How A Philosopher From The ’90s Predicted Our Current Mess — And Could Help Us Fix It

More than two decades ago, the American philosopher Richard Rorty looked at the state of American affairs and issued a warning: It was only a matter of time before the country would elect a demagogue.

“Members of labor unions, and unorganised unskilled workers will sooner or later realise that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking,” Rorty wrote.

And then came the now eerily prescient prediction. Those same workers were set to turn away from established institutions, Rorty said, and embrace something far more autocratic.

“At that point, something will crack. The non-suburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking for a strongman to vote for — someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots.”

Of course, in our post-Trumpian age, Rorty has been proven right. Donald Trump campaigned in the 2016 election on the promise that “smug bureaucrats” — a category into which he threw everyone from fellow politicians to journalists — would be taken to task, and then he spent four long years as President banging that same drum. “Drain the swamp” became a euphemism for dismantling those antiquated systems Trump said had lost sight of his base’s interests. Fuck the postmodernist professors, Trump said: now was the time to Make America Great again.

Rorty’s words, though deeply prescient, went unheeded. His ability to predict a demagogue like Trump was ignored by a philosophical establishment that too frequently thought of him as being a destructive philosopher, tearing the tradition apart.

But as it turns out, Rorty’s philosophy not only has the ability to predict trends in American political and social life: it also has the ability to guide us through a range of contemporary problems, most notably the fight for gender equality.

In order to see how, let’s first look at what makes his philosophy distinct.

Richard Rorty And The Nature of Truth

Most major philosophers since Plato have attempted to secure something like an objective truth on which to lay their findings. It’s not enough for these thinkers to merely state their conclusions. They need to “prove” that these conclusions are correct in a way that goes beyond mere human agreement, and demonstrates they understand the world “as it really is”.

For instance, Immanuel Kant, the famously stuffy German philosopher, tried to pin his entire system on the back of a “real” rationality, one that helps us pierce the simple appearances of the world and discover something iron-wrought and stable about it; facts that would exist whether or not there were a human there to observe them.

Rorty, by contrast, has no such aim. Rorty is a pragmatist — he believes that “if something makes no difference to practice, it should make no difference to philosophy.” Whether or not something is true in an objective, non-human sense doesn’t matter one dot to Rorty. Human agreement, the process by which we decide which ethical values are important to us, for instance, need not reflect “real” things about the “actual” world. Agreement is enough entirely on its own.

More than that, Rorty points out that most philosophers are not very good at proving the objectivity of their findings. Even a titan like Kant has widely agreed upon holes in his arguments. And though Kant’s followers have spent the hundreds of years since his death trying to patch those holes up, there is still no widespread acceptance of the objectivity-seeking power of rationality.

Basically, there are no solid, universal agreements in philosophy. And Rorty thinks that trying to find them is a waste of time.

Indeed, Rorty asks us to imagine what the world would even look like if philosophers found the objective agreement that they have spent so long chasing. Let’s say that every single living philosopher agreed that there was a “truth” to the problem of how to behave ethically; a non-human set of facts about how to live that were as stable as most of us consider the laws of mathematics to be. Would we accept such findings? Do we really think about ethics as the kind of conundrum for which there is one answer? Rorty doesn’t think so.

That’s not to say that by dismantling “truth” Rorty believes you can say whatever you like. He substitutes the attempt to find objectivity for the importance of justification. Rorty still thinks we can reason; that we can justify the things that we say about how we should treat one another. We can’t go around claiming that the moon is made of cheese, just because we don’t believe in some grand theory of truth.

Instead, Rorty wants us to stop pinning our beliefs on something bigger or more “stable” than our mere human contingency. We’ll never be more than human, Rorty says, or able to see the world in any way but a human one. And so we should halt the process of  dabbling in metaphysics — arguments over what is “real” and “true” — and get down to the important work of fixing our society.

The Importance of Self-Creation

So what does this all actually mean? Well, because there’s nothing stable, or true, or “real”, about who we are and how we are meant to live, Rorty thinks that we are free to re-describe ourselves however we want. According to his philosophy, there’s no set way of being a woman, or an Australian, or a leftist. These labels don’t reflect some non-human reality. They are what we make them. “The method,” Rorty wrote of his philosophy, “is to redescribe lots and lots of things in new ways, until you have created a pattern which will tempt the rising generation to adopt it.”

