floyd merrell
Purdue University
West Lafayette, IN 47907
A GUT REACTION
WHAT KIND OF PRECEDENT IS THIS?
On December 7 1941, an eager audience in New York City awaited a
lecture by John Dewey, then 82 years of age, on the topic of the First World
War. Recalling his decision to support
North America’s military intervention in that war, and shocked, as was
everybody present, of the news of Pearl Harbor, his audience desired some
reassuring by this country’s foremost philosopher at that time. Dewey demurred, however, beginning
with: ‘I have nothing, had nothing, and
have nothing now, to say directly about the war’. Intellectuals, he went on, must be careful about hasty generalizations
lest they give the impression that they are justifying, and what is worse,
rationalizing, the course of national and world events.
How times have changed! These
days, philosophers and scholars in the humanities that are not politically
engaged—or if not, at least politically correct—are up for suspicion. Dewey, of course, played an important role
in the creation of that native North American philosophy, pragmatism, the
contemporary expression of which occasionally goes by the name of
neopragmatism. His philosophy was also
scientifically oriented. Since Dewey’s
time science, at least of the classical variety, has often been on the chopping
block within humanities departments.
Few neopragmatists dare pledge their allegiance to the scientific
enterprise, which is frequently on intimate terms with the defense industry and
transnational corporate interests.
Where does their allegiance rest then?
On language, on the so-called ‘linguistic turn’, and on the power
accrued through language. The
linguistic turn shifts focus from the physical world and from links between
modes of interpreting the world to language and virtually nothing but
language. Obviously science, that
science of the classical mold—which unfortunately is the only science with
which many scholars in the humanities are familiar—doesn’t fare well when it
loses the ground upon which it has stood for centuries. Science’s fate in the heyday of the
linguistic turn occasionally finds it relegated to dusty closets, or at least
banished from the spotlight as fountainhead of truth and knowledge.
Rorty has been criticized for taking Dewey’s scientific-oriented
philosophy and reformulating it as a linguistic venture. Yet, in spite of Dewey’s allegiance to
scientific method, he remained sympathetic to literature and the arts, and he nurtured
artistic ambitions to understand the world and express it through the various
artistic modes. That much said, Rorty
appreciated Heidegger’s notion that philosophy, like science, has no way of
knowing truth and reality as traditional conceived to be standing apart from
the thinker. It was not, Rorty insists,
that Heidegger saw philosophy as having been following a futile course of
inquiry and thus in need of being brought back to its proper task. Much like Wittgenstein and Dewey, Heidegger
saw philosophy as an illusionary quest in search for something other than
origins, wellsprings, or foundations of knowledge. Recognizing that both the idealist and the realist offer only a
representation of thought and not the thing represented, Heidegger turned to
the discipline of phenomenology in order to investigate not how truth is found
but how the world might reveal itself, only to conclude that the investigator
is part of the world and that there is no way to step outside of it to study
it.
If we are in the world and must remain bound to it, what is left for
the philosopher to do regarding the world of politics and its using the
world—including humans, institutions, and cultural practices—for its particular
purposes? Rorty tells us in Philosophy
and Social Hope (232) that when it ‘comes to political deliberation,
philosophy is a good servant but a bad master’. Since for Rorty philosophy is of no account except as a means for
a lot of talk, even though philosophy is a bad master, we must use it as a
servant put to the service of the Grand Conversation of Humankind. If political deliberation becomes the talk
of the hour, so be it. The servant has
been doing the work all along, and by now knows the ropes as well or better
than any master.
WHAT SHOULD WE DO ABOUT TERRORISM?
So, Rorty seems to feel
quite comfortable writing, in ‘Fighting Terrorism with Democracy’, that ‘A year
after 9/11, the United States is still not facing up to the hardest questions
that that disaster posed. Nobody has
yet explained how the government might hope to take effective precautions
against a terrorist attack’.
If I might beg the
indulgence of anybody that happens to be reading this modest essay, allow me to
say that while the matter of taking ‘effective precautions’ is of
unquestionable importance, we should be asking why this sort of terrorism is
occurring in the first place. Perhaps
we should be focusing on global symptoms that include ‘developed’ nations, and
‘developing’ nations as well. Perhaps
we should ask questions regarding the cause of these symptoms. What are the symptoms resulting from social
diseases that have bred terrorism?
Rorty says in so many words that Bush and his people attempt to skirt
the issue. ‘Even if 9/11 had not
happened’, he writes, ‘it might still be the case that the danger of letting Iraq
continue to build weapons is greater than the danger of the chaos throughout
the Middle East that will be produced by an all-out attempt to bring about
regime change. But the Bush
administration is not interested in making this case. The last thing it wants is genuine public debate about what needs
to be done. For such debate would
endanger the conviction that it wishes to encourage—that we are already at war,
and that the President must therefore be entrusted with the same sort of
powers, and the same freedom from accountability, that Roosevelt was given in
World War II’.
