Episode 157: Richard Rorty on Politics for the Left (Part One)

0:00 Mark: You are listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some guys who at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 157 is something like, what attitude should philosophers adopt toward concrete political matters? And we read Richard Rorty's Achieving Our country leftist thought in 20th century America from 1997. To. To get the reading and more information, Please check out partiallyexaminedlife.com My name is Mark Linsenmayer, inspirational yet critical. In Madison, Wisconsin, this is Seth Paskin,

0:29 Seth: trapped in leftist academic isolation in Austin,

0:33 Wes: Texas, this is Wes Alwan, rediscovering his national pride in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the last place you'd suspect.

0:42 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey, avoiding my inherent sadism in Middleton, Wisconsin.

0:47 Mark: All right, we've got to be very inspirational today. That is one of the messages of this reading.

0:52 Seth: Is that why you're changing the way you're speaking? Is that inspirational talk?

0:55 Mark: I'm going to do it the whole. The entire discussion.

0:58 Wes: So you're basically taking the mocking tone that it's exactly the opposite he argues against.

1:03 Dylan: Yes. Yes.

1:05 Wes: You're too cynical to take in his.

1:07 Mark: Yep, you just can't recognize authentic enthusiasm. You're too jaded.

1:12 Dylan: Well, it's not that.

1:18 Mark: Perhaps we should read some ground rules for our discussion.

1:20 Dylan: Well, let me put it this way, Mark. If you proposed to your future wife in that tone of voice, would she have said yes?

1:27 Mark: If I always talk like that, then it would just be normal.

1:33 Wes: And as for ground rules, there shouldn't be an external frame of reference that's imposed upon us from without. The ground rules are just what we tacitly agree to in the course of the conversation.

1:46 Mark: It doesn't have to be tacit. It can be explicit.

1:48 Seth: Wes, these ground rules were decided by us. They were not handed down by God.

1:53 Dylan: Yes. And we can always adjust them as we feel fit to do so as is appropriate to the situation, as we

2:00 Seth: have done in the past.

2:00 Wes: Every podcast needs laws, just like every country. You're right.

2:04 Mark: All right, well, what is the first law? Tell us, Wes.

2:09 Seth: Thou shalt not harm a human being, nor, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. Is that the right one?

2:16 Mark: Also, try not to assume.

2:18 Wes: There you go.

2:18 Mark: Our audience has read what we're talking about or has any other background in philosophy, and I will include in that. You don't have to have listened to the previous two Rorty episodes. I'm sure we're going to still refer to the stuff in that, but not in detail. That's not what this is about. This reading does not require that you have read a much more difficult book prior to this. So why should our discussion assume that. Number two, don't make arguments that hinge on something other than what we've agreed to read. Don't say, you know what I was talking about. If you'd seen that Mystery Science Theater episode where there was an alien that was kind of like a rip off ET except he was called Trumpy. That's a real thing.

2:54 Seth: Really?

2:55 Mark: I'm not making that up. It was called the Pod People or the New Extraterrestrials, I believe is the direct translation from the Italian. Number three will be rigorous and exact in all that we say, unless doing otherwise would be potentially more entertaining.

3:10 Wes: What inspired this reversion to the ground

3:12 Mark: rules we just haven't done in a long time?

3:14 Wes: I thought it was something about this reading which made you want to retreat to the comfort of rules.

3:22 Mark: Maybe. Maybe. This is a breezy book. This is good.

3:26 Wes: This is stunningly good. This is a fantastic book and from 20 years ago and absolutely prescient. I mean, some of it is just basically a highly specific prophecy of today's politics.

3:41 Seth: It's also a diagnosis of my personality flaws. So in that respect, it's also very prescient. Twenty years ago, he predicted what a inside the bubble, deluded leftist quasi intellectual I would become.

3:55 Dylan: Well, that's what's a psychology book, too.

3:58 Mark: It's interesting that the part of this book that has been quoted. If you have not heard about this, look it up. He's been tweeted about like, oh, it's this book. It's Rorty. He was so prescient. He predicted that Trump would win. And the particular passage, which is not until chapter three in here, though in context, is actually attributed to someone else. Edward Luttwak has suggested that fascism may be in the American future. The point of his book, the Endangered American Dream, is that members of labor unions and organized unskilled labor will sooner or later realize their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or prevent jobs from being exported.

So a strong man will come and all that stuff. So he's. Even though there's no quotes, these ideas are explicitly attributed to someone else. So it's just funny that Rorty is being has a revival because of this quote from somebody else.

4:48 Wes: Well, that is the point of the whole piece, though. And he draws on lots of different sources. A unity in a diversity, as he says in another context.

4:58 Seth: Hmm.

4:59 Dylan: We should start with like why it's called Achieving our Country, Right?

5:04 Mark: Yeah, it's explained right there at the beginning.

5:06 Dylan: Yeah. It might be worth saying that the book is three lectures, the William Massey Senior Lectures in the History of American Civilization that he gave in 97. And those are the first three essays. And then there are two that are called appendices are other essays he wrote, Movements and Campaigns and the Inspirational Value of Great Works of Literature, which are well worth reading as well. And at the beginning of the first lecture called American National Pride, he talks about what amounts to the name of his collection where he's talking about a book by James Baldwin and refers to a quote.

