[Deepening Democracy in Global Contexts, Chapter One]
Judith M. Green, Fordham University
Richard Rorty performed a timely and valuable service in writing Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth Century America (1998), a call to moral and political re-engagement by American intellectuals in the difficult yet urgent project of more fully realizing the meaning of democracy. Originally presented in 1997 at Harvard University as The William E. Massey, Sr., Lectures in the History of American Civilization, these three lectures and the two essays that accompany them in their published form immediately became a non-fiction bestseller, finding a large audience among non-academic American intellectuals as well as among professors and students in a wide range of disciplines, because Rorty has touched something deep that many feel at this time in American history. Claiming the authority of Walt Whitman and John Dewey, Rorty transforms their evocations of the democratic ideal into an inspiring story of great reforms achieved by a coalition of intellectuals and grassroots activists. He tells this story in order to reawaken social hope in a common dream of economic justice and equality of opportunity that can motivate and frame new reform-focused campaigns to realize America’s democratic potential in this era of globalization. Now that the initial enthusiasm that greeted Rorty’s book has had a little time to percolate through reflective layers of continuing experience and ongoing inquiry about the important goals and issues it raises, it is time to critically reconsider whether Rorty’s story and the transformative strategy in which it plays a central role are as well-grounded and as likely to be effective as others that can be told in the hopeful yet world-wary spirits of Whitman and Dewey.
Rorty’s title derives from James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time (1963), which tells a very different story, one of national crime against the author and other black Americans that can never be forgiven: "This is the crime of which I accuse my country and my countrymen, and for which neither I not time nor history will ever forgive them, that they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it" (Baldwin 1963: 5, Rorty 1998: 12). Yet in spite of this unforgivable and continuing crime, Baldwin claims America as his country and calls mature blacks and whites to work together in shaping a more democratic future: "If we--and now I mean the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of the others--do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world" (Baldwin 1963: 97, Rorty 1998: 12). Baldwin’s is a story of a hard-won social hope shared by a handful of members of adversarial groups who seek an end to a history of incalculable harms inflicted and borne. Theirs is a hope born of painful remembering and the courage it stimulates to reach out to one another, in knowledge and in determined love amidst deep differences, in order to forge a common effort against enormous obstacles to awaken a racially divided American people to the attitudes, habits, and consequences that realizing democracy entails, and thereby to begin a new way of living for the world.
Instead of painful memory, courageous knowledge, and committed love amidst unforgivable group-linked harms, Rorty’s very different story of America’s becoming uses processes of forgetting, replacement, denial, and dream-inspiration to make room for shared social hope grounded in national pride. His story expresses faith in a new, antiauthoritarian "civic religion" of the Left that guides creation of the conditions in America that will bring forth diverse, more evolved individual realizations of what it is to be human, thereby showing the way to the rest of the world. On the basis of the shared social hope this new American story inspires, Left intellectuals are to make peace among themselves inside and outside the academy, and then to form an alliance with labor unions in order to articulate a People’s Charter of specific legal reforms that will create conditions of economic justice and equal opportunity for all, which they commit themselves to achieving together through determined, well-focused campaigns. In order to realize these practical gains, this reconstructed "reformist Left" is to accept America’s existing institutional framework of constitutional democracy and market capitalism while eschewing both of America’s major political parties as these are presently constituted, as well as the alternative political formations of so-called "participatory democracy." They are to be dedicated to a common dream of an American "melting pot" in which we no longer notice divisive group differences, yet we foster enormous diversity in individual self-creations. Rorty derives this story and this transformative strategy from the his experience of the "Deweyan, pragmatic, participatory Left" that was replaced in the late 1960s by a "spectatorial" New Left because of the Vietnam War (Rorty 1998: 38). This older "Reformist Left" should once again be respected and imitated, he agues, because it offers "the best model available" for the twenty-first century, with the potential for guiding the emergence of a Second Progressive Era (Rorty 1998: 56).
Like Baldwin’s, Rorty’s story of democracy, and of why achieving its meaning in and for America should matter greatly to American citizens now, is more psychological than institutional. It expresses hopes and fears, his own and those of others, as well as what he takes to be the preconditions for the kinds of processes of national and personal identity formation, self-respect, and individual human flourishing that are motivational and practical prerequisites to collaboratively achieving America’s democratic potential as a nation. However, Rorty’s analyses of each of these important topics, his transformative prescription, and his readings of others’ texts from which he claims to derive his own vision are distorted by his elitist cultural location and backward-looking generational commitments, including a nostalgic desire to have old battles come out differently in the future that blocks a more realistic awareness of the contemporary global political situation within which he rightly calls American intellectuals to work for a deeper realization of America’s democratic potentials.
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. Clearly, my own hopes and fears are different in many ways from Rorty’s, and sometimes adversarial to them. Yet we share a great hope that "achieving our country" is possible, as well as a great fear that forces of globalization may kill the dream of democracy.
At the same time, we share a belief in the importance of democratic public deliberation and the stories that give direction and weight to its processes, including the potential power of stories to reframe our hopes and fears, and to transform them into shared motivations for collaborative struggle to achieve better life possibilities for all concerned. Within democratic public deliberation processes, reasons count, and some stories show themselves to be better than others, not because of who tells them, but because they remember and assess the shared past in ways that clarify and open up the shared present so as to guide action toward the realization of mutually desirable future possibilities. Reasons and stories are related rather than antagonistic elements within the kind of productive, democratic social deliberations to which Rorty has re-called American intellectuals.
As the following discussion will show, however, a set of interlinked shortcomings in Rorty’s story, and in his reasoning about the transformative strategy of which is is a part, suggest that a somewhat different story within a more inclusive transformative strategy would be a better guide for intellectuals’ re-engagement within the processes of public deliberation on behalf of deepening democracy in the crucial years ahead. These shortcomings, and my own counterproposals, concern seven elements of Rorty’s story:
1. Achieving democracy: meaning, preconditions, and processes
2. Democratic epistemology: the (in)compatibility of knowledge and social hope
3. Participatory democracy: movements, campaigns, and democratic living
4. Democratic political economy: the (in)compatibility of democracy and global capitalism,
and the feasibility of alternatives
5. Democratic diversity: multicultural education and a multicultural society
6. Democratizing academic culture: the role of universities and the "college bred"
7. Democratizing the churches: religion, public life, and the rebirth of social hope
Running through all of these elements of the following discussion are disagreements about how to read Dewey’s and others’ texts, about what pragmatism means and implies, and about how the American struggle to achieve our country connects with similar struggles in Central Europe and in other global contexts. Taken together, these considerations suggest that Baldwin’s insights about group-linked memory, shared social knowledge, and loyalty-expanding, courageous love must reframe Rorty’s story of national pride. A realistic social hope of "achieving our country" now includes and depends upon "achieving our world"--a more deeply democratic world.
1. Achieving democracy: meaning, preconditions, and processes
In contrast with the institutional emphasis of economists and political theorists who have guided democratization processes in Central and Eastern Europe since citizens destroyed the Berlin Wall in 1989, Rorty’s analysis of democracy is more psychological than institutional, and more uplifting than critical. For Rorty, democracy as understood in the visionary tradition of Whitman and Dewey is "an inspiring story," "a dream," "an image" of America that stimulates faith in a reformist "civic religion" that guides collaborative efforts to achieve our nation’s potential within our existing constitutional and economic framework. Other readers have been struck by Whitman’s analysis of democracy as "a great word whose history remains unwritten," and by Dewey’s treatment of the democratic ideal as an imaginative extension of desirable existing qualities of community life that can offer practical guidance to processes of deep social transformation.[1] In subtle contrast, Rorty reads Whitman and Dewey’s language of democracy as telling a story of America’s pursuit of a new kind of individuality that depends upon achieving conditions of economic justice and equal opportunity, a patriotic story that inspires shared pride in our nation in all stages of its on-going development, and thus motivates cooperative action guided by the desire to fulfill its meaning.
Continuing this story up to the present and into the future, Rorty argues, requires intellectuals to reject many of the stories that have been told about the meaning and trajectory of America since Dewey’s death in 1952, especially shame-provoking stories about America’s role in the Cold War and in Vietnam, its treatment of racial and ethnic minorities, and its role in the economic and cultural globalization processes that are changing the world today. Effective public deliberation and collaborative action to achieve our country requires that citizen-agents believe strongly in America’s positive potentials.
National pride is to countries what self-respect is to individuals: a necessary condition for self-improvement. ...Emotional involvements with one’s country--feelings of intense shame or of growing 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. (Rorty 1998: 3, opening paragraph)
Rorty’s purpose in these lectures--to exhort American intellectuals of the Left to tell a common, patriotic story that can guide transformative action to fulfill our nation’s democratic potential--frames his choice of models as well as his way of telling key events of American history:
Those who hope to persuade a nation to exert itself need to remind their country of what it can take pride in as well as what it should be ashamed of. They must tell inspiring stories about episodes and figures in the nation’s past--episodes and figures to which the country should remain true. Nations rely on artists and intellectuals to create images of, and to tell stories about, the national past. (Rorty 1998: 3-4).
While he acknowledges in passing the importance of also remembering what our nation should be ashamed of, Rorty forgets this insight in telling his own story of America, perhaps because he thinks that pride attracts more adherents than shame in the competition for dominance within political life: "Competition for political leadership is in part a competition between differing stories about a nation’s self-identity, and between differing symbols of its greatness" (Rorty 1998: 3-4).
Framing the role of national stories in terms of this competition for political dominance gives Rorty’s democratic transformation strategy has an oddly elitist, anti-realist ring: the way to gain power to direct the nation’s future is to achieve dominance for the intellectual Left’s narrative about America’s past, including establishing interpretive control of a set of symbols that express certain key national characteristics and their sources. Thus, changing the story takes precedence, at least strategically, over acknowledging, criticizing, and changing undemocratic real circumstances in which we live. America’s greatest problem at the end of the twentieth century, according to Rorty, was a lack of "inspiring stories and images" that are appropriate and effective in our current context (Rorty 1998: 4). At present, America’s prominent stories offer choices among militaristic chauvinism, self-mockery, and self-disgust. The first option is simple-minded; the other two are impediments to the kind of national hope that motivated powerful, critical stories of the first half of the twentieth century like The Jungle, An American Tragedy, and The Grapes of Wrath. These stories effectively challenged Americans to work for economic justice and equality of opportunity for all, which became the project of the American Left until the late 1960s (Rorty 1998: 8). Like their authors, democracy-minded intellectuals today need to overcome the now-dominant stories with a reformist liberal "rhetoric" in which patriotism motivates action to achieve the long-shared American dream whose development Whitman and Dewey greatly influenced (Rorty 1998: 9).
The great difference between this intellectual approach to political life and that characteristic of the period from the late-1960s to the present, in Rorty’s view, is that between "agents and spectators" (Rorty 1998: 9). He mirrors this contrast by reflecting on an earlier period in American intellectual history, comparing William James’s approach to public life with Henry Adams’s "proto-Heideggerian cultural pessimism," which Rorty says James regarded as "perverse, . . . decadent and cowardly"--a motivation, in Rorty’s view, for James’ pragmatist conception of truth. For James, democracy is a shared "civic religion" that calls citizens to hopeful transformative action to achieve its goals, even though the evidence that these are feasible is insufficient to compel belief.
For James, disgust with American hypocrisy and self-deception was pointless unless accompanied by an effort to give America reason to be proud of itself in the future. . . . "Democracy," James wrote, "is a kind of religion, and we are bound not to admit its failure. Faiths and utopias are the noblest exercise of human reason, and no one with a spark of reason in him will sit down fatalistically before the croaker’s picture." (Rorty 1998: 9, quoting James’s "The Social Value of the College-Bred," 109)
Only militaristic chauvinists claim this sort of American "civic religion" today, Rorty comments; the college-bred are systematically stripped both of faith in their country’s future and of the agency that depends upon it, becoming spectators unable "to think of American citizenship as an opportunity for action" (Rorty 1998: 11).
In explaining his choice of the word ‘image’ to express the kind of common vision of America he urges intellectuals to strive to re-create, Rorty rejects the possibility of striving for an "objective" account of our national identity.
Nobody knows what it would be like to try to be objective when attempting to decide what one’s country really is, what its history really means, any more than when answering the question of who one really is oneself, what one’s individual past really adds up to. We raise questions about our individual or national identity as part of the process of deciding what we will do next, what we will try to become. (Rorty 1998: 11)
As will become clearer below, 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.
What are Rorty’s great fears and hopes? Both are suggested by his his scorn for "the academic Left" because of its failure to tell a motivating common story: "The academic Left has no projects to propose to America, no vision of a country to be achieved by building a consensus on the need for specific reforms" (Rorty 1998: 15). The American Left, Rorty says, once was an active and effective alliance between intellectuals and the unions--but this broke down in the 1960s over the Vietnam War (and also, we might add, over the Civil Rights Movement). Since seizing intellectual leadership in the late 1960s, "the academic Left" has sunk into "an attitude like Henry Adams’"--even into unintentional collaboration with the Right in allowing "cultural politics" to replace "real politics." This criticism suggests that Rorty’s great fear is that America’s academic Left, of which he should be counted as a leading member, will betray his intellectual legacy and the dreams of his youth--or rather, that his youthful image of America is no longer vital, that it already has been irretrievably replaced. Perhaps this is why his own analysis of what has gone wrong has an oddly "spectatorial and retrospective" quality of the kind he argues is incompatible with the responsibility of the Left (Rorty 1998: 14), and why his transformative prescription seems to express a nostalgic longing for a long-lost struggle and a hope, like that of Kierkegaard’s unhappiest man, that the past will come out differently in the future.
Thus, Rorty hopes for a revival of the "civic religion" once shared by his anti-communist, reformist branch of the pre-1960s American Left. Though always opposed by the Right, this civic faith engaged enough popular support before the Vietnam War to motivate real progress, in Rorty’s view, while sustaining a sense of a meaningful, engaged life by keeping alive the prospect of achieving a shared dream of economic justice and equal opportunity for all. Rorty thanks the New Left for ending the Vietnam War, which he calls a necessary task, yet an impossible one for his own branch of the Left (Rorty 1998: 67-68). However, he blames the New Left for retreating thereafter into "cultural politics," focusing on issues of race, culture, and gender identity instead of renewing the reformist struggle for economic justice and equal opportunity. There is some truth in Rorty’s judgment: the views of some influential French "postmodernist" cultural critics, especially as interpreted by their American disciples, have become intellectual impediments to democratic transformative theory and practice both inside and outside the academy, though this may reflect lack of careful reading by both their partisans and their pragmatist critics.[2] However, these theorists are only part of the story of the academic Left. Many of the new departments and courses that emerged out of the cultural criticism of the late 1960s have had a practical democratic impact on America’s political economy, including who gets educational opportunities, who holds what jobs, who makes government decisions, and on what these are focused. Moreover, contrary to Rorty’s continuing partisan hopes, Marxists have not disappeared from the academy; in combination with cultural critics, professors in the new departments, pragmatists of non-Rortyean hues, community-based proponents of participatory democracy, and a revived religious left, they are now engaging in influential critiques of capital punishment, the prison-industrial complex, workers’ rights, and the emerging international economic order.[3] It is not clear how Rorty’s "civic religion" can offer guidance for the revitalization of America’s intellectual Left while retrospectively opposing most of its component groups, as well as the goals these groups advocate and the methods they employ.
As Rorty rightly points out, social democracy and economic justice are much older ideals that do not rely on Marxism. These older ideals actually were impeded by Marxism-Leninism in Rorty’s view, with which he correctly states many Central and Eastern Europeans would agree; Marxism was "not only a catastrophe for all the the countries in which Marxists took power, but a disaster for the reformist Left in all the countries in which they did not" (Rorty 1998: 41). To move beyond Marxism’s failure, Rorty argues, the American Left should repudiate the Marxist claim that "capitalism must be overthrown," though he does not clarify whether this is because capitalism is desirable or at least acceptable, or because its revolutionary overthrow is not feasible as a means of democratic transformation (Rorty 1998: 41-42). Rorty also argues that we should abandon the residually Marxist "leftist-vs.-liberal" distinction, instead using the term "reformist Left" instead of "Old Left" to refer to those self-described American "socialists" who "struggled within the framework of constitutional democracy to protect the weak from the strong" during the years after World War II and before Vietnam, and using the term "New Left" to mean post-1964 rejection of the possibility of working for social justice within the system (Rorty 1998: 43). While these proposed changes in language may express Rorty’s experience, they clearly re-center some people in the story of "achieving our country" while de-centering, even erasing others. Moreover, contrary to historical fact, Rorty’s proposal suggests that there has been no "reformist Left" since 1964, and that no self-described "New Leftists" have become intra-system reformers.
Advancing Rorty’s revisionist history of the American Left involves two additional linguistic changes. Rejecting the Marxist quest for purity, Rorty suggests the odd term "part-time Leftist" to categorize reformers like Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt who were hated both by the Right and by Marxists (Rorty 1998: 45). A more important change is his call for American intellectuals to give up the sentimental self-designation as "Marxists" that appalls Poles, Hungarians, and Chinese dissidents, when all they mean to express by it, in his view, is that the rich exploit the poor and retain control of the system (Rorty 1998: 46). But surely more than this is involved in self-designation by this label. It also implies a moral judgment rejecting the justice of this situation, as well as an active commitment to liberatory transformation by revolutionary means if necessary--although most American intellectuals who adopt it today are probably self-deceived, romanticizing an effectively engaged life quite different from their own.
Though Rorty argues that American intellectuals should drop the Marxist label and forget about overthrowing capitalism, he also argues that the dividing line between Left and Right, before 1964 and now, is the belief that the state must take responsibility for a morally and socially desirable redistribution of wealth (Rorty 1998: 48). The Left’s goal again must become creation of a "cooperative commonwealth," for which reformist Leftists once used the term "socialism" to reflect criticisms of individualism they learned from progressive social scientists like Richard Ely and "social workers" like Jane Addams, who advocated turning American universities into "something like a national ‘church,’" in Eldon Eisenach’s words, and supported the first great strikes.[4]
In contrast with John Rawls, Rorty’s Dewey treats the ultimate meaning of democracy as metaphysical, not political: "Democracy is neither a form of government nor a social expediency, but a metaphysic of the relation of man and his experience in nature."[5] Rorty calls Dewey’s language of metaphysics "a bit unfortunate" and suggests that what he meant is, contra Nietzsche, "democracy is the principal means by which a more evolved form of humanity will come into existence" (Rorty 1998: 142, fn 12). In spite of his shrugging off of metaphysics, Rorty goes on to say, in Kenneth Burke’s language, that Deweyan democratic humanity will have "more being"-- in the sense of more diverse perspectives from which they can legitimately be viewed that give rise to a new dimension of terms or necessary predicates--than predemocratic humanity: "The citizens of a democratic, Whitmanesque society are able to create new, hitherto unimagined roles and goals for themselves. So a greater variety of perspectives, and of descriptive terms, becomes available to them, and can with justice be used to account for them" (Rorty 1998: 143, fn 12).
