There is nothing deep down inside us except what we have put there ourselves

Richard Rorty and the modern left.

Richard Rorty is few peoples’ problematic favorite. He’s not even mine: although I think of him, like my other modern leftist heroes Guy Debord and André Gorz, as flawed visionaries who weren’t always right about everything, well…who is? Rorty is in no way problematic to me. To me, he is perhaps the greatest leftist thinker America produced in the latter half of the 20th century. To me, when he spoke of the idea of a “People’s Charter” – a document containing the basic reforms, actions, and demands of a just society, which could be read and memorized, debated and understood, but everyone one from “professors and production workers…professional people and those who clean the professionals’ toilets” – his work would form, if not the spine or heart or brain of that document, at least the legs on which it stood.

But Rorty was never embraced by much of the American left. While many of the European structuralists embraced his neo-pragmatic view of politics and his rejection of traditional metaphysics, Americans on the academic left tended to criticize him for the same reasons: he dismissed as a waste of time and effort the search for absolute knowledge and truth, and his embrace of the practical and the observable led many to call him an elitist. His relentless criticism of the New Left for its inward turn and failure to address how the people would learn the skills they needed to govern without capitalist made him an enemy of academic liberals starting in the ‘70s, and today he is largely forgotten as leftist politics and philosophy isolates itself into towers of identity, authenticity, and legitimacy – all concepts he found of dubious value.

I hope it is not merely my having encountered Rorty at a time when I was easily influenced by his message, but I do not think that is the case. He rejected the notion that Marxism was scientific, emphasizing instead that its specificity and particularism (elements which marked it as prematurely postmodern) were its strength, not the universality that modernism aspired to. While I believe in the scientific nature of Marxist analysis, I have also always said that Marxists should be utopian, that our vision of the future should be restricted only by our imaginations, for it is our imaginations that make the world. That, among many other beliefs I cherish, is something I got from Rorty.

Some of his contemporaries saw Richard Rorty as an insufferable highbrow. This was always stunning to me: If his most basic ideas, his most fundamental premises, spoke so strongly and seemed so perfectly sensible and comprehensible to me, a high school dropout from the tail end of the decaying white middle class, how could it be read as snobbish to his fellow privileged academics? And yet the concept of the ironist – his ideal person, his concept of the kind of human being whose understanding of economic, social, and ethical relations would equip them to usher in the kind of a just future that underpinned the Marxist utopia of his dreams – was often tarred as elitist by his peers. (It probably didn’t help that his exemplar of the perfect ironist was the notoriously difficult, provocative, and widely despised Jacques Derrida.)

The ironist, though – and I do not flatter myself one, though its definition is perpetually aspirational to me – does not seem elite, or remote, or unachievable for the common man; not from where I’m sitting. So what is it? As described in his masterpiece, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, it is first someone who rejects absolutist definitions, distrusts essentialist language, and recognizes language, social relations, and even our concepts of selfhood and personhood as fundamentally contingent. Truth and falsehood exist by human definition alone and can be appealed to no higher authority; those definitions should be tested against other definitions, and not against any undiscoverable notion of absolute truth; the vocabularies we form through those definitions are influenced by our histories, experiences, and pasts, and can never be construed as final; and the more we withdraw into essentialist definitional games, the more we justify cruelty, for if we define absolutely who is human, we must by necessity define who is not.

What then? Then, says Rorty, the ironist continues to question the current vocabulary he uses as final or settled; he both seeks out and also questions the vocabulary used by others; he understands that there can be no permanent resolution to those questions, nor can his doubts about them ever be settled; and he continues on a path to building solidarity that understands that it is an attempt to improve the lives of as many other people as it can reach, rather than the tool to a final apprehension of a ‘true’ reality or an ‘objective’ higher power. The progress of individual humanity, then, is a process of continual redescription, of the honing of the self and one’s relationship to others to an ever sharper point – not following the track to a visible finish line.

Rorty’s moral expansiveness was miraculous, incredibly generous and non-partisan as well as critical. He recognized early on a staple of what is now leftist discourse:  Humans are addicted to “we-statements”, prohibitions or permissions that claim with no solid ground beneath them to speak for entire categories of human beings. Rather than advocate the restriction and dismissal of those who do so, he advocates a constant expansion of who is included in that “we”, so it becomes ever harder to define others as “not-we” and thus not worthy of in-group protections. Yet he dismisses as impractical mere suffering as a grounds for moral authority: “If pain were all that mattered,” he wrote, “It would be as important to protect the rabbits from the foxes as the Jews from the Nazis.”

Rorty was a bit too in love with America to ever really understand the damage its empire had wrought in the world. His disillusion with the failures of the New Left led him not further out into Marxism, but into a weak liberalism of acceptance. And he didn’t live long enough to see the rejuvenation of the American left following the financial collapse of 2008. But even at the end, largely abandoned by the New Left – the Cutural Left, as he called them as he attacked them for focusing more on social taboos and “hidden psychosexual motivations” than obvious greed and material disparities – and hated by the right for their belief that he was a prophet of the newly despised “moral relativism”, he still fought for an imaginative utopia he thought leftism alone could provide.

In Achieving Our Country, his last major work, he was strikingly prescient about what was coming. “Members of labor unions and unorganized unskilled workers will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported,” he wrote – in 1999. “Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers, themselves desperately afraid of being downsized, are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else. At that point, something will crack. The electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for – someone willing to assure them that once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and post-modernist professors will no longer be calling the shots. One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past forty years by black and brown Americans and by homosexuals will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion.”

He resisted until the end moral tests of movement leaders and fruitless attempts to find people without flaws (that is to say, people who are not people) on the pedestals we’ve cleared; the blaming of social conditions on mindsets and attitudes rather than economic realities; and the search for a preternatural, prehuman flawlessness of person which he felt led to sectarianism among Marxists. And most of all, he believed in something that he would never have called an absolute truth, but which is as real as anything I have ever heard:  that solidarity is not something you discover by preaching, reflection, or conversation, but something that you create by effort and understanding.