I'm just going to read the quote from him, which is on page 12. In short, we, the black and the white, deeply need each other here if we are really to become a nation. If we are really, that is, to achieve our identity, our maturity as men and women. He ends this book with a sentence which has been quoted over and over again. If we. And now, I mean the relatively conscious whites and relatively conscious blacks who must, like lovers, insist on or create the consciousness of the others, do not falter in our duty now we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare and achieve our country and change the history of the world.

6:29 Mark: There you go. So achieving our country means finally fulfilling the ideals which America was based on.

6:37 Wes: Well, I don't. I mean, I think it's more of a process. Right. So there's always a future and you're. We're always looking towards the future. So for instance, if you think about achieving our country is such a great phrase because it captures that sense of process and it captures that sense of uniting cooperatively to do something. But also look at it in the context of current politics and phrases like make America great again, which in a way is forward looking, but also looks back at the same time, as if the only way people could think of looking forward was to look back.

That's how jaded we are, how unable to look forward we are. And then the response to the Clinton campaign was, well, America's always been great, as if the Democrats were now the conservatives. Truly bizarre. Part of the point of this essay is what's lost in the current American left is the segment, the political portion of society, that should be forward looking.

7:34 Unknown speaker: Right?

7:34 Wes: They want to change things. They want to make things better. That sense of progression, of progressiveness, of achieving our country has been lost, according to Rorty. Instead, the left has become spectatorial, cynical, disgusted and politically inactive, basically.

7:52 Dylan: And part of that diagnosis is that they become guilty of, in some ways the very thing that constrains the right, which is being overly moralizing and focused on sin.

8:06 Mark: Right, which we should explain, that is achieving our country, is explained in the context of the first lecture, which is called American National Whitman and Dewey. And he starts off just talking about what national pride is. You might think that that is just something that belongs to the right. That is a matter of militaristic chauvinism. No, he says, national pride is to countries what self respect is to individuals. A necessary condition for self improvement. If you have too much of it, you could have bellicosity and imperialism. Just as excessive self respect can produce arrogance, but just as too little self respect makes it difficult for a person to display moral courage, so insufficient national pride makes energetic and effective debate about national policy unlikely.

8:55 Wes: Right. This made me think of the Crito, where there's some sense in which we are constructed by our countries, our customs, our laws, and things are bad. You have a choice of either abandoning it. You know, he talks of the possibility of suicide, for instance, or simply resigning oneself. I mean, there's the possibility persuading yourself or it, if it's your country, to change. And that staying within the realm of persuasion and progress and political action is what Rorty is advocating, as opposed to simply stepping back and condemning and theorizing and essentially being politically inactive, even when you seem pseudo politically active because you're fighting culture wars.

9:38 Mark: When what Dylan was referring to by sin might be realizing, hey, you know, in the 50s, kids were taught that America was just great, but we know now that the settlers were horrible to the Native Americans. And we know about, you know, all that stuff that we talked about in the bell hooks episode about the treatment of African Americans and African American women and all women. And those things are kind of inexcusable. We've had so many foreign wars and just were responsible for so much that there's no way that we could have pride in that. So that's the idea of sin, as opposed to something that was in the past that we can learn from. You know, a more Nietzschean attitude towards forgiving, not forgetting, but being able to still have pride in the thing that we want to achieve, have a civic faith that allows us to actually still engage politically.

10:29 Wes: Yeah. This points to what I was just talking about, about the ability to remain an agent, which is what sin works against for much of this essay. He describes a sort of secular project of Dewey and Whitman where the point is to create a country which is not you see America as a project and you see it as a unique country in the sense that it's not beholden to God or some external authority. It really is just a matter of what we make of it. Americans are sort of quintessential poets in the sense. And America is not really. It's less an object of knowledge to be condemned or praised than a project, something to have hope about.

So you move beyond Christianity and traditional religion in that sense, unless you regress with condemnations of an evil past that sort of distract you from improving things. On page 32, he's asking, well, what do we do once we realize that we've done something horrible, whether as a nation or as an individual? But now suppose that one has in fact done one of the things one could not have imagined doing and finds that one is still alive at that point. One's choices are suicide, a life of bottomless self disgust and an attempt to live so as to never do such a thing again.

Dewey recommends the third choice. He thinks you should remain an agent rather than either committing suicide or becoming a horrified spectator of your own past. He regards self loathing as a luxury which agents, either individuals or nations cannot afford. He was quite aware of the possibility and indeed the likelihood of tragedy. But he utterly repudiated the idea of sin as an explanation of tragedy. The attitude that we're sort of originally sinful because of the atrocities in our nation's past leads to a kind of passivity. Because a complete lack of national pride, according to Rorty, results in that kind of passivity.

You have to have pride in some sort of future in order to work towards that future.

12:31 Dylan: Yeah, and you mentioned it earlier, Wes. Just the future orientedness of achieving our country and emphasizing the process aspect of it.