In explaining why democracy-minded intellectuals of the American Left must take the leading role in bringing a more evolved form of humanity into being, Rorty treats the Left as "the party of hope" within a neo-Hegelian dialectical approach to understanding history (Rorty 1998: 14). Rorty reads Marx as having erred in treating Hegel’s dialectic as useful for prediction, unwarrantably exceeding the limited "inspirational purposes" for which Hegel and his more careful readers like Whitman, Dewey, and Rorty himself employ it (Rorty 1998: 19). Rorty’s purpose in using the language of dialectic within his own American story is not only to reclaim it from rival Marxists, but to draw attention to a struggle of ideas that he believes does real work in the world, to which he aims to re-call intellectuals. Thus, although Rorty’s account of the Left’s hopeful role in history highlights the unions’ pursuit of social justice and equal opportunity, the devastating, quasi-Marxist criticisms of America’s economic system and its wider effects that once were forcefully voiced by Eugene Debs, Joe Hill, and other radical labor organizers play no real role in Rorty’s story and the inspirational purposes for which he offers it. Instead, Rorty’s Left is hopeful about possibilities structured by America’s existing institutions, refusing to accept an unjust status quo and determined to achieve some limited, particular reforms while stimulating Americans’ national pride and the confident individual self-creations that depend upon it.
In spite of his evocation of an unceasing dialectic within America’s history, Rorty seems to express his own greatest fear when he claims that what Dewey feared was "stasis: a time in which everybody would take for granted that the purpose of history had been accomplished, an age of spectators rather than agents, a country in which arguments between Left and Right would no longer be heard" (Rorty 1998: 20). I know of no passage in Dewey’s writings that supports Rorty’s attribution of this fear to him; nor is it clear why Rorty fears this situation that he seems to think has already come to pass, or is on the verge of coming to pass. Perhaps Rorty fears loss of the meaning-giving vision of America we inherit from Whitman, Dewey, and others--the image of an exceptional America, the fruit and "the vanguard" of human history, a collaborative self-creation that makes individual self-creation possible exactly because "we put ourselves in the place of God: our essence is our existence, and our existence is in the future" (Rorty 1998: 22). However, "the price of temporalization is contingency," Rorty argues, and with contingency comes risk; "the vanguard of humanity" may "lead our species over a cliff" (Rorty 1998: 23). Instead of offering guarantees or assuring criteria that he and other intellectual leaders of this vanguard are on the right track, however, Rorty only summons the companionship of Whitman and Dewey, announcing that lack of assurance makes room for "pure, joyous hope" (Rorty 1998: 23). As Mad Magazine’s fictional hero, Alfred E. Newman, famously declared, "What me, worry?" Rorty’s hope has no grounding and is possible, in his view, exactly because grounding is impossible--a view very different from Dewey’s contingent hope, we must note, which he grounded (though without guarantees) by tracing an allegedly irreversible historical process of immanent human desire and growing practical commitment to the democratic ideal, as well as by sketching a self-correcting approach to guiding active, collaborative efforts toward democratic social transformation.
Rorty characterizes Dewey’s conception of democracy as "the only form of moral and social faith" that does not try to subject experience to some form of external control or authority.[6] "Antiauthoritarianism" is the motive behind Dewey’s objection to "Platonic and theocentric metaphysics," as well as the correspondence theory of truth (Rorty 1998: 29), in Rorty’s view. America’s poetic self-creation requires breaking through previous fames of reference (Rorty 1998: 29) to become "the paradigmatic democracy . . . in which governments and social institutions exist only for the purpose of making a new sort of individual possible, one who will take nothing as authoritative save free consensus between as diverse a variety of citizens as can possibly be produced," rejecting castes and classes as incompatible with the self-respect required for "free participation in democratic deliberation" (Rorty 1998: 30)--though what kind of transformative role beyond the now-underutilized franchise such democratic deliberation is to play is unclear, given Rorty’s objections to "participatory democracy." Such a society, he claims, would produce "less unnecessary suffering than any other"--though again, how is unclear--and is the best means to achieving the goal of "the creation of a greater diversity of individuals--larger, fuller, more imaginative and daring individuals (Rorty 1998: 30). Because it has not yet been achieved, "This conception of the purpose of social organization is a specifically leftist one"; most partisans of the American Right are unwitting pawns of the rich and powerful because of a convergence of desires to prevent social and economic change (Rorty 1998: 30-31). Subsequent American leftists have offered no advance over Dewey’s understanding that "the only point of society is to construct subjects capable of ever more novel, ever richer, forms of human happiness" (Rorty 1998: 31).
Rorty’s proposal about how to continue the story of "achieving our country" casts intellectuals as a vanguard within the American Left, leading a democratic partnership with working people whose ways of thinking and living are very different from their own: "In democratic countries you get things done by compromising your principles in order to form alliances with groups about whom you have grave doubts" (Rorty 1998: 52). Until its fateful breakdown in the late 1960s, this is the transformative partnership that Rorty believes achieved real progress by using the institutions of a constitutional democracy in efforts to correct the vast inequalities in American society : "The history of leftist politics in America is a story of how top-down initiatives and bottom-up initiatives have interlocked" (Rorty 1998: 53-55). Rorty argues that we need to replace the anti-American story of the Left with which C. Wright Mills and Christopher Lasch influenced student generations during and after the late 1960s with this one, which "gives the reformers their due, and thereby leaves more room for national pride and national hope. Emphasizing the continuity between Herbert Croly and Lyndon Johnson, between John Dewey and Martin Luther King, between Eugene Debs and Walter Reuther, would help us to recall a reformist Left which deserves not only respect but imitation--the best model available for the American Left in the coming century. If the intellectuals and the unions could ever get back together again, and could reconstitute the kind of Left which existed in the Forties and Fifties, the first decade of the twenty-first century might conceivably be a Second Progressive Era" (Rorty 1998: 56).[7]
This is Rorty’s main transformative thesis. Though it distorts the role of intellectuals in suggesting too much leading and too little listening, it is insightful in its stress on continuing efforts toward democratic reform achieved through a mutually committed partnership among diverse groups amidst significant differences in their ways of living, thinking, communicating, and imagining the good life. However, it ignores some important developments, such as the radical decline in America’s percentage of union workers (which would be even more profound except for the growth of unions in the lower-paid service sector), as well as problems American unions have had about race and gender since their origins in the early nineteenth century that have always complicated intellectuals’ support, a recent statement by the president of the Teamsters’ Union that they would in future pursue "a bipartisan approach" to advancing their political agenda, and the practical gains that other citizen-activists working for the "participatory democracy" Rorty scorns have continued to achieve since the late 1960s, especially at local levels. At the same time, Rorty’s transformative thesis is overly influenced by other developments--certainly by the writings of elite Left intellectuals who do not speak to or for the vast majority of Americans, and perhaps by still-repeated anti-American comments from certain civil rights activists and some ant-Vietnam War activists in the late-1960s that even at the time misrepresented the beliefs of many others in these movements who argued that America means and deserves better than the injustices they protested.
These factors--both his intellectual influences and the developments he ignores--may explain why Rorty’s transformative prescription seems oddly detached from post-1960s reality, ironically expressing a nostalgic, spectatorial quality. He is a child of Left intellectuals who grew up proud of their committed struggle, and shaping his personal identity around a determination to carry it forward, perhaps overstating in the process the extent to which they and any other American intellectuals have directed the course of our history. In contrast, Whitman and Dewey both knew that the greater gifts American intellectuals have contributed to the democratization of our society are for hearing acutely what others are saying, for understanding what it means, and on their best days, for celebrating, warning, or exhorting in tones that others can hear and consider. One of Rorty’s continuing generational hang-ups concerns whether the Cold War should have been fought, given that it entailed the atrocity of Vietnam (Rorty 1998: 56-57). Liberation-seeking Leftists in Central and Eastern Europe support his view that the Cold War was necessary, Rorty points out, though he acknowledges that leftists in Latin America and Asia agree with Frederic Jameson and other opponents of the Cold War. Why does this matter now? Rorty implicitly answers this question and explicitly explains his own stance autobiographically: he was a "red-diaper anticommunist baby" (Rorty 1998: 58). When he was growing up, most American Leftist writers did not doubt that America was "a great, noble, progressive country in which justice would eventually triumph," by which they meant "decent wages and working conditions, and the end of racial prejudice" (Rorty 1998: 59). This is still his dream and commitment. However, the Cold War is over in the only context in which this dream and commitment can be forwarded now; the old Cold War paradigm of struggle and its old team loyalties distort analysis of the current situation and drain energies that need to be re-employed.
If Rorty’s transformative thesis were informed by events he ignores, and reframed to allow in some of the language and some of the participants he fears--other voices of the poor, various groups opposing oppression on the basis of race, ethnicity, and gender, environmental activists, and the progressive, justice-focused churches he seeks to exclude from public life--it could become a useful prescription for drawing upon past reformers’ historical achievements as guides for sustaining and realizing our democratic social hopes. Of course, a "Second Progressive Era," as the first Progressives themselves would have pointed out, will not emerge from the same strategies that were only partially effective in the very different conditions of their very different times. It will, as Rorty suggests, depend upon re-turning intellectuals to partnership in democratic transformative practice, but with many other partners in addition to the unions, all of them influencing one another’s mutual transformation in order to achieve the kind of collaborative unity amidst diversity that can reshape the processes of globalization that now unevadably contextualize the project of "achieving our country." Moreover, fulfilling America’s potential is both too important to the rest of the world and too limited a concern in a time of locality-penetrating global interactions to exclude other nations’ peoples from this collaborative process. For us and for others, "achieving our country" requires "achieving our world"--a democratic world that welcomes national and cultural differences as well as individual ones, whose citizens collaboratively shape its future with mutual respect and commitment to the extent that this is within human control.
Once Rorty’s main transformative thesis has been reframed and redirected in these ways, its corollary deserves our attention: Left intellectuals must reconcile themselves with one another if they are to engage in effective transformative partnership with others. He attempts to begin this reconciliation by acknowledging, as a member of the older Reformist Left, that by forcing an end to the Vietnam War, the New Left "may have saved us from losing our moral identity" (Rorty 1998: 67-68)--a concession on a still-contentious issue that may be hotly debated by Americans as long as there are members of the Vietnam-era generations still alive. Moreover, his pre-1964 reformist Left focused its efforts on economic reform rather than the needs of oppressed groups, Rorty acknowledges, incorrectly believing that changing the economic inequality would eliminate racial and other forms of discrimination; "In retrospect this belief that ending selfishness would eliminate sadism seems misguided . . . .Sadism was recognized as having deeper roots than economic insecurity" (Rorty 1998: 76). This is why Freud partially replaced Marx as a source of social theory, as sadism became the principal target of the heirs of the New Left within the academy.
However, the "cultural Left" that emerged from the New Left made an enormous mistake, Rorty charges, by focusing on the politics of difference, identity, and recognition while ignoring economics. Part of the shift away from fighting for economic justice may have been due to resentment of the labor unions for failing to support McGovern for President in 1972, he suggests, and part of it may have been due to a movement of the center of "leftist ferment" from the social sciences to the humanities. However it came to pass, the cultural Left now has few ties to the pre-1960s reformist Left except for a "saving remnant" that thinks more about passing laws than about changing the culture (Rorty 1998: 76-78). While the cultural Left approves of such activities, its own work is too abstract to guide particular political initiatives, and in any case, according to the dominant view within the cultural Left, "the system, not just the laws, must be changed. Reformism is not good enough" (Rorty 1998: 78). Yet the cultural Left has no alternative to propose. "When the Right proclaims that socialism has failed, and that capitalism is the only alternative, the cultural Left has little to say in reply. . . . Its principal enemy is a mind-set rather than a set of economic arrangements" (Rorty 1998: 79). This dominant, enemy mind-set is variously called "Cold War ideology," "technocratic rationality," and "phallogocentrism." It can be subverted, its cultural Left critics argue, by teaching Americans to "recognize otherness," which has motivated the creation of new disciplines of cultural studies "to help victims of socially acceptable forms of sadism by making such sadism no longer acceptable" (Rorty 1998: 79-80). In Rorty’s view, the cultural Left has been successful in this, and this is good: "The change in the way we treat one another has been enormous." (Rorty 1998: 80-81). Conservative critics may decry "politicizing of the universities," but Rorty sees such "outrage against cruelty" as part of the history and role of universities; "conservative intellectual" is an oxymoron, he argues, "For intellectuals are supposed to be aware of, and speak to, issues of social justice" (Rorty 1998: 82).
These comments suggest that Rorty does not object to the cultural Left’s work against "socially acceptable forms of sadism," but rather to what he sees as its lack of comparable attention to economic critique and counterproposals. However, much of the academic Left has in fact conjoined the two, critiquing racist and sexist attitudes and cultural traditions, while at the same time proposing various ways to achieve equality of economic opportunity across lines of race and gender within the American constitutional framework. Moreover, they have been effective in helping to improve economic opportunities as well as social respect for women and minorities, though their efforts have left the situation of an urban underclass relatively untouched. However, relatively little attention has yet been given by non-Marxists to issues of how to democratically transform capitalism in ways that address issues of class, especially issues of deep poverty. Clearly, it is easier to get hired and tenured now within American universities if one works on cultural issues of "sadism" and related socio-economic reforms within our existing demo-capitalist institutional framework, than if one proposes changes in that framework, whether through deep, systematic reforms or through revolution.
Though he overstates the academic Left’s preoccupation with cultural issues since the Vietnam War, Rorty is right to note that during this same period, economic inequality and insecurity have "steadily increased" without effective Leftist opposition, leaving the fomenting of "a bottom-up populist revolt" to "scurrilous demagogues" like Patrick Buchanan (Rorty 1998: 83). An important part of this insecurity, Rorty accurately points out, is due to "the globalization of the labor market--a trend which can reasonably be expected to accelerate indefinitely . . . a problem Dewey and Croly never envisaged" (Rorty 1998: 84-85). In Rorty’s insightful diagnosis, the world economy is becoming "owned" by "a cosmopolitan upper class which has no more sense of community with any workers anywhere than the great American capitalists of the 1900 had with the immigrants who manned their enterprises. . . . This frightening economic cosmopolitanism has, as a by-product, an agreeable cultural cosmopolitanism" limited to the richest twenty-five per cent of Americans (Rorty 1998: 84-85). This is leading to "an America divided into hereditary social castes," run by what Michael Lind calls "the overclass"; suburbanites are raising the drawbridge, initiating what Robert Reich has called "the secession of the successful" (Rorty 1998: 86).
Sometime in the 1970s, Rorty reminds us, the Democratic Party started moving to "the center," distanced the unions, and stopped talking about redistribution of income and wealth. Thus, the two major political parties now offer a choice between "cynical lies and terrified silence’ (Rorty 1998: 86-87). In this Orwellian world, he warns, academics are expected to ensure that the decisions of "the Inner Party--namely, the international, cosmopolitan super-rich . . . are carried out smoothly and efficiently (Rorty 1998: 87). This can be achieved by turning attention away from economic issues and toward "ethnic and religious hostilities, and . . . debates about sexual mores" (Rorty 1998: 88). The American Left disagrees about whether to combat this selfish, antidemocratic process of upward redistribution of power and wealth by calling for mitigation of inequalities between nations, or by focusing on the needs of the least advantaged citizens of their own democratic nation-state, rival responses that attract different constituencies and divide intellectuals from unions and the marginally employed (Rorty 1998: 88). At some point, economic anxiety may motivate urban working people to refuse further cooperation with this erosion of their security and their future hopes, and to seek a "strongman" to lead their resistance to globalization (Rorty 1998: 89-90). If this happens, Rorty warns, anti-sadist gains of the past forty years will be wiped out.
This nightmare scenario suggests that, in spite of his forgetful dream-image of America before the Vietnam War disrupted our civic faith, Rorty is awake to the fact that globalization has created a sense of peril within America’s working and middle classes, to which both major American political parties are responding by lying to voters about their intentions while pandering to the increasingly powerful cosmo-minority. Rorty sees America’s universities as complicit in this, training rising members of the cosmo-minority, distracting attention from the key economic issues by focusing attention on cultural issues, and failing to theorize transformatively about the kinds of government-led, socio-economic reforms that justice requires. Thus, his greatest fear is not stasis, as his earlier remarks suggested, but rather fascism: an enforced end to the dream of democracy.
In this time of democratic emergency, Rorty calls upon intellectuals, and especially the academic Left he has fiercely criticized, to wake up, to focus on the economic heart of the problem, and to take the leadership role in implementing his transformative prescription. To deal effectively with the consequences of globalization, however, "the present cultural Left would have to transform itself by opening relations with the residue of the old reformist Left, and in particular with the labor unions" (Rorty 1998:91). The self-transformation he calls for goes much deeper than new patterns of association; the academic Left must change its self-understanding, the focus of its efforts, its language, and its American story to fit those of the unions and the remnants of the reformist Left.
I have two suggestions about how to effect this transition. The first is that the Left should put a moratorium on theory. It should try to kick its philosophy habit. The second is that the Left should try to mobilize what remains of our pride in being Americans. It should ask the public to consider how the country of Lincoln and Whitman might be achieved. (Rorty 1998: 91-92)
It is important to note that Baldwin’s America has dropped out of Rorty’s list of imaginative guides to the academic Left’s self-reconstruction. Rorty cites only Dewey’s Reconstruction in Philosophy in re-calling academics to "the problems of men," expressing exasperation about the kind of "sterile debate" now going on concerning "individualism versus communitarianism," and ridiculing the common belief among the academic Left that "the higher your level of abstraction, the more subversive of the established order you can be. The more sweeping and novel your conceptual apparatus, the more radical your critique" (Rorty 1998: 92-93).
This fashionable meta-principle of disengaged abstraction, Rorty says, explains why Foucault’s work has distracted so much of the academic Left’s time and attention from its real and pressing practical responsibilities to lead democratic political processes of economic reform in America.
