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A review by bittersweet_symphony
Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America by Richard Rorty
5.0
Twenty years later and this is just as prescient. A leftist writer critiquing the American Left, Rorty distinguishes between the Reformist Left, which was eclipsed in the 1960s, and the Cultural Left, which has taken over leftist discourse since the Vietnam War.
In short, there are those on the Left who believe America is irredeemable, born in sins that can never be overcome. And then there are those who acknowledge the list of things America should be ashamed of while calling attention to the highest ideals of America. Revolutionaries who want to burn "the system" to the ground have no concrete vision to look to. Alternatively, reformists might actually be best position to continue progress by asserting a specific type of national pride. Make note, this national pride isn't the militaristic chauvinism that is common on the Right, but rather the kind that empowers communities to stand up and become their best selves.
Achieving Our Country is not a point to be arrived at, but a process, in line with the patriotic visions of Walt Whitman and John Dewey. American has made great progress in the name of diminishing human suffering and combatting social injustices. Yet, America must continue its work on that front. According to Rorty, America must make social justice its "animating principle."
In his vision for a liberal democracy includes rejecting the correspondence theory of truth, and in its stead embracing a neo-pragmatist view of truth. We ought to shirk purity politics, dogmas, and creeds grounded in "Moral Law," "God's Will," or abstract reason. Instead, we ought to embrace the language and conceptions of truth that are best suited to address the problems we face in our particular historical moment.
Teaser: as many recent publications have highlighted, Rorty offers an incredibly prophetic warning about contemporary American politics, including the "rise of a strongman" (pages 85-90).
Some quotes that I found particularly enlightening:
“National pride is to countries what self-respect is to individuals: a necessary condition for self-improvement. Too much national pride can produce bellicosity and imperialism, just as excessive self-respect can produce arrogance. But just as too little self-respect makes it difficult for a person to display moral courage, so insufficient national pride makes energetic and effective debate about national policy unlikely. Emotional involvement with one's country-feelings of intense shame or of glowing pride aroused by various parts of its history, and by various present-day national policies-is necessary if political deliberation is to be imaginative and productive. Such deliberation will probably not occur unless pride outweighs shame.”
“For Whitman and Dewey, a classless and casteless society—the sort of society which American leftists have spent the twentieth century trying to construct—is neither more natural nor more rational than the cruel societies of feudal Europe or of eighteenth-century Virginia. All that can be said in its defense is that it would produce less unnecessary suffering than any other, and that it is the best means to a certain end: the creation of a greater diversity of individuals-larger, fuller, more imaginative and daring individuals.”
“The heirs of the New Left of the Sixties have created, within the academy, a cultural Left. Many members of this Left specialize in what they call the 'politics of difference' or 'of identity' or 'of recognition.' This cultural Left thinks more about stigma than about money, more about deep and hidden psychosexual motivations than about shallow and evident greed.”
“Encouraging students to be what mocking neoconservatives call ‘politically correct’ has made our country a far better place. American leftist academics have a lot to be proud of. Their conservative critics, who have no remedies to propose either for American sadism or for American selfishness, have a great deal to be ashamed of.”
“The heirs of the New Left of the Sixties have created, within the academy, a cultural Left. Many members of this Left specialize in what they call the ‘politics of difference’ or ‘of identity’ or ‘of recognition.’ This cultural Left thinks more about stigma than about money, more about deep and hidden psychoxexual motivations than about shallow and evident greed.”
“It [the cultural Left] thinks the system, and not just the laws, must be changed. Reformism is not good enough. Because the very vocabulary of liberal politics is infected with dubious presuppositions which need to be exposed, the first task of the Left must be, just as Confucius said, the rectification of names. The concern to do what the Sixties called ‘naming the system’ takes precedence over reforming the laws.”
“The adoption of attitudes which the Right sneers at as ‘politically correct’ has made America a far more civilized society than it was thirty years ago. Except for a few Supreme Court decisions, there has been little change for the better in our country’s laws since the Sixties. But the change in the way we treat one another has been enormous.”