12:40 Mark: So what do you guys, though, think about this connection between hope and pride? I mean, the way you just put it, Wes, it sounds like, no, you have to have hope in the future. Why do you need pride in the future? That seems kind of weird.

12:52 Dylan: It's not pride in the future, it's pride in the project.

12:56 Wes: In the project Project which extends into the future, but is an ongoing thing in the present. So yeah, so hope is intimate, you know, is implicated in that because that's what projects involve, right, this forward looking aspect. But they, yeah, they happen now you

13:13 Seth: have to have pride and belief in the project and hope that it will succeed or that there's an opportunity to push to achieve it.

13:21 Dylan: Just before what Wes read, there's another paragraph in which he says one might protest Is there nothing incompatible with American national pride? I think that the Dewey Whitman answer is that there are many things that should chasten and temper such pride, but that nothing a nation has done should make it impossible for a constitutional democracy to regain self respect. To say that certain acts do make this impossible is to abandon the secular anti authoritarian vocabulary of shared hope in favor of the vocabulary which Whitman and Dewey abhorred, a vocabulary built around the notion of sin.

14:00 Mark: So we've said enough here to make it clear that really there are two elements to the story here which you might ask, can they be extricated, that one of them is just achieving our country? The left should be hopeful. We shouldn't just be critical, we should be engaging. And then second, is this anti correspondence theory of truth what he sees as anti authoritarianism? It really amounts to making an explicit analogy between how democracy is a breaking away of all preordained authority and then how his take on epistemology is a breaking away from the correspondence theory of truth.

And likewise ethics is no longer following some preordained God's law. It's a human existentialist sort of human creation. So that's a hefty philosophical point that I think we've made a good chunk of in our previous Rorty discussions. But then applying that to this new realm and it's not clear, I think those two things are pretty separable. I think you'd make a pretty strong case for what we've said so far about the achieving the country part and just leave all the relativity of truth stuff out of it. I don't think those need to go together.

15:17 Wes: I expressed reticence about what seems like relativism in Rorty, although I should read more before I, you know, give a final pronouncement on that. But. So I've objected to that. But I think all one really needs to be to buy into this sort of thing is a skeptic of some sort. And I mean skeptic in the sense of agnostic about our ability to obtain some final truth. So the effect is sort of the same. So in other words, if you think you can possess the truth with a capital T and you know what's good for everyone, and that ultimately that knowledge is so strong that the means justify the ends in imposing that on a society, that quickly becomes an authoritarian frame of mind.

So I don't think we have to worry about relativism per se, because there's a broader, healthy, I think, epistemological standpoint here that concerns our relationship to truth and how that affects politics and our relationship to authority.

16:20 Dylan: Part of this is why even Rorty refers to it this way, a civic religion that ends up in a secular manner, dulling the authoritarianism of religion and other more big T, truth oriented versions of nationalism and stuff that provides focus, frankly, for the vision of what that future ought to look like without being so constrained and prescriptive as to be the truth that ought to be imposed upon everybody.

17:00 Mark: Well, he's pretty clear about what he thinks the goal of a liberal society, a leftist, a forward looking society should be, which is less needless suffering and a greater diversity of impressive human beings. So built in there is the sort of Nietzschean we don't know what the good of man is. The good of man is not singular in the way somebody like Aristotle might think. That's why we want to promote diversity, because people growing in all sorts of different directions, self powered, built on discoveries that they make and on their interactions and the interactions of all these different influences.

So this is not the same as he wants to clarify, he's not talking about diversity in terms of retaining multiculturalism, retaining various cultural identities. No, he wants the growth of new kinds of people. So yes, it has that element where it's acknowledging the relativism. But still, like I think you could state in pretty absolutist terms, yes, we want to reduce needless suffering and we want strong, healthy, impressive individuals.

18:09 Wes: Well, let's read that. So he's relying heavily on Whitman at this point.

18:14 Mark: Can you give a thumbnail? We haven't read any Whitman.

18:17 Wes: No, no, no, just what he quotes here.

18:19 Mark: Okay.

18:21 Wes: Thus a country which would pride itself as one in which governments and social institutions exist only for the purpose of making a new sort of individual possible. And this does sound very Nietzsche. One who will take nothing as authoritative save free consensus between as diverse a variety of citizens as can possibly be produced. Such a country cannot contain castes or classes because the kind of self respect which is needed for free participation and democratic deliberation is incompatible with such social divisions. So we ought to emphasize that as well.

18:55 Dylan: Well, yeah, read the middle of the next paragraph.

18:58 Wes: Yes, the suffering element that Mark talked about. So all that can be said in its defense is that it would. So he rejects the idea that we can look at this from a scientific standpoint and say whether somehow this classless society is truer than feudalism or something like that, or more rational. And then he says all that can be said in its defense is that it would produce less unnecessary suffering than any other. And that it is the best means to a certain end, the creation of a greater diversity of individuals, larger, fuller, more imaginative and daring individuals. That's the especially Nietzschean part there.

19:34 Mark: Yeah, yeah.