Disengagement from practice produces theoretical hallucinations. . . . The cultural Left is haunted by ubiquitous specters, the most frightening of which is called ‘power,’" which Mark Edmundson calls "Foucault’s haunting agency, which is everywhere and nowhere, as evanescent and insistent as a resourceful spook." (Rorty 1998: 94)[8]
In being everywhere and inescapable, Rorty argues, Foucauldian power is like original sin. In the academic Left’s commitment to theory, it has "gotten something which is entirely too much like religion . . . within a vast quasi-cosmological perspective" (Rorty 1998: 95). In such a Gothic world, "democratic politics has become a farce" (Rorty 1998: 95). Like traditional religions, such disengaged, abstracted, spectatorial philosophies confuse and obstruct public deliberation about urgent practical problems. Therefore, like religion, philosophy should be regarded as a private indulgence; neither has a public role to play in addressing the problems of achieving our country.
[Such] quasi-religious form[s] of spiritual pathos [as those advocated by Foucault, Derrida, and Levinas] . . . should be relegated to private life and not taken as guides to political deliberation. . . . When we take up our public responsibilities, . . . the infinite and the unrepresentable are merely nuisances. Thinking of our responsibilities in these terms is as much of a stumbling block to effective political organization as is the sense of sin. . . . For purposes of thinking about how to achieve our country, . . . 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." (Rorty 1998: 96-97)
Whether Rorty’s criticisms of postmodernist philosophy are well-taken, or reflect careless reading, they do not answer the question of which practical problems--and whose--should become the focus of the transformative efforts toward achieving our country for which he calls. Absent Baldwin, Rorty’s Lincoln and Whitman are easily employed as tools of a dangerous erasure and forgetting that would misguide our hope and our transformative action.
In addition to giving up the habitual practices of whole disciplines, the self-reconstruction Rorty calls for requires a reorientation in the academic Left’s sources of personal identity, beliefs about the present, and hopes for the future. It requires suspending the conviction that nation-states are obsolete and instead, "deriving our moral identity, at least in part, from our citizenship in a democratic nation-state, and from leftist attempts to fulfill the promise of that nation" (Rorty 1998: 97). This change is necessary for effective re-engagement as transformative leaders, he argues, because "the government of our nation-state will be, for the foreseeable future, the only agent capable of making any real difference in the amount of selfishness and sadism inflicted on Americans" (Rorty 1998: 98). Thus, the academic Left must shed "its semi-conscious anti-Americanism" and instead, "construct inspiring images of the country" that will allow it to "form alliances with people outside the academy--and specifically, with the labor unions," which are necessary if the Left is to influence the laws (Rorty 1998: 98-99).
Within this new Left alliance, Rorty calls for agreement on "a concrete political platform, a People’s Charter, a list of specific reforms" that "might revitalize leftist politics" (Rorty 1998: 99). Such a transformative agenda should focus mostly on problems that stem from "selfishness rather than sadism" (99), Rorty argues, apparently because he thinks economic issues are the core concerns of the non-academic allies, and perhaps because, having already forgotten his earlier acknowledgement both of the New Left’s correctness in opposing the Vietnam War and of the "cultural" Left’s insight that sadism has a different mechanism than selfishness, he still believes that economic inequalities are more fundamental, and that they cause or at least can somehow be separated from traditional cultural prejudices and the social harms to which these lead. Assuming leadership to organize this new alliance and to guide the articulation of this People’s Charter will require that the academic Left "change the tone" in which it now talks about sadism, Rorty argues, including its rejection of the "melting-pot" metaphor (Rorty 1998: 100).
This is no small concession for which Rorty calls; as his contemporary, sociologist Nathan Glazer recently commented in explaining his own abandonment of his once-fierce defense of the "melting-pot" metaphor, "We are all multiculturalists now."[9] Glazer argues that even reformist liberals like himself, who would prefer to think of America as a place in which racial, ethnic, and gender differences no longer impede equal opportunities, must recognize that we are not yet that America, and that "color-blind" strategies inspired by the "melting-pot" metaphor have not rectified still radically unequal opportunities, especially for African Americans. Thus, purely voluntary, individualistic affiliation strategies inspired by a "postethnic" perspective within a common culture are premature if our transformative concern for justice is to be effectively grounded in descriptive accuracy about how we now live. We must work through multicultural strategies in the school curriculum and in the larger culture, Glazer argues, in order eventually to move beyond them. Rorty’s proposal that the academic Left reconstruct its self-understanding by embracing the "melting-pot" metaphor once again would require Glazer and other social scientists to forget more than thirty years’ worth of data and theoretical struggle about how to frame recommendations to guide democratic reforms in public policy. Why should honest scholars deny and forget such evidence of their collective hard and careful work, and of our nation’s growth of experience? Doesn’t this require abandoning their integrity in the process of abandoning their disciplines’ methods and guiding paradigms? How could such deep changes be justified? Are they even possible without electric shock or brain transplants, or at least deep denial?
The urgency to our times that drives the need for intellectuals to meet the expectations of other partners in his projected Left alliance on common ground seems to be Rorty’s rationale for abandoning such disciplinary and personal commitments. This self-transformation process will be made more palatable, he further seems suggest, if we also give up the notions of self-continuity and the growth of knowledge in order to make room for free self-creation and joyous social hope. We need "common dreams," Rorty argues, and forging them requires that we "cease noticing . . . differences" (Rorty 1998: 100-101). Again, however, Baldwin reminds us that it is impossible for at least some Americans to cease noticing our differences; "achieving our country" requires us to remember all these have cost us while reaching out to one another is courageous love and hope for a better, collaboratively forged democratic future.
In advising us to forget about our differences, Rorty implicitly rejects Baldwin’s analysis of the inextricable interconnections between the nature and consequences of past failures of America’s democracy and any effective transformative path toward a preferable future. Rorty offers a different analysis of the great problem to be overcome in restarting the democratic reform process: it is not racism, or sexism, or poverty, or any other deeply entrenched social formation, but rather the now-habitual expectation among intellectuals that someone else will come to our rescue. The Left has trouble dreaming the common dream we need in such perilous times, Rorty argues, because it still awaits rescue "by an angelic power called ‘the people’ . . . a force whose demonic counterpart is names ‘power’ or ‘the system.’ The cultural Left inherited the slogan ‘Power to the people’ from the 1960s Left, whose members rarely asked about how the transference of power was supposed to work. This question still goes unasked" (Rorty 1998: 102).
Rorty’s memory is severely truncated here, again perhaps because he continues to fight old battles in the hope that they will come out differently in the future. As the following chapter will trace in greater detail, this reliance on the democratic power of the people goes back to America’s founding, and even earlier. Its prophets are his own prophets: Jefferson, Emerson, Lincoln, Whitman, Dewey and the other Progressives. Like Robert Westbrook, Rorty is right to express concern that their shared dream of democratic self-governance of a daily, participatory kind was in many areas short on details about how it was to be realized; but this shows the need for those details, not a deficiency in the dream, whose power within their shared intellectual inheritance explains to a great extent why the New Left so passionately invoked the slogan, "Power to the people." This was not some alien, foreign phrase reflecting a lack of national self-respect at the deepest layers of these Americans’ personal identities. Rather, it was an affirmation of their American intellectual inheritance, whose attractiveness abroad as a democratic transformation-guiding slogan since America’s founding days continues to testify to rightly valued aspects of "exceptionalism" when our county is understood as a global moral and political experiment.
Plunging into the Freudian language and metaphor field he attributes to a monolithic "cultural" Left, Rorty confuses a power-wary Foucauldian social analysis and power-defusing transformative prescription with the power-affirming social analysis and power-redistributing transformative prescription of the New Left he claims it replaced. This monolithic "cultural" left has helped to produce a "politically useless" national collective unconscious, Rorty claims, one that "dreams not of political reforms but of inexplicable, magical transformation," not only through its talk of power as "an invisible, ubiquitous, and malevolent presence," but also "by adopting ideals which nobody is yet able to imagine being actualized. Among these ideals are participatory democracy and the end of capitalism" (Rorty 1998: 102). This analysis includes several mistakes. First, contrary to fact, it suggests that Foucault’s analysis of power has widespread currency within American society, most of which knows nothing of Foucault and actually tends to regard power as a good thing in their nation, in the groups to which they belong, in individuals like themselves, and even among deserving others whom they might agree to help "empower." Second, Foucauldians do not tend to advocate participatory democracy; they tend to be wary of it, whereas Jeffersonians and most Deweyan pragmatists favor it. Third, many Foucauldians join Marxists, Christian socialists, and most Deweyan pragmatists in calling for and peering beyond the fundamental transformation of "capitalism as we know it" into something better, though these strange bedfellows engage in continuous, heated battles about how to transform capitalism and toward what goals. None of them regard the end of capitalism as an ideal per se; instead, they treat it more as an "end-in-view" that is indicated as necessary by the guiding ideals they favor, to use Dewey’s language.
Guiding ideals like participatory democracy are not, Dewey reminds us, "cookbook recipes" for actualizing final outcomes, but rather directional indicators that we continuously throw before us and retrospectively re-detail in reflection on the active processes of transformative experience they guide. Thus, careful readers of Dewey should not be surprised that "nobody is yet able to imagine" just how such guiding ideals would be actualized. Deweyan pragmatists would not expect this, because this is not their function within change processes in which fallibilistic, self-correcting, experience-based knowing contingently guides action, which in turn makes it possible to expand our reflection-inclusive experience in the course of shaping new contexts for our future actions that will be given continuous, though not unchanging, directional guidance by always-incomplete, historically unfolding, location-specific, yet imaginatively extended ideals.
Rorty has tripped on his own theoretical coattails and by paying too much attention to the theorists he himself castigates and too little to others. His Freudian language of "collective unconscious," "magical transformation," "malevolent presence," and "dream ideals" unconnected to practical experience expresses a self-insulating thought-world that Rorty himself mistakes for reality. At the same time, he dismisses out of hand--"nobody knows," he says--various suggestions that have actually been offered, some of which are being tested in Deweyan experimental practice, about how to actualize participatory democracy, including how to progressively transform "global capitalism as we are coming to know it" into a better economic system, one that fosters instead of undercutting democracy. For example, Rorty simply rejects the idea advocated by David McClean and others that when power within corporations passes to shareholders, and social audits become a requirement for fulfilling their expectations of managers, entrepreneurship and markets will no longer play their present role, which Rorty interprets as equivalent to the claim that capitalism as we know it will have ended.[10] ". . .What this new thing will be, nobody knows," Rorty says, and "they never told us how ‘the people’ would learn how to handle this" (Rorty 1998: 103). To become a political Left, the cultural Left will have to confront such questions, he insists, including how the public will gain the know-how to fulfill the roles such dreams assign to them (Rorty 1998: 104). Certainly the Left must, and in fact is, confronting such questions--Rorty simply is not listening to the provisional, partial answers that twenty-first century progressives are proposing, perhaps in large part because his long-term rivalry with Marxists who have advocated "participatory democracy" makes him suspicious that anyone who advocates it could be, as Dewey suggested, deriving an ideal to guide democracy-deepening transformative practice from already-experienced realities within community life.
Because of his suspicion-based ignorance of the practical achievements and experience-based insights of citizen-proponents of participatory democracy throughout America’s dialectical political history, and especially during the last thirty years, when they have faced powerful global as well as national and local opponents, Rorty’s prescription for guiding democratic transformation is short-sighted and unfeasible, devoid of a Deweyan revisable ideal to motivate and to provide on-going guidance for the practical processes of the work for justice for which he rightly calls.
I think that the Left should get back into the business of piecemeal reform within the framework of a market economy. . . . Someday, perhaps, cumulative piecemeal reforms will be found to have brought about revolutionary change. . . . But in the meantime, we should not let the abstractly described best be the enemy of the better. We should not let speculation about a totally changed system, and a totally different way of thinking about human life and human affairs, replace step-by-step reform of the system we presently have. (Rorty 1998: 105)
We must, as Rorty suggests, avoid allowing a purely speculative best to block our work of striving for a partially experienced better. An ideal whose only genesis is speculation is surely useless if not dangerous to efforts to deepen democracy in global contexts, and step-by-step transformative efforts are surely required. Nonetheless, the realistic grounding of our hopes in working toward particular, step-by-step reforms depends upon successively interrelating these reforms relative to the directional guidance of a revisable practical ideal, and also upon employing a practical process of mutually adjusting our strategies and our guiding ideal itself as we gain understanding and capability through active participation in transformative practice. How would we know which reforms to strive for, how to organize our efforts, and how to assess them without such a democratic ideal and the practical processes of using it within the kind of collaborative, practically focused, mutually-educational action that Dewey and others have written about, and that many are now testing and learning to generalize in action?
Rorty rightly urges us not to take the viewpoint of a detached cosmopolitan spectator when assessing our country’s past and prospects.[11] Instead, he urges us to substitute shared utopian dreams in the place of knowledge claims, to rejoin Whitman’s and Dewey’s party of hope (Rorty 1998: 106-107). Theirs is the right party for the Left to join, but it is not Rorty’s party insofar as his nostalgic attachment.to winning old, well-lost battles, his suspicion of old opponents and their inheritors, and his willingness to read abstract theory but not works grounded in participatory democratic practice guide both his personal loyalties and his transformative prescriptions. However, if Rorty’s transformative prescription is revised to include many of the groups who are active already in pursuing democratic reforms in America and in other countries world-wide, and if, contra Rorty’s advice, their dispersed knowledge and their differing but potentially converging hopes are conjoined within the more ambitious transformative of achieving our world, we would have good grounds for shared social hope that deepening democracy in global contexts is possible.
2. Democratic epistemology: the (in)compatibility of knowledge and social hope
America’s "most prominent and vocal" intellectual Left today finds our country unforgivable and unachievable, Rorty argues (Rorty 1998: 35). This leads them to step back from our country and to "theorize" it (Rorty 1998: 36), mocking the idea that democratic institutions "might once again be made to serve social justice," as Rorty thinks they did in the first six decades of the twentieth century. In the process, these intellectuals become spectators rather than agents, trying to see "the American adventure" within "a fixed frame of reference . . . supplied by theory. . . . This retreat from secularism and pragmatism to theory has accompanied a revival of ineffability" and hopelessness among intellectuals (Rorty 1998: 36-37), repeating the preference for knowledge over over hope of the Marxist Left earlier in the twentieth century. "This distrust of humanism, with its retreat from practice to theory, is the sort of failure of nerve which leads people to abandon secularism for a belief in sin . . . ." (Rorty 1998: 37-38). Intellectual courage is required, Rorty claims, to avoid regressive adoption of a religious framework, or a substitute for one: "Grand theories--eschatologies like Hegel’s or Marx’s, inverted eschatologies like Heidegger’s, and rationalizations of hopelessness like Foucault’s and Lacan’s--satisfy the urges that theology used to satisfy. These are urges which Dewey hoped Americans might cease to feel" (Rorty 1998: 38).
In Rorty’s view, there is and can be no knowledge of the truth of our history that could rightly ground or undercut our social hopes; Baldwin’s choice to hope, to reach out, and to work to achieve our country in spite of its unforgivable past cannot be justified over the alternative path to condemn America and to reject the moral claims of citizenship that Elijah Muhammad and the Black Muslims chose. For the same reasons, it makes no sense to ask whether Whitman and Dewey got America’s story right (and perhaps whether Rorty got Whitman and Dewey right). Social hope concerns issues of moral identity, national and personal, not of knowledge, in Rorty’s view.
Stories about what a nation has been and should try to be are not attempts at accurate representation, but rather attempts to forge a moral identity. The argument between Left and Right about which episodes in our history we Americans should pride ourselves on will never be a contest between a true and a false account of our country’s history and its identity. It is better described as an argument about which hopes to allow ourselves and which to forgo. (Rorty 1998: 13-14).
How, then, are we to choose among different stories, different hopes?
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" (16). Luciferean pride is no longer a sin in Rorty’s world, both because there are no more sins, and because we deny any other source of our being as well as any authority that we can and should respect in our creative becoming other than our own imaginations and the active choices they guide, acknowledging in our freedom only our fellow archangels as equally potent and equally free from external authority as we are ourselves.
In claiming that this self-understanding has and should guide the American party of hope, Rorty cites passages from Whitman’s Leaves of Grass with which he claims Dewey would have agreed, suggesting that these indicate the deeper democratic motive for pragmatism’s rejection of the correspondence theory of truth, and of any other conception of pre-existing Truth that limits humanity’s imagination and our freedom to agree among ourselves alone about what we will regard as binding upon us
I speak the password primeval . . . I give the sign of democracy;/By God! I will accept nothing which all cannot have their counterpart of on the same terms./ . . . Logic and sermons never convince,/The damp of night drives deeper into my soul./ Only what proves itself to every man and woman is so,/Only what nobody denies is so. (Rorty 1998: 26-27, quoting Whitman 50 and 56).
Rorty does not offer a close reading of Whitman’s lines, but his implied praise of them in combination with his explicit anti-religious commitments and his emphasis on self-creation suggest that he takes them to express moral egalitarianism grounded only in a personal stance of choosing to reject inequality and to reject any extra-individual ground for well-warranted belief other than universal convergence in personal experiences. Rorty may read "the password primeval" as referring to a generalized self-respect that humanity’s intuition or shared common sense has always taught us, in spite of the pretentious claims of philosophers and theologians that there are other sources of epistemic and moral validity that can and do exercise authority over the adequacy of our own determinations. Probably Rorty reads reference to the divinity as a self-reference to the poet, while also claiming it as self-referring for him, too, and also for to any other self-creating and world-shaping human being.
This reading is further supported by Rorty’s implicitly praising gloss of pragmatism’s conception of truth that immediately follows: "These passages in Whitman can be read as presaging the doctrine that made pragmatism both original and infamous: its refusal to believe in the existence of Truth, in the sense of something not made by human hands, something which has authority over human beings. The closest Hegel got to this pragmatist doctrine was his dictum that philosophy is its own time held in thought" (Rorty 1998: 27). Instead of an independent Truth serving as the criterion for the descriptive accuracy and moral desirability of any American story, Rorty’s pragmatism sees the aspirations and active needs of America as a nation-state as the criterion for the adequacy of conceptions of truth and rightness.
