ACHIEVING RICHARD RORTY

The reactionary masses will soon become fed up with the spoiled over-class, he writes in his newly published series of lectures, Achieving Our Country, and they will install a militaristic strongman. This dictator “will quickly make his peace with the international super-rich, just as Hitler made his with the German industrialists. He will invoke the glorious memory of the Gulf War to provoke military adventures which will generate short-term prosperity.” American culture will turn ugly: “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. The words ‘nigger’ and ‘kike’ will once again be heard in the workplace.”

There are many words that could be applied to this set of predictions — loopy, paranoid, idiotic — but I think the one that best captures Rorty is successful: Richard Rorty is the Bill Gates of the “attention economy,” the stock market for seekers of publicity. For the past quarter century, he has put forward a series of subversive and outrageous statements that have generated endless debate. And, brilliantly, he has managed it without making a laughingstock of himself. On the contrary, he has become ever more respected, and in some quarters revered. In a subtle and fascinating trajectory, he has made himself what French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu would call a “consecrated radical.”

Bourdieu provides the best lens through which to view Rorty. In a series of books with such titles as The Field of Cultural Production (1993) and Homo Academicus (1984), Bourdieu’s great aim has been to develop an economy of symbolic exchanges, to delineate the rules and patterns of the intellectual marketplace. His basic thesis is that all intellectuals enter the market with certain forms of capital. They may have such academic capital as the right degrees, such cultural capital as knowledge of a field or a feel for proper intellectual etiquette, or such linguistic capital as a skill with language.

Intellectuals spend their careers trying to augment their capital and convert their particular form of capital into other forms. One intellectual might attack the sacred figures in his field in order to win notoriety that can be converted into publishing contracts. Another might host a lecture series so he can suck up to the journal editors and other gatekeepers in his field. Bourdieu doesn’t say these strategies are self-conscious or cynical, merely that intellectuals naturally respond to pressures by adjusting their thinking. In incredibly great detail — and incredibly turgid prose — Bourdieu describes the successive attitudes, positions, and strategies thinkers adopt to succeed.

Rorty is well suited to this sort of analysis because he has never even pretended to do what most intellectuals do: pursue truth or knowledge. Starting with his 1979 book, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Rorty has dismissed the notion that there could be any such thing as truth, or some ultimate reality that people could hope to discover through reason.

Instead, he is a pragmatist, of sorts — a self-proclaimed follower of Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey. But these magisterial figures of American philosophy from 1870 to 1940 typically used “pragmatism” to mean that we should wait to see the practical, pragmatic consequences of an idea before judging whether the idea is true. Rorty insists that we never come to the point of being able to judge the truth of an idea — and so people should stick with whatever notions happen to work for them at the time.

Human beings, Rorty continues, are nothing more than “decentered webs” of notions, ideas, and perceptions contingent on the circumstances of their lives and the language games they happen to be playing at the time. We are who we are, but if the breaks had gone differently, we might be somebody else. So we shouldn’t get too hyped up about the notions that happen to be sliding through our minds at any given moment.

If that’s your view, it would be silly to hold tenaciously to positions that do you harm. If you’re going to be a pragmatist about the world, you might as well be pragmatic about your career. So while philosophers have always sought to refute Rorty’s books on logical grounds, they might have done better to judge whether his ideas work for him. And the inescapable conclusion is that they do. Rorty has held some of the finest academic appointments in America (he is leaving the University of Virginia for the sunny confines of Stanford next fall), he is widely quoted and endlessly debated. In an academic world in which the person who sits on the best panels wins, Rorty is the undisputed champion.

If we look at Rorty’s marketing strategy from Bourdieu’s perspective, the first thing to notice is that he has adopted what might be called the “Tu-Quoque Strategy” — a way of avoiding having to give specific answers by accusing his opponents of failing to give specific answers, a way of seizing the high ground by accusing his opponents of failing to do what he himself fails to do.

So, for example, the purported aim of Achieving Our Country is to castigate the political Left in America for being too interested in theory and not interested enough in practical politics. “Leftists in the academy have permitted cultural politics to supplant real politics,” he writes, “and have collaborated with the Right in making cultural issues central to public debate.” Rorty, by contrast, says he wants a Left that proposes pragmatic political initiatives.

Of course, if he really believed this, he would have written a book of practical initiatives. But then he would be just another policy wonk with a book of proposals. And so Achieving Our Country contains not even one sentence of practical political or public-policy advice. Indeed, Rorty appears blissfully ignorant about such matters. Instead he has written a book to promulgate the theory that there’s too much talk about theory on the Left in America — not bothering to mention how much of that talk (particularly in the non-philosophical forms in which it appears in English, history, and political-science departments across the country) claims Rorty as its prophet and Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature as its scripture.