19:35 Dylan: And I think you just characterized it as rejecting the sort of scientific understanding. And I think that's right. But I liked the way he summarized Whitman and Dewey, that their priority was a classless and casteless society, and that for them it was neither more natural nor more rational than the cruel societies of feudal Europe or 18th century Virginia. So this goal is not made, as you just said, in the sense of, well, clearly by a rational argument, you will see that this is better than what you're doing now. They're saying that these are the values that we ought to have and they're preferable. It's preferable to where we are to reduce suffering, to have less sadism, to have less selfishness. And that is the best way we get to having more people flourishing in larger and more imaginative ways.

20:33 Wes: I think if you poke at that sort of these epistemological statements too hard, you get into stuff where a lot of people aren't going to agree. Because if you talk about, you know, well, what constitutes suffering and is suffering the proper standard and all that stuff, then you could start having an argument with Rorty about ethics and metaethics and what the proper standards are. But I think regardless of one's point of view there, what's valuable about this sort of thing is that what Rorty recognizes is the sort of interminability of those sorts of philosophical discussions, their sort of undecidability.

And I absolutely agree with him on that. And instead of trying to step outside of the social or the discursive fabric of society, let's say that outside of the conversation and make pronouncements from on high about what God demands that we do, or this or that, or even what Marx demands that we do, or human nature. You remain inside that discursive fabric and make your arguments, try to persuade your fellow citizens, your interlocutors, engage in that dialectic. And that is a true model of what genuine politics looks like. Dylan mentioned the diversity thing and what that meant.

So on page 24, he says this romance of endless diversity should not, however, be confused with what nowadays is sometimes called multicultural. And then on downwards, he, meaning Whitman, wanted competition and argument between alternative forms of life, a poetic agon struggle in which jarring dialectical discords would be resolved in previously unheard harmonies. Everybody gets played off against everybody else. This new culture will be better because it will contain more variety and unity. It will be a tapestry in which more strands have been woven together.

But this tapestry, too, will eventually have to be torn to shreds in order that a larger one may be woven in order that the past may not obstruct the future. Effing beautiful. Like practically every other paragraph in this. In these lectures.

22:43 Mark: Easy for him to say white man.

22:48 Wes: Yes,

22:50 Seth: right.

22:50 Mark: He doesn't give a very. You know, this. This reference to multiculturalism is short, and it relates to what he has to say later about intellectual trends and how a lot of them have resulted in leftist intellectuals being politically. Well, I was going to say ineffective, but also just not engaged. I think there's a lot of room for further exploration on argument. And perhaps leftist. Many have gotten the message since 20 years ago.

23:21 Wes: Wait, really?

23:24 Mark: Well.

23:25 Wes: Well, who is the progressive in this current political disaster? I mean, who had the progressive message? The left ceded the whole concept of progressiveness. They abandoned unions and workers and said, let's do free trade and globalism and.

23:44 Mark: Okay, but you're not talking about, like, bell hooks. Like, bell hooks is probably somebody that voted for Clinton and was a Clinton supporter and is guilty of the kind of emphasis. So the way he characterizes it in the third lecture here when he's talking about the intellectuals is that before the 1960s, the leftists were concerned with selfishness of how do we battle? How do we keep big business from gobbling everything up? How do we keep workers from being exploited? And then starting in the 60s, going forward, there was a shift more toward battling sadism, which is worth battling.

24:22 Wes: Right. Say what you mean by sadism there.

24:25 Mark: Sadism in terms of racism, in terms of sexism, in terms of just humiliating people. And specifically, he says, based on things apart from economic status, like, of course, historically, there are all sorts of the nobles humiliating the lower classes. But once we. Oh, we've achieved. There's no formal nobility here anymore. And so there's not actually much discussion of class nowadays. That's sort of being something that's being rediscovered now. But there's plenty of discussion of racism and sexism and all that stuff. And he says what the right mockingly calls political correctness has actually been very good.

You know, we've just, in the past 20 years, from his perspective, he says it's accomplished more than, you know, was accomplished in the previous 70 years in terms of equalizing the economic factors. In other words, that there's a whole generation and now there's a couple more generations of people that are less sadistic. In this race that are less racist, that are less sexist, and that's all fine and good, but he thinks that people that were like bell hooks, of course he doesn't talk about her specifically, but who are focused on what portrayals of black women in the media.

We had a lot of that in their bell hooks. Reading to the exclusion of actually raising the minimum wage and helping labor unions and stuff like that would be the thing that he would be against. That sounds like what you're talking about, Wes, that, oh, the left just is paying attention to these cultural issues which don't actually, you know, address the fundamental economic problems that are going on. And that's why they lost. Well, I feel like if you actually asked bell hooks or anybody in Black Lives Matter or anything like that, they're going to say no.

Of course we're both concerned about the cultural stuff and we're really concerned about the, you know, the 1% and the. They're really concerned about economic stuff.

26:17 Wes: Okay. That's not the way it seems to a lot of people. And I have been watching this slow motion train wreck for eight years in which the dominant left leaning forces in the media and the university utterly betrayed their interest in sort of a uni, you know, the sort of Obama unifying. You know, Obama is a perfect example of the sort of progressive ideal that you can use to actually unify people in a project. For the last eight years we've been listening to stuff about white privilege, for instance, and things which piss a lot of people off and make them not want to be your friend.