Despite this historicism, Hegel could never bring himself to assert the primacy of the practical over the theoretical--what Hilary Putnam, defining the essence of pragmatism, has called the primacy of the agent point of view. Dewey, like Marx in the Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach, took the primacy of the practical all the way. His pragmatism is an answer to the question "What can philosophy do for the United States?" rather than to the question "How can the United States be philosophically justified?" He abandoned the question "Why should one prefer democracy to feudalism, and self-creation to obedience to authority?" in favor of the question "Given the preferences we Americans share, given the adventure on which we are embarked, what should we say about truth, knowledge, reason, virtue, human nature, and all the other traditional philosophical topics?" America will, Dewey hoped, be the first nation-state to have the courage to renounce hope of justification from on high--from a source which is immovable and eternal. Such a country will treat both its philosophy and its poetry as modes of self-expression, rather than ask its philosophers to provide it with reassurance. (Rorty 1998: 27-28)
Having no basis other than personal opinion for criticizing their nation’s arrogant self-preoccupation, and no grounds to which they can appeal other than the agreement of their fellow citizens for reassuring those same citizens that America’s institutions, its international policies, or even its perceived shortcomings are justifiable, philosophers must recognize that they have no public role to play and can contribute nothing more (or less) than poets to their nation’s guidance.
We like what we have achieved; our self-satisfaction is what makes it true or right, Rorty says.
The culminating achievement of Dewey’s philosophy was to treat evaluative terms such as "true" and "right" not as signifying a relation to some antecedently existing thing--such as God’s Will, or Moral Law, or the Intrinsic Nature of Objective Reality--but as expressions of satisfaction at having found a solution to a problem: a problem which may someday seem obsolete, and a satisfaction which may someday seem misplaced. The effect of this treatment is to change our account of progress. Instead of seeing progress as a matter of getting closer to something specifiable in advance, we see it as a matter of solving more problems. Progress is, as Thomas Kuhn suggested, measured by the extent to which we have made ourselves better than we were in the past rather than by our increased proximity to a goal. (Rorty 1998: 28)
Though he makes Dewey sound like a modified moral emotivist, who has simply added descriptive criteria in order to better explain why we cheer what we like and boo what we dislike, Rorty has captured two important aspects of Dewey’s conception of an action-guiding hypothesis: we are motivated to act in order to change circumstances that have given us problems in the past, and our ideal goals tend to be too vague to be achievable through Platonic stage-wise approximations. However, Rorty understates Dewey’s assessment of the importance of those vague ultimate goals or guiding ideals in our lives. For Dewey, scientists who rightly have given up belief in an antecedent Truth still do and should seek truths and better truths, and American citizens who rightly have given up belief in Manifest Destiny still do and should guide their actions by the democratic ideal. The term ‘rightly’ as used in the previous sentence has meaning for Dewey, expressing more than personal opinion or a widely shared social belief in his view, even if one has given up the correspondence theory of truth and belief in a divinely foreordained course of human history. Deweyan consequences include more than personal satisfactions.
In Rorty’s view, Dewey’s epistemic democracy was motivated by and served the needs of his moral and political democracy, understood as a faith he shared with Whitman in the ultimate value and authority of individual human beings, and at the same time, in the exceptional nation dedicated to creating the conditions for their diverse self-creation.
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)
In an unexplained departure from his earlier metaphysical individualism, Rorty here describes the nation as the agent in this great project of self-creation, whose success will assessed by the citizens this emerging nation shapes. Other nations’ opinions will not and should not matter to them unless they agree with their own, and they will tend to agree with their own to the extent that other nations democratically re-create themselves according to the American model.
So much for my interpretation of Whitman’s and Dewey’s attempts thoroughly to secularize America--to see America as the paradigmatic democracy, and thus as the country which would pride itself as one in which governments and social institutions exist only for the purpose of making a new sort of individual possible, one who will take nothing as authoritative save free consensus between as diverse a variety of citizens as can possibly be produced. (Rorty 1998: 30)
Thus, Rorty’s nation-state here replaces Dewey’s community as the indispensable mode of human social organization.
A few pages later, social individuals (presumably those shaped by the nation) are treated as the arbiters by their democratic consensus of what is "objectively" the case. For Dewey, Rorty argues, as for Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida,
. . . objectivity is a matter of intersubjective consensus among human beings, not of accurate representation of something nonhuman. Insofar as human beings do not share the same needs, they may disagree about what is objectively the case. But the resolution of such disagreement cannot be an appeal to the way reality, apart from any human need, really is. The resolution can only be political: one must use democratic institutions and procedures to conciliate these various needs, and thereby widen the range of consensus about how things are. (Rorty 1998: 35).
Rorty is partly right here in his emphasis on the importance of achieving a wide democratic consensus about how things are, and also about what should be done if we seek to guide public deliberation democratically and toward more deeply democratic end; but he is also misleading, and certainly far from Dewey, in his apparent suggestion that the agreement in question is only that of the citizens of a nation-state, and that such agreement requires no rational and evidential warrants.
It is important for the reader to realize that Rorty’s Dewey is an odd mixture of the real American pragmatist, who left traces in texts and in living memory, and a fictional character of Rorty’s making who advances quite different arguments to serve Rorty’s purposes--rather like Plato’s Socrates in the Middle Dialogues. Rorty’s Dewey has forgotten the community. His hopes are groundless, dependent on forgetting. Democracy is a dream, an image, a story, but no longer a guiding practical ideal already partly actualized in history and lived experience. Moreover, Rorty’s Dewey has given up on the alternative approach to fruitful inquiry to which the real Dewey devoted at least three books and countless essays, hoping to achieve its adoption within the various sciences and also within participatory democratic processes. Dewey’s pragmatist conception of truth had already been misrepresented by William James in the much-misunderstood essay on that subject that made pragmatism infamous; like Rorty, James in his originality often misrepresented his friends as well as his opponents. James had so misrepresented his dear friend Charles Sanders Peirce’s significantly different pragmatist conception of truth in an earlier essay that Peirce renamed his position "pragmaticism" in order to dissociate himself from the school of thought increasingly associated with James’s own views. James’s own pragmatist conception of truth, as this emerged in his texts over time, is well worth reconsideration. The important point here is that Dewey’s conception of truth was neither that attributed to him by James, nor that attributed to him by Rorty.
On the subject of truth, as on others Dewey considered, keeping one eye on his reconstructed metaphysics is the key to understanding both what he says and how Rorty misrepresents him. Like the earlier views in the Western philosophical tradition that Dewey criticizes, Rorty treats the theoretical and the practical as separable and as hierarchically related; he merely inverts the hierarchy to give control to the practical. This is not Dewey’s view. Instead, Dewey treats the theoretical and the practical (like the polar elements in the other classical dualisms) as inextricably interrelated, whether we intend and acknowledge them to be so in our philosophical analyses and our ways of living, or not. Likewise, we are both agents and ‘patients," in Dewey’s language, acting and undergoing simultaneously and sequentially, always becomings-within-Nature, both reflecting and collaboratively causing emergent outcomes that introduce new structures, new relationships, and genuinely new kinds of actor-patients. (Peirce and James called this world process of generating emergent newness "tychism.") Moreover, in Dewey’s view, humans are and need to be members of communities, which give our individual lives context, meaning, some measure of security, and various opportunities that we need if we are to develop some of our unique, eventually valued, individuality-defining potentials. These have become increasingly complex individual potentials as the structures and needs of human communities have become increasingly complex over the course of human history. However events came to pass that led to humanity emerging within Nature, we are an active kind of creatures who need to ask questions, to seek answers, to reflect on our surroundings and on events in our shared-and-individual lives, both in order to understand this world we experience as exceeding our grasp, and to gain at least some small measure of control in shaping the future’s course in ways that matter to us, including but surpassing a pleasure-pain economy.
Unlike Emerson and Rorty, who would shake off earlier layers of history and antecedent forms of civilization in order to attend to a unique American context within which an unprecedented new being with an utterly new vision might be shaped, the real Dewey reflects on and sustains continuity with the past, treating it as a resource of human experience and longing that can offer some guidance in new contexts. We carry forward within ourselves, he suggests, the "immanent impulse" toward the conditions of mutual human flourishing that we inherited from our biological and social progenitors--a longing inherited in our bodies, our central nervous systems, our deep emotions, as well as in our thought-world and the institutions, social practices, and ritual reenactments that sustain it. We call the future conditions that would fulfill that longing "democracy"--each generation adding insights about what must be avoided, what must be protected, what must be risked, and what may be gained by such risks, yet passing the task of advancing that project to each new generation in new circumstances, in which their progenitors’ experience can be at best only a partial guide.
The real Dewey was a practical meliorist, trying to make problematic aspects of human experience better in various ways, rather than a utopian optimist of the kind Rorty calls us to be, because he had experienced so much tragedy in his own life and through the reports of others he incorporated into his reflections, including through his reading of history. Moreover, Dewey was not a Whitman disciple, as Rorty suggests, much as he appreciated him. Even Whitman was not Rorty’s Whitman--in addition to celebrating the creative potentials of his own body-spirit and those of his fellow men and women, the real Walt also lamented their role in causing Lincoln’s death, as well as all the hopes that died with him, in "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed" and "O Captain! My Captain!" The real Dewey did not make up his own goals single-handedly, though he claimed and reframed those he had inherited; nor did he listen only to his own heart in determining whether a course of action and the belief-structure that directs and explains it are likely to advance those goals in a context of real dangers and obstacles. Rather, inquiring cooperatively with others, he drew upon and added to the best evidence available, acting practically within a theoretical framework fallibilistically adopted, and put to the test even as it was being relied upon, to bring about consequences that mattered greatly to him and to others.
In so doing, the real Dewey acted within his American context, but for the sake of a wider world, whose welfare he rightly saw as inseparable from America’s welfare, and whose citizens he included in the "we" of his Great Community. Moreover, that welfare included the satisfaction of the ancient human impulse to aweful wonder that stimulates our human need to understand how things are because we are fascinated by the world, semi-independently from from our needs to know how to bend things to our will in creative play and to know how to enhance our mutual security. Like Rorty, Dewey regarded humanity as part of the world, and our quest for knowing about it as interactively affecting our world, instead of giving us infallible insight about how it is or would be independent of us. But he took this quest for knowing seriously, as Rorty does not seem to do. The real Dewey criticized his progenitors’ approaches to knowing and their hopes for its certain and permanent security not in order to end the quest for knowing, but to redirect it more fruitfully, though with chastened hopes. Justification from on high will not be forthcoming to the Deweyan knower both because we cannot exceed this world and because we are co-creators within its continuous process of becoming.
In renouncing knowing per se, the real Dewey would challenge Rorty, you renounce the fulfillment of a deep and ancient part of our humanity that will not be denied, but whose direction in its unfolding you trust to less reliable guides. Without its processive fulfillment, the other parts of our being that are inextricably interlinked with it, including memory and imagination, will be stunted, overblown, undirected, untested. Thus, in imagining and acting to achieve America, we may forget the world of which it is a part, and the other processes active within the world’s becoming with which we must reckon if we are to be effective in achieving goals we will want if our aspirations are fulfilled. Agreement among committed members of a Left alliance is insufficient as a guide to feasible and desirable transformation processes, as students of on-going struggles in Ireland and the Balkans have come to understand. Yet we have a better alternative, Dewey suggests, than either calling upon Divine Authority and thereby refusing our human responsibility to inquire, or passively seeking validation by appeal to a correspondence theory of truth and thereby denying our inescapably interactive role within the world about which we inquire: we can draw upon and contribute to the growth of fallibilistic collaborative knowing, continuously improving our knowing in active processes of testing, revising, and remembering that both chasten and sustain our hopes.
Even supposing that I am right that Rorty has misrepresented the views of the historical person we know as John Dewey, and that my Dewey story is closer to the real Dewey’s own views (or at least the ideas expressed in his texts), why should this matter to Rorty or to Rorty’s readers? It should matter because Dewey’s unfinished story is better than Rorty’s revision, Dewey’s actual reasoning is better than Rorty’s sketchy revision of it, and we have a great deal at stake. Though Rorty is right that we need to tell an American story that can successfully re-call American intellectuals and the partners with whom we must work as respected, mutually transforming equals in a process of working together to "achieve our country," the kind of story that can successfully guide our efforts must continuously re-frame what we hope for in light of active, widely dispersed, fallibilistic knowing that is expanded and corrected through collaborative inquiry. Forging such a collaboration and guiding it successfully, not just to achieve dominance but to deepen democracy, will require us, as Baldwin advises, to remember much that Rorty would have us forget.
In Rorty’s view, many things should "chasten and temper" our national pride, but "nothing a nation has done should make it impossible for a constitutional democracy to regain self-respect." Otherwise, he argues, we abandon shared social hope for the vocabulary of sin (Rorty 1998: 32). Rorty does not explain here why these vocabularies are necessarily incompatible. In fact, social hope that does not depend upon denial of the magnitude of social disasters like the Holocaust and American chattel slavery and its racist aftermath, in which citizens of constitutional democracies have been knowingly and willingly complicit, requires acknowledging unspeakably cruel human actions for which the vocabulary of sin seems woefully inadequate, while also acknowledging courageously moral human actions amidst these horrors that give rise to a fragile sense of a better possibility that can spur action toward a future in which such horrors do not occur. Rorty is surely right to call on Dewey’s support in arguing that what makes us moral beings is that there are some things we think we would die rather than do; and for our lesser moral failings, Rorty is helpful in suggesting that if we do such things in spite of our sense that they are wrong, we must remain agents, resolving never to do them again (Rorty 1998: 33). This may be the right way to respond to our own lies, broken promises, thefts, even some forms of personal violence. However, such a prompt resolution seems wholly inadequate to greater crimes, individual or collective, which call for silence, reflection, self-reconstruction, making whatever amends to victims may still be possible, and creating individual and collective defenses against repetition of such acts. Otherwise, the pledge "never again" is nothing more than a self-deceiving insult to the memory of the victims. "To forget would be a sin," Elie Wiesel writes of the Holocaust. "To remember is essential; is is a worthy endeavor, a noble cause for which many of us have fought relentlessly" (Wiesel 2001:A3). Though Wiesel uses the ambiguous, seemingly mental language of "sin" to characterize forgetting, what is involved in the alternative he urges--remembering--is more than a pious mental act. It is a re-calling into being of an active experience, shared by others, of as much as we can comprehend among us of what has been lost, combined with a demand for accountability, insofar as this is possible, and a forward-looking rededication to cultivating and protecting a sense of the precious.
Realistic social hope requires such remembering: acknowledgment of the enormous harms that beggar the language of sin that constitutional democracies have wrought in the still-living past, in combination with rededication to more widely actualizing the better possibilities that some of our prophetic brothers and sisters devoted their lives to manifesting even in the midst of such horrors. Because he is so determined to avoid the language of sin, Rorty fails to respond adequately to the great evils that social hope must both acknowledge and transform into motivations for engaged, transformative, more deeply democratic living. Rorty endorses Andrew Delbanco’s way of describing Dewey’s Emersonian conception of evil as "the failure of imagination to reach beyond itself, . . . to open oneself to a spirit that both chastises one for confidence in one’s own righteousness and promises the enduring comfort of reciprocal love."[12] However, Rorty rejects Delbanco’s conclusion that Dewey’s conception of evil so described is inadequate, and that humanity needs a fixed moral standard. Dewey’s rejection of the language of sin in favor of a more hopeful conception of the human spirit required "intellectual courage," Rorty argues; such a reframing of human possibilities was basic to the Progressive Movement’s confidence in education and reform. We must also remember, however, that the Progressives were deeply divided in their own minds and against one another on the great moral issues of war and peace, industrial violence against and by workers, and what should be done about lynching, exclusion of African Americans from education and the professions, and other Jim Crow-era manifestations of America’s deeply ingrained racial attitudes.
The Progressives’ challenge, like ours in dealing with the still-resonating horrors of the past and of our own time, was to take in experientially the inexpressibly evil, to find language-in-action that acknowledges it without paralyzing us to respond deeply and appropriately, instead guiding committed efforts to achieve profound transformations in hearts, minds, and institutions while keeping our eyes open to the possibility that our opponents may be working equally hard in pursuit of incompatible hopes that, if realized, might devastate our own. Motivating and sustaining well-focused and effectively transformative social hope does not depend upon minimizing the significance of moral horrors through individual acts of strong imagination, as Rorty seems to read Delbanco’s Dewey. Instead it depends upon courage to reach out without intellectual assurance toward what Delbanco calls "a spirit"--what Dewey himself called, without dualistic metaphysics,
a "religious" spirit--that has the power to change one’s own heart and to raise up a transformative community whose goals and whose means arise through the powers and processes of interactive, future-making love. In his desire to separate religion from public life, and thereby to free human persons for individual self-definition, Rorty has too quickly accepted an impoverished language of social hope insufficiently complicated by the dreadful realities others have sought to evoke, though perhaps inadequately, with the language of sin. He also has failed to appreciate sources and processes of evoking and sustaining realistic social hope within the life experience of a loving community that are extra-rational, though they need not be other-worldly.
Evidently Rorty regards belief in the transformative potential of "participatory democracy" as a Marxism-inspired, unacceptable substitute for religious faith, one incompatible with the American "civic religion" in which he calls intellectuals to reaffirm their faith. Here again, however, Rorty’s unreconstructed bondage to his inherited generational paradigm, in combination with his ill-considered and un-Deweyan attempt to liberate social hope from memory-linked fallibilistic knowing and its provisionally affirmed facts, mislead his analysis. Instead of embracing recent developments that should support and guide shared social hope, he rejects them, and with them, the best emerging path to achieving our country and achieving our world in an era of globalization.
3. Participatory democracy: movements, campaigns, and democratic living
The seeming contradiction of Rorty’s brusque dismissal of "participatory democracy" in the context of re-calling twenty-first century American intellectuals to participate in collaborative democratic reform sends a confusing signal to the careful reader, one that requires interpretation and critical assessment. This confusing signal and the key to its interpretation are both included in Rorty’s dedication of Achieving Our Country to two of his heroes, Irving Howe and A. Philip Randolph, Jr., who model very different approaches to living a good life within the context of transgenerational struggles to deepen America’s democracy.
These lectures are dedicated to the memory of Irving Howe and of A. Philip Randolph, Jr. I had only fleeting personal contact with these two men, but their writings, their social roles, and their political stances made a great impression on me when I was young. They seemed then, and still seem, to symbolize my country at its best. (Rorty 1998: Dedication)
The influence of both of these men is evident in Rorty’s self-identification with the Left and in his retrospective argument that, during the first half of the twentieth century, intellectuals and labor unions forged an effective alliance loyally dedicated to economic reforms within the American framework, the best example of how to achieve our country we have. However, Howe’s is clearly the model of living Rorty seeks to emulate and to justify as a guide for the twenty-first century, whereas he implicitly treats Randolph’s model as deeply misguided, though admirable.