Whether the case is weapons
build-up or Middle East chaos, the idea that we are already ‘at war’ rather
than the possibility that we might be ‘at war’ if the prevailing conditions continue
and we do not prepare ourselves effectively to confront the ‘enemy’, the common
denominator is still ‘war’. Perhaps a
question to ask should be: Whose war,
and what kind of war? A war against
Iran in the name of terrorism is Bush’s war and his kind of war. The problem that isn’t usually addressed is
that a genuine war on terrorism actually entails no army backed up by billions
of dollars going to battle against a concrete, readily identifiable enemy with
winning in mind. The enemy’s identity is
vague at best, the symptoms are equally vague, and the international disease is
elusive.
I would submit that the idea
of ‘war’ has been misplaced. It should
be focused on ‘poverty’, ‘violations of human rights’ and ‘human dignity’, and
on ‘cruelty and humiliation’ of humans by humans the world over—to use a pair
of Rorty’s own terms. We learn by
reading Rorty that the ‘liberal ironist’ becomes an ironist by becoming
knowledgeable about humans inflicting ‘cruelty’ on and ‘humiliation’ other
humans. Then she becomes keenly
interested in reducing the indices of ‘cruelty’ and ‘humiliation’ through the
world.
But how does she become
knowledgeable regarding these issues?
By reading lots and lots of books, most particularly novels, so she can
learn about human nature and how it reveals its more malicious self within
human contexts. By reading books, the
liberal ironist learns how to become more human than human and hence to
resisting inflicting cruelty on and humiliating other humans. These experiences of cruelty and humiliation
are private, knowledge of them is private, and the liberal ironist’s becoming a
better human is likewise private. So
ideally we will have a collection of liberal ironist readers gathering for
conversation and telling one another stories about—among other things—how they
could have become, how they became, or how they can yet become, better
humans. Thus we have the liberal
ironist as solitary and private. She
sits alone and reads about cruelty and humiliation, and this is how she learns,
not from parents or friends, or even from neighborhood bullies. There are no parents, friends, or
bullies. There are just library cards
and stacks and stacks of novels to be read well into the night, and a novel
right here and now in our liberal ironist’s hands. Yes. Rorty searches for
private perfection and public justice, art and politics. He searches for the good life, on a personal
basis, and amiable, tolerant conversation publicly.
Nietzsche once wrote that
God is dead, but there is saving grace, since the body is alive, so Nietzsche
ends up dancing. Rorty has told us that
truth is dead, but we are not condemned to silence, for language is alive, so
we can at least read and talk. For Nietzsche
truth is in bodymind’s doing, in interdependent, interrelated interaction; for
Rorty the only available truth is in sentences, and their
interrelationships. Perhaps both
Nietzsche and Rorty are on the right track.
It is not for me to say. The fact
remains, whether we know it or not and whether we like it or not, that bodymind
is prior to language use. Charles S.
Peirce once taught us this, as did Maurice Merleau-Ponty and others of kindred
spirit, as well as recent ‘sensuous scholars’ like Paul Stoller in the social
sciences, especially anthropology.
Maybe all is well in academic after all.
But go out in the world of
concrete living tell all this to private individual havenots of the world who
scramble from dawn to well after dark simply to survive, who do not have the
luxury of dreaming up dreams and hoping hopes.
The Rortyan pragmatic web of a private individual havenot is presumably
a centerless web of beliefs and desires.
If we assume so much, and if we take a community of these private webs
and put them all together, by no means do we have any ideal public sphere whose
center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. Rather, the center of our collection of
individuals and cultures is under the control of a web of global capitalist enterprises
and enterprisers. This global
capitalist web exercises a form of Global Unwitting Terrorism (GUT) against any
and all havenots of ‘fourth-world’ countries at the private level. I write ‘Unwitting Terrorism’, because at
the corporate boardroom and CEO level, and even at the white and blue-collar
levels in the U. S., there is often little attention to or awareness of the
consequences of the terrorism exercised by global capitalism on the world’s
havenots.
Rortyanly put, GUT just
tries to keep the conversation and greenbacks flowing and the investors happy
so everybody can find their way to the good life—that is, the ‘American’ way of
living. The problem is that this view
can also be—though not necessarily—provincial, ethnocentric, and it can bring
about violence to other peoples of other ethnicities and cultures. A comparable GUT expression of violence has
institutionally been disguised over the past half century as international
loans for economic development. They
presumably liberate people so that can practice democracy ‘American’
style. They propose to enforce human
rights in order to make people better and as a byproduct bring about an end to
cruelty and humiliation. Then we can
all enter into the world’s conversation.
