Richard Rorty and the Failure of Discourse

 by George Shadroui  

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Almost a decade after he tried to mobilize a thoughtful left, Richard Rorty is feeling hopeless: in his view structural economic problems are unmanageable, the religious right is likely to usher in an era of fascism, and the working class left doesn’t comprehend Rorty’s political agenda.

With the possible exception of John Rawls, few philosophers over the past quarter century have been more widely heard or acknowledged on issues of politics and culture than Richard Rorty.
 
This is telling because to read most of his work is to lose oneself in the obscure regions of esoteric philosophical discourse. Names like Kant, Dewey, Foucault, Derrida, Heidegger and Wiggenstein get bandied about along with phrases about nature, knowledge, meaning and the order of things. We lay readers are hard pressed to make much sense of it. We can only presume that something important is at stake, for why else would intelligent people expend so much time mining these arcane fields?
 
John Diggins, in his highly readable book, The Promise of Pragmatism, notes:

At once influential and controversial, Richard Rorty is a unique figure in American intellectual life, a searching, profound scholar who has ceased believing in the promises of philosophy without ceasing to be credulous about the possibility of knowledge by other means. Not surprisingly, he has had a greater impact on literary theorists and intellectual historians than upon American philosophers themselves. (p. 450)

A 1983 review from the New York Review of Books, in which Rorty’s seminal work The Mirror of Nature is discussed, helps set the stage. “The End of Philosophy?” asks the headline. Upon such questions are careers and reputations made. The last such formulation to enter the mainstream of public discourse was Fukuyama’s “the end of history” and intellectuals debated its meaning for years. Rorty’s work has had a similar impact on his profession.
 
I shall not delve deeply into Rorty’s philosophy and not only because it is beyond my grasp. Rorty himself acknowledges that it is meaningless twaddle to the average citizen. Part of what makes Rorty interesting to untrained readers is that he bluntly admits the limits of what he calls “analytical philosophy” in charting a course to useful knowledge. He is no less frank about his brand of pragmatism, which in his view should not be vested with too much significance.
 
The NYRB reviewer states Rorty’s fundamental thesis: “The search for the indubitable foundations of our thought is no more likely to succeed than the search for the unicorn, and ought immediately (and for the same reason) to be called off.”
 
The implications of Rorty’s philosophy on his politics are not inconsequential, however, and we soon find ourselves treading on interesting ground. If there are no permanent truths but only transitory compromises aimed at improving our lives, on what basis are legal, cultural or political priorities established?
 
For Rorty, religion as a moral foundation is highly suspect. In a collection of interviews published in 2006, Take care of freedom and truth will take care of itself, Rorty is emphatic on this point.

Utilitarians and pragmatists like myself do not hope that human beings will become more religious or more rational. We hope instead that human beings will come to enjoy more money, more free time and greater social equality, and also that they will develop more empathy, more ability to put themselves in the shoes of others. We hope that human beings will behave more decently toward one another as their standard of living improves. (p. 68)

This is a strange formulation for several reasons. For starters, why are equality, empathy or decency values to which people should aspire as opposed to efficiency or brutal competition? There have been plenty of thinkers – Bentham, Ayn Rand and Nietzsche come to mind – who might disagree.
 
If we have discovered no truths over the past few millenniums, how is it that Rorty, as he strives for a just society, winds up espousing values and principles rooted in the very systems he debunks? Rorty’s general antagonism toward religion is obvious, but he aims particularly at the religious right.  Let me excerpt just a few comments sprinkled throughout these interviews.

It’s certainly true that Christianity softened Europe up for the idea of egalitarian democracy. But I suspect the idea would have emerged even if we had all worshipped Baal. (p. 119).
 