Rorty’s approach to philosophy as "self-expression," which desirably includes the personal experiences that unavoidably influence people’s adoption of their deepest beliefs, and which favors direct expression of one’s opinion in one’s own voice, unfortunately does not include much reasoned argument that is intended to persuade others to share those opinions. Thus, a reader who thinks that reasons matter as much as stories must excavate Rorty’s texts and extrapolate beyond what he actually says to construct approximations of the kinds of reasons Rorty would offer if, contrary to his announced philosophical practice, he were to offer reasons in explanation if not in justification of his views. These would not, in the end, turn out to be very good reasons for others to adopt his views on "participatory democracy" because they forget too many of the important and painful lessons from past generations’ struggles toward "achieving our country," and they overlook some of the important current needs and significant practical achievements of citizen-activists engaging at their peril in the great twenty-first century struggle of "achieving our world."
Rorty’s quick dismissal of "participatory democracy" seems to spring from two causes, both autobiographically linked. First, he dismisses it as a slogan of the New Left, whose necessary and effective participation in the Anti-Vietnam War Movement he acknowledged only to quickly forget it. "Participatory democracy" as a slogan suggests no specific reforms and thus does no work, in Rorty’s view; instead, it masks an anti-democratic Marxist agenda that history has proven to be disastrous. Second, Rorty dismisses the desire to work for "participatory democracy" as an expression of Kierkegaard’s "longing of the infinite" and the need for "the assurance of purity" that typically characterizes movements; he favors limited campaigns over movements because, he suggests, movements are dangerous to their partisans, ineffective in achieving concrete reforms, and performatively self-contradictory over the long term, inevitably giving rise to countermovements to acknowledge their devastating impurity, their unevadable historical limits, and their practical incapacity to achieve their motivating goals.
Though Rorty rejects movements in general and Marxism in particular, A. Philip Randolph, Jr., to whose memory Achieving Our County is dedicated in part, was self-identified with and shaped within two of America’s great, transgenerational democratic movements: he was "a race man" and "a union man," the founder of the Black Sleeping Car Porters Union known to its members and friends as "the Chief," and the editor of The Messenger, moreover, he was an original American thinker who found much to agree with in Marxism (Moses 1997). Unlike such contemporary conservative triumphalists as Samuel Huntington and Frances Fukuyama, who treat Marxism as now politically irrelevant, Rorty’s comments on movements, "participatory democracy," and several other topics as framed in Marxist language suggest that Rorty continues to engage Marxism, both nostalgically and as a continuing intellectual competitor to tell the American story that will shape national and personal self-conceptions, and all the events that flow from these. Though his comments are brief and dismissive, Rorty seems to think that American Marxists, like the "cultural" Left he criticizes in greater detail, foster national self-disgust while being so preoccupied with abstract theoretical issues, and with intra-curricular struggles, that they fail to engage with the real, practical issues of the day. Moreover, he argues, their dreams of "the end of capitalism" and of "participatory democracy" are vague, unachievable, and as other-worldly as the dreams of heaven of Christian fundamentalists; and these similarly block the way to "achieving our country" by distracting energies and confusing the goals of collaborative struggle. Thus, though Rorty praises Martin Luther King, Jr., and Walter Reuther, leaders of the Civil Rights Movement and the Labor Movements respectively, as well as Randolph, who was a leader of both, he rejects movements in part because they are associated with Marxism, apparently on the principle that any friend of my enemy is an enemy of mine, or alternatively, any concept that has been misused historically is thereby too sullied for future good use.
Ironically, however, their partisans’ allegedly inevitable attachment to a "quest for purity" is one of the reasons why Rorty rejects movements in favor of "campaigns." Here he claims the guidance of the lived example of the other man to whom he dedicates Achieving Our Country, Irving Howe, who parted ways in 1954 with Partisan Review, the movement-oriented journal of the intellectual reformist Left, because it had lost its radical edge, founding Dissent as an alternative, independent journal of individual Left opinion. The avant -garde from which Howe then sought independence, as Rorty tells his story, had combined briefly but fruitfully, in the years between 1936 and 1941, a critical allegiance to the modernist movement in the arts with a political allegiance to the reformist Left, the latter allegiance stimulated by the sensibilities aroused by the first. Howe’s prose inspired young Rorty to seek likewise to combine "critical consciousness" and "political conscience" in his way of living (Rorty 1998: 112).
By 1982, when Howe published A Margin of Hope: An Intellectual Autobiography, he and Rorty had both come to regard this aspiration as unrealizable, apparently in part because good minds do not operate well in an organized, unified manner; they are and must remain independent, and thus, incapable of pledging their loyalty to a movement. However, they can and do properly contribute their energetic gifts to campaigns.
By "campaign," I mean something finite, something that can be recognized to have succeeded or to have, so far, failed. Movements, by contrast, neither succeed nor fail. They are too big and too amorphous to do anything that simple. They share in what Kierkegaard called "the passion of the infinite." They are exemplified by Christianity and by Marxism, the sort of movements which enable novelists like Dostoevsky to do what Howe admiringly called "feeling thought."[13]
In addition to the impossibility of maintaining intellectual independence within movements, Rorty’s other concern about them seems to be that they require a kind of self-deception about the scope of their transformative powers that no honest, experienced political partisan should or can practice. Membership in a movement, Rorty claims, requires the partisan to interpret events as "parts of something much bigger, and as having little meaning in themselves" (Rorty 1998: 114). Thus, literature, art, history, and philosophy must be combined together in a movement’s imaginative alchemy in order to create "a larger context in which politics is no longer just politics, but rather the matrix out of which will emerge something like Paul’s ‘new being in Christ’ or Mao’s ‘new socialist man’" (Rorty 1998:115). Such a movement politics, about which Howe was as skeptical in the 1980s as he had been in the 1930s, Rorty says, "assumes that things will be changed utterly, that a terrible new beauty will be born" (Rorty 1998: 115).
The impossibility of such a complete transformation, and the pain of disillusionment when one discovers its impossibility, is the second reason why Howe stuck to campaigning, and apparently why Rorty has done likewise, not only avoiding movements, but also de-linking critical consciousness from political conscience and giving up the aspiration of perfectly synthesizing work with life (Rorty 1998: 115). Howe’s Dissent was, for Rorty, a source of information about current campaigns of interest to members of the independent intellectual Left, not a standard for right living. Rorty writes admiringly of Howe that "he wrote as he pleased and about what he pleased, without asking which larger goals he served or how his work tied in with the spirit of the age" (Rorty 1998: 116). Though Howe himself confessed that he was troubled by his inability to "reconcile my desire to be a writer with remembered fantasies about public action," Rorty dismisses such a concern, stating that Howe was "the envy of his contemporaries, precisely because he was able to find the time to be both an accomplished man of letters and the unpaid editor of his country’s most useful political magazine" (Rorty 1998: 116). The independence from movements that Rorty admires in Howe, apparently because it allowed him to manage demands on his time more effectively and thus, to finish his books and his journal issues on schedule, came at a self-recognized cost to Howe’s remembered consciousness as an aspiring activist that Rorty refuses to acknowledge
Instead, Howe was a "warrior-saint," in Rorty’s view, modeling a way of living that combined "the contemplative and the active lives, how to look inward and outward on alternate days of the week, and how to combine this ambidexterity with a sense of finitude and an ironic recognition of impurity" (Rorty 1998: 116). Here Rorty telegraphs his own aspiration for living, yet it is an oddly spectatorial one. Rorty’s Howe looks in different directions, and he reads and writes, but instead of bravely leading dangerous, change-making action, as he fantasizes, and as in fact did A. Philip Randolph, Jr., Walter Reuther, and Martin Luther King, Jr., he does not seem to act at all.
Unlike them, and unlike others whose lives are shaped by movements, Rorty’s "warrior-saint" has given up the "assurance of purity" that movement life offers in its dedication to willing one single thing, instead adopting a "polytheistic" ability to "internalize and tolerate oppositions" (Rorty 1998: 117). Howe had learned from reading political novels that movements are dangerous to one’s psychic integrity in a way that campaigns are not. "Each campaign is finite, and there is always another campaign to enlist in when the first fails or goes rancid. The realized impurity of a movement can destroy the person who has identified himself with that movement, but the impurity of a campaign can be taken in one’s stride: such impurity is just what one expects of something finite and mortal" (Rorty 1998: 118-119). Rorty suggests that Howe’s claim about modernism is true of all movements: they "must always struggle but never quite triumph, and then, after a time, must struggle in order not to triumph," because success would reveal that a movement’s goals were always finite and would betray its partisans’ unachievable quest for purity.[14] Arguing in very abstract, theoretical terms like those he criticized as characteristic of the "cultural" Left, Rorty posits that cultural movements are killed off by other movements of the same kind, "a new sublime" killing off the old one; people who cannot live without a movement invent and then hype a new one, as postmodernism was born from the death of modernism (Rorty 1998: 119-120).
Instead of making no-longer-credible claims that our world has been shaped by a series of great movements, Rorty suggests, we should try imagining the cultural and sociopolitical history of the West in terms of a "a very large number of small campaigns," understanding each of these as analogous to "the career of an individual poet, novelist, dancer, critic, or painter"--finite, mortal, a success or a failure to some degree, borrowing impetus, enthusiasm, and self-definition from alliances and oppositions in "trying to make the future different from the past--trying to make a new role rather than to play an old role well" (Rorty 1998: 121-122). "If there is a connection between artistic freedom and creativity and the spirit of democracy," Rorty suggests, "it is that the former provide examples of the kind of courageous self-transformation of which we hope democratic societies will become increasingly capable--transformation which is conscious and willed, rather than semiconsciously endured" (Rorty 1998: 122). If we take his advice, writing "narratives of overlapping campaigns and careers," we would "lose dramatic intensity," but we might "immunize ourselves against the passion of the infinite," telling a story of "increasing freedom" without "inevitable progress" and "immanent teleology" (Rorty 1998: 122-123). In so doing, we would give up the evaluative criterion of how well a campaign or a career aligned with or even promoted the movement of history, instead realizing that chance plays a large role in events and that "occasionally and briefly, beauty flashes forth," while asking only whether a campaign, a career, or a journal "did some good" (Rorty 1998: 123). Of someone like Irving Howe, we would ask only "whether his political conscience led him to support good causes, and whether his critical consciousness took the form of essays which stand comparison with those of Orwell and Wilson," Howe’s own models (Rorty 1998: 124).
It is hard to compare an approach to living learned from the warnings of political novels with one learned in active self-identification within movements, and it is certainly not the role of the living to judge the value of the lives of the dead, especially those who have supported good causes. Nonetheless, the lives of Irving Howe and of A. Philip Randolph, Jr., offer very different models, and if we use them to measure the value of movements, they suggest very different conclusions. Rorty’s rejection of movements seems to reflect his own preference for a more self-controlled life, one that willingly relinquishes the sense of participating in the historic drama of great movements in favor of maintaining control over one’s time and agenda while protecting one’s psychic security from the great disappointments that activists may experience when their collective efforts are rebuffed by superior forces and their heroes’ feet of clay are revealed. Surely his own choice of a model for living properly belongs to Rorty himself, especially since he, like Howe, frequently supports "good causes." However, Rorty’s claim that we can say everything important about Randolph’s alternative kind of life, and the way such a life has meaning and impact within the project of "achieving our country," by telling a narrative of "a very large number of small campaigns," does not bear scrutiny. Reflecting on the interconnections among some of the great American social movements, the kinds of lives they have framed, and the campaigns whose eventual success they have made possible shows that, without the movements Rorty dismisses, the effectiveness of the campaigns he endorses and even our evaluation of them as "good causes" would be impossible.
A. Philip Randolph, Jr., became the kind of man he was because the great movements in terms of which he framed his life, including the influential individuals he encountered and the decisive events in which he participated, required and called forth the development of the great potentials we retrospectively regard as characteristic of him. As Dewey suggests in his essay "Time and Individuality" (1940), any human being encompasses myriad potentials, only some of which will actually be developed in the course of living a particular life in a particular social and historical context. We are not born as finished individuals, nor do our families, our early friends, and our childhood circumstances complete the individualization process, though all of them are important in shaping who we become. Formal education (or lack thereof) also is important, though not finally decisive--remember Lincoln. Certainly choice and chance are important factors in our on-going individualization throughout our lives, as Rorty rightly reminds us. Nonetheless, the educative associations and opportunities of our adult life are profoundly formative--especially our daily work because it takes up so much of our time and energies, and because our culture strongly influences us to treat it as self-definitive, but also our families and friendships outside the work place, as well as the often-related "avocational" interests and commitments to which we devote our "free time." Gardeners, bird watchers, fishers, and wilderness lovers become special breeds; couch potatoes and internet trawlers are other kinds of people; singers, painters, and mystery writers are shaped by the media they shape; and citizen-activists become what their causes need and stimulate them to become in the course of their collaborative efforts to transform institutions and social practices from without and from within. A. Philip Randolph, Jr., became the man he did because the parents who named him as a baby and the community that cared for him as a child taught and evinced idealistic values, as well as needs related to race and to economic opportunity within the still-unfinished America they claimed as their country; in response to that caring, those values, and those needs, he chose to become "a race man" and "a union man"; chance combined with his own hard-wrought talents and the hard work of many others who also identified themselves with these great movements to create the extraordinary opportunities and circumstances that helped to form the adult individual who, Rorty says retrospectively, "symbolize[s] my country at its best."
Without the movements that formed him as he led them, that Randolph would never have lived. The same is true of the Martin Luther King, Jr., the world knows, and of the Walter Reuther some of us remember. However, none of these highly effective movement leaders willed "a single thing," as Rorty suggests one inevitably must if one commits one’s loyalty to a movement. Instead, each was a complex individual responsive to multiple loyalties, guided by a broader democratic vision, and appreciative of others’ efforts and commitments to achieve different aspects of "our country." Participating in their particular movements during their moment in shaping history was a calling to them that came with a high price, yet with great rewards: a sense of larger meaning in their lives than if they had focused only on a pre-defined career and a narrowly conceived family; opportunities for their own development and that of others like them who would come after them that otherwise would not have existed; a sense of doing right in the face of great wrongs that could not be denied; sustaining and exhilarating friendships with other committed, creative, actively developing, change-making individuals.
Those movements, and other democratic movements equally great, were more than "a very large number of small campaigns" in their goals, in their social and organizational structures, in their duration across the lives of many generations, in their capacities to sustain hope and loyalty through times of adversity, in their potentiality-evoking powers, in their moral significance, and in their transformative effectiveness. Like the movement to abolish slavery, the women’s rights movement that emerged out of it spanned many generations, and was guided both by American precedents and by broader democratic ideals. These were powerfully expressed by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, Frederick Douglass, and others in their Seneca Falls Declaration, which focused participants’ energies in a series of great campaigns to achieve both immediate and larger objectives, many of which were not accomplished until many years after their deaths: women’s suffrage, access to higher educational institutions and the various professions, legal guarantees of equal pay and equal employment opportunities, legal control of their own finances and of their own reproductive capacities. Some of the objectives the American women’s movement has sought at various times have subsequently seemed ill-advised or no longer necessary. For example, special protective labor legislation decreeing shorter hours for women, lighter loads to be lifted, and a chair on which to sit during breaks came to seem unnecessary because the broader labor movement eventually achieved legal and customary protection of safer and more human working conditions for most workers in most fields, and women gradually have become accepted as co-workers in most kinds of employment (though women are still paid less collectively and are still less likely to be chosen for top leadership positions in many fields). Other goals and examples of the early feminists were ignored with embarrassment for a time, but later regarded by many of their movement inheritors as prophetic. Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s Women’s Bible is is one of these, and the feminist, interracial wedding ceremony of Angelina Grimke’ and Theodore Weld is another. All of these goals, strategies, campaigns, and symbols were adopted and justified to others not only in terms of the mysterious workings of individual conscience, but also in terms of shared moral values and guiding ideals, for whose meaning partisans of the women’s movement contested with their intellectual-cultural tradition as well as the dominant members of their contemporary society. Part of their effectiveness was due to persuading others by reasoned argument; part of it was due to their ability to demonstrate by their lived example that another kind of life was possible; part of it was due to the practical capability that their committed relationships with one another and their stable alliances with members of other movements gave them to maximize their inferior political, legal, economic, and cultural power in ways that allowed them over time to influence laws and social institutions, as well as the outlook and preferences of others.
Similar stories can be told of the Progressive Movement that Rorty admires and advises us to imitate, of the Labor Movement and the Civil Rights Movement from which he draws heroes, and of the Anti-Vietnam War Movement (also known as the Peace Movement) whose wider message he continues to resist. Effective movements require well-focused campaigns; effective campaigns that can be recognized as "good causes" require the practical and interpretive context that larger ideals and longer-term transformative movements provide. Many contributors to the effectiveness of campaigns that larger ideals illuminate as "good causes" may not choose to dedicate themselves to the movements that organize and direct these campaigns, and this is fine--they may, like Henry David Thoreau, have other life business to be about. However, it is important to realize that Thoreau’s life, as much as Randolph’s or Howe’s, would not have been what it was were it not for the willingness and great gifts of others to organize and to sustain movements in support of the democratic ideal and in opposition to the great evils of his day--the movement to abolish slavery, the movement in opposition to the Mexican-American War, the movement for universal public education, the budding movement to cherish and protect the land--to which Thoreau could occasionally contribute his own great gifts, and from which his conscience could thereby obtain absolution for his choice to lead a predominantly solitary life.
Movements end, as Rorty points out, and sometimes they achieve some of their great goals while failing to achieve others; but if their partisans’ ultimate commitment is to an ideal like the democratic ideal, the longing that gives rise to these movements, the organizational relationships they shape, and the special skills they evoke usually continue to seek new structures for their effective transformative employment. Former partisans who fail to find such new transformative opportunities nostalgically long for "the good old days of the movement." Those who do move on to new activist commitments form new friendships and develop new aspects of their individuality while building on and continuing to revise their active "how-to" knowledge as well as the senses of "what" and "why" they gain through their citizen activism. The attraction is not "purity" or "infinitude," but a meaningful life and their own better becoming through participation in trans-generationally effective agency in shaping a world that even partially "achieves" their ideals.