But does communication
really take place between haves and havenots?
Sometimes it seems as if small enclaves of citizens of the global
community are incapable of communicating with other enclaves. Perhaps we’re all ensconced within our
minuscule cultural cubicles, incapable genuinely of reaching out to
others. I’m reminded of Bertrand
Russell, who once gave a talk on solipsism, after which a member of the
audience, who wanted to know of more solipsists in order to form a club so they
could share their ideas, approached him.
In a certain sense that’s Rorty?
Each individual is for herself within her mini-community, and each
mini-community is for itself among the world’s communities? Little communication here. (This is also like Groucho Marx’s quip that
he would never join a club that would have him as a member, thus alluding to
the Russell’s notorious paradox of sets that cannot be members of
themselves. Is each individual a set
within herself and also a member of a larger set? If so, how is communication possible between sets each member of
which is a set?)
But for now let’s just take
Rorty at his word and get on with it.
For Dewey, one of Rorty’s
champions, there should not be meaninglessness and anxiety among pragmatists
but adventure, possibilities, and an open, unfinished future. The idea of an open, unfinished future
should genuinely open eyes and ears and all senses toward other people of other
lands. Although Rorty excludes Peirce
from his “post-philosophy” project, Peirce, the first founding father of
American pragmatism, could easily have taken part in much current pragmatic
dialogical activity while rejecting some of its convictions. Rorty ignores Peirce because he believed in
the eventual possibility of reaching truth.
Actually, Peirce writes that we can reach the truth only in the
indefinite future, which is to say that we will never really reach the absolute
truth in our lifetime or in that of anybody else. For Peirce, whatever we might be fortunate enough to know opens
out to a wide, unlimited horizon.
Consequently, one can imagine Peirce eagerly participating in a Rortyan
conversation. For Peirce realized that
pragmatism solves no problems for all time, because there is always the element
of fallibilism. Peirce, much like
Dewey, remained optimistic. What is
important is the process of learning, not knowledge, participating with the
community, not arriving at ironclad truth.
What is the problem
here? Dewey shared with Peirce the
conviction that the answer to the eclipse of older notions of truth and
authority lies in modern scientific methodology. The problem is that there exists the possibility that it can end
up as the smug satisfaction that ‘our way’ is best for us and be damned with or
else simply pay no mind to ‘their ways’.
This is, once again, ethnocentrism.
It is also typical of GUT policies.
GUT, by its very nature, is provincial.
As a consequence of its provincialism, it is unable genuinely to
comprehend other ethnicities and other cultures. So it unwittingly propagates ‘terrorism’, GUT ‘terrorism’.
How so? Allow me a personal story: my experience in a ghetto (favela) in
Salvador, Brazil, that goes by the name of Fazenda Grande do Retiro. Over the past years my wife and I have
become good friends with a family residing in Fazenda Grande. The members of this family of seven live in
a small four-room home that was built, brick-by-brick, a few decades ago by the
grandfather when life was easier. One
brother of some 55 years of age is epileptic and has never worked a day of his
life. Another brother of 35 years has
little education and manages to pick up part time jobs here and there. A sister with three daughters takes care of
house and kids and sedentary brothers.
The only person who works, a woman of 37 years, has held a steady job
over the past few years as a seamstress.
Two years ago she earned $270 in Reais a month, a little over the
minimum wage, and about $130 dollars.
Last year her paycheck was reduced to the equivalent of about $90
dollars—adjusted, since Brazilian currency has lost value. When she protested she was told to take it
or leave it, for plenty of others would line up for the job if she left.
Like this family, the poor
of Brazil and elsewhere are suffering the consequences of neoliberalism and
privatization, of the terrible burden of loan payments for development that has
profited the Brazilian moneyed class and multinational banks and
corporations. That, indeed, is
violence, silent violence, but violence as sure as the most brutal form of
physical violence. It is also
terrorism. It is GUT in the worst
way for the poor of the world. And
perhaps we might say in the best way for liberal ironists who read books
and engage in amiable chitchat in pursuit of the good life. Remaining ensconced within books and wrapped
up in the words issuing forth from their mouths in a comfortable easy chair
with a crystal glass of fine wine at hand, they remain distant from the gritty,
grimy world of the havenots.
But, we are to suppose, this
is fine, for among liberal ironists there is a melioristic attitude toward
life. All they have to do is keep the
talk is a fluid state, and eventually they and everybody else—that is, if they
follow the liberal ironists’ good example—will realize their dreams through the
conversation rather than coercion, fables rather than force, and amiableness
rather than attacks. The hope is that
if the conversation keeps going long enough, things will naturally get better
without any resort to force. It’s not as
cut and dried as the Nike phrase ‘Just do it’; it is more a matter of Rorty’s
suggestion, ‘Let’s try it.’ That way,
things are left more open, more experimental.
