Achieving Our Country, by Richard Rorty

This bookthought is by Josh Friedlander. You can -- and should! -- follow him on Goodreads for more excellent book-thinking: https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/7226831-josh-friedlander

A philosopher friend recommended this and promised it was "not as political as it sounds". It's…extremely political! But also mostly consists of literary and philosophical musings on politics, so, no complaints.

Rorty's basic claim, outlined in a series of public lectures from which this is adapted, is that the left is perceived (correctly!) as having given up on America. Patriotism and nationalism have become the property of the right, and the left has adopted a posture of cynical disengagement towards the country. This is obviously instrumentally bad (nothing will ever get fixed this way), but also, Rorty argues, a shift away from an old tradition of American leftist optimism (represented by Whitman and Dewey and William James). (There is also a precedent for "cynical detachment", in the person of Henry Adams.) The biggest change since this was written is that the right, or elements of it, has also come round to the belief that America is bad: its foreign interventions wasteful and damaging mistakes, its institutions corrupt, its ruling class oligarchic and enervated. The left still agrees that America is bad; although the reference example today is probably the first landing of African slaves in Virginia, not a million dead Vietnamese.

Rorty's title comes from Baldwin:

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.

Whether this is true or not, believing it will make change possible.

Whitman and Dewey both saw America, or democracy (Whitman explicitly says that he uses them interchangeably), as a collective attempt to build a more perfect society. Whitman didn't read much Hegel, but Dewey did (Rorty, as a philosopher, spends more time on Dewey). In Hegel's philosophy of history we are involved in an ongoing process of improvement - God is manifested in time.

(Marx and Engels in an attempt to be scientific very carefully described how this process should go - this was a bad idea. This is an unapologetically anti-Marxist book, and the second lecture is dedicated to undoing the traditional distinction between "left" and "liberal". [As background the author mentions his own upbringing as a "red-diaper anticommunist baby".] Rorty argues that we should instead distinguish between the "Reformist left", which believed change possible within the current system, and the "New left" [exemplified by thinkers like C. Wright Mills and Christopher Lasch], which did not, and which turned a blind eye to the authoritarian excesses of Communism. A good line: "Had Kerensky managed to ship Lenin back to Zurich, Marx would still have been honored as a brilliant political economist who foresaw how the rich would use industrialization to immiserate the poor. But his philosophy of history would have seemed, like Herbert Spencer's, a nineteenth-century curiosity.")

For Dewey the end goal of this process is not clear, it is something which society works out together. It's also possible that it could utterly fail. But the goal is to create, in contrast to the modern idea of multiculturalism - which is just people preserving their cultures and getting along - a vibrant clash of ideas (occasionally violent, as in the Civil War, but generally not), and to find the best. The 60s counterculture possessed some of this spirit, but after the Vietnam War the left turned away from it. It has become a "theorising", cynical left, with no policy suggestions, because it believes nothing can be fixed. "Baldwin believed America unforgivable, but not unachievable".

The final essay takes on the cultural angle of this critique, focusing on the big names of Critical Theory - Foucault, Jameson, Deleuze and Guattari, Lacan. He sees such work as at best a distraction and at worst pulling out the rug from under all political activity: if the very subject is a social construct, what sense does it make to try and improve the world in specific ways? Aware that variations of this critique are most frequently heard on the right, Rorty attempts to distinguish his version: he does think that studying women's history, African-American history, Queer studies, Chicanx studies, migrant studies etc. helps reduce the casual prejudice in society which until recently could be found even in progressive circles; it makes society, in Avishai Margalit's terms, more "decent" and less "sadistic". But he approvingly cites Stefan Collini's line that "cultural studies" means "victim studies" - "such programs were created not out of the sort of curiosity about diverse forms of human life which gave rise to cultural anthropology, but rather from a sense of what America needed in order to make itself a better place." And of course this excludes groups which don't have enough visibility: "nobody is setting up a program in unemployed studies, homeless studies, or trailer park studies, because the unemployed, the homeless, and residents of trailer parks are not "other" in the relevant sense".

And Rorty thinks that there is a direct link between this focus on eradicating sadism and the steady growth in wealth inequality, "as if the American Left could not handle more than one initiative at a time". He brings up the standard anti-globalisation lines, about offshoring and the "cosmopolitan rich". Citing Edward Luttwak's uncannily prescient 1994 book The Endangered American Dream, he expresses the concern that the union members of yesteryear will choose to follow a nativist, anti-intellectual strongman type who promises to bring back jobs and scorns smug bureaucrats, overpaid financiers and postmodern professors. [Note: after writing this, I see that every GR review leads with this quote, which seems to have lent this book its 15 minutes of fame.] Interestingly, when Rorty talks about the end goal of all of the "piecemeal reforms" he advocates, he seems to picture some kind of proletarian mass solidarity movement, a type of federation where "American national pride would become as quaint as pride in being from Nebraska or Kazakhstan or Sicily". Globalisation no, but globalism yes? (This also seems a bit elitist - are people not proud of being from Kazakhstan?)

My 2c: with the usual caveats about quoting a Nazi, what I like about Carl Schmitt's critique of liberalism is its understanding of the danger of the righteous cause. When you believe that your politics are not just self-interest but the noble unfolding of the Spirit of History, the temptation to avoid compromise and force your views on strangers is overwhelming. A bit of idealism in politics is essential, but it is also valuable to maintain the awareness that people are disappointing, the world is a dark place, and if you try to fix everyone you are basically just opening yourself up to endless conflict to the death. The suggestion that other people's bad ideas ought not to be merely tolerated but seized by the beard and wrestled to the ground reminded me of this. (But this is just an observation on the Deweyan democratic ideal; of course I agree that Adamsian disengagement is just as bad or worse.)

P.S. The second of two appendices contains a good critique of what Iris Murdoch called "dryness" in modern philosophy, in the context of what has gone wrong with the "cultural left" - Frederick Jameson is seen as having brought about a joyless exactitude to the humanities, in contrast to Harold Bloom's "romance", paralleling how analytic philosophy changed between A.N. Whitehead and A.J. Ayer. Whitehead "agreed with Goethe that the ability to shudder with awe is the best feature of human beings"; Ayer "regarded shudders of awe as neurotic symptoms". Ayer won out, and so today to get a PhD and be taken seriously you must study "the proper analysis of subjunctive conditional sentences" or some such. Without such "inspirational value", a discipline can continue to create knowledge, but not enthusiasm, and is liable to become "what it was in Oxbridge before the reforms of the 187Os: merely a turnstile for admission to the overclass".