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📙 Philosophy and Social Hope

Author: Richard Rorty

Full Title: Philosophy and Social Hope

Highlights from September 19th, 2020.

I have been suggesting that we think of pragmatism as an attempt to alter our self-image so as to make it consistent with the Darwinian claim that we differ from other animals simply in the complexity of our behaviour.
The big change in the outlook of the intellectuals – as opposed to a change in human nature – that happened around 1910 was that they began to be confident that human beings had only bodies, and no souls. The resulting this-worldliness made them receptive to the idea that one’s sexual behaviour did not have much to do with one’s moral worth – an idea that the Enlightenment-minded author of ‘Locksley Hall’ still found impossible to accept. It is hard to disentangle the idea that we have an immortal soul from the belief that this soul can be stained by the commission of certain sexual acts. For sex is the first thing that comes to mind when we think about the human body as something located down there, underneath the human soul. So when we started thinking that we might have only complicated, accomplished, vulnerable bodies, and no souls, the word ‘impurity’ began to lose both sexual overtones and moral resonance.
The main reason religion needs to be privatized is that, in political discussion with those outside the relevant religious community, it is a conversation-stopper.
an appropriate response by nonreligious interlocutors to the claim that abortion is required (or forbidden) by the will of God. He does not think it good enough to say: OK, but since I don’t think there is such a thing as the will of God, and since I doubt that we’ll get anywhere arguing theism vs. atheism, let’s see if we have some shared premises on the basis of which to continue our argument about abortion. He thinks such a reply would be condescending and trivializing. But are we atheist interlocutors supposed to try to keep the conversation going by saying, ‘Gee! I’m impressed. You must have a really deep, sincere faith’?
The best parts of his very thoughtful, and often persuasive, book are those in which he points up the inconsistency of our behaviour, and the hypocrisy involved in saying that believers somehow have no right to base their political views on their religious faith, whereas we atheists have every right to base ours on Enlightenment philosophy. The claim that in doing so we are appealing to reason, whereas the religious are being irrational, is hokum. Carter is quite right to debunk it.
Carter is also right to say that liberal theory has not shown that ‘the will of any of the brilliant philosophers of the liberal tradition, or, for that matter, the will of the Supreme Court of the United States, is more relevant to moral decisions than the will of God’. But he is wrong in suggesting that it has to show this. All liberal theory has to show is that moral decisions that are to be enforced by a pluralist and democratic state’s monopoly of violence are best made by public discussion in which voices claiming to be God’s, or reason’s, or science’s, are put on a par with everybody else’s.
I take the point of Rawls and Habermas, as of Dewey and Peirce, to be that the epistemology suitable for such a democracy is one in which the only test of a political proposal is its ability to gain assent from people who retain radically diverse ideas about the point and meaning of human life, about the path to private perfection.
Carter seems to think that religious believers’ moral convictions are somehow more deeply interwoven with their self-identity than those of atheists with theirs. He seems unwilling to admit that the role of Enlightenment ideology in giving meaning to the lives of atheists is just as great as Christianity’s role in giving meaning to his own life.
Failed prophecies often make invaluable inspirational reading. Consider two examples: the New Testament and the Communist Manifesto.
Analogously, we cannot be sure but that some day we may catch sight of new ideals which will replace those that Marx and Engels dismissively called ‘bourgeois individuality, bourgeois independence, and bourgeois freedom’. But we have waited patiently for regimes calling themselves ‘Marxist’ to explain to us exactly what these new ideals look like, and how they are to be realized in practice. So far, all such regimes have turned out to be throwbacks to pre-Enlightenment barbarism rather than the first glimmerings of a post-Enlightenment utopia.
Just as the Christians have counselled patience, and assured us that it is unfair to judge Christ by the mistakes of his sinful servants, so the Marxists have assured us that all the ‘Marxist’ regimes so far have been absurd perversions of Marx’s intent. The few surviving Marxists now admit that the Communist parties of Lenin, Mao and Castro bore no resemblance to the empowered proletariat of Marx’s dreams, but were merely the tools of autocrats and oligarchs. Nevertheless, they tell us, some day there will be a genuinely revolutionary, genuinely proletarian, party – a party whose triumph will bring us a freedom as unlike ‘bourgeois freedom’ as the Christian doctrine that love is the only law is unlike the arbitrary dictates of Leviticus.
Just as the New Testament is still read by millions of people who spend little time wondering whether Christ will some day return in glory, so the Communist Manifesto is still read even by those of us who hope and believe that full social justice can be attained without a revolution of the sort Marx predicted: that a classless society, a world in which ‘the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all’ can come about as a result of what Marx despised as ‘bourgeois reformism’. Parents and teachers should encourage young people to read both books. The young will be morally better for having done so.
The children need to read Christ’s message of human fraternity alongside Marx and Engel’s account of how industrial capitalism and free markets – indispensable as they have turned out to be – make it very difficult to institute that fraternity. They need to see their lives as given meaning by efforts towards the realization of the moral potential inherent in our ability to communicate our needs and our hopes to one another. They should learn stories both about Christian congregations meeting in the catacombs and about workers’ rallies in city squares. For both have played equally important roles in the long process of actualizing this potentiality.