Mistakes may be made, but that’s all right. We can learn from them, keep up our incessant reading and
chattering, and some we’ll manage to ‘do it’.
Of course, the assumption is that we already find ourselves in a liberal
society, where free speech is taken for granted—albeit with a massive dose of
politically correct strictures—and where we can touch on virtually any topic
that happens to pop into our heads. We
can do so, because we already enjoy the good life, with a comfy salary
accompanied with plenty of benefits.
Very convenient, all this.
Indeed, if you will indulge
me a few moments more, I wish to take a tangential move briefly to expound on
this issue. My lingering hope would be
that by means of this digression I might reveal the need for an expanded vision
from the neopragmatist perspective.
Since the Industrial
Revolution and modern nation-state building in what makes up today’s Western
World, close to 200 nation-states have experienced birth, most of them in Latin
America, Asia, the Middle East and Africa.
This is an impressive proliferation of political systems many of which
sport at least remotely comparable characteristics. The proliferation also evinces diminishing returns regarding the
possibilities for development with respect to many of these nation-states. Many of these political systems that arose
in the nineteenth century in Latin America and the nation-states formed during
the twentieth century are still looked upon as unfinished projects; yet the
dream of modernity lingers on. In the
case of Latin America’s nation-states, born out of influence from the North
American and French Revolutions roughly from 1810 to 1821, by the end of the
twentieth century they still failed to join the venerable club of developed
capitalist powers. Some say this is due
to the ‘lost decade’ of debt crisis during the 1980s and 1990s after promising
development from the 1950s to the 1980s.
Actually prior to that over a century had been lost without their
managing to become modern, prosperous societies.
What is the upshot of all
this? The poor of Latin America and
other so-called ‘developing countries’ are paying dearly for the aborted and
often squandered ambitions and dreams of the rich in their quest for
modernization and abundance and the good life.
Now, these poor dream no dreams, save for the possibility of emigrating
to the capital city of their country or migrating to developed countries
whenever possible. In most these
countries capital for investment is sorely lacking, unemployment is huge, demographic
growth is out of the ceiling, and raw materials are exported at diminishing and
unprofitable prices. These countries
hardly see any alternative but to seek transnational investment, to become
neoliberalized. They see this as their
only hope to get the people to work, increase the technological level of their
production, and develop competitive exports.
Not so easy. The transnational
corporations are cautious and selective.
They won’t invest just anywhere, but only in the countries that are
stable and already relatively developed. They invest only where there is promise of big profits. Moreover, they harbor little loyalty toward
their own country of origin. Coca-Cola,
Nike, Nissan, and Nestlé do not identify themselves with the Unites States,
Swiss, or Japanese interests. Prior to
the string of scandals after Enron, it was assumed that they were at least
loyal to their investors. Now it seems
that their loyalty was to themselves and themselves alone. They enjoy increasing world power, and at
the same time they assume hardly any international responsibility for their
actions.
This phenomenon marks the
emergence of a new non-state aristocracy that enjoys trigonometrically
increasing world power. In contrast to
traditional aristocracies intent on defending their national ambitions against
international pressures, global aristocracies take relatively little interest
in nationalities. Whether or not a
particular society is plagued by economic disparities, commits violations of
human rights, causes massive environmental damage, or depends on oppressive
regimes, is not the greatest of concerns.
What is important is whether the country is a good investment risk. Transnational corporation executives don’t care
to establish links with the particular interests of local or national communities. Their concerns are money and virtually money
alone. All this is to say that
transnational global power is becoming increasingly anonymous. Unelected officials decide on the economic
future of countries of the world. They
affect the fate of millions of people.
Consequently, whatever
tendency toward democratization that might have existed in a particular society
begins to erode, since the people have lost a grip on their country’s
economy. A sense of belonging to a
communal web of human interrelations begins to wane; apathy and a feeling of
social anomie emerges; frustration seeps in; violence erupts sporadically here
and there. The situation within each
country tends to become even less democratic since the elected officials of a
given country, compelled to bow to the interests of an unelected international
technocracy, must be careful to avoid revealing their policies to the citizenry
of that country, since they affect the daily lives of everybody. So rather than seek approval of the people
or open proposed programs to a popular or electoral vote, they follow
instructions from the IMF and World Bank.
In this manner many elected governments in Africa, Asia, and Latin
America that call themselves democratic are becoming rapidly transformed in
ways beyond the citizens’ control.
