What Can We Hope For?

Essays on Politics

Richard Rorty, Chris Voparil, W. P. Malecki, Chris Voparil, W. P. Małecki

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780691217536
• Topic: Filosofia
• Subtopic: Filosofia politica

Prescient essays about the state of our politics from the philosopher who predicted that a populist demagogue would become president of the United States Richard Rorty, one of the most influential intellectuals of recent decades, is perhaps best known today as the philosopher who, almost two decades before the 2016 U.S. presidential election, warned of the rise of a Trumpian strongman in America. What Can We Hope For? gathers nineteen of Rorty's essays on American and global politics, including four previously unpublished and many lesser-known and hard-to-find pieces.In these provocative and compelling essays, Rorty confronts the critical challenges democracies face at home and abroad, including populism, growing economic inequality, and overpopulation and environmental devastation. In response, he offers optimistic and realistic ideas about how to address these crises. He outlines strategies for fostering social hope and building an inclusive global community of trust, and urges us to put our faith in trade unions, universities, bottom-up social campaigns, and bold political visions that thwart ideological pieties.Driven by Rorty's sense of emergency about our collective future, What Can We Hope For? is filled with striking diagnoses of today's political crises and creative proposals for solving them.

I

POLITICS AND PHILOSOPHY

1

WHO ARE WE?

MORAL UNIVERSALISM AND ECONOMIC TRIAGE (1996)

In what sort of situation might someone ask the question “Who are we?” It seems most appropriate in the mouth of someone trying to shape her audience into a more coherent community. It is the sort of rhetorical question a party leader might ask at a party rally. In such situations, it means something like “what unifying ideal can we find to make us less like a mob and more like an army, less like people thrown together by accident and more like people who have united to accomplish a task?”

“Who are we?” is quite different from the traditional philosophical question “What are we?” The latter is synonymous with Kant’s question, “What is Man?” Both mean something like “how does the human species differ from the rest of the animal kingdom?” or “among the differences between us and the other animals, which ones matter most?” This “what?” question is scientific or metaphysical.

By contrast, the “who?” question is political. It is asked by people who want to separate off the human beings who are better suited to some particular purpose than other human beings, and to gather the former into a self-conscious moral community: that is, a community united by reciprocal trust, and by willingness to come to fellow-members’ assistance when they need it. Answers to the “who?” question are attempts to forge, or reforge, a moral identity.

Traditional moral universalism blends an answer to the scientific or metaphysical “what?” question with an answer to the political “who?” question. Universalism presupposes that the discovery of traits shared by all human beings suffices to show why, and perhaps how, all human beings should organize themselves into a cosmopolis. It proposes a scientific or metaphysical foundation for global politics. Following the model of religious claims that human beings are made in the image of God, philosophical universalism claims that the presence of common traits testifies to a common purpose. It says that the form of the ideal human community can be determined by reference to a universal human nature.

The idea of human nature has, in recent Western philosophy, come to seem obsolete. Ever since Darwin, philosophers have become increasingly suspicious of the very idea of naturalness. Western philosophy has been trying to adapt itself to Darwin’s claim that what we call biological species are the haphazard productions of chance—a claim which erases the Greek distinction between natural and artificial kinds. For if the paradigm cases of natural kinds—biological species—are accidental results of accidental encounters between mutated genes and environmental niches, then the very idea of naturalness begins to seem artificial. Darwin makes it hard to continue the practice, common to the Greeks and to the Enlightenment, of using the term “natural” as a term of praise.

When the idea of naturalness goes, so does the Greek picture of inquiry as substituting reality for appearance, the way things are in their own intrinsic nature for the various ways human beings find it useful to describe them. The beginnings of the attempt to abandon the reality-appearance distinction are found in Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols and William James’s Pragmatism. Both books argue that the idea of truth as correspondence to reality only makes sense if reality has an intrinsic nature, and that it is unclear how we could ever tell whether or not a given descriptive vocabulary “corresponds” to such a nature.