That's not a political project that doesn't rise to the level of a political project. And as such, it can't be progressive. It can't even live up to the ideals of progressivism. It's inherently conservative because it's a sort of do nothing ism. You write your Salon.com articles, you get on Twitter and condemn things and you engage in a brutal pessimism which says nothing can ever change. And you engage in a sort of fantasy that a political project involves re educating people by means of the Internet, which it doesn't, instead of actual political action actually getting laws passed and policies in place.

And I understand that many people would disagree with that, but I think there's a very strong argument to be made that Rorty was prescient in the way this has unfolded.

27:45 Mark: Well, but the same people that are writing these Salon.com articles are the people that were involved in Occupy Wall street and things. And I think that maybe the reason that it seems Politically ineffective is because. Yeah, since the 60s. In the 60s, when protest movements started, it seemed like, well, we can really get things done. We can have a sit in and shut down the bus system and then they'll have to integrate and things. But now all these people protest, like in Wisconsin here about the unions. Exactly. The economic issue, granted, it was only for teachers and other public sector workers, but that's all that, that the government was having control over. Unions in the private sector were already, for the most part, dead. So, like, people are protesting what they can, and even that is not having any effect.

28:31 Dylan: But isn't the point there that the protesting is absent the whatever force there is that's actually changing laws and making those proposals?

28:43 Wes: Exactly. I mean, what even. And again, I thought a lot about this with the Crito episode. What even counts as a protest? I mean, it's clear, you know, that civil rights movements of the 60s, the protest involved an appeal to conscience. You did things which forced people to do horrible things and do them openly in a way where they had to confront themselves and the horrible things they were doing. And there were specific demands being made and demands directly related to those appeals to conscience. We should not be made to sit in the back of the bus and all those other things. What real appeal to conscience is there in what I would call, quote, unquote, protests today? I don't think they're protests. I think a lot of them are inconvenient street parties. What specific Occupy Wall street demand do any of you even remember?

29:35 Seth: That was actually the criticism.

29:36 Wes: Yeah, then that was a common criticism at the time. I mean, I think just going out and saying, I'm having a protest and pretending that's political action, I think that's part of the problem. Blocking a highway. If you think you're winning over sympathizers by a few hundred people going out with signs and blocking a highway, I think that's extraordinarily politically naive and the wrong way to approach things. You have to be making some appeal to conscience?

29:59 Dylan: Well, yeah, some demands. I mean, one of the reasons why the glorious strikes of the early union movement worked was because when they had a sit down in a factory, that was frankly part of a negotiation tactic.

30:15 Wes: Yeah, plus they knew what they wanted. They wanted a 40 hour work week and all those other things, and they had some power. You know, the worker was an essential part of that whole system.

30:28 Mark: Okay, so you're saying that if you're doing it outside the system. So in other words, the people that were the citizens that were Spent weeks and weeks protesting in Madison here about destroying unionization for teachers and very much appealing to people's consciences. Come on. Why are we teachers? We want to dick over teachers.

30:50 Wes: But there's a whole history of the Democrat. The Democrats abandoned unions a long time ago. We're going to pretend that we're going to. We're going to go protest now and ignore that abandonment. I mean, what I'm saying is, and this is parallel to Rorty's point about authority, the protest can't be a giant fuck you. It can't just be. Certain segments of society are deplorable. And we demand in some vague way that that change you have to operate, you could say, within the system, within the discursive fabric. So that means that you have to have some sort of power that's not a sort of pseudo authority from on high power. You have to be able to appeal to conscience. You have to be able to persuade. Or you have to, as with the workers, you have to have this kind of relationship, essential sort of relationship to the people you're trying to get to meet your demands, things like that.

31:48 Mark: Well, it sounds like you're just ruling out the efficacy of any protesting of any sort that I would be able to think of.

31:55 Dylan: No, I don't hear him saying that at all.

31:57 Mark: Whether you're at abortion clinics or you're at animal testing labs or whatever.

32:03 Wes: Well, yeah. What changes have been brought up by letting the rabbits out of animal testing labs?

32:08 Mark: Okay, so you're saying that unless it in some way works within the system to achieve positive change.

32:14 Wes: Okay, the system was a bad word to use. No, I'm saying there has to. I don't have a very well defined definition of protest, but I think we should think about what counts as protest. And I think the sense in which you can appeal to conscience and persuade people and win sympathizers, that you have a strategy for that is really, really important. And it's not just a reversion to the concept of sin and to the idea that society is terrible or that certain segments of society are terrible. Those are the people you have to win over, not condemn.

32:49 Mark: So we're again reaching back to the point that the whole getting rid of the sense of sin was a matter of, for Rorty, getting rid of moral objectivity. And it seems like whether a protest is going to be effective or not, or whether something is going to count as political action or not, or whether an appeal to conscience is going to be effective or not is a completely. Does not Require. And in fact, one of the most effective ways to appealing to people's conscience, for instance, ask Martin Luther King, is to play on their absolutist religious sympathies. Right. It's not to say moral relativism and Emersonian post ethics.

