Practicing Utopia

I finally managed to get some reading done over the Thanksgiving break. A good friend of mine lent me Richard Rorty's Achieving our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth Century America, and it turned out to be one of the most interesting and rewarding books I've read in awhile. It's a serious of lectures delivered in 1998, and it's less than a hundred pages. But A little background is necessary to appreciate some of the details.

Rorty was trained as an analytic philosopher. These are philosophers, traditionally in the US and the UK, who continue Descartes' line of work: producing knowledge as "clear and distinct ideas." These are the philosophers who tackle problems like "what is free will and do we have it?" Their prevailing metric of success is the Correspondence Theory of Truth (click here for the Wikipedia entry or here for the Stanford version). In a nutshell, the closer an idea, concept, or theory represents some real, objective world "out there" somewhere, the truer it must be. There are many problems with this seemingly obvious and useful notion of truth, and reading through my other posts will start you down some of that rabbit hole, but for now, back to Rorty.

Rorty was well known in the world of philosophy, which is why his 1979 book Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature came as quite a shock. In this now famous book, he does a complete about-face and argues that questions about "truth" and "free will" are really just language games (for those keeping score, Wittgenstein argued something similar--read Wittgenstein's Poker by Edmonds and Eidinow for a fun, easy take on these issues). Rorty thinks that these huge questions have no actual answer which we can discover or deduce. Instead, he argues, we should approach such issues, and all issues really, pragmatically. We should think about truth not in terms of absolute answers or some absolute reality. Instead, we should focus on what works. Contrary to common thought, science works this same way. If we get serious about how our scientific knowledge is linked to empirical facts, all we can say is that the model which describes the Earth moving around the Sun works better than the one which has the Sun going around the Earth; the math is simpler, and it can explain a wider range of data. But, what we cannot say is that the heliocentric model is truer than the geocentric one, that is, if truer means anything more than what I've just said.

In Achieving our Country, Rorty turns his attention to Leftist politic thought in America. The thrust of his argument is that, after the fiascoes of Watergate and the Vietnam War, the Left retreated to the university, to a place of sedentary criticism. Rorty grants that when it comes to our attitudes, the Left has still achieved much and points to the rise of multicultural sensitivity and gay rights. But, he argues, we (I'll assume my role as Leftist here) have given up on our country. We are no longer proud to be Americans. We are ashamed: ashamed of the atrocities our armed forces commit abroad, ashamed of our collateral damage, ashamed of the big corporations buying our government outright, ashamed of our relationship with Israel and our support of its illegal occupation, ashamed of the deeds done in the name of "Freedom".

I have to admit, I feel some of that shame. While I wasn't here for Vietnam or Watergate, I was here for Iraq and Afghanistan, for the 2008 crash and bailout, for our continued support of Israel's continued illegal occupation and settlement expansion. I am appalled at the wealth gap, the usurping of Washington by Wall Street, the exploitation of labor in "developing" nations, our wasteful consumerism...I could go on. Now with a good chunk of graduate school under my belt, having read Weber, Marx, and Foucault, having studied the history of religion, capitalism, and many things in between, I can honestly say that the world appears to be broken beyond repair. Weber called it an "iron cage" or, in another translation, a "shell as hard as steel." We have painted ourselves into a corner. The only way to keep the world turning is to ravage it. What is there left to do—take care of my own, get my piece of the pie, and wait for nature to sort us out.

But Rorty tries to rally the Left back from its melancholy armchair and down from its dark, Ivory Tower. He urges us to be proud of our country again, arguing that our country has yet to be achieved, that, while the fight for justice is never over, we can and have made progress. He wants us to imagine a utopia again. He draws from Walt Whitman and John Dewey, arguing for an impassioned pragmatism. There is no Truth or Freedom which our country should be trying to manifest. Rather, we should be a practical country, concerned with what works when it comes to achieving a happy, flourishing life for its citizens. I think that is something I can begin to be proud of. I think that the Left and the Right should start having a serious conversation again about our long term picture of this nation, about where are headed. Utopia isn't something to simply dream about, it's something to achieve in little bursts. Rorty describes it via Sisyphus, but instead of the boulder rolling all the way back down the mountain, it just slides a bit now and then. There is no summit to reach, but there are plateaus, little victories. Utopia is a practice, not a theory. Perhaps Weber's iron cage is as unbreakable as it seems, but at least we can go down rattling the bars. And, who knows, maybe we can bend one or two, get an arm free or stick out our heads and look around. Maybe our empathy will outstrip our greed. Maybe. Maybe not. That's why we need to practice.