Persky on Rorty

Part of an excellent essay by Stan Persky on Richard Rorty:

[...]

Among his generation, [Richard] Rorty was unusual in not deprecating or despising the New Left of the 1960s and ‘70s. Though he was critical of the tumultuous student movement at the time, he thought retrospectively that it had done a pretty good job on a number of issues, especially peace and feminism. He was more sharply critical of the “identity politics” of the Academic Left of the 1990s, which he regarded as a very fancy substitute for efforts to change the world.

As well, Rorty thought that a lot of the Old Left and the Old Liberals that he had grown up with–people like Norman Thomas, Sidney Hook, Irving Howe, A. Phillip Randolph and Lionel Trilling–had it pretty much right. He thought that a mixture of Old, New, and even some of the contemporary Cultural Left, all harnassed to pressing practical aims, would make for an improved, progressive politics.

Finally, he thought that a progressive American politics should be rooted in American thought–particularly the thought of Walt Whitman and John Dewey-and that while it should be unsparingly critical of American failures, as exemplified by his own denunciation of the Bush administration’s war in Iraq, it should not slide into a self-loathing that denied the virtues of American democracy. In short, Rorty was a patriotic American moderate leftist, which he judged to be the appropriate position for maximizing hope in the present era.     

The thinking underlying Rorty’s rather old-fashioned moderate leftism often made readers uneasy because what he says is not reassuring or comforting. What makes such readers uncomfortable is that Rorty doesn’t think that “people like us” — “we decent, liberal humanitarian types” — are absolutely or even fundamentally right.

Rather, “representatives of the moral community to which both my [readers] and I belong, are just luckier, not more insightful, than the bullies with whom we struggle.” Rorty is often dismissively read as being a “cultural relativist,” someone who believes that all views are equally valid. But he explicitly denies being a relativist of any sort, “if that means saying that every moral view is as good as any other. Our moral view is, I firmly believe, much better than any competing view, even though there are a lot of people whom you will never be able to convert to it. It is one thing to say, falsely, that there is nothing to choose between us and the Nazis. It is another thing to say, correctly, that there is no neutral, common ground to which an experienced Nazi philosopher and I can repair in order to argue out our differences. The Nazi and I will always strike one another as begging all the crucial questions, arguing in circles.”

There is, according to Rorty, simply no neutral ground, period. There is no objective truth about moral beliefs “out there,” apart from ourselves, to which we can appeal.

If that’s true, it raises several questions. The most troubling one, I suppose, is, Does this mean, then, that there’s no guarantee that our decent, liberal humanitarian views will prevail? The answer is, Yes, no guarantees. The most we can hope for is that in the course of history we will succeed in persuading more and more people to adopt our views. To dispel the ensuing gloom, it should be noted that Rorty holds the rather chipper view of history that we have been, in recent centuries, doing precisely that. 

[...]

more