the quest for knowledge, denying any particular knowledge claims about the real that might limit imagination and therefore hope, denying any traditional claims of human or nonhuman authority, forgetting eternity and extra-human divinity. Rorty sees the image of America he attributes to Whitman and Dewey as retaining the Christian scriptures’ emphasis on fraternity and loving kindness while excising “supernatural parentage, immortality, providence, and–most important–sin” . . .

Green supplies a revealing quote from Rorty:

Repudiating the correspondence theory of truth was Dewey’s way of restating, in philosophical terms, Whitman’s claim that America does not need to place itself within a frame of reference. Great Romantic poems, such as “Song of Myself” or the United States of America, are supposed to break through previous frames of reference, not be intelligible within them. To say that the United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem is to say that America will create the taste by which it will be judged. It is to envisage our nation-state as both self-creating poet and self-created poem. (Rorty 1998: 29)

This is self-confessed mythmaking at its most bankrupt. Green argues that Rorty has Dewey wrong, with a postscript on how Rorty gets Whitman wrong as well. She also punctures Rortyp;s misreading of his two heroes, Irving Howe and A. Philip Randolph, as well as Rorty’s preference for “campaigns” as opposed to “movements”.

Green also questions Rorty’s advocacy of reform within the accepted system of market capitalism as an inadequate response to globalization.

There are several interpretations of “multiculturalism,” and Green sees Rorty’s attack on the concept, promoting instead an individualistic and joyous “social hope”, as a denial of the brutal realities of our history that Baldwin advocated facing. Rorty criticizes academia but inadequately addresses its undemocratic structures.

With respect to democratizing academia, Green lauds her own institution, Fordham University, for its efforts in promoting diversity, etc., recognizing the pluses and minuses of its association with the Catholic Church.

Here Green injects her own Catholicism into the discussion. We’ll bookmark this juncture for the moment, to return to the beginning of the essay, where Green confesses her own orientation:

Though I also write as an American pragmatist philosopher who admires Whitman, Dewey, and Baldwin, and who agrees that intellectuals have a great and urgent responsibility to work toward deepening democracy in the contemporary global situation, my own cultural location and generational commitments are very different than Rorty’s. I am a Midwest-born child of the working class and the labor unions with whom Rorty seeks renewed solidarity; a member of the student generation whose effective opposition to the Vietnam War he grudgingly praises and then forgets; a critic of the institutional framework of constitutional democracy and global capitalism he accepts and a proponent of the the processes of “participatory democracy” he fears; an ethnically conscious Irish American university professor teaching courses in African American philosophy, Native American philosophy, and feminism and thus, a member of the “cultural” Left he castigates; a Catholic activist immersed in faith- and love-based causes of social and environmental justice, and thus, a native speaker of one of the religious languages Rorty proposes to ban from the public square.

So, where we bookmarked her argument with Rorty, Green attacks him at what is arguably his most progressive stance, his advocacy of banishment of religion from the public sphere.

She claims that Rorty’s semi-Hegelian version of civil religion is based on a misreading of Jefferson, William James, and Dewey and that Rorty ignores actual communities.

In addition to her confession of left-wing Catholicism, Green mentions philosophical organizations such as Society for the Study of Africana Philosophy, Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy, Radical Philosophy Association, Study of Africana Philosophy, and the Philosophy Born of Struggle Association. This is where she disintegrates into the obscurantism so typical of the academic left. All of these organizations are packed with philosophically dubious tendencies, though none so reprehensible as Catholicism itself. The pragmatist revival, opportunist, incoherent, subjectivist and propagandistic, is the facilitator of all the contemporary intellectual tendencies of pseudo-radical obscurantism.