Such a life is "alive" in a way that Irving Howe recognized and felt drawn to, even though he lived a different kind of life himself. It need not entail greater dangers to one’s psychic integrity than other kinds of lives, especially the life of skeptical apathy that so many fortunate young Americans seem to find themselves living now. It does require mature response to disappointment and disillusionment because more is risked; but a democratic movement’s larger guiding ideals and an experienced, multigenerational community pursuing them together can offer the resources to shape and to sustain a mature response of continuing hope, enlightened dedication, undamaged personal worth, and undiminished regard for partners in struggle who live up to shared values.
Rorty’s individualism gets in the way of envisioning and fostering shared social hope because it obscures both the value of well-organized democratic movements and the urgency of many of the twenty-first century’s "good causes" that makes commitment to them desirable as a way of framing a life. It may be that his social location blocks his view of how urgent their very different locations make those causes for many others. Thus, he may not recognize what William James called the "genuine options" that call for knowledge-preceding choice within the very real practical, ethical, and psychological issues such urgent circumstances of living raise for some of the rest of us:
- how to sustain ourselves in protracted struggle while surviving devastating set-backs, hard life choices, personal harms, and daily costs to ourselves, our families, our friends, and our heroes, long enough to make deep personal, institutional, and cultural changes;
- how to understand the relationship between these deeper, hard-won changes and the prospects of the particular campaigns we envision;
- how to recognize the difference between what coalitions can achieve in the short term, and what it takes committed communities to achieve in the longer term;
- how to create or to find the ways in which, as Dewey understood, committed democratic engagement can open up possibilities for developing desirable potentials instead of stifling them in routine, or in the conformity Rorty fears;
- how to reflectively welcome the ways that wider engagements change the meaning of our own mortality in ways that Whitman understood;
- how to understand and to express why we need a Deweyan democratic ideal to give guidance to our movements, our campaigns, and our life choices, beyond and in addition to the guiding role of individual consciences.
"Achieving our country," the great project to which Rorty’s book calls us, cannot emerge from unrelated small campaigns with limited horizons and episodic contributions of "spare energy" from the "free time" of anonymous, unrelated individuals pursuing essentially private lives. It is by its very nature the kind of project that frames lives and calls for the conjoined efforts of multiple movements that learn from, build on, and revise the shared understandings that emerge from past movements. Likewise, "achieving our world," the even more ambitious project that now must frame realistic, effective, and morally justifiable American aspirations toward "achieving our country," requires acknowledging, learning from, and working with related democratic movements in many other places: Solidarity in Poland and related citizen liberation movements in Central Europe; the African National Congress and other democratic transformation efforts in South Africa; liberatory struggles against dictators and for indigenous peoples’ rights in various Latin American nations; the student-led Otpor ("Resistance") movement in Yugoslavia that overthrew the dictator Slobodan Milosevic in October 2000 and made an obstacle-strewn opening for democratic self-governance; the continuing human rights struggles in Burma/Myanmar, Tibet, and China; local and global environmental struggles in every nation; ethnic and religious struggles involving the Taliban in Afghanistan, the imposition of Islamic Sharia in parts of Nigeria, Serbian nationalists and their neighbors in the Balkans, the Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda, and struggles for democracy within and through the churches in all parts of the world.
Instead of being an exclusive, copyright-protected slogan of Marxist revolutionaries, as Rorty seems to suggest, "participatory democracy" is one way of expressing both the shared guiding ideal and the most effective methods developed within diverse, localized movements for "achieving our country" and "achieving our world." It is also a framing value that guides broad convergences in the culturally differing, situation-specific approaches to living of many committed members of these movements that, like democratic movements of the past, focus their emerging transformative visions, stimulate the development of their much-needed, valuable potentials, and motivate their effective cross-difference communication, all of which support a shared social hope that "achieving our world"--a deeply democratic world--is possible. Fostering this hope in the context of twenty-first century globalization requires revising Rorty’s advice that, in working for democratic reforms, we accept our existing institutional framework of constitutional democracy and market capitalism.
4. Democratic political economy: the (in)compatibility of constitutional democracy
and market capitalism, and the feasibility of alternatives
On first hearing, Rorty’s prescription for "achieving our country" by working on piecemeal reforms within the framework of constitutional democracy and market capitalism seems so accepting of the status quo as to be absurdly incompatible with his claim that it offers offers the best guidance for "the party of hope," a revitalized American Left. It sounds, instead, like the kind of claim that Frances Fukuyama, Samuel Huntington, and other conservative triumphalists made at the end of the Cold War: that these achieved American institutional forms represent "the end of history" and are good in themselves because they respect individual liberty and produce just outcomes in their operations, and thus, they deserve of our moral as well as our political support. At the same time, Rorty’s prescription seems oddly unresponsive to the threat to democracy everywhere of which he himself grimly warns at some length: that economic globalization is giving rise to international labor markets manipulated for their own benefit by a detached, super-rich cosmopolitan elite, and that globalization poses such a threat to the economic expectations of American workers that it may eventually frighten them into supporting a fascist strongman they believe can protect their interests, someone who unites and inspires them by means of the usual scapegoating processes that will erase America’s hard-won cultural gains against sadism.
Rorty is not alone in this sense that globalized market capitalism, which has already shown that it can effectively manipulate constitutional frameworks like our own, threatens the future of democracy. The influential liberal democratic theorist Robert Dahl has expressed concern that market capitalism limits the process of deepening democracy in America and other experienced democracies: "Because market capitalism inevitably creates inequalities, it limits the democratic potential of polyarchal democracy by generating inequalities in the distribution of political resources" (Dahl 1998: 177). Why, in spite of this widely acknowledged tension between democracy and capitalism, as well as his realistic fears that globalization will tip the balance against democracy, does Rorty recommend that the reformist American Left whose revitalization he hopes to stimulate accept the framework of constitutional democracy and market capitalism?
It is not because Rorty has given up on the Left’s traditional belief that the state can and should take responsibility for a morally and socially desirable redistribution of wealth; careful readers will remember that Rorty regards this as a defining characteristic of the Left, whose goal has always been and must remain the creation of a "cooperative commonwealth." Rather, Rorty’s thinking on this subject seems to be strategic, based on three considerations: first, what he regards as the academic Left’s failure of responsibility during the past thirty years to develop a credible alternative to market capitalism; second, his assessment of the lack of preparation of American citizens to bear responsibility for operating any alternative form of democratic political economy that places greater imaginative and practical demands on them; and third, his concern that invoking the old Marxist dream of "the end of capitalism" in our present global context will dangerously reinforce a now-widespread, spectatorial cultural tendency to sit on our hands and wait for rescue, which may block the resurgence of a revitalized, reformist Left with the ability to undertake the effective, well-organized actions that will be needed if we are to keep the hope of "achieving of country" alive during the first twenty-five years of the twenty-first century.
Rorty’s endorsement of constitutional democracy seems whole-hearted. It has supported or at least tolerated desirable democratic reforms in America’s past, he reminds us, including those advocated by the Progressive Movement at the turn of the twentieth century and those advocated by the pre-1964 Reformist Left. Moreover, he argues, constitutional democracies have done nothing that should make it impossible for them to regain self-respect--a historically questionable claim, as I have argued, but clearly one that Rorty hopes will support a less-ambitious contention that their record is less worrisome than that of alternative political formations, and thus, they are our safest bet as a political framework. Lastly, there is no practical alternative, in Rorty’s view; the nation is the only agent capable of influencing Americans’ experience of selfishness and sadism in this time of enormous economic and cultural stress because it controls the distribution of various social benefits. Here he overstates the self-protective and self-expansive capacities of nation-states in our era of globalization while understating the agent capacities of transnational corporations and quasi-governmental agencies, as well as those of more localized levels of government, nongovernmental organizations, and citizen movements. Democratic constitutional frameworks respond to all of these agencies to various extents. Thus, while constitutional democracy is a good thing, and a necessary condition for sustaining a deeper democracy, these other elements of our actual operative framework must be factored into feasible and desirable strategies for deepening democracy, both in America and world-wide.
Rorty’s strategic endorsement of market capitalism seems more a product of his frustration with the academic Left’s habitual tendency to invest its energies in arguing over a speculative "best" instead of devising an achievable "better" economic alternative framework and transformative path. This speculative tendency has had the opportunity cost of withholding well-educated and relatively well-heeled intellectuals’ much-needed efforts from collaborative work for practical reforms that could affect the experienced quality of less-fortunate people’s lives, and thereby influence the emerging character of American culture. There is some truth in this criticism, especially as applied to those he specifically targets. Once again, however, Rorty’s thinking seems to reflect his lifelong opposition to Marxism and his continuing attachment to the Cold War paradigm of struggle: the Marxists opposed market capitalism; therefore, he seems to say, let me taunt them once again by endorsing it, however provisionally. Within the pre-1989 Cold War paradigm, the economic options were capitalism, communism, or some mysterious "Third Way" for which no one seemed able to produce a credible blueprint. As an anti-communist "democratic socialist" and a believer in "the cooperative commonwealth," Rorty could not wholeheartedly endorse either of the first two options; but in the urgent context of the present, in which globalization threatens the possibility of ever achieving his democratic dream by permanently redistributing economic power and other dependent powers away from those who must believe in and work for democracy, there is no more time to wait for tardy theorists to devise a feasible and desirable "Third Way." We must act now, and practicality as well as old allegiances determine Rorty’s conclusion that we must continue to reject the devil of defeated, disastrous communism, instead launching our hopes on market capitalism’s deep blue sea.
Yet contrary to the methods of Dewey’s equally anti-capitalist and anti-communist pragmatism, Rorty’s prescription reflects concern about the lack of a complete, antecedently guaranteed map to guide a dangerous, American-led voyage of exploration in pursuit of an economic alternative to market capitalism, which he seems to think sensible people will demand before getting on board any ship traveling to such an unknown destination. "Nobody knows," he says--an odd criticism from a rejecter of knowledge in favor of pure, joyous social hope. Therefore, he rejects others’ transformative suggestions about how to transform capitalism from within by, for example, democratically empowering and influencing shareholders, and he ignores others’ experiments in developing alternative economic institutions and networks within our existing "demo-capitalist" legal and economic frameworks that, whether they succeed or fail, offer useful information that we need in the process of discovering feasible and desirable generalizations about how to democratize market-based regional, national, and international economies that now operate within the practical powers and the intellectual framework of global capitalism.[15]
"Someday, perhaps," Rorty grudgingly acknowledges, "cumulative piecemeal reforms will be found to have brought about revolutionary change." Unfortunately, the change process he outlines is neither desirable nor feasible.
Such reforms might someday produce a presently unimaginable nonmarket economy, and much more widely distributed powers of decisionmaking. They might also, given similar reforms in other countries, bring about an international federation, a world government. In such a new world, American national pride would become as quaint as pride in being from Nebraska or Kazakhstan or Sicily. But in the meantime, we should not let the abstractly described best be the enemy of the better. We should not let speculation about a totally changed system, and a totally different way of thinking about human life and human affairs, replace step-by-step reform of the system we presently have. (Rorty 1998: 105)
As a born-and-bred Midwesterner, I do not regard attachment to the land that is still my meditative horizon, as well as the populist regional culture that shaped my particular slant on the American dream, as "quaint," nor do I see pride in my nation at its best as incompatible with celebration of other nations’ companion achievements within a motivating loyalty to " achieving our world." Moreover, given that he lived through Stalin’s and Hitler’s global experiments, Rorty should not need to be reminded that "reform" has had, and still has, more than one meaning. It is guidance of change by a Deweyan democratic ideal, revised and employed within an on-going participatory process of collaborative efforts among diverse citizens to achieve shared ends-in-view while becoming changed in their self-understandings and their developed potentials in the process, that makes "reforms" democratically desirable and feasible, as I will argue at greater length in the next chapter. In imaginatively reframing economic life, such democratic reforms need not be guided by an end-in-view, much less an ideal, of dispensing with markets, as Rorty seems to suggest. As I will argue at greater length in later chapters, markets, like the pursuit of economic justice, are much older than capitalism, and their effectiveness does not depend on framing their operation within each-and-all of our current American legal, political, and economic institutions, nor on guiding it with mainstream "neoclassical" capitalist economic theory, much less by the recommendations of now-influential libertarian economists that government regulation, national and international, play an even more limited role within emerging global markets.
To imagine economic justice and equal opportunity is to imagine a more humane and democratic political economy than America or any other nation has now, and thus, "the end of capitalism" as we know it. Achieving this dream does not require a detailed map, but only emergent, fallibilistic, effective knowing-how (and -what and -why), achieved within and through the collaborative efforts of diverse citizens (including philosophers, social scientists, and other scholars) within and outside of government, working toward and beyond specific reforms in a process that we could call "participatory democracy," as Dewey and many of its other prophets, like its effective proponents over the last thirty years, have called it. "Achieving our country" while "achieving our world" in the context of the threat that twenty-first century economic, political, and cultural globalization poses to the possibility of deepening democracy requires that we acknowledge and work within the framework of constitutional democracy and market capitalism while using tensions within it to transform this contingent and temporary institutional partnership, as well as those cultures that have come to believe in its necessity and its permanence.
This is the only "common dream" that is big enough to get the job done. Dreaming it requires that we regard our home cultures and the lands that support them as precious, rather than "quaint," but without aiming to keep them "pure" and unchanging, as Rorty seems to fear we must if we abjure the "melting pot" in favor any version of multiculturalism. Recognizing that cultural diversity is necessary to the individual diversity he celebrates, as well as a source of insights, a basis for peace-making, and a part of the meaning of and motive for democracy in the world today, may help to rouse Rorty and others from illusory fears of dangerous, group-based "otherness."
5. Democratic diversity: multicultural education and a multicultural society
One of the deepest differences between Baldwin’s American story and Rorty’s is revealed by considering how each of them thinks of the goal of democratic diversity, and of the value of a multicultural approach to education relative to that goal. Clearly, there are many conceptions of "multiculturalism" in active use among academics and cultural commentators today. Some of these have all of the flaws Rorty attributes to all of them: they aim to create separate mini-societies within the larger American whole by shaming the privileged white no-longer-majority, demanding remorse and recompense for past group-inflicted harms, uncritically rejecting everything "white," "Anglo," and "European" (and sometimes "male" and "straight" as well) as flawed by cultural imperialism and its distortions of moral and intellectual vision, while uncritically embracing all the intellectual, cultural, and artistic products of an oppressed people as liberatory, engaging, and filled with insight, and at the same time attempting to keep this oppressed culture pure and unchanging, or to recreate it across the distances of time, forced separations, and minimal, unsupported cultural survivals. Rorty is right to regard such multiculturalisms as neither feasible nor desirable.
However, Rorty commits the classical fallacy of false generalization when he attributes the characteristics of some examples of multiculturalism to all of them. Many anthologies have appeared in recent years that thoughtfully explore alternative conceptions and practices of multicultural education that avoid the failings Rorty rightly criticizes while pursuing important aspects of democratic diversity that he fails to acknowledge. One of the most inclusive and thoughtful of these, Cynthia Willett’s collection, Theorizing Multiculturalism: A Guide to the Current Debate (1998), includes twenty essays by scholars working within a wide range of intellectual perspectives, including three by pragmatists; an expanded version of my own essay from this collection, which draws on insights from Dewey and from Alain Locke, is included here as Chapter Six. Baldwin, unlike Rorty, had realized by 1963 that democratic diversity could not be achieved by pursuing a "color-blind" strategy of forgetting the group identities that have played and still play such an important and unforgivable role in America’s becoming. Rather, as Baldwin suggests, we must learn and understand the group-linked realities of our history and our present life as a multicultural society in order to work together in committed love to transform them--not to melt them or to erase them, because this cannot be done, and also because many aspects of our diverse group identities are hard-won gifts of history that embody beauty, courage, and contrasting insights that can contribute to our creative individual becoming, as well as to our collaborative success in "achieving our country" and "achieving our world."
Rorty’s brief discussion of Dewey’s metaphysics suggests one of Rorty’s reasons for opposing multicultural education, falsely generalized: it treats cultures as real, he implies, whereas he is committed to treating only individuals as real, and thinks that ontologically-based group claims would limit individuals’ freedom, creativity, and meaning-making power.[16] More explicitly, Rorty objects that multiculturalism is committed to peaceful coexistence among fixed, pure cultures, an impossible goal that is incompatible with the dynamic, interchanging nature of real cultures (whatever their metaphysical status may be) and the growth of civilizations through ongoing struggle among cultures. Rorty’s third objection is that multiculturalists have dangerously disrupted "real politics" by shifting the attention of intellectuals to "cultural politics" at a time when their energies and influence are urgently needed to unite Americans in active pursuit of a common dream of justice, because very real fears of entitlement-threatening globalization are already motivating middle class secession, and may eventually motivate working class support for "strongman" fascism that would sweep away America’s recent and fragile gains in cross-difference civility.
Rorty draws upon the visionary authority of Whitman and James in framing his first objection--that multiculturalism implies an ontological status for groups that must be reserved only for individuals if they are to experience the freedom, creativity, and meaning-making power that democratic life could make rightly their own. Rorty’s first appeal is to Whitman’s affirmation of Mill’s quotation from von Humboldt as the epigraph for Mill’s On Liberty: "The point of social organization is to make evident the absolute and essential importance of human development in its richest diversity," about which Whitman comments that this requires "a large variety of character" and "full play" for its development.[17] However, this passage could at least as well be read as calling for individuality-framing collective social diversity, created in part by the influence of the differing cultures that could be given support for their semi-autonomous development combined with opportunities for communicative interaction within a shared America, for which many current multiculturalists echo the critical pragmatist Alain Locke’s call early twentieth century call.[18] Against such a proposal, Rorty supports his ontologically individualist reading by evoking James’s authority: there is "no standard, not even a divine one, against which the decisions of a free people can be measured," other than "discovering one another’s desires" (Rorty 1998: 16). However, James’s argument here (presumably from "The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life") concerns necessarily social individuals whose own desires, if moral, are always framed with a consciousness of and a motivation to satisfy others’ desires. James’s analysis is silent on but not incompatible with acknowledging the formative and continuing moral importance of communities and group memberships, including cultures and other "unchosen" groups, which play important roles in the analyses of James’s fellow pragmatists, Josiah Royce and John Dewey.