33:31 Wes: I don't think so.

33:31 Mark: True freedom, existential freedom, like this is a thing that only the elites, that only intellectuals, I think generally get a handle on. Like that ethics is something that we create ourselves. Like that is not something that is like the appeal to the masses that gets things done is to bring in this sort of relativism.

33:49 Dylan: But that's not what Rorty's saying. He's not saying go and make the appeal to our national pride in politics and for political discourse on the basis of saying that there are no moral standards. I mean, the argument is for having a broad based way in which we. What's the reason for national pride is we have to have a unity, a thing that brings us together and a vision for what that looks like for why we ought to be together and what we get out of it and why that makes it a better way, place to live, a better country to be. It makes us better people and a better community and something to be ambitious for, something to want to achieve.

34:34 Wes: You know, that's what we have pride in. So he says on 17. Both Dewey and Whitman viewed the United States as an opportunity to see ultimate significance in a finite human historical project rather than in something eternal and non human. They both hoped that America would be the place where a religion of love would finally replace a religion of fear. And just going moving on down that paragraph a little bit, they wanted to put hope for a casteless and classless America in the place traditionally occupied by knowledge of the will of God. They wanted that utopian America to replace God as the unconditional object of desire.

They wanted the struggle for justice to be the country's animating principle, the nation's soul. So if you think of that struggle, that project of seeking justice as the nation's soul, and that's something you can actively have pride in. And a protest that acknowledges that pride, that it's sort of in line with it, is one that doesn't simply condemn. It doesn't say, well, America's bad because of all these atrocities and that the dues can never be repaid and so on and so forth, it says, you know, we all can work together for this possible future and we're all worthy of it and we're all capable of it.

And I reach out to you, fellow citizen, in the spirit of us accomplishing that together. And the civil rights protests, I thought, were certainly in that spirit. I mean, there's a whole argument about that time about whether you should be a militant protester or you should be a pacifist, nonviolent protester who goes and gets beaten up by thugs, basically. And Martin Luther King proposed the latter because he knew that was a praxis, that was an actual form of persuasion. It wasn't a pretense to some authority that actually isn't there.

36:21 Mark: I just think it doesn't matter to me whether the shared goal gets put in religious language or not. And historically, you know, a lot of chapter two is about this alleged, you know, why was there this break between what he sees as the effective positive cultural left of the pre 60s versus this angrier and ultimately ineffective one that's happened since then? He says a lot of the problem there is because starting in the 60s, people would dismiss their predecessors in the left as somehow impure, that those people actually supported the war in Vietnam, that they were anti communist.

And he puts a lot of the blame on Marxism, on intellectuals that pretty much said, well, either you're a Marxist or you're just, you're part of the problem, you're a collaborator. And so in the same way, whether or not you use religious language or not, if you're working toward this common goal that Dylan just described, then, yeah, Rorty would be okay with you, even though he thinks the best description of this is the one that Dewey gave, that Whitman gave, that is secularist. But I think that overemphasizing secularism in here is a little beside the point.

I think that the way to achieve these coalitions is to explicitly play on people's religious sentiment as part of their conscience. However conscience works in them, however conscience works in them, like, that's how you get them on your side.

37:56 Wes: I don't agree. I don't think that's how Martin Luther King, for instance, got people on his side. And I think the, you know, the role of secularism is really important because it's this movement beyond an authoritarian framework. I think that's critical.

38:12 Mark: Well, it has to be a movement beyond sectarianism, beyond bickering between different sects so that you can have Christians and Jews and all that, you know, have a nice Unitarian, you know, generic spirituality. Like a lot of what he was talking about, this whole thing of Whitman, like, I can completely see that, you know, as part of a left wing Christian or Unitarian, you know, sermon.

38:33 Wes: Basically, I'M saying you have to turn away from any idea of possessing truth with a capital T and being able to authoritatively impose that. You have to be a, you know, not a relativist in my terms, but a, again, a zetetic skeptic of a sort, an agnostic of a sort. And that allows you to look at others who you may profoundly disagree with and think are doing abhorrent things or supporting abhorrent things, and think of them not as evil people who are contravening the word of God or contravening the word of Marx, but as persuadable, forgivable human beings who have a point of view that you want to figure out how to move them closer to your point of view. Something like that.

39:20 Mark: And all that is equally compatible with a liberal, nice religion of love form of Christianity, for instance, or many forms of Judaism or other other religions. As long as you're, like, not being a dick about your religion, then it can work just fine in this system.

39:36 Wes: Well, you can call Unitarianism a religion if you like.

39:41 Dylan: So I'm losing a little bit about what the point that you're trying to make is, Mark. Are you trying to just say that what Rorty's saying is compatible with people having their own private spirituality that they engage in robustly as part of their community, where the main point from Rorty's perspective is that the authority of that religion for them is part of their own internal soul and is not part of what they impose on the rest of the community as a demand, an authoritarian demand, I'd say.

40:11 Wes: Yes, that's true, but the collective project has to be a secular project.