Indeed, the IMF and World Bank, joined with the WTO, make up a
transnational high priesthood that has managed to convert the oligarchies of
nearly all the developing countries of the globe. Outside the rebel Muslim forces, there is now virtually a single
economic faith among the majority of the world’s population. There is almost a worldwide consensus that
there exists no viable alternative to neoliberal policies: free trade, deregulation, and privatization.
Nevertheless, after a decade and a half of applying structural
adjustments and reforming markets, most of the African, Asian, and Latin
American nations remain trapped in a labyrinth of neoliberal mandates, and
unemployment and poverty are still with them.
Social inequalities are growing.
In Zambia 84.6 percent of the people barely survive on less than a
dollar a day. Percentages taper off
slowly. To cite a few examples, in
Madagascar it’s 72.3%, in Niger 61.5%, in Guatemala 53.3%, in India 52.5%, in
Peru 49.4%, in Rwanda 45.7%, in Ethiopia 33.8%, in Ecuador 30.0 %, and in
Bangladesh 29.0. Shocking, even at the
lower levels. In 2000, about 1.3
billion citizens of the world were living in poverty. Yet, a single creed rules most of the globe’s economies. The haves propagate this creed as the only
salvation for the havenots. The world’s
economic oligarchy, making up less than 25% of the world’s inhabitants at 1
billion, has 90% of the world’s scientists and engineers. They also have 97% of the computers and
invest more than 220 billion dollars in research and development yearly. How can the disparity do anything but become
greater? Obviously the Achilles’ heel
of the future world economy, if and when it becomes a global shopping mall,
will be stringently shunted by the developing world’s lack of purchasing
power: there are barely 1.8 billion
consumers who can afford the ‘good life’ among a total of 6 billion people; the
rest are destined to stand outside gazing through the store windows. There is no Adam Smith ‘wealth of nations’
within the global jungle. What there
is, is dog-eat-dog Darwinism.
Global transnational Darwinism has created the false promise of
international aid (stepdaughter of the dream of unlimited development), that,
since the 1960s has left most ‘developing’ countries in worse shape than before
the presumed altruistic programs were instituted. The sordid reality tells us today that nobody knows where the
utopian pie in the sky can be found.
The haves are still getting richer and the havenots poorer. The combined income of around 300
billionaires is roughly equal to that of the bottom 2.7 billion people
representing almost 45% of the world’s population. The Pied Pipers leading us all toward that comfortable horizon
out there in the future to the tune of Yankee Doodle in the American Way are
immediately followed by the technocrat Gurus crunching numbers in their laptops
and thus quantitizing any and all qualitative cultural processes, and woe be
anybody who dares get in their way.
They pay attention to GNPs while ignoring the profound qualitative
social, environmental, and structural dysfunctions popping up everywhere.
According to Oswaldo de Rivero’s The Myth of Development, global
transnational Darwinism that comes in the form of GUT is predatory. It promotes capitalism, for sure. But it is a special kind of capitalism. Chinese capitalist-socialism combines gulag
with capitalist exploitations of workers worse than anything found in the
United States during the 1920s and thereafter.
The form of capitalism promoted sells pop music, Coca-Cola, Kentucky
Fried Chicken, and Wal-Mart goods more than it promotes democracy; if a given
country maintains order by brutal force yet keeps its nose clean in the eyes of
the CIA, it is a good candidate for massive investment of dollars. Markets have been liberalized and economies
have been privatized, but without civil society and a general sense of
community democracy can hardly emerge into the light of day. Political rights of individuals, democratic
programs, and an adequate degree of social equality will continue to remain
subordinated to the liberalization and deregulation of the market. Multinational capitalism is predatory, because
the economy is becoming globalized, but ethics is not. Motives involve getting in, making big bucks
fast, and getting out when conditions become less than comfortable. The high priests of the new religion, GUT,
sacrifice the poor of the world.
Finally, back to the topic at hand….
ON THE HOME BASE
Rorty writes that
‘Democratic politicians are terrified.
They see President Bush’s post-9/11 approval ratings as a sign that
refusal to endorse the planned war on Iraq would how then to be insufficiently
tough on terrorism. Democratic politicians
can hardly tell the public the truth:
that they are as baffled as the Republicans about how to insure that no
other American cities will be attacked.
Faced with a threat that nobody has any idea how to deal with, both
parties are unable to speak frankly to the voters. No American politician can admit that our military prowess can do
little to lessen the danger that our cities will be subject to unpredictable
and unpreventable attacks by small nongovernmental organizations like Al
Qaeda’.