Hope often takes the form of false prediction, as it did in both documents. But hope for social justice is nevertheless the only basis for a worthwhile human life.
Christianity and Marxism still have the power to do a great deal of harm, for both the New Testament and the Communist Manifesto can still be effectively quoted by moral hypocrites and egomaniacal gangsters.
To say that history is ‘the history of class struggle’ is still true, if it is interpreted to mean that in every culture, under every form of government, and in every imaginable situation (e.g., England when Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries, Indonesia after the Dutch went home, China after Mao’s death, Britain and America under Thatcher and Reagan) the people who have already got their hands on money and power will lie, cheat and steal in order to make sure that they and their descendants monopolize both for ever.
The trade union movement, which Marx and Engels thought of as only a transition to the establishment of revolutionary political parties, has turned out to be the most inspiring embodiment of the Christian virtues of self-sacrifice and of fraternal agape in recorded history.
The words of the Gospels and of the Manifesto may have provided equal quantities of courage and inspiration. But there are many respects in which the Manifesto is a better book to give to the young than the New Testament. For the latter document is morally flawed by its otherworldliness, by its suggestion that we can separate the question of our individual relation to God – our individual chance for salvation – from our participation in cooperative efforts to end needless suffering.
The New Testament, a document of the ancient world, accepts one of the central convictions of the Greek philosophers who urge that contemplation of universal truths is the ideal life for a human being.
This conviction leads the writers of the New Testament to turn their attention from the possibility of a better human future to the hope of pie in the sky when we die. The only utopia these writers can imagine is in another world altogether.
It would be best, of course, if we could find a new document to provide our children with inspiration and hope – one which was as free of the defects of the New Testament as of those of the Manifesto.
It would be good to have a reformist text, one which lacked the apocalyptic character of both books – which did not say that all things must be made new, or that justice ‘can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions’.
My native country has world-historical importance only because it cast itself in the role of vanguard of a global egalitarian utopia. It no longer casts itself in that role, and is therefore in danger of losing its soul. The spirit which animated the writing of Whitman and Dewey is no longer present.
The core of Dewey’s thought was an insistence that nothing – not the Will of God, not the Intrinsic Nature of Reality, not the Moral Law – can take precedence over the result of agreement freely reached by members of a democratic community.
The reason this kind of philosophy is relevant to politics is simply that it encourages people to have a self-image in which their real or imagined citizenship in a democratic republic is central. This kind of anti-authoritarian philosophy helps people set aside religious and ethnic identities in favour of an image of themselves as part of a great human adventure, one carried out on a global scale. This kind of philosophy, so to speak, clears philosophy out of the way in order to let the imagination play upon the possibilities of a utopian future.
Our long, hesitant, painful recovery, over the last five decades, from the breakdown of democratic institutions during the Dark Years (2014–2044) has changed our political vocabulary, as well as our sense of the relation between the moral order and the economic order.
Most of the moral progress that took place in the second half of the twentieth century was brought about by the Supreme Court’s invocation of constitutional rights, in such decisions as Brown v. Board of Education (1954) and Romer v. Evans (1996), the first Supreme Court decision favourable to homosexuals. But this progress was confined almost entirely to improvements in the situation of groups identified by race, ethnicity or sexuality.
But though such groups could use the rhetoric of rights to good effect, the trade unions, the unemployed and those employed at the ludicrously low minimum wage ($174 an hour, in 2095 dollars, compared with the present minimum of $400) could not.
Our nation’s leaders, in the last decade of the old century and the first of the new, seemed never to have thought that it might be dangerous to make automatic weapons freely and cheaply available to desperate men and women – people without hope – living next to the centres of transportation and communication. Those weapons burst into the streets in 2014, in the revolution that, leaving the cities in ruins and dislocating American economic life, plunged the country into the Second Great Depression.
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.
The Democratic Vistas Party, the coalition of trade unions and churches that toppled the military dictatorship in 2044, has retained control of Congress by successfully convincing the voters that its opponents constitute ‘the parties of selfishness’.
In the first two centuries of American history Jefferson’s use of rights had set the tone for political discourse, but now political argument is not about who has the right to what but about what can best prevent the re-emergence of hereditary castes – either racial or economic.
Various as the definitions of ‘postmodern’ are, most of them have something to do with a perceived loss of unity.
The inability to believe has increased steadily during the last few decades, as it has become clear that Europe is no longer in command of the planet, and that the sociopolitical future of humanity has become utterly unforeseeable.
Unlike their ancestors, these Europeans felt that they could go it alone – that they could achieve human perfection without reliance on a nonhuman power.
The Romantics were inspired by the successes of antimonarchist and anticlericalist revolutions to think that the desire for something to obey is a symptom of immaturity. These successes made it possible to envisage building a new Jerusalem without divine assistance, thereby creating a society in which men and women would lead the perfected lives which had previously seemed possible only in an invisible, immaterial, post-mortem paradise. The image of progress toward such a society – horizontal progress, so to speak – began to take the place of Platonic or Dantean images of vertical ascent. History began to replace God, Reason and Nature as the source of human hope.