40:16 Dylan: Yeah, I mean, they have to effectively buy into secularism in the sense that their religion, while guiding what they would choose in their values, is not part of what would be persuasive to other people?

40:32 Mark: Well, it's a secular spirituality is explicitly what we're talking about here. We're not talking about John Rawls's. You know, we want to be neutral with regard to any sort of spiritual beliefs. You know, that's kind of a lot of the point here is that he thinks the default type of secularism is Marxism, you know, in intellectual leftist circles, as once you decide that Plato was full of it and there are no absolute forms, then you become a materialist, then you become a scientist about changing.

41:04 Dylan: But he's right for lumping in Marx, Marxism and Platonism in the same side of the fence in that respect, he's right to say that they're guilty of

41:13 Mark: the because they both posit that there is a good that we are objectively morally obliged to achieve. Now the Marxist might not put it that way, might say, come on, all these talking about morals in this way, that's just the superstructure of the economic system talking. And so we actually need to get beyond oughts and stuff. But effectively you still end up, you know, either you're working for the revolution and the freedom of all man, or you're part of the problem.

41:44 Wes: So for Marx, you know, he is what he says. Page 19 to 20. Marx unfortunately has been the most influential of the left wing Hegelians. But Marx mistakenly thought that Hegel's dialectic could be used for predictive as well as inspirational purposes. That is why Marxists have produced the form of historicism which Karl Popper rightly criticized as impoverished. But there is another form of Hegelian historicism which survives Popper's criticisms intact. In this form, historicism is simply the temporalization of what Plato and even Kant tried to eternalize.

It is the temporalization of ultimate significance and of awe. So this is partly about our, you know, the problem with Marx is partly about our relationship to the future and whether we see it in terms of, you know, an ultimate good that's been pre established or with Marx, a sort of predictive scientific power of his theory of history, or whether we see the future in some sense more as an existentialist would, as something undetermined and to be made by us as a poem again to bring that metaphor back. So with Marx's sort of determinism, a kind of fatalism, right?

Everything is already. It's going to happen the way it's going to happen. It's going to unfold according to a certain determinism. But if you're more of an existentialist, then political action is all the more vital. You really believe the future is what you make of it.

43:10 Mark: So it's good you brought awe up there. A W e. So again, getting back to what we started here with the inspirational character of this whole thing. And in fact one of the two essays at the end is all about, you know, why is philosophy so dry now? Philosophy should have more awe. Yes, we should have people that are analytic philosophers whose whole purpose is to fight fuzzy thinking. But we also need people like Whitehead, people like Nietzsche that. People who want to be the next Whitehead and the next Nietzsche. We have to have people that can inspire awe, that can not only produce works that inspire people to become philosophers, but who point out the things I'm trying to Think where does the awe come from?

I mean, I think he thinks that, like the project itself of making the world a better place, of this potential future utopia, like this is supposed to fill us with awe. This is supposed to take our attention. He says explicitly we might have, you know, wasted our time, turned toward God. Well now we should put that energy into contemplating the needs of other people and into, you know, the wonder that is the human being in all of his diversity. And again, this is kind of getting the Nietzschean romantic language here, that that's how awe is supposed to point.

44:29 Wes: Well, yes, but also this theme of. Yeah, this theme of awe is an explicitly Nietzschean theme, by the way. It's all over the Gay science. And the question is, you know, because this is the sort of question of nihilism that Nietzsche addresses once God has died, what is there to be in awe of? We need something. And it turns out it is the. You know, there's a famous passage 107 in the Gay Science where we redirect our awe away from this final complete thing, you know, again, a temporal thing, godlike thing that's outside of history, that we're always reaching for but can never actually reach.

And we turn it towards the process and we turn it towards poesis. So he says we do not always keep our eyes from rounding off something and as it were, finishing the poem and then it is no longer eternal imperfection that we carry across the river of becoming. Then we have the sense of carrying a goddess and feel proud and childlike as we perform the service. As an aesthetic phenomenon, existence is still bearable for us. So this whole idea of being proud of the poiesis of one's country as opposed to these external absolutes is directly related to this Nietzsche concept of approaching existence as something aesthetic, as something that's a process like a poem, and redirecting our awe away from the complete towards the process of the ongoing, never ending process of completion.

So that's where awe, I think is really. There's a deeper level to that that's really important.

45:59 Mark: I just wonder if awe remains unchanged in that transformation, in that redirection that I was brought to mind in parts of this is what Rorty is recommending here, violating what Simone de Beauvoir recommended in telling us to avoid becoming the serious man. Right. She explicitly targeted the Marxists, right, who Rorty is against as well, in a very similar way of there's, oh, these eternal historical laws that we kind of have to bow to. Like that would be an example of being The Serious Man. But then I think, you know, we were asking in that discussion, like, well, what is our status with regard to being a political actor?

Can you really, like, throw yourself like parts of this in the description of awe in here in particular, make it sound like, yes, the project of building our country, of achieving our country, is bigger than you, it's bigger than me. You know, it's something worth dying for. It is something worth becoming the Serious man about.