Whether the possibility of rearing new Martin Luther Kings is worth the risk of rearing new Jerry Falwells is a matter of risk management. To my mind, the advantage of getting rid of the Falwells is worth the risk of getting rid of the Kings. (p. 118)
 
But on the whole I think religion still does more political harm than good. Certainly in the U.S., the `born-again Christians’ who support Bush make up a reactionary and very dangerous movement. (p. 157)
 
I don’t think religion is going to be very important in America, where religious toleration is fairly well established, and the difference between Christians, Jews, and Muslims is not essential. What is important is the contrast between fundamentalist religions and nonfundamentalist ones, because it is the difference between fanatics and nonfanatics, fascists and democrats. The members of the fundamentalist churches in the U.S. tend to be fanatically prejudiced and fanatically violent, and they are just not trustworthy citizens of the country. Theirs is a return to the churches as a way to establish a sense of identity that excludes infidels, nonfundamentalists, and nonbelievers. (p. 61)

Even if this interview were conducted prior to 9/11 (it is not dated), it is fully in keeping with the leftist notion that American Baptists pose a greater threat to our long-term liberties than enemies abroad who attack our cities or lace our mail with anthrax. Even the thoughtful left, of which Rorty is a part, seems more worried about the occasional rant by Pat Robertson than about fascists in Iraq, Iran or North Korea who have openly declared their desire to commit global genocide. This disconnect is impossible to comprehend even for an enlightenment Catholic like myself.
 
Rorty’s inability to acknowledge the role of Judeo-Christian values in pacifying the human heart and enriching human experience is telling. He strains to root human compassion in sentimentality or material circumstances that allow human beings to make humane choices, but does not explain how the most blindingly profound moral code known to man emerged from a poor, backwater colony of the Roman Empire.
 
Rorty calls himself a “Dissent” leftist. Long ago he joined Irving Howe in breaking with the Stalinists but not with the idea of creating a more just society based on socialist principles in which power is invested in the state. While he accepts the free market as a necessary evil, he still speaks of it as an evil. Those who embrace market mechanisms as the best way to lift economic hopes are dismissed, generally, as greedy, conniving, and exploitative. This is particularly true in Rorty’s political tract, Achieving Our Country, which appeared in the late 1990s.
 
David Horowitz ably dissected this book but I think a few points are worth revisiting. Rorty has absolutely nothing good to say about any conservative or Republican. He can favorably mention people like Eleanor Roosevelt, Jesse Jackson, Angela Davis, Noam Chomsky, John Kenneth Galbraith and Michael Harrington, despite their many flaws and misguided notions, but he cannot manage a generous thought for conservatives like Winston Churchill, Bill Buckley, Ronald Reagan or T. S. Eliot, people who helped mobilize the West against dogmatic materialism of the fascist and Stalinist variety. This is more than an oversight, it is intellectually dishonest.
 
The rich are the enemy in Rorty’s reasoning but beyond mobilizing unions and the working class and redistributing wealth en masse, it is difficult to grasp precisely what his political agenda might be. "We Americans did not need Marx to show us the need for redistribution, or to tell us that the state was often little more than the executive committee of the rich and powerful," he writes.
 
Well, if you are thoroughly confused, join the club. Most of the liberals mentioned approvingly by Rorty are advocates if not participants in the empowered state. It is they, not Bill Buckley, who have advocated leveraging that power to grant favors, redistribute wealth and to tinker endlessly with the marketplace (sometimes necessarily, sometimes not) in which billions of free choices create the economic landscape. 
 
Rorty often sounds like a man who no longer believes what he preaches, but somehow can’t summon the energy it would take to write a new sermon. Horowitz noticed. While he credited Rorty for dissecting what is wrong with the new left, he also suggested that Rorty’s refusal to break with the left was a failure of political courage. In these times of near leftist monopoly of the academy it would be imprudent indeed for the reigning philosopher king to alienate himself from the political establishment as it exists on our campuses today. To do so is to risk ostracism and obscurity.