“For purposes of thinking about how to achieve our country, we do not need to worry about the correspondence theory of truth, the grounds of normativity, the impossibility of justice, or the infinite distance which separates us from the other. For those purposes, we can give both religion and philosophy a pass. We can just get on with trying to solve what Dewey called “the problems of men.”
“The current leftist habit of taking the long view and looking beyond nationhood to a global polity is as useless as was faith in Marx’s philosophy of history, for which it has become a substitute. Both are equally irrelevant to the question of how to prevent the reemergence of hereditary casts, or of how to prevent right-wing populists from taking advantage of resentment at that reemergence.”
“The Left will have to stop thinking up ever more abstract and abusive names for ‘the system’ and start trying to construct inspiring images of the country.”
“This strategy [referring to the reformed Left] gave rise to the ‘platoon’ movies, which showed Americans of various ethnic backgrounds fighting and dying side by side. By contrast, the contemporary cultural Left urges that America should not be a melting-pot, because we need to respect one another in our differences. This Left wants to preserve otherness rather than ignore it.”
“If the cultural Left insists on its present strategy—on asking us to respect one another in our differences rather than asking us to cease noticing those differences—it will have to find a new way of creating a sense of commonality at the level of national politics. For only a rhetoric of commonality can forge a winning majority in national elections.”
“One reason the cultural Left will have a hard time transforming itself into a political Left is that, like the Sixties Left, it still dreams of being rescued by an angelic power called ‘the people.’ In this sense, ‘the people’ is the name of a redemptive preturnatural force, a force whose demonic counterpart is named ‘power’ or ‘the system.’ The cultural Left inherited the slogan ‘Power to the people’ from the Sixties Left, whose members rarely asked about how the transference of power was supposed to work. This question still goes unasked . . . . The rhetoric of this Left remains revolutionary rather than reformist and pragmatic.”
“Whitman and Dewey tried to substitute hope for knowledge. They wanted to put shared utopian dreams—dreams of an ideally decent and civilized society—in the place of knowledge of God’s Will, Moral Law, the Laws of History, or the Facts of Science. Their party, the party of hope, made twentieth-century America more than just an economic and military gian. Without the American Left, we might still have been strong and brave, but nobody would have suggested that we were good. As long as we have a functioning political Left, we still have a chance to achieve our country, to make it the country of Whitman’s and Dewey’s dreams.”
In short, there are those on the Left who believe America is irredeemable, born in sins that can never be overcome. And then there are those who acknowledge the list of things America should be ashamed of while calling attention to the highest ideals of America. Revolutionaries who want to burn "the system" to the ground have no concrete vision to look to. Alternatively, reformists might actually be best position to continue progress by asserting a specific type of national pride. Make note, this national pride isn't the militaristic chauvinism that is common on the Right, but rather the kind that empowers communities to stand up and become their best selves.
Achieving Our Country is not a point to be arrived at, but a process, in line with the patriotic visions of Walt Whitman and John Dewey. American has made great progress in the name of diminishing human suffering and combatting social injustices. Yet, America must continue its work on that front. According to Rorty, America must make social justice its "animating principle."
In his vision for a liberal democracy includes rejecting the correspondence theory of truth, and in its stead embracing a neo-pragmatist view of truth. We ought to shirk purity politics, dogmas, and creeds grounded in "Moral Law," "God's Will," or abstract reason. Instead, we ought to embrace the language and conceptions of truth that are best suited to address the problems we face in our particular historical moment.
Teaser: as many recent publications have highlighted, Rorty offers an incredibly prophetic warning about contemporary American politics, including the "rise of a strongman" (pages 85-90).
Some quotes that I found particularly enlightening:
“National pride is to countries what self-respect is to individuals: a necessary condition for self-improvement. Too much national pride can produce bellicosity and imperialism, just as excessive self-respect can produce arrogance. But just as too little self-respect makes it difficult for a person to display moral courage, so insufficient national pride makes energetic and effective debate about national policy unlikely. Emotional involvement with one's country-feelings of intense shame or of glowing pride aroused by various parts of its history, and by various present-day national policies-is necessary if political deliberation is to be imaginative and productive. Such deliberation will probably not occur unless pride outweighs shame.”