From Plato to Hegel, it was natural to think of the various ways of leading a human life as hierarchically ordered.
Women were said to have less of this ingredient than men, barbarians than Greeks, slaves than free men, true believers than heathens, blacks than whites, and so on.
After Darwin, however, it became possible to believe that Nature is not leading up to anything – that Nature has nothing in mind.
It suggested further that humans have to dream up the point of human life, and cannot appeal to a nonhuman standard to determine whether they have chosen wisely.
Such developments made it possible to see the aim of social organization as freedom rather than virtue, and to see the virtues in Meno’s way rather than Socrates’: as a collection of unrelated sorts of excellence. It became possible to substitute a Rabelaisian sense of the value of sheer human variety for a Platonic search for unity. In particular, these developments helped people to see sex as no more bestial, no ‘lower’, than any other source of human delight (for example, religious devotion, philosophical reflection, or artistic creation). In the twentieth century, the thought that we are free citizens of democratically ruled republics has gone hand in hand with the thought that our neighbours’ sources of private pleasure are none of our business.
The culminating moment of this line of thought comes with pragmatism’s renunciation of the idea that truth consists in correspondence with reality. For this renunciation has as a corollary that the search for truth is not distinct from the search for human happiness. It also implies that there is no need to make all true propositions cohere into one unified vision of how things are.
In a sense, the critics of Utilitarianism and pragmatism are right in saying that these doctrines animalize human beings. For both drop the idea of the extra added ingredient. They substitute the idea that human beings have, thanks to having invented language, a much larger behavioural repertoire than the beasts, and thus much more diverse and interesting ways of finding joy.
I think it is important for an understanding of post-Darwinian intellectual life to grasp the importance of the pragmatists’ refusal to accept the correspondence account of truth: the theory that true beliefs are accurate representations of a pre-existent reality.
The link between Darwinism and pragmatism is clearest if one asks oneself the following question: At what point in biological evolution did organisms stop just coping with reality and start representing it? To pose the riddle is to suggest the answer: Maybe they never did start representing it.
Maybe the whole idea of mental representation was just an uncashable and unfruitful metaphor. Maybe this metaphor was inspired by the same need to get in touch with a powerful nonhuman authority which made the priests think themselves more truly human than the warriors.
Conflict between beliefs adopted for diverse purposes will only arise when we engage in projects of social cooperation, when we need to agree about what is to be done.
So the pursuit of a political Utopia becomes disjoined from both religion and science. It has no religious or scientific or philosophical foundations, but only utilitarian and pragmatic ones.
A liberal democratic utopia, on the pragmatists’ view, is no truer to human nature or the demands of an ahistorical moral law than is a fascist tyranny. But it is much more likely to produce greater human happiness. A perfected society will not live up to a pre-existent standard, but will be an artistic achievement, produced by the same long and difficult process of trial and error as is required by any other creative effort.
I turn now to some questions which have begun to burden intellectuals in recent decades, and which are often referred to as ‘the problems of postmodernity’. These questions are raised by the fact that, as Clifford Geertz puts it, the liberalism, the aspiration towards such a perfected society, is itself ‘a culturally specific phenomenon, born in the West and perfected there’.
Pragmatists are entirely at home with the idea that political theory should view itself as suggestions for future action emerging out of recent historical experience, rather than attempting to legitimate the outcome of that experience by reference to something ahistorical.
We pragmatists are not arguing that modern Europe has any superior insight into eternal, ahistorical realities. We do not claim any superior rationality. We claim only an experimental success: we have come up with a way of bringing people into some degree of comity, and of increasing human happiness, which looks more promising than any other way which has been proposed so far.
I think these are three plausible reasons for believing that neither democratic freedom nor philosophical pluralism will survive the next century. If I were a wagering Olympian, I might well bet my fellow divinities that pragmatism, Utilitarianism and liberalism would, among mortals, be only faint memories in a hundred years’ time.
Insofar as ‘postmodern’ philosophical thinking is identified with a mindless and stupid cultural relativism – with the idea that any fool thing that calls itself culture is worthy of respect – then I have no use for such thinking. But I do not see that what I have called ‘philosophical pluralism’ entails any such stupidity. The reason to try persuasion rather than force, to do our best to come to terms with people whose convictions are archaic and ingenerate, is simply that using force, or mockery, or insult, is likely to decrease human happiness.
Many of my fellow philosophers use the term ‘postmodernist relativism’ as if it were a pleonasm, and as if utilitarians, pragmatists and philosophical pluralists generally had committed a sort of ‘treason of the clerks’, as Julien Benda puts it. They often suggest that if philosophers had united behind the good old theologicometaphysical verities – or if James and Nietzsche had been strangled in their cradles – the fate of mankind might have been different. Just as Christian fundamentalists tell us that tolerance of homosexuality leads to the collapse of civilization, so those who would have us return to Plato and Kant believe that Utilitarianism and pragmatism may weaken our intellectual and moral fibre.
The utopian social hope which sprang up in nineteenth-century Europe is still the noblest imaginative creation of which we have record.