Rorty tries again, suggesting that only an ontologically individualist analysis that is taken up in life-framing practice can free us sufficiently from the past to open the full range of human meaning-making possibilities in the future: "No past human achievement, not Plato’s or even Christ’s, can tell us about the ultimate significance of human life. . . . The future will widen endlessly. . . . Individual life will become unthinkably diverse and social life unthinkably free" (Rorty 1998: 24). Again, however, semi-autonomous cultures need not present a barrier to social freedom and individual diversity, and may even be necessary to their achievement in our real America, as in other nations struggling against the forces of global capitalism within an international geopolitical context of sometimes coercive international institutions, invasive transnational powers, and culture-eroding deceptive persuasions to accept their authority. Rorty’s quasi-libertarian dream of culture-free, fully autonomous individuals who creatively choose myriad, radically diverse lives, is dangerously out of touch, both with real processes of forming personalities and life goals, and with the conditions that shape the current social and economic injustices he aims to transform.
Rorty argues, however, that it is important not to let such knowledge claims get in the way of pure, joyous social hope. He evokes that claim in this context by characterizing his Whitmanesque vision of myriad diverse, culture-free individuals as a "romance" in which multiculturalism is the foe, not the friend: "This romance of endless diversity should not, however, be confused with what nowadays is sometimes called multiculturalism" (Rorty 1998: 24). Rorty’s Whitman rejects purity and preservation in favor of "competition and argument between alternative forms of human life--a poetic agon in which jarring dialectical discords would be resolved in previously unheard harmonies" through a Hegelian progressive evolution, occurring "nonviolently if possible, but violently if necessary" in order to make "a new culture" containing "more variety in unity," a tapestry of many threads that eventually will have to be torn apart to weave a larger one (Rorty 1998: 24-25). Interestingly enough, W. E. B. DuBois and Alain Locke, both of them American "race men" like Randolph, Baldwin, and King, projected related, positive images of a unified civilization emerging through interactive contributions of diverse cultures, DuBois suggesting the image of a colorful mosaic, and Locke suggesting that of a great fugue (a metaphor he borrowed from Goethe); neither of them romanticized the competitive struggle, however, perhaps because they knew the high cost both of loss and of great gains.[19] They would agree that Rorty’s Whitman is right to reject cultural purity and static preservation, because such claims are historically false, practically unsustainable, and undesirable for both moral and practical reasons; this explains why few multiculturalists make them.
The "competition" between alternative forms of life Rorty romanticizes, however, is all too real today, with little of poetry about it. Instead, cultures are being destroyed and their native tongues silenced, both violently through post-colonial nationalist wars, and nonviolently through global processes of corporate buy-out, local product replacement, coerced institutional restructuring on demo-capitalist models, reorientation of regional and national economies toward international tastes and markets, and the "romance" of advertising and the profit-oriented mass media. Instead of multiplying diversity, these processes are leading to less variety in unpalatable and unstable unity, without democratic voices for most individuals or their cultures in shaping the larger global tapestry in-the-becoming. The fact that individuals in many parts of the world can now listen to "world music," can dress in clothing manufactured in distant places, and can eat "foreign" foods sufficiently homogenized to suit the bland pallet of the average American who purchases them at suburban shopping malls does not demonstrate that myriad instantiations of creative individuality are coming into being through globalization processes--au contraire.
Thus, Rorty’s second argument in support of ontological individualism as a reason for opposing multiculturalism fails, betraying misunderstanding of the real political purposes that partially motivate most forms of multiculturalism; moreover, it is metaphysically and morally inconsistent with his own call to national loyalty and self-identification, revealing a deep flaw in his own understanding of the contemporary political situation within which he calls intellectuals to devote themselves to "achieving our country." Rorty’s reading of the current American political situation is that this era of globalization is a dangerous time for democracy, in which widespread economic fears may again marginalize those whose demands for equal inclusion have been divisive in the past thirty years. At such a time, he argues, the cultural Left’s subtle cultural analyses are self-indulgent distractions and refusals of intellectuals’ leadership responsibility to effectively tell a "common story" of how we can collaboratively achieve our country--a "common story" that can rouse people to work together for a common dream of justice by moving them to derive their personal moral identity, "at least in part, from our citizenship in a democratic nation-state, and from leftist attempts to fulfill the promise of that nation" (Rorty 1998: 97).
However, Rorty’s "common story" is not comprehensive enough for our real globalized situation: we cannot achieve "our country" in isolation from achieving "our world," a just, democratic world, and both this fulfilled promise of America and this just, democratic world need to be among the touchstones for our moral identities now. Instead of giving philosophy and religion "a pass," we need to call on both domains to abandon non-productive abstractions and to remember their ancient and continuing roles as centers of thinking and ferment about the meaning of justice and how it can be achieved in this world. This means finding wise and effective ways to intertwine respect for valuable differences within our common dream of justice, without which those dreams are neither democratic nor feasible in our real context. We must become, like Jane Addams and the other women of Hull House, partners seeking to do something effective "with" others instead of "for" them.[20] Like these First Progressives, intellectuals within a revitalized American Left must be prepared to be mutually changed through the collaborative process and to reflect its workings in our theorizing, instead of expecting to lead as a vanguard and trying to reform "for" others while remaining untouched by the experiences, values, and concerns of our democratic partners, as Rorty’s transformative prescription suggests.
Certainly most intellectuals must "change our tone" to become equal and effective collaborating partners who can help to express, assess, and continuously revise the kind of "People’s Charter" that Rorty rightly calls for as a practical focus for our conjoint efforts. However, his separation of issues of "sadism" from those of "selfishness" is his own trouble-making theoretical distinction--one which does not play well outside the academy, where poverty, opportunities denied, group-linked disrespect, and bodily insecurity are closely intertwined in many people’s lives and in our historical experience as an American people-in-the-world. In marginalizing the issues of "sadism" and suggesting that the issues of "selfishness" are really the central ones in these dangerous times, Rorty forgets his earlier admission of error in his belief that achieving economic equality will erase other social inequalities; he also forgets his acknowledgment of the importance of the cultural Left’s work to achieve cross-difference civility within American society. Rorty himself creates another theoretical obstacle to practical transformative collaboration when he continues to fight an already-lost battle for a return to the theoretical metaphor of "the melting pot." The 2000 Census shows that advocates for a place within America’s daily ways of living for non-English languages, and for combining multi-racial identities and diverse ethnic traditions within a shared but non-homogeneous American identity, have already won the day--and a great victory this is for the American dream of deep democracy, bringing together as it does key issues of personal identity formation, life-group empowerment, and the practical meaning of economic justice. As a resident of the small city of Mount Vernon, which adjoins New York City’s borough of the Bronx, I am surrounded each day by fellow citizens who speak more than one hundred different languages, a context that seems full of "oxygen" for my democratic soul. Clearly, if I am to work "with" my neighbors to achieve our country, I will need to expand my communicative range by learning at least Spanish to supplement my native English and my academic French. Effective loyalty to America now requires active self-identification with a multicultural nation.[21]
As Alain Locke suggested fifty years ago, our challenge as intellectuals who seek to foster a "Second Progressive Era" in America now is to learn and to teach others to actively live this kind of cultural "diversity in unity" in ways that are mutually enriching, collaboratively fruitful, and productive of peace on individual, local, national, and global levels. In the twenty-first century, international agencies and global forces increasingly influence governance in our own and others’ nation-states, reshaping both the operative context in which such governance occurs and the living social context that prompts the agendas of more localized levels of government, nongovernmental organizations, and social movements. The theoretical supremacy of nation-states is compromised and strictly limited in practice by the cosmo-elite agents Rorty himself identifies, by the processes of global capitalism they guide or ride, by the financial, trade, and military institutions that ratify and implement their decisions, and by the environmental, cultural, and existential consequences of their choices that they neither anticipate nor count in their decision models. Thus, while the nation-state must be treated as a still-important agent in shaping global futures, an adequate democratic politics for this era of globalization must factor in and draw upon many other agents, seeking leverage at all levels to deepen citizen commitment to and efficacy in employing the means of a deep, locally focused, yet globally aware democracy. "Achieving our country" must continue to be a motivating dream for Americans today, as much as achieving theirs is and must be for the Czechs, the Poles, the Hungarians, the South Africans, and others. We must recognize, however, that the achievement of any of these dreams now depends upon the conjoint achievement of all of them, and this requires dreaming more complex and more diverse dreams that are both local and global, dreams that include the biotic community. Instead of ceasing to notice differences, dreaming such interrelated, feasible, and desirable dreams for our locations, our nations, and our common world requires that we pay more attention to our differences--but more wisely, more collaboratively, and drawing upon better information in forging "People’s Charters" to guide our collaborative efforts at local, national, and trans-national levels.
This is the multicultural approach favored and practiced by most of the leaders and members of the Society for the Study of Africana Philosophy, a thirty-year-old, New York City-based philosophical society that dedicates its monthly meetings to critical evaluation of recent intellectual work by and about African Americans and other peoples of the African diaspora, and which offers guidance and support for courses in African American philosophy like the one I teach. It was the approach favored by the American Philosophical Association’s Committee on the Status of Women and its Committee of the Status of American Indians during the years I served each as a member, to which I contributed what I had learned through activist involvement, reading texts, and teaching courses in feminism and in Native American philosophy. This is the kind of practical, far-seeing, globally contextualized multiculturalism that has been advocated in recent works by Amartya Sen, Martha C. Nussbaum, Catherine Eschele, and Jorge M. Valadez.[22] Unlike Rorty’s dangerously unrealistic and isolating diversity among individual self-creations, this kind of multiculturalism echoes Baldwin’s dream of reaching out to each other in historically-informed understanding and courageous love amidst our sometimes ineradicable, often valuable group-linked differences, seeking and reporting feasible and desirable ways to make our existing diversity more democratic.
6. Democratizing academic culture: the role of universities and "the college bred"
Rorty is right to focus considerable attention on the role of universities and the responsibilities of those William James called "the college bred" for deepening democracy in America and in other nations around the world. Though he is wrong to think of intellectuals as a vanguard leading their partners in democratic struggle, he is right to think that our universities should offer opportunities to develop desirable capacities that can allow their beneficiaries to make invaluable contributions to democratic struggles by listening effectively and saying well what they have heard, by telling empowering stories, by learning and explaining the intricacies of how the world works, and by offering experiment-based insights about institutional alternatives and ends-in-view worth pursuing. He is right to criticize universities that have willingly or unknowingly become agents of an emerging global cosmo-elite, preparing privileged students to fill boring, morally unjustifiable, but unquestioned economic roles in the hope that their loyalty to distant, frequently changing masters will allow them to join the "secession of the successful," and thereby will save them from poverty and the daily disrespect they witness directed toward every large American city’s urban underclasses, and especially toward homeless people.
Rorty is right that our college and university students deserve an invitation and a challenge to live larger, more autonomous, more meaningful lives in collaborative pursuit of "achieving our country," though he has not yet recognized, as increasing numbers of our students themselves have, that this also requires collaboratively pursuing changes in the geo-economic, geo-political, and geo-environmental conditions with which that American dream is inextricably intertwined. "It would be a big help to American efforts for social justice," Rorty rightly suggests, "if each new generation were able to think of itself as participating in a movement which has lasted for more than a century, and has served human liberty well. . . . Each new generation of students ought to think of American leftism as having a long and glorious history. They should be able to see, as Whitman and Dewey [and DuBois, Addams, Locke, Randolph, Baldwin, Ruether, and King] did, the struggle for social justices as central to their country’s moral identity" (Rorty 1998: 51). Moreover, Rorty is right that implicitly or explicitly anti-American attitudes block many of our faculty members and their students from contributing their much-needed efforts to "achieving our country"--and without "achieving our country," the prospects for the project of "achieving our world" in which they may be more inclined to invest their energies are dim. Rorty is even right that part of the reason why our universities are not yet taking a leading role in "achieving our country" is faculty fascination with abstraction in many American philosophy departments and allied disciplines, and that the solution to this part of the problem is to turn our attention from what Dewey called "the problems of philosophy" to what we might call, in an inclusive spirit of Deweyan reconstruction, "the problems of the real world."
However, there is a larger social problem within our universities that we must simultaneously address if they are to fulfill their role as centers of democratic intellectual ferment and schools for democratic living: we must democratize the academic cultures of our university communities if they are to educate multiculturally competent, collaboratively effective, democracy-minded individuals, and also to foster the kinds of problem-focused, collaborative research across disciplines and across university-outer world boundaries that will allow us to "achieve our country" while "achieving our world." Our American universities are not these kinds of places now, as witness not only the typical narrowness of faculty interests and the sharp, hierarchical divisions of labor and rewards, but also the all-too-common incidents of racist, sexist, and homophobic hate speech as well as alcohol-related violence on campuses across our country. Many of these incidents are quickly hushed up because they create bad publicity for colleges and universities where they occur, potentially impacting reputation-linked enrollments, bequests, and awards of prestigious grants and fellowships. Such silence may mean, however, that many students and faculty members do not know that these incidents occur and cause devastating harms; therefore, these ill-informed students and faculty members may regard complaints about their institution’s "chilly climate" as whining or paranoia, and may regard diversity-focused initiatives such as courses, speakers, and cross-difference discussions in the residence halls as attempts to enforce "political correctness." As I explain in greater detail in Chapter Seven, my own institution, New York City’s Fordham University, has courageously chosen to break the silence, to openly investigate such incidents and their underlying causes, and to form a Faculty Task Force on Campus Culture to coordinate our attempt to reflectively, collaboratively develop a more democratic campus culture that better reflects the values expressed in our Vision Statement: "In keeping with our Jesuit tradition, we strive to live as men and women for and with others, as members of a humane and inclusive collegiate community. We seek to practice a faith that does justice, one that reverences the dignity of individuals; that honors and seeks to increase positive aspects of our cultural diversity. We wish to serve and to learn from our wider urban community in mutual hospitality, and to contribute to the common good as scholars, as world citizens, as stewards of the Earth, and as children of God."
In this continuing process of democratizing our academic culture, Fordham University’s association with the Catholic Church has created both obstacles and opportunities, both of which shed light on the discussion in Chapter Eight of why the churches must be further democratized in order to fulfill their great potential as agents of democracy in the public square. One of the great opportunities their Catholic affiliation offers to universities like Fordham is an orientation toward community service, which is manifested in well-developed programs of voluntary community service at local and global levels, as well as in our new Service Learning Program that links such community service to students’ programs of study, and in the problem-focused research orientation toward justice of many of our faculty members. Some of our fellow institutional members of the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities have already gone even further than Fordham in developing such initiatives; Boston College’s PULSE Program offers a fully coordinated service learning curriculum, and Loyola University of Chicago’s Center for Urban Research and Learning (CURL) houses a well-developed, influential, twenty-year-old program of problem-focused, collaborative research involving a partnership of university faculty and citizen-representatives of various organizations in the surrounding community, as described in greater detail in Chapter Two.
Such steps are experimental beginnings in learning how to democratize academic cultures in the midst of the profoundly anti-democratic global and national processes Rorty rightly calls our universities and "the college-bred" to enter into as agents of transformation. We must do much more than these first steps, and they will all be difficult. We must change the faculty role within our universities to reassert a twenty-first century version of our medieval corporate responsibility, broadening our presence in the life of our campus, our community, our nation, and our world. We must make changes in marketing, in the selection of trustees, and in the orientation of new students, faculty, and staff. We must reorient our research and teaching toward mutual hospitality, shared service, and collaborative problem-solving with diverse groups in our surrounding communities, with many other partners within our multicultural nations, and with our democracy-minded university colleagues in other nations. The good news is that, as my own experience with Fordham University’s Faculty Task Force on Campus Culture has shown, the hard work, and the growth of understanding and practical efficacy it can bring, may also be linked with what Rorty calls "pure, joyous social hope."
Such efforts to democratize academic cultures may at the same time transform the anti-American attitudes Rorty accurately notes among many faculty members and students. Discussions of this issue at recent meetings of the Society for the Study of Africana Philosophy suggested that many of us who are members of the student generation of the Vietnam War era were so scarred, angered, and confused by the experiences of facing or evading mandatory military service in this deeply problematic war, or of protesting it when many of our friends and relatives were facing deadly harm--"falling through a hole in the flag," in the words of the musical Hair, having trouble seeing the interests for which this war was being fought as "American" in our idealistic sense, or the people who were to be killed to win it as our enemies--that many of us are only now beginning to be able to reclaim our submerged American patriotism. It is a chastened patriotism more in the spirit of Baldwin than of Rorty, however, because it involves claiming our country and its future without forgetting or forgiving these and other memories of its past. We have also recognized that the shallowness of our moral and social engagements with most of our colleagues, in part because of the narrowly focused lives that are typical of philosophers and other university professors, makes it difficult to respond to our felt impulse to work toward "achieving our country" within the structures of our universities. Those who do so generally work in isolation, and counter to institutional norms and rewards. Frustration with this narrow life, as well as with experiences of continuing racism and sexism that are invisible as such to most of our colleagues, including those responsible for many of the less-blatant harms, these contribute to the difficulties we, like Baldwin, face in claiming our country and working to fulfill its potential. Such frustrations help to rub raw our awareness of the gap of painful hypocrisy between our country’s avowed values and those that are manifested in our daily life as American people.
What we need is a feeling of transformative efficacy in collaboration with our faculty colleagues and with other community members that can sustain our hope that America can become something better in the twenty-first century, and that our universities can become sites of this transformation. Well-organized, effective projects to democratize academic cultures can bring democracy-minded colleagues out of isolation into cooperative networks, build our transformative efficacy, create new incentives for problem-focused research, and prepare us to play a broader, collaborative role in "achieving our country" while "achieving our world." In this way, our universities can play effective roles in the revival of an American "civic religion" without sacrificing all other faiths to it.