“For Whitman and Dewey, a classless and casteless society—the sort of society which American leftists have spent the twentieth century trying to construct—is neither more natural nor more rational than the cruel societies of feudal Europe or of eighteenth-century Virginia. All that can be said in its defense is that it would produce less unnecessary suffering than any other, and that it is the best means to a certain end: the creation of a greater diversity of individuals-larger, fuller, more imaginative and daring individuals.”
“The heirs of the New Left of the Sixties have created, within the academy, a cultural Left. Many members of this Left specialize in what they call the 'politics of difference' or 'of identity' or 'of recognition.' This cultural Left thinks more about stigma than about money, more about deep and hidden psychosexual motivations than about shallow and evident greed.”
“Encouraging students to be what mocking neoconservatives call ‘politically correct’ has made our country a far better place. American leftist academics have a lot to be proud of. Their conservative critics, who have no remedies to propose either for American sadism or for American selfishness, have a great deal to be ashamed of.”
“The heirs of the New Left of the Sixties have created, within the academy, a cultural Left. Many members of this Left specialize in what they call the ‘politics of difference’ or ‘of identity’ or ‘of recognition.’ This cultural Left thinks more about stigma than about money, more about deep and hidden psychoxexual motivations than about shallow and evident greed.”
“It [the cultural Left] thinks the system, and not just the laws, must be changed. Reformism is not good enough. Because the very vocabulary of liberal politics is infected with dubious presuppositions which need to be exposed, the first task of the Left must be, just as Confucius said, the rectification of names. The concern to do what the Sixties called ‘naming the system’ takes precedence over reforming the laws.”
“The adoption of attitudes which the Right sneers at as ‘politically correct’ has made America a far more civilized society than it was thirty years ago. Except for a few Supreme Court decisions, there has been little change for the better in our country’s laws since the Sixties. But the change in the way we treat one another has been enormous.”
“For purposes of thinking about how to achieve our country, we do not need to worry about the correspondence theory of truth, the grounds of normativity, the impossibility of justice, or the infinite distance which separates us from the other. For those purposes, we can give both religion and philosophy a pass. We can just get on with trying to solve what Dewey called “the problems of men.”
“The current leftist habit of taking the long view and looking beyond nationhood to a global polity is as useless as was faith in Marx’s philosophy of history, for which it has become a substitute. Both are equally irrelevant to the question of how to prevent the reemergence of hereditary casts, or of how to prevent right-wing populists from taking advantage of resentment at that reemergence.”
“The Left will have to stop thinking up ever more abstract and abusive names for ‘the system’ and start trying to construct inspiring images of the country.”
“This strategy [referring to the reformed Left] gave rise to the ‘platoon’ movies, which showed Americans of various ethnic backgrounds fighting and dying side by side. By contrast, the contemporary cultural Left urges that America should not be a melting-pot, because we need to respect one another in our differences. This Left wants to preserve otherness rather than ignore it.”
“If the cultural Left insists on its present strategy—on asking us to respect one another in our differences rather than asking us to cease noticing those differences—it will have to find a new way of creating a sense of commonality at the level of national politics. For only a rhetoric of commonality can forge a winning majority in national elections.”
“One reason the cultural Left will have a hard time transforming itself into a political Left is that, like the Sixties Left, it still dreams of being rescued by an angelic power called ‘the people.’ In this sense, ‘the people’ is the name of a redemptive preturnatural force, a force whose demonic counterpart is named ‘power’ or ‘the system.’ The cultural Left inherited the slogan ‘Power to the people’ from the Sixties Left, whose members rarely asked about how the transference of power was supposed to work. This question still goes unasked . . . . The rhetoric of this Left remains revolutionary rather than reformist and pragmatic.”
“Whitman and Dewey tried to substitute hope for knowledge. They wanted to put shared utopian dreams—dreams of an ideally decent and civilized society—in the place of knowledge of God’s Will, Moral Law, the Laws of History, or the Facts of Science. Their party, the party of hope, made twentieth-century America more than just an economic and military gian. Without the American Left, we might still have been strong and brave, but nobody would have suggested that we were good. As long as we have a functioning political Left, we still have a chance to achieve our country, to make it the country of Whitman’s and Dewey’s dreams.”