Rorty’s second strategy has been to position himself as a pseudodeviant. He attaches himself to the dominant strain of intellectual thought (at least in his milieu) while at the same time claiming to deviate from it in an attention-getting way. In philosophy, he is a relativist who claims to deviate from “true” relativism. And in Achieving Our Country, he declares himself a man of the Left who prefers 1930s leftism to the 1960s leftism that is the dominant strain in academia. This allows him to make a series of assertions in the tone of someone bravely going against the grain — while at the same time not actually saying anything one of his readers could get angry about.

This strategy lets him write of the Cold War, for example, “I am still unable to see much difference between fighting Hitler and fighting Stalin” — as though there were hordes of powerful Stalin apologists ready to jump on him for this heresy (and implying, with that lovely word “still,” that he routinely compared the Communists to the Nazis back before the fall of communism).

But even more important, this “pseudo-deviant” strategy allows him to criticize members of the 1960s Left in a way they can all agree with. First, he depicts an America in which there are only sadistic elites and oppressed workers — and standing between them, a small minority of humane academics. He thus draws his readers into a charmed and smug circle. He then proceeds to slap them with a feather. He argues that the problem with the members of the New Left is that they don’t love America enough. But he doesn’t insist they should love the actual America (which would seem vaguely conservative and therefore truly deviationist). He just says they should love the ideals of America, an anodyne notion if ever there was one. Thus he can portray himself as a critic of his colleagues while actually saying nothing that would truly offend them: perfect pseudo-deviationism.

Meanwhile, he ignores the Right (who are so far outside his milieu that they would never bother to respond to whatever he might say), and also the politicians, unions, and activists of the practical Left (who are also beyond his professional orbit and therefore of no interest).

Rorty’s third strategy is genial iconoclasm. Throughout his career, Rorty has been vehemently anti-religious. His ideal society, he says, would be one in which “no trace of divinity remained, either in the form of a divinized world or a divinized self.” In the society he envisions nobody would look to God for rules to live by. Nobody would seek meaning in any sort of transcendent realm. Nobody would entertain thoughts about the infinite. No religion. No metaphysics. Just you and me.

In Achieving Our Country, Rorty cites Whitman — And I call to mankind, Be not curious about God, / For I who am curious about each am not curious about God — and he praises Whitman and Dewey because they tried to create a vocabulary that dispenses with the notion of sin. Dewey, Rorty explains, “repudiated the idea of sin as an explanation for tragedy.”

Renouncing religion is not exactly cutting edge in academic circles these days. But Rorty’s innovation is that he’s so happy about it. There’s no gloomy peering into the abyss for Rorty, or moaning about the meaninglessness of existence. Getting rid or religion is for him like getting out of a bad relationship; it’s a chance to date more people. Rorty advises readers to be intellectually promiscuous, to try out and surf through all the different ideas out there — to expand yourself limitlessly.

While this stuff appears radical, if you strip away Rorty’s grand declarations about the death of God and Truth and get down to the type of public personality that Rorty calls for, he begins to appear instead as the Norman Rockwell for the intellectual bourgeoisie in the age of the booming stock market. Rorty’s ideal person doesn’t go inventing troubles or take himself too seriously. The Rortyian — perhaps we should call him the Rortyarian — steps lightly. He cherishes civility and openness. He won’t judge others harshly, and if he hates anybody at all, it will be those people who make the arrogant assumption that they are in a position to judge. He is also deeply concerned about cruelty (Rorty comes back to cruelty again and again in his writing). Absent eternal principles and truths, suffering becomes the primary, maybe the only, moral fact. Old-fashioned types who really believe in transcendent truth will be cruel for the sake of some higher principle — punishing people for the sake of justice — but in the Rortyarian world the suffering of the person being punished looms large while the lofty principle fades into insignificance as just another contingency. This worldview faithfully mirrors that of the suburban upper middle class.

Rorty is so esteemed because while seeming radical he articulates sentiments that are mainstream in his milieu. He probably couldn’t have planned such a delicate balance. Such other consecrated radicals as Oliver Stone or Spike Lee or Norman Mailer have fallen one way or another, either by slipping off into real deviance instead of pseudo-deviance or by tilting too far in a commercial direction and so losing some radical status. Rorty hasn’t. He may not have achieved our country, but he certainly has achieved success.

David Brooks is a senior editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.