Granted. Bush has become the head cheerleader. He is rah rahing Congress, both Republicans
and Democrats, and the general populace as well, into war with Iraq. As Rorty puts it, any Democratic senator or
congressperson ‘who expresses doubts about a new war against Iraq can count on
being described by members of the Bush Administration as an effete Europhile,
unworthy to hold office in a country that must stand united against evil’. Bush tells applauding North Americans that
we will win the war, and, since he is now unusually silent about Al-Qaeda and
Bin Laden, presumably we are somehow to believe that victory over terrorism is
included in the package. And the
economy? It is undergoing a
‘correctification’, we are told in his words, and if we just spend enough
money, we’ll all be happy. In order to
spend like we should, we’ve got to have oil.
And plenty of it. After all, if
God didn’t want us to use the earth’s oil he wouldn’t have allowed us to create
SUV’s and all our gas powered gimmickry.
So the implications go. In other
words, to address Rorty’s query, the terrorist threat is supposed to take care
of itself if we can jus attend to the big issues: Saddam Hussein and a flowing supply of oil.
Rorty also alludes to the
‘concern felt by Europeans over the amazing arrogance that our government has
displayed since President Bush took office.
We are horrified by our government’s repudiation of the last vestiges of
Wilsonian internationalism-manifest in our government’s insistence that
American soldiers never be under a foreigner’s command, and that American war
criminals never be tried by an international court’.
There’s still that other
symptom of a deeper malaise throughout the world: hunger, disease, malnutrition, exploitation, cruelty,
humiliation—all a GUT product of systematic violence—are problems that have
been skirted for decades, at least since Kennedy’s Grand Designs and Johnson’s
‘Guns and Butter’ policy didn’t pay dividends.
But, then, that was during the cold war, and the attempt was to prevent
the spread of Communism and hence the genuine humanitarian motives must be
suspect.
And yet, I must repeat
myself: both neoliberal North America
and Europe, especially France, are actually quite provincial. In spite of Rorty’s counseling us that our
‘opinion of pragmatism can, and should, be independent’ of our opinion ‘of
either democracy or America’ (PSH 24), his opinion of democracy and America is
that of the liberal ironist, which inevitably evokes ideas of his view of
pragmatism. Ethnographer Clifford
Geertz, among others, has remarked that liberalism—and by extrapolation liberal
irony—is culturally specific to the West.
When Rorty strives to convert his audience to the liberal view he is
thus espousing a particular political program, the ‘American way’, and a
particular philosophy, ‘neopragmatism’.
He sneaks his ‘imperialist’ propaganda through the maid’s entrance with
the intent of catching his audience off guard.
Rorty is familiar with the criticism of his approach. He writes of ‘postcolonial skeptics’ who
‘suspect that liberalism is an attempt to impose the outcome of a specifically
European experience on people who have had no share in this experience’ (PSH
272). He responds that the pragmatists
‘are not arguing that modern Europe has any superior insight into eternal,
ahistorical realities. We do not claim
superior rationality. We claim only an
experimental success: we have come up
with a way of bringing people into some degree of comity, and of increasing
human happiness, which looks more promising than any other way which has been
proposed so far’ (PSH 273). It would
appear that the utopian social hope, product of nineteenth-century Europe, is
still the noblest imaginative creation we have.
Is this unabashed
ethnocentrism or what? Rorty is not
propagating liberal values through presumed impartial discourse. He openly defends his values by telling a
story, his way, from the perspective of what he believes is his community, as
an ethnocentric defense of liberalism.
From his ethnocentric tower, Rorty observes that civilization ‘is now
threatened not just be rogue states like Hitler’s Germany or Milosevic’s Serbia
but by people who are not exactly enemy combatants and not exactly
criminals…. Our new enemies are people
who operate far from our borders and who can, perhaps without the knowledge of
the government of the country in which they happen to be at the moment, prepare
a nuclear device or a biological weapon.
They can then place it inside a container that will, on the other side
of the world, be loaded off a ship directly onto a railroad car. All they have to do after that is arrange
for someone to press a button when the train arrives at the relevant
city’. This new type of war threatens
‘Civilization’? Actually, it was
‘Civilization’, Americanophile, Europhile ‘Civilization’, helped create the
causes of this war in the first place.
‘Civilization’ has brought about extermination and violence against
others for a couple of centuries. The
harvest has been resentment among the havenots against the haves, especially
those of the United States. ‘Our new
enemies’? Actually, the enemies,
enemies of GUT, have also been around for quite a while. These enemies are as unseen as the
terrorists: hunger, sickness, the
wasting away of human potential. True,
these enemies operate ‘far from our borders’, far from our comfortable ‘good
life’, and true, they will ‘attack’ by means of degradation of humans
throughout the world that will ultimately have an effect on our own society, by
means of environmental destruction, by means of support of brutal regimes whose
only claim to U.S. support comes from their bowing to U.S. demands in order to
get World Bank and IMF loans.