7. Democratizing the churches: religion, public life, and the rebirth of social hope
Religion is risky business, Richard Rorty and I agree. Thoughtful people must be very rare who are untroubled either by the problem of evil or by the dreadful misuses of power by churches, and by those who have claimed their blessing, throughout the course of human history, continuing into these early years of the twenty-first century. Though I do not know the details of the very personal story of how Richard Rorty, the grandson of Walter Rauschenbusch, the influential preacher of the Social Gospel who called upon early twentieth century Christians to devote themselves to fighting for social justice, came to declare himself a "non-aggressive atheist," I am one theistic religious believer who can certainly understand a thoughtful atheism. During the Vietnam War years of living with daily death on television, with fears for my beloved brother and for many friends in harm’s way, with the intransigence of the liberal political establishment about the necessity and desirability of this continuing tragedy as well as their effective opposition to the deeper economic and political changes required by President Johnson’s Civil Rights Movement-inspired "War on Poverty," with the murders of the Kennedy brothers, Malcolm X. Shabazz, Martin Luther King, Jr., and other less famous citizen-activists, and the abrupt ruptures in social hope for achieving our country that these events successively caused, the fist-raised stance of Ivan in The Brothers Karamazov, refusing to worship a god who created and maintained such a world, made a great deal of sense to me. It is a longer story than I can tell here, and perhaps a longer story than I know, as to why this democracy-minded feminist pragmatist philosopher returned to the faith for whose free exercise as well as for economic justice generations of her Irish republican ancestors struggled, a struggle that continued openly in this country until the landmark day of John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s election as President, and that still continues today, as witness George W. Bush’s perceived need to win the support for his presidential campaign of those so-called "conservatives" to whom his speech at Bob Jones University was a signal of his agreement with their anti-Catholicism, as well as their racism and their sexism. There is more to my oppositional commitment to my church than "refusing to let the boys have all the real estate," as a nun-friend put it--there are experiences of deep, motivating community within the framework of recurring ritual, experiences of desirable social influence on some national and global issues of justice and civic friendship, and experiences of holy ground and divine presence that William James well understood, even if he claimed not to have them himself. Certainly my way of being Catholic requires as embattled a posture within my church, as well as within the philosophical profession and within American public life, as does Richard Rorty’s messianic religious atheism.
Where we part ways concerns Rorty’s passionate claim that religion can and should be excised from the realms of democratic political deliberation, and that doing so is necessary for promoting belief in a "civic religion" focused on "achieving our country." A surprising aspect, at least to this reader, of Rorty’s call to America’s Left intellectuals to re-engage in "real politics" is his fierce repudiation of any reconstructive role for the churches, and for independent-minded religious thinking. Rorty clearly believes that religions other than his post-Christian, post-Marxist "civic religion" are and must be the opponents of his "joyous social hope" of "achieving our country." In making his case for this view, both here and in several other places where he criticizes Stephen L. Carter’s view that religion can play an important role in public life as "external moral critic and alternative source of values and meaning" (Carter 1994: 273), Rorty misreads Jefferson, James, and Dewey on the central importance of separating the churches and religious thinking from public life, claiming their support for his own view that religion must be treated as a purely private matter. In my own view, which I explain and support at greater length in Chapter Eight, both Rorty and Carter are wrong--Rorty to think that religion can be privatized; Carter to think that religious values, feeling, and thinking can be separated and protected from reasoning of the kind that properly guides public life and thus, that criticisms of churches’ racism, sexism, and homophobia misfire; both to think that religion by its nature must oppose the values that characterize deeply democratic public life. Contra Rorty, I argue that it is neither possible nor desirable to limit the play of religious language, ideals, and webs of belief in public life; furthermore, with Jefferson and contra both Rorty, I argue that publicly engaging the churches and other individuals’ religious thinking in respectful, critical, democracy-minded ways is necessary for the good of the churches and that of one’s fellow citizen-thinkers, as well as for deepening the democracy of our country and of our world.
In spite of the obvious role that attachments to a remembered past play in shaping Rorty’s sense of the present state of American politics, his prescription for its preferable transformation through a revival of a democratic "civic religion" relies heavily on forgetting and excising aspects of other historically influential "religions" that do not fit with his dream. In motivating and expressing this religious replacement, Rorty strips The Bible’s Old Testament prophecies and New Testament "Sermon on the Mount" of theological reference, strips "The Communist Manifesto" of its call to revolution, and then combines them into an exhortation to collaborative pursuit of the conditions required for humanistic self-recreation. Thus, the image of America that Rorty attributes to Whitman and Dewey retains the Christian scriptures’ emphasis on fraternity and loving kindness while excising "supernatural parentage, immortality, providence, and--most important--sin" (Rorty 1998: 16). Following Whitman, Rorty argues, Americans should take pride in what they can achieve by themselves, under their own steam, by their own lights, without divine authority or assistance, because this is an issue of personal and national identity that influences where people put their energies and how they hope to derive a sense of their own lives’ ultimate significance (Rorty 1998: 16). As Rorty reads Whitman, the dream of fulfilling America’s potential replaces the dream of the community of love or the coming of the Kingdom (Rorty 1998: 16-17). In describing what America meant to Whitman and Dewey, Rorty uses theological language: "ultimate significance," "a religion of love" finally replacing "a religion of fear," "the religious impulse" to be separated (in a way James would have rejected) from "the infantile need for security, the childish hope of escaping from time and chance," "unconditional object of desire," "the struggle for justice" as "the country’s animating principle, the nation’s soul" (Rorty 1998: 18).
Thus, Rorty’s is a post-Christian, post-Marxian "civic religion" in which the hope of "achieving our country" replaces the hope of the beatific vision, a religion in which the authority and creative power once attributed to God are located in individuals whose choices in self-creation are regulated only by the guiding vision of the potential America. Strangely enough, nowhere in describing this civic religion he claims to derive in part from Dewey does Rorty grant any role to actual and possible communities, which Dewey treated as metaphysically, morally, and transformatively necessary to fulfilling the potentials of democracy. Instead, drawing more heavily on Whitman, Rorty’s civic religion is guided by an ideal vision of what it is to be human: "a conception which has no room for obedience to a nonhuman authority, and in which nothing save freely achieved consensus has any authority at all" (Rorty 1998: 18). Against Steven Rockefeller and, I would argue, against Dewey himself, Rorty claims that Dewey’s hoped-for integration of "the religious life with the American democratic life" was not a blending of the two, but "a matter of forgetting about eternity," of "replacing shared knowledge of what is already real with social hope for what might become real" (Rorty 1998: 18).
Rorty sees Hegel as having eased Whitman’s and Dewey’s path to a civic replacement of Christian religion, and Marx as a misguided though influential left-wing Hegelian. An alternative form of Hegelian historicism--the one he attributes to Whitman and Dewey, and claims himself-- offers "the temporalization of ultimate significance, and of awe" (Rorty 1998: 20). The Left seems to have replaced God, or at least Christianity, for Rorty’s Hegel-loving Whitman, and for Rorty himself: "For Hegel told a story about history as the growth of freedom, the gradual dawning of the idea that human beings are on their own, because there is nothing more to God than his march through the world--nothing more to the divine than the history of the human adventure" (Rorty 1998: 21, emphasis added) What motivates Rorty’s double "nothing more" here--Luciferean pride, or a gasping existential need for freedom from a predetermined future that would make his struggles and even his achievements meaningless? If the latter, why not stress, with the real Hegel, God’s immanence and continuing becoming toward fullness in time?
. . . Hegel thinks God remains incomplete until he enters time--until, in Christian terminology, he becomes incarnate and suffers on the Cross. Hegel uses the doctrine of Incarnation to turn Greek metaphysics on its head, and to argue that without God the Son, God the Father would remain a mere potentiality, a mere Idea. Without time and suffering, God is, in Hegel’s terms, a "mere abstraction." (Rorty 1998: 21, Hegel source not cited)
Perhaps, with his Whitman, Rorty thinks the supernatural God-concept does no real work, but only causes mischief, and thus, is better jettisoned: "The whole theory of the special and supernatural and all that was twined with it or educed out of it departs as a dream. . . . It is not consistent with the reality of the soul to admit that there is anything in the universe more divine than men and women."[23]
Rorty hopes is to get the churches out of public life because he fears their influence, especially when ignited by allusions to "divine favor or wrath" (Rorty 1998: 15). This exclusion of the churches from the public square was partially achieved by Whitman and Dewey, in Rorty’s view, and it is a central part of their image of America: "The most striking feature of their redescription of our country is its thoroughgoing secularism" (Rorty 1998: 15), by which he means anticlericalism, as carefully distinguished from what Dewey called "aggressive atheism" (Rorty 1998: 142, fn 8). Rorty misleadingly claims both Dewey’s and James’s guidance on this subject, citing Dewey’s A Common Faith as well as James’s writings in arguing for his own claim that pragmatism is compatible with "a privatized religious belief," but "not with the sort of religious belief that produces churches, especially churches which take political positions" (Rorty 1998: 142, fn 8). However, the central point of James’s Varieties of Religious Experience is his claim that religious belief cannot be privatized, but rather spills over unavoidably, and in many cases desirably, into all other aspects of the believer’s experience, choices, and conduct. Likewise, in many great late books, including Reconstruction in Philosophy, Experience and Nature, and Art as Experience , Dewey treated the religious dimension of experience as one of the most important in stimulating individual development and in building community. Moreover, in A Common Faith, Dewey did not oppose churches per se, but rather the otherworldly belief systems that distract some of them from their responsibility to engage in the transformative work of building democracy in this world and in history. In fact, Dewey argued that churches that share "a common faith" in human potential and in the democratic ideal are among the social institutions best placed to directly address urgent human needs, to educate human capacities in the process, and thereby to help raise up a public that can effectively shape democratic social policy.[24]
Rorty’s surprisingly fierce opposition to any role for religious groups in the public square, and to any kind of religious thinking in public deliberation except for invocations of his own "civic religion," reveals how far he is prepared to go in detaching the project of "achieving our country" from its actual historical origins as well as the actual religious motivations that have contributed to its advancement in many times of crisis. After all, as Stephen L. Carter points out, it was the prominent role of fervent religious beliefs and the cooperative projects these motivated that first struck Alexis de Tocqueville when he began the travels that led to his critical biography of our country, Democracy in America (Carter 1994: 35). In contrast, Rorty argues in his 1994 essay "Religion as Conversation-stopper," which he collects in Philosophy and Social Hope, that the one of the greatest accomplishments of the Enlightenment was the excision of religious thinking from intellectual life, aided in great part by the work of Thomas Jefferson to exclude the churches from American public life (Rorty 1999: 169-170).
On the face of it, this is a straightforward misreading of Jefferson’s words, both his Act for Establishing Religious Freedom (1779), which was adopted by the Assembly of the State of Virginia in 1786 and subsequently influenced adoption of the interrelated elements of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, and in his letters to James Madison and others, in which he discussed his motivating hopes for what his Act might accomplish. Unless we take Jefferson to be willfully misleading his readers, his language about religious liberty in these places clearly expresses his own view that religious thinking is so important both to individuals and to America as a nation that its role in public life cannot be allowed to be regulated by the churches--we must be free to express views about public issues that reflect our own religious thinking without being either barred or licensed by religious institutions. Thus, contra Rorty, Jefferson aimed to do more than to prevent the state from interfering with individuals’ private right to subscribe to any religion or religious opinion they choose; he aimed to encourage Americans to engage democratically in religious thinking about these broad matters of ultimate significance, and to bring the results of that thinking into their public roles as citizens, not only tolerating others’ differing religious thinking, but respecting it enough to engage it critically in civic discussion on matters of common concern. Religion was not, for Jefferson, a "private" matter that can be separated from one’s "public" discourse and actions, as Rorty suggests, but rather the stuff of one’s deepest beliefs and commitments that runs throughout one’s experience in all its locations, binding them together as it binds together a social community. To be "American," in Jefferson’s sense, one’s way of holding one’s religious faith must be to see it as playing a role within the life of a diversely religious, democratic community, working to promote the good life among those living on Earth now and in the future, whatever might be one’s beliefs and hopes concerning an afterlife. A corollary to his belief that religious thinking is a necessary resource for American public life to which I think Jefferson would also have subscribed, though he suggests rather than states it, is that such openly independent American religious thinking is a necessary resource for democratizing the churches, understood as invaluable and as practically unexcludable institutional players in "achieving our country."
It is because religion cannot be kept private and democratic thinking cannot be kept public that an influential member of my own faith community, John Courtney Murray, wrote in 1960 that instead of asking "whether Catholicism is compatible with American democracy," Catholics must ask "whether American democracy is compatible with Catholicism," to which Murray added that his conclusion that there is no inconsistency is "one of the truths I hold" (Carter 1994: 35, 283). Nonetheless, it is clear that their American faith has made a great difference in the Catholicism of many Americans inside and outside the academy, an influence the Vatican is currently attempting to counter with practical enforcement of the papal encyclical Ex Cordia Ecclesiae , which require that theologians at universities related to the Roman Catholic Church be licensed by their bishops to teach and to write, and in a related strategy, with papal selection of hierarchy-minded bishops and cardinals who can be relied upon to exercise a firm hand with the large numbers of American Catholics who insist, like Jefferson, on doing thing own religious thinking on birth control, abortion, homosexuality, and other matters of public as well as private importance. It is in part because I believe that my own and other churches are in need of a deeper democracy that I argue, with Jefferson and contra Rorty, that we should not try to separate religion from public life, but rather to encourage the kind of independent, diversity-respecting religious thinking that can help, as it has in the past, to democratize the churches and to re-turn their attention to issues of social justice and courageous love, a desirable outcome for many reasons, and a necessary one for the messianic projects that attract our social hopes--Baldwin’s, Rorty’s, and my own--of "achieving our country" and "achieving our world."
[1] This is how I read Dewey’s focal understanding of democracy in my Deep Democracy: Community, Diversity, and Transformation (1999). See Walt Whitman, Democratic Vistas (1871) and John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (1927) and other works.
[2] John J. Stuhr argues persuasively in his Genealogical Pragmatism: Philosophy, Experience, and Community (1997) that many interpreters of "postmodern" theorists like Derrida, Foucault, and Lyotard, including both their proponents and their pragmatist critics, have not read their texts carefully enough in coming to their conclusions about what these theorists say and how their positions should be evaluated.
[3] I have heard discussions of these issues at recent meetings of the Radical Philosophy Association, the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy, the Society for the Study of Africana Philosophy, and the Philosophy Born of Struggle Association; I have also heard them raised from the pulpit in progressive churches and by community-based critics of Pacifica News Service’s censorship of once-New Left radio stations under its control, in addition to reading daily updates about them on progressive student internet lists and occasionally seeing articles about them in The New York Times.
[4] Rorty 1998, 48-50, quoting Eldon Eisenach’s The Lost Promise of Progressivism, Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1994: 7. In these passing comments, Rorty honors Jane Addams’ practical commitment but fails to appreciate its role within her equally important philosophical contribution, which Dewey acknowledged; Rorty also fails to note that Addams was much more actively supportive of the Pullman strike that were other progressives.
[5] John Rawls, "Justice as Fairness: Political Not Metaphysical," Philosophy and Public Affairs XIV (Summer 1985), 223-251; Rorty 1998: 18, quoting Dewey’s "Maeterlinck’s Philosophy of Life," MW 6, 1978: 135.
[6] Rorty 1998: 29, citing "Creative Democracy--The Task Before Us," LW 14, 1988: 229.
[7] For a contrasting discussion of the influence of C. Wright Mills and Christopher Lasch on the New Left, including the development of Students for a Democratic Society’s "Port Huron Statement," see Robert Westbrook’s John Dewey and American Democracy (1991).
[8] See Mark Edmundson’s Nightmare on Main Street: Angels, Sadomasochism, and the culture of the Gothic, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997: 41).
[9] Nathan Glazer, We Are All Multiculturalists Now (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997). Glazer’s criticisms as discussed here apply to Rorty’s book, but focus on David Hollinger’s Postethnic America (New York: Basic Books, 1995). Rorty debated multiculturalism vs. the melting pot as a member of a panel that included Richard Bernstein, Leonard Harris, and me at a meeting of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy sponsored by Rice University in Houston, Texas, in March 1994. Clearly, the other participants’ views on this subject did not influence Rorty to revise his own.
[10] See David E. McClean, "The Cultural Left and the Limits of Social Hope: Why We Need A New Breed of Public Intellectual," presented to the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy at Las Vegas, NV (March 13, 2001).
[11] See, for example, Jason Hill’s kind of anti-ascriptive, location-independent cosmopolitanism (cite), but not Alain Locke’s kind of engaged, locality-affirming cosmopolitan (cite).
[12] Rorty 1998: 34, quoting Delbanco’s The Death of Satan: How Americans Have Lost the Sense of Evil, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995: 175-176.
[13] Rorty 1998: 114, quoting Howe’s Politics and the Novel, 1957: 254, from an anonymous contemporary of Dostoevsky.
[14] Rorty 1998: 119, quoting Howe, Selected Writings, 1950-1990, 1990: 141.
[15] I discussed broad outlines of some of these experiments in transforming world capitalisms in Chapter Six of my Deep Democracy: Community, Diversity, and Transformation (1999). A federation of promising American micro-experiments in democratic political economy is listed in An Economy of Hope: Annotated National Directory of Worker’s Co-ops, Democratic ESOPs, Sustainable Enterprises, Support Organizations & Resources, compiled and edited by the GEO Newsletter Staff <www.geonewsletter.org>.
[16] For a thoughtful defense of ontologically-based group claims, see many of Charles Taylor’s works, including . . . .
[17] Rorty 1998: 23-24, quoting Whitman’s Democratic Vistas, 929.
[18] See Alain LeRoy Locke, The Philosophy of Alain Locke: Harlem Renaissance and Beyond, ed. Leonard Harris (1987); Cynthia Willett, ed., Theorizing Multiculturalism: A Guide to the Current Debate (1998); Leonard Harris, ed., The Critical Pragmatism of Alain Locke: A Reader on Value Theory, Aesthetics, Community, Culture, Race, and Education (1999).
[19] See W. E. B. DuBois’s "The Conservation of Races" (1897) and Alain Locke’s "Values and Imperatives" (1935), which I discuss in greater detail in Chapter Four of Deep Democracy: Community, Diversity, and Transformation (1999).
[20] See Jane Addams’ Democracy and Social Ethics (1902), especially the chapter on "Charitable Work," as well as her Twenty Years at Hull House (1910), both of them insightfully interpreted by Charlene Haddock Seigfried in her Pragmatism and Feminism: Reweaving the Social Fabric (1996).
[21] Jorge M. Valadez’s Deliberative Democracy, Political Legitimacy, and Self-Determination in Multicultural Societies (2001), the first volume of a three-book project, offers valuable insights and suggestions about what acknowledging that our societies are multicultural means for democratic theory and practice.
[22] See Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom (1999); Martha C. Nussbaum, Sex and Social Justice (1999); Catherine Eschle, Global Democracy, Social Movements, and Feminism (2001): and Jorge M. Valadez, Deliberative Democracy, Political Legitimacy, and Self-Determination in Multicultural Societies (2001).
[23] Rorty 1998: 21-22, quoting Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, 1982: 16.
[24] See also Rorty’s essays on this in the Putnam and Dickstein collection, as well as is essay in common Knowledge contra Stephen Carter’s argument that religious voices need to be heard in the public square.