Rorty has no intention of abandoning a movement in whose causes he has toiled as a life-long partisan. When all his complaints are registered, the left remains in his eyes the "party of hope," the only possible politics a decent, humane and moral intellectual could embrace. This familiar air of invincible self-righteousness, and the almost religious conviction with which it is expressed, make Rorty’s lament at once a desperate and revealing case, an emblem of the impossible quandary in which the American left now finds itself. (Horowitz)

Rorty recognizes the left’s failure to offer a pragmatic agenda or even to articulate a revived vision, but nevertheless cannot surrender the dream, no matter how nightmarish it turned out. As Horowitz observed:

The true source of the left’s negativism is its guilty recognition that the future it promoted for two hundred years killed tens of millions, impoverished billions and, in the end, didn’t work. Achieving Our Country is a disappointing book by a man who should know better, but like so many other pundits of today’s radical academy doesn’t have the intellectual grit to admit that he was wrong.

Almost a decade later, Rorty continues his attacks on the system, but without having moved forward any solutions on how to fix the problems he identifies. 

. . . the most important fact about American society is that the globalization of the labor market is driving down U.S. wages and it’s producing not exactly unemployment, but employment at a starvation wage. If a husband and wife in America both work for the minimum wage, they take home about twenty thousand dollars a year, but no one can raise a family in the U.S. on twenty thousand dollars a year. For the people who work for minimum wage, which is going to be more and more of America, there is no future. Sooner or later there will be a populist upheaval, probably from the fascist right. (TCF, p. 62)

After the Supreme Court stopped the travesty unfolding during the 2000 election, Rorty, like most of the left, was beside himself:
 
I quite agree that the Supreme Court tarnished its own image and dealt a severe blow to the legitimacy of the system. I think that Justice Scalia will be seen as having dome more damage to the court, and to American democracy, than any of predecessors since Taney, the author of the Dred Scott decision. (p. 112)

He has no solutions, only laments. 

My hunch is that the normal cycle of boom and bust doesn’t matter much as long as the long-term average income of the middle class keeps going down, and the gap between rich and poor keeps growing. I don’t think there’s anything that is going to reverse that. I don’t have any optimistic suggestions . . . as long as the standard of living of the middle-class in the democracies is in danger, democratic government is in danger.

He suggests (I happen to agree with him) that America is becoming a fantasy factory rather than a tough, realistic republic of the old-fashioned variety. We churn out television, movies, music, much of it nihilistic in substance and tone or so far-fetched as to have no meaningful lesson to our everyday lives. Children should be allowed to indulge in Disney fantasies from time to time, but do we really want our nation ruled by people raised on “reality” television?
 
Again, a conservative might suggest traditional religious faith as at least a partial answer to this nihilism, but Rorty has rejected religion or traditional moral discourse as ways to mitigate this cultural decline. And so, almost a decade after he tried to mobilize a thoughtful left, Rorty is feeling hopeless: in his view structural economic problems are unmanageable, the religious right is likely to usher in an era of fascism, and the working class left doesn’t comprehend Rorty’s political agenda.
 
What is most troubling is the arrogant dogmatism so apparent in his rhetoric, as if conservatives have never considered these issues but honestly reached different conclusions about how to best confront them. Buckley wrote in his book Four Reforms that he knew that an evening in the company of a Pablo Casals playing Bach was more meaningful than an evening with the Rolling Stones. But beyond lamenting misguided popular taste, Buckley observed, he could not justify trying to impose his will on the market mechanisms by which free individuals made their preference for Mick Jagger known.
 
Nor would you know reading Rorty (though Eugene Genovese, also a leftist, has acknowledged it) that there is an enlightened critique of capitalism on the right that can be traced all the way back to Burke. More recently, Russell Kirk, George Will and others have argued convincingly that as citizens we have obligations that extend beyond the board rooms of corporate America.
 
Rorty has apparently never met a thoughtful or decent religious conservative. I see them daily, so the problem isn’t that they are in short supply. The problem is that for Rorty, and many others on the left, conversation and dialogue ends at the conservative water’s edge. Rorty has spent a lifetime debunking the possibility of eternal truths but his political commentary might force one to rethink that supposition; leftist dogmatism and arrogance – alas – will be with us always.

Political Theory, Humanities, Language, Academia, Histo

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