All this reminds me of a
recent ‘Doonesbury’ strip in the local newspaper. One of the interlocutors had just returned from a trip
abroad. His words: ‘You can’t believe how poorly our
belligerent … isolationism is playing around the world! From regime changes, to disengagement in
Palestine, to tariffs, to violating key treaties and refusing to sign others,
our foreign policy has been reduced to arrogant self-interest! In one year, Bush has transformed worldwide
sympathy toward America into universal resentment. It’s gotten so bad I had to pretend I was Canadian!’ ‘And where was that?’ asked the second
interlocutor. The response: ‘Canada.
Elsewhere I’m Belgian’. This also
reminds me of Latin America, where on occasion I have sensed the necessity of
posing as Danish, Norwegian, Polish, and also Canadian, whenever I thought it
would bring out a more comfortable conversational environment among recent
acquaintances, in order that I might more effectively get into their mind and
their cultural behavioral tendencies and patterns.
Why are these deceptive
tactics necessary—at least in my humble estimation? Because I am for many Latin Americans the spitting image of
Rorty’s ‘Civilization’. This, I find
embarrassing when in the presence of nonacademic friends and associates in
Latin American, especially if they are counted among the havenots. Back to Rorty’s words.
We read that if we cannot
forestall impending terrorist attacks, ‘we may nonetheless be able to survive
them. We may have the strength to keep
our democratic institutions intact even after realizing that our cities may
never again be invulnerable. We may be
able to keep the moral gains—the increases in political freedom and in social
justice—made by the West in the past two centuries even if 9/11 is repeated
year after year’.
I assume Rorty alludes to ‘moral
gains’, ‘political freedom’, and ‘social justice’ as the crowning efforts of
Western ‘Civilization’ over the past two centuries. All at the expense of whom?
Colonization throughout the world by the West, that came to an end over
the 19th and 20th centuries, but which continued in the
form of economic and social and cultural colonization: postcolonialism. And now, provincialism, that plague limiting the horizon of Europhiles
and Americanophiles, prevents our looking elsewhere in search of the causes of
the present malaise. Indeed, Thomas
McCarthy once remarked that Rorty avoids debates concerning large governmental
systems, social institutions, and broad global issues. He refuses, because he is an Emersonian;
that is, he is a true-blue ‘American’.
This view of what it is to be ‘American’ has always brought with it the
assumption that a collection of individuals discussing an important issue do so
as if there were in a ‘town meeting’.
Their discussion focuses on particular—and hence provincial—‘American’
issues, with little or perhaps no regard for peoples outside the borders of
‘America’.
Where is the answer? For Rorty, it’s a lot more
conversation. He writes in Philosophy
and the Mirror of Nature that: ‘To
see keeping a conversation going as a sufficient aim of philosophy, to see
wisdom as consisting in the ability to sustain a conversation, is to see human
beings as generators of new descriptions rather than beings we hope to be able
to describe accurately’ (378). Since
there is no telling things exactly like they are, Rorty doesn’t wish to argue
for the purpose of convincing others.
He wants to convert them.
Convert? As if to a religious
point of view? Or perhaps what is
worse, to his ethnocentric view? Not
really. Or at least that would be my
hope. This is not presumed learning
from the master as representative of supreme authority. Nor is it even learning by doing. Contrary to the old adage, ‘Don’t go into
the water until you’ve learned to swim’, it’s a matter of ‘Plunge into the conversation,
and talk, talk, talk, in order to keep it going swimmingly’. But between ethnocentric vocabularies within
distinct languages, this becomes excruciatingly difficult.
Do we have incommensurable
language games here as some critics might charge? No, not really! Rorty’s a
mildly critical follower of Donald Davidson’s ‘radical interpretation’ and
believes we can somehow tune into the other’s talk because there is somehow
something we share that is profoundly human, and if we exercise enough of the ‘principle
of charity’, we can’t help but understand at least well enough to keep the
words flowing. Granted, there is no way
to get out of our own time and place and into some other time and place; there
is no description of how things are from a God’s-eye view, no sky hook to lift
us into another culture. Yet, if we
talk the talk, somehow we can resonate with citizens of other cultures. But we might say with Albert Einstein,
‘Don’t take them for what they say; look at what they actually do’. And what do they do? Promote conversation among all people of the
world, but at times unfortunately by means of speaking with myopic,
ethnocentric vision.
Rorty
would like to free intellectual culture of its stodgy, static, parochial
obsessions. He would encourage new
ventures along the lines of socio-political themes, all in the name of
‘compassion’. Yet it’s still at heart
ethnocentric, and such it simply can’t fly.
Rorty’s scare tactics include a relatively small portion of the
U.S.—whose population is roughly 1/20 of the world population—has suffered, is
suffering, from the horror of terrorism.
