I’m teaching Richard Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature this semester in a senior seminar on pragmatism. I have taken it as an opportunity to revisit some of Rorty’s other works (like Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity) and dip into a new collection of his essays, What Can We Hope For? Rorty, always the provocateur, is variously loved and hated (I am mostly in the former camp, but roll my eyes at some of his performances). I admire his desire to be an American gadfly, in the best traditions of philosophy, even if his stances sometimes reek of the genteel privilege of the oak-paneled faculty club.
To read Rorty now is to be transported back to a foreign world, in many ways. It’s a little hard, for example, to blithely tout the virtues of “conversation” when your interlocutors include the QAnon shaman and the talking heads of our polarized media. Nevertheless, there remains a deep prescience in Rorty’s reflections from the end of the 20th century.
You’ve probably seen his quote about how late capitalism would generate the reactionary desire for a strong man. (I tweeted about this way back in May (!) 2016.1) But this morning I was struck by the continued relevance of a 1994 New York Times editorial Rorty wrote on “The Unpatriotic Academy.” Lazy academics will worry that Rorty is just providing ammunition for the right’s war against universities, but I think such a response misses what Rorty gets right; indeed, it would sort of prove Rorty’s point.
Rorty grants that universities are one of our “sanctuaries for left-wing political views.”2 While grateful for such environs, Rorty is not uncritical:
I am glad there are such sanctuaries, even though I wish we had a left more broadly based, less self-involved and less jargon-ridden than our present one. But any left is better than none, and this one is doing a great deal of good for people who have gotten a raw deal in our society: women, African-Americans, gay men and lesbians. This focus on marginalized groups will, in the long run, help to make our country much more decent, more tolerant and more civilized.
Here’s the focus of his critique, which still feels deeply (if not more) relevant 30 years later:
But there is a problem with this left: it is unpatriotic. In the name of "the politics of difference," it refuses to rejoice in the country it inhabits.
The academic left treats as dichotomous what should be the best manifestation of the American experiment: forging a national identity that makes room for, and even celebrates, difference. Such a project is what Rorty calls “pluralism.”
Pluralism is the attempt to make America what the philosopher John Rawls calls "a social union of social unions," a community of communities, a nation with far more room for difference than most. Multiculturalism [a very 90s term] is turning into the attempt to keep these communities at odds with one another.
If you rush to complain about assimilationist politics, you’re missing the point. It is about envisioning a kind of sharing and joining that is nonreductive and yet binding. “Like every other country,.” Rorty remarks, “ours has a lot to be proud of and a lot to be ashamed of.”3 It reminds me of what David Leonhardt recently described as “moral patriotism”: a reality-facing endeavor that is infused with a “local” (i.e., distinctly “U.S.”-ish) aspiration rooted in who we want to become as a nation (what Rorty would call “Emersonian hope”). Rorty puts it this way:
[A] sense of shared national identity is not an evil. It is an absolutely essential component of citizenship, of any attempt to take our country and its problems seriously. There is no incompatibility between respect for cultural differences and American patriotism.
And then another one of those prescient bits, where Rorty cites the recipe for academics to alienate their fellow citizens:
If in the interests of ideological purity, or out of the need to stay as angry as possible, the academic left insists on a "politics of difference," it will become increasingly isolated and ineffective. An unpatriotic left has never achieved anything. A left that refuses to take pride in its country will have no impact on that country's politics, and will eventually become an object of contempt.
Identification with a shared national endeavor is not some blanket affirmation of the status quo. Again, I can do no better than quote Rorty from 1994:
There is no contradiction between such identification and shame at the greed, the intolerance and the indifference to suffering that is widespread in the United States. On the contrary, you can feel shame over your country's behavior only to the extent to which you feel it is your country. If we fail in such identification, we fail in national hope. If we fail in national hope, we shall no longer even try to change our ways.
Hear, hear. And amen.
The single time I was retweeted by Joyce Carol Oates, I think.
If you think universities are sanctuaries for only left-wing political views, you’ve clearly never visited a School of Business or a School of Engineering.
One might almost be tempted, per City of God, to describe this as a healthy Augustinian realism.