The idea that some such vocabularies are somehow closer to the intrinsic nature of reality than others makes sense to religious believers. For those who believe that a certain religion enshrines the Word, and thus the Will, of the Creator and Lord of the Universe, not only does the question “In what language does the universe demand to be described?” make sense, but the answer is already evident. For secularists, however, the only way to make sense of the idea that the universe demands description in a certain vocabulary is to turn to science. Enlightenment secularism suggested that the vocabulary of the natural sciences is nature’s own—the divisions made by this vocabulary are the joints at which nature demands to be cut.

James and Nietzsche viewed this sort of scientism as an unfortunate persistence of religious ways of thinking. They urged that the vocabulary of physics is simply one useful vocabulary among others—useful for technological purposes but useless for any others. Both thought that the Enlightenment’s attempt to put science in the place of theology was a mistake, as was the initial assumption that the universe somehow demands a certain description. Both saw the choice among descriptions as a choice among human purposes, not a choice between human purposes and those of something nonhuman. Their Darwinian view of the human situation persuaded them that descriptions were tools, not attempts to correspond to the nature of reality. Different purposes demand different tools.

Adopting this view means replacing the choice between theological, scientific, and metaphysical descriptions of the world with a choice between human purposes. But the choice of what purposes to have is almost always, in practice, a choice among groups of people rather than a choice among abstract formulae. A choice of purposes to which to devote one’s life is typically a choice between actual or possible human communities: between the sort of people who have one overriding purpose and the sort of people who have another. So, on the pragmatist view common to both Nietzsche and James, metaphysical questions are concealed political questions, questions about the group or groups with which one hopes to affiliate oneself, or which one hopes to create.

For example, to adopt a physicalistic metaphysics is to opt for a human community devoted to mastering nature for the sake of what Bacon called “the improvement of man’s estate.” To reject that metaphysics, either in the terms in which religious fundamentalists would reject it, or in those in which Gandhi or Heidegger would reject it, is to presuppose an alternative answer to the question “Who are we?” Such a rejection is part of an attempt to create a different sort of human community, organized around a different goal.

To sum up what I have been saying so far: I read Nietzsche and James as saying that the question “Who are we?” should replace “What are we?” as the primordial question of philosophy. For it is the one to which we shall always return—the one which has always already been answered when we answer other questions. Every account of what human beings are is, for pragmatists like Nietzsche and James, a disguised proposal for shaping a new human community. The question “Who are we?” replaces the Greek question “What is Being?” and also Kant’s questions “What can I know?” and “What is Man?” It replaces all these with a new form of Kant’s question “What may I hope?”

In this new form, Kant’s question becomes “What may we hope?” For it is no longer, as it was for Kant, a question about the immortality of the individual soul, but about the future of the species. The question “Who are we?” is future oriented in a way in which the question “What are we?” is not. The “what?” question enshrines the pre-Darwinian notion of a human essence, which has its place in a Platonic heaven of other essences. The “who?” question sets aside the notion of essence, of intrinsic reality, and thus, as I have already said, of the distinction between reality and appearance. It thereby stops asking a timeless question, and asks a question about future time. But this question about the future is not a request for a prediction, but rather for a project. To ask who we are becomes a way of asking what future we should try, cooperatively, to build.

Nietzsche and James agree on the primordiality of this question, but disagree about the answer. The two have different projects in mind: Nietzsche’s is an aristocratic project and James’s democratic. Nietzsche’s “we” consists of a happy few, Zarathustra’s chosen companions. James’s “we” are the inhabitants of a global cooperative commonwealth. James took for granted the universalistic assumption, common to Christianity and the Enlightenment, that our moral community should be identical with our biological species—defined not in any essentialistic way, but simply as consisting of any organism with which any of us can interbreed. This amounts to the project of distributing the planet’s resources in such a way that no human child lacks the opportunities for individual development, the life-chances, available to any other human child.

Nietzsche, obviously, did not take this assumption, or this project, for granted. Were he to reappear among us, Nietzsche would presumably say that this project is even more absurd than it was a century before. For now, even if it were desirable, it is obviously unfeasible. In 1900, when there were only one and a half billion people in the world, and there were still forests on land and fish in the sea, such an egalitarian project might have made some sense. But in 2010 we shall have seven billion people, almost no forest, and barely any fish. So, one can imagine Nietzsche saying, even if democratic egalitarianism had been a good idea in 1900, nobody can put it forward as a practical proposal now. Doing so is either hypocritical or self-deceptive.