But all people of the world are all suffering from the fear of GUT
terrorism, to a greater or lesser degree.
People in other countries would tell us terrorism is nothing new. They’ve been experiencing it for years. Their terrorism is of a different nature, of
course, but it is terrorism just the same.
Maybe we in the U.S. should try to forget about ourselves, forget about
our narcissistic self-fixating, mirror-gazing selves, and create a genuine
sense of compassion for others. This is
no time for futilely trying to converse across cultural borders from
monocultural perspectives with the assumption that if we are good enough
liberal ironists, if we can bring ourselves to practice sufficient tolerance,
we’ll manage to find some form of resonance along each other’s wave lengths.
Rorty says the U.S. hasn’t
made proper preparations to prevent 9/11 style terrorism from happening
again. But that would be putting a
Band-Aid over a gaping wound. We’ve got
it all wrong. We should be attending to
the cause of the wound. The U.S. has
for decades created Band-Aid solutions.
Band-Aid remedies have been practiced to combat what I have ironically
termed GUT, that unspoken, silent, implied or inferred terrorism. I allude to Band-Aids the likes of AID and
Peace Corps for preventing the spread of communism, the IMF and World Bank, and
self help programs in the 1990s following ‘trickle down’ philosophy under the
guise of ‘structural adjustment’. All
the while, consumerist dreams sail on, while Tacit Terrorism, GUT, has been
tearing the world apart in the name of neoliberalism for the sake of
globalization. And Rorty and likeminded
ironists continue on, within their comfortable confines, reading, reading, …
and reading, in readiness for talking with other likeminded readers.
However, premonition
remains: had GUT never existed, quite
likely we would not be experiencing terrorism of the sort we are experiencing
in the U.S., and if GUT were to enter into a stage of terminal atrophy, quite
possibly, terrorism as we know it in the U.S. would begin to wane.
Uruguayan
intellectual Eduardo Galeano tells of the story of Subcommandante Marcos, who
went into the jungle of Chiapas and tried to join hands with the Amerindian
peasants and talk to them so they could be good ‘Zapatistas’. But they didn’t understand him. Gradually, Marcos learned to listen. And then he could talk.
For Marcos, the mask has a
transformative power that allows him to shed the idiosyncrasies of his birth
and assume a communal identity. He
becomes a nonperson with a nonself.
This nonself makes it possible for him to become the spokesperson for
the indigenous communities. But he is
no more than that. He is no omnipresent
caudillo. His mask is for the
purpose of symbolic anonymity. He must
remain transparent; at the same time he must remain iconographic. He hides his face so that he can present an
image. The image implies themes such
as: ‘Everything for everybody, nothing
for ourselves’, ‘Built instead of destroy’, ‘Work for a world that contains
many worlds’, and ‘Our word is our weapon’ (reliance more on words than on
bullets). The object of the image is
not Marcos but EZLN; it is the face of each and every dispossessed person of
Chiapas, of Mexico, of America; it is the face of the havenots the world
over. This paradox informs all Marcos’s
writing.
Why do I
evoke the Marcos image? Because for
Rorty, the liberal ironist can be as privatist and ‘irrationalist’ and
aestheticist as she desires so long as she does it on her own time, causing no
harm to others and using no resources needed by the less advantaged. Yes, of course. And all the while she lives in her own private world while drawing
a comfortable salary made possible by economic colonialism practiced by have
nations against havenot nations. So
actually, she can’t help causing harm to others by the very fact of her
relatively plush existence. I evoke the
Marcos image because those who would prefer that he silently pass out of
existence might well be on good terms with neopragmatism and liberal
ironists. One might imagine a beginning
of the millennium liberal arguing, perhaps somewhat like Ambrose
Evans-Pritchard and early twentieth-century anthropologists with the best of
intentions, that nineteenth-century imperialism was a benevolent Western
enterprise: it helped the savage
heathens pull themselves from the cultural swamp within which they were
mired. A well-meaning liberal might
conceivably be found arguing against welfare programs, affirmative action, and
Medicaid and Medicare reforms, since they foster dependency and rob people of
their dignity, hence they are ‘cruel’ and ‘humiliating’. One might also imagine the liberal declaring
himself against EZLN because it creates a glitch in the smooth running
neoliberal economic machine and NAFTA, which is a problem, for what is good for
neoliberalism and NAFTA is good for the U.S., and what is good for the U.S.
must be good for the world.
After all, to rephrase
Hamlet somewhat, an argument is neither good nor bad, but proper thinking and
reasoning can make it so. Which is to
say that the navel-gazing, self-obsessed, quite well-off do-gooder can eventually
convince himself that his own good is tantamount to cosmic well being. However,… will he convert the havenots of
the world?