Using this method, we don’t create social change by saying that new movements or ideas are better at explaining the non-human, “real” world. We create social change by re-describing ourselves, over and over again, in ways that will be enticing to more and more people.

What does that process actually look like in practice? Well, because Rorty has let go of objectivity, he doesn’t think that there are “better” or “worse” ways to re-describe. In place of a term like “better”, he uses something a little more wordy. A “good” self-description is one, Rorty says, that gives us “more of what we want and less of what we don’t.”

And further than that, there’s no fixed schema for what that “more” refers to. We can choose it ourselves, through a process of establishing a consensus, or as much “unforced agreement” as possible.

For instance, let’s say that we want gender equality: we have decided through a process of establishing consensus that that is the “more” in Rorty’s schema. How do we go about bringing about that reality? Not by saying that gender equality would be a process that better explains a non-human world, Rorty thinks. Instead, we can change and expand what it means to be a woman — what equality looks like — through a process of entirely human, contingent re-description.

Rorty and Feminism

To better see what this process of re-description looks like, let’s compare it to the opposite process – one where change is established by reaching to objective facts, exactly as Rorty doesn’t want us to do. We don’t need to look far to see examples of this anti-Rortyian way of arguing; the internet is full of them. A wide range of arguments between the left and the right, between factions in the left and other factions in the left, are often expressed as a disagreement over how the world “really” is.

By the rules of this particular game, the winners of these disagreements are seen as those who can cite the most hard, factual evidence; who can point to their ability to describe reality more accurately than the opposing side. Such arguments move past lived experiences, and turn on attempts to prove how the world “actually is”, in a non-human sense.

But what do such arguments actually solve? If the last few years of online discourse has taught us anything, it’s that there are frequently no real winners in such debates. Both sides throw evidence that they believe explains the actual world at the other; both walk away convinced that they have better explained the problem. And yet the proof cited by one side is rejected by the other. A reality drawn up by the left is seen as ridiculous and out of touch by the right. No real forward movement is made.

A reality drawn up by the left is seen as ridiculous and out of touch by the right.

So, let’s see what an argument would look like if conducted by Rorty’s lights. In his paper ‘Feminism and Pragmatism’, Rorty gives a look at what creating this new way of being can look like in practice. He says that we should never “charge a current social practice … with being unfaithful to reality, with getting things wrong.” That would be falling into the trap of objectivity, and a process of submerging oneself in stagnant arguments the kind of which the internet is full of.

Instead, Rorty believes that we should “appeal to a still only dimly imagined future practice.” The feminist can appeal to a process of creating a fairer world; a more equitable one. And to do this, the feminist doesn’t need to cite evidence from “neutral criteria” like “Nature or Reason or History or the Moral Law.” Instead, the feminist can just make a comparison between the “actual present and a possible future”; a future full of self-creation, and one that gives us more of what we want and less of what we don’t.

It’s Time To Move

Again, we don’t need to look far for examples of what this Rortyian form of discourse looks like: the modern feminist movement is increasingly turning to re-description. That’s the work that thinkers like Judith Butler do — not falling back on old descriptions of “woman”, but updating and changing what that label could even mean, without pointing to some iron-wrought sense of non-human facts in the process.

That’s not to say that theorists like Butler are just making it up as they go along. Again, Rorty still believes in justification. We are not free to re-describe wily nilly. Rorty’s thinking just means that our identities are entirely contingent; not fixed in place by a non-human set of facts, but entirely created by important, justified and ever-changing cultural forces.

Thus, the campaigner for gender equality can draw a picture of what it means to be a woman without needing to cite a better understanding of the “actual world”. Instead, the goal of the campaigner can be to create a new way of being; to open up a space where there was once nothing, and to triumphantly self-create.

There’s still justification here. But justification doesn’t need objectivity, or stability. It’s a process that takes in contingent human behaviour and movement.

And that movement is the key. Rorty’s contingent view of justification is flexible. It doesn’t need to get bogged down in discussions of how the world “really is”; discussions that a brief search through Twitter proves are never really settled.

If we embrace Rorty’s turn, we will move faster. Debates that seemed stagnated will suddenly speed the fuck up. And in a warming, increasingly troubled world, speed is precisely what we need.

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Joseph Earp is a philosopher, staff writer at Junkee and certified Richard Rorty stan. He tweets @JosephOEarp.

Overthinking It is a regular column about philosophy and pop culture, created by Junkee and The Ethics Centre.

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