47:02 Dylan: No, that's the mistake right there. I think he's completely compatible and in full agreement with Beauvoir's.

47:08 Wes: This is totally existentialist, this text.

47:11 Dylan: Yes. I mean, it's exactly what she said. And you know, at the end of that book where she talks about a very, very similar thing, the Serious man is someone who focuses essentially on the sin of what's going on, who takes things as utterly absolute and authoritarian. And the place of awe is to situate yourself and your project in the sense of being part of something bigger and being able to be affected by the world, being affected by others, and to be in a state of awe. Seem to me in some ways be opposite that Serious Man.

47:51 Wes: Yeah, that's what you get by temporalizing awe.

47:54 Dylan: Yes. Maybe the way in which Mark is thinking about it is if you fail to temporalize it, you end up in a similar place as someone, as a Platonist or a Marxist does. And so we have to be a little bit careful about understanding that what Rorty is talking about is preserving awe, but with an important ingredient of temporalizing it.

48:17 Wes: Right, so page 18. Democracy, Dewey said, is neither a form of government nor a social expediency, but a metaphysic of the relationship of man to his experience in nature, which is also another beautiful way of putting things. But for both Whitman and Dewey, the terms American democracy are shorthand for a new conception of what it is to be human. A conception which has no room for obedience to a non human authority and in which nothing save freely achieved consensus among human beings has any authority at all. So that's the point where you might say, well, you know, if you're saying freely achieved consensus is the authority, then aren't you just becoming the serious man?

Because you're, you're resorting to that. And then you could accuse de Beauvoir of the same thing. Well, aren't you the serious woman? Because you're making freedom sort of the standard of everything. But I don't think that sort of argument works because again, this ultimate standard is undefined and open ended. Ultimately, it's a nation state. Right. So he says later on that for Whitman, it's the nation state that replaces the kingdom of God. And, you know, the temporalization there is that we don't rely on some preconceived notion of what the nation state is to become.

We make it what it's to become out of our consensus. And it's not clear what that consensus is going to look like before we reach it.

49:36 Dylan: Yeah. Importantly, it's not a fundamentalism. On page 45, and this is in the second essay. It's called the Eclipse of the Reformist Left. And it's sort of a history of the two eras of the left in America in particular, where the Reformist Left is from sort of the early 1900s up to 1960s and is characterized by the birth of the unions and this idea of leftists who work within the system kind of thing. And at the beginning, he is just taking it straight ahead, this notion of we can't look for purity in these things. He says, if you look for people who make no mistakes, who are always on the right side, who never apologized for tyrants or unjust wars, we shall have few heroes and heroines.

Marxism encouraged us to look for such purity. Marxists suggested that the only revolutionary proletariat could embody virtue, that bourgeois reformers were objectively reactionary, and that the failure to take Marxist scenario seriously was proof of complicity with the forces of darkness. Marxism was, as Paul Tillich and others rightly noted, more of a religion than a secularist program for social change. Like all fundamentalist sects, it emphasized purity. Lenin demanded complete freedom from sin and undeviating obedience. And that's the thing that's.

Absent this. Right. There aren't oaths to be taken, loyalty oaths to be taken.

51:03 Wes: Right. Yeah. And those who disagree with you aren't evil.

51:07 Dylan: Yes.

51:08 Mark: Well, there's not loyalty oaths to a particular leader, but you could still have the Pledge of Allegiance. Like, that's all in line with believing national pride, believing in the possibility of an achievable America.

51:22 Dylan: Yes.

51:22 Wes: I pledge allegiance to our potential.

51:25 Dylan: Yes.

51:26 Wes: And to the. To the future possibilities for which it may stand.

51:30 Mark: And he. He does say that, you know, the way that we inspire, the way that we. Why do we want to equate America and democracy, for instance? Why do we want to say that we are exceptional in some way? Well, you can point to particular things in the past.

51:45 Wes: That.

51:45 Mark: That's. Pointing to particular things in the past is a way of defining. Of arguing for who we are now. And potentially where you think we should go in the future. So, yes, you can acknowledge that America did all these horrible things to the Native Americans and to minorities and women and things, but you can also point to these leftist figures that he brings up and Martin Luther King and many others, and use that as your launching point. So it's not entirely free of reflection on the past. Reflection on the past is essential for making meaning, for thinking about the future.

Again, I feel like the inspirational message here, I just think that it's not a particularly tight argument. The whole thing in terms of you need all these pieces, like the epistemological point to argue for the inspirational message, and do you need even all the portions of the inspirational message, like this emphasis on awe, in order to get people being politically effective? And we'll talk about some other contrasts that he makes between different kinds of intellectuals, you know, the critical kind we've been talking about and the. Versus, the participatory kind making actual policy.

Like, I don't see why those things are incompatible at all. And I think your average. I don't know about your average, but I think you're going to find plenty of people in leftist academia who are plenty politically active and all this stuff. So I, I see the thread of his argument here and how you can use this to tell the story about what's going on now, but I'm not convinced so far that I should be less snarky and, and that we need a fundamental. Ditch the problems that leftists are concerned with right now in favor of these other ones.