Nietzsche’s point can be restated and enlarged as follows: the part of the world which fostered Christianity and the Enlightenment was exceptionally lucky. The assumption that our moral community should be identical with our biological species, could only have occurred to people who were lucky enough to have more material goods than they really needed. It is not an idea which could have occurred to those who had to struggle to survive. Moral universalism is an invention of the rich.

The rich parts of the world, the ones which have already realized some of the dreams of the Enlightenment, are also the places where technology took off. Technology began making Europe rich even before the Enlightenment began making it democratic. Only people who were already exceptionally rich, and therefore exceptionally secure, could have taken the idea of democracy, much less of global democracy, seriously. Moral idealism goes along with economic success. The latter is obviously not a sufficient condition for the former, but I think we should concede to Nietzsche that it is a necessary one.

I think that we also have to concede to Nietzsche that no foreseeable application of technology could make every human family rich enough to give their children anything remotely like the chances that a family in the lucky parts of the world now takes for granted for theirs. Nobody has written a scenario which ends with every child born in Peru, Angola, and Bangladesh going to school, rather than working, until the age of eighteen, and then, if talented, proceeding to a university for training which will enable it to realize its fullest potentialities. Nobody has even written a scenario showing how a family in these countries would acquire a reason to practice birth control, instead of trying to propagate as many sources of income as possible.

Furthermore, nobody has written a scenario which shows how the people in the lucky industrialized democracies might redistribute their wealth in ways which create bright prospects for the children of the undeveloped countries without destroying the prospects of their own children and of their own societies. The institutions of the rich democracies are now so intertwined with advanced methods of transportation and communication, and more generally with expensive technology, that it is hardly possible to imagine their survival if the rich countries had to reduce their share of the world’s resources to a fraction of what they now consume. Democratic institutions in these countries depend on the existence of things like universal literacy, meritocratic social mobility, bureaucratic rationality, and the existence of many competing sources of information about public affairs. Free universities, a free press, incorruptible judges, and unbribable police officers do not come cheap.

To mention all these missing scenarios is to suggest that the rich parts of the world may be in the position of somebody proposing to share her one loaf of bread with a hundred starving people. Even if she does share, everybody, including herself, will starve anyway. So she may easily be guilty, as my hypothetical Nietzsche suggests, either of self-deception or hypocrisy.

I do not know—perhaps nobody knows—whether the project of constructing a global cooperative commonwealth is as hopeless as I have been suggesting it may be. Technology has surprised us before, and so has the success of moral idealists in bringing about the seemingly impossible. Both might surprise us again. Maybe somebody has written scenarios I have not read. But my present concern is not with predictions, either gloomy or optimistic, but rather with describing the present moral situation of the rich and lucky inhabitants of the world in terms of alternative answers to the question “Who are we?”

One way to get these alternatives in focus is to remark that a traditional expression of moral idealism is for a smaller group of people to identify themselves imaginatively with a larger group. Fifty-one years ago, a set of rich and lucky people imagined themselves to be “We, the people of the United Nations.” One reason they chose those words was that, a hundred and fifty-six years earlier, some equally rich and lucky people had imagined themselves to be “We, the people of the United States.”

It has often been suggested that the authors of the Constitution of the United States of America were not entitled to describe themselves as the people of the United States. They were, it is said, only entitled to call themselves something like “We, the representatives of the property-owning white males of the United States.” Their black slaves, their white servants, and even their wives and daughters, did not really come into the picture. Similarly, it has often been suggested that when the representatives of governments signed the Charter of the United Nations, the most that they were really entitled to say was something like “We, the representatives of the political classes of our respective countries.”

The existence of a moral community which can plausibly and without qualification identify itself as “We, the people of the United States” is still a project rather than an actuality. In a few respects, my country is closer to accomplishing this project now than it has ever been, thanks to the civil rights revolution of the 1960s and to the continuing pressure exerted by feminists. In most respects, however, it is losing gr...