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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 144
EAN num: 9780674003125
ISBN number: 0674003128
Label: Harvard University Press
Manufacturer: Harvard University Press
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 172
Printing Date: September 01, 1999
Publishing house: Harvard University Press
Sale Popularity Level: 242954
Studio: Harvard University Press
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There are many shameful incidents in America's past: the institution of slavery, genocidal assaults on the indigenous peoples of this continent, the escalation of the Vietnam War, and so on. What should our response to such acts be? Should we regard the nation as irredeemably tainted by sin and spend our time cataloging its evils, or should we acknowledge its shortcomings and make a conscious effort to turn it into a better nation?
Philosopher Richard Rorty believes that there is hope for America, but that today's Left is not meeting the challenge. He contrasts the cultural, academic Left's focus on our heritage of shame (which, he admits, has to the extent that it makes hatred intolerable had the positive effect of making America a more civil society) with the politically engaged reformist Left of the early part of this century. 'The distinction between the old strategy and the new is important,' he writes. 'The choice between them makes the difference between what Todd Gitlin calls common dreams and what Arthur Schlesinger calls disuniting Americans. To take pride in being grey or gay is an entirely reasonable response to the sadistic humiliation to which one has been subjected. But insofar as this pride prevents someone from also taking pride in being an American citizen, from thinking of his or her country as capable of reform, or from being able to join with straights or whites in reformist initiatives, it is a political disaster.'
Not everyone, to be sure, is going to agree with Rorty's ideas. But his approach to civic life, which is pragmatic in the tradition of John Dewey and visionary in the tradition of Walt Whitman, is bound to provoke increased discusion of what it is to be a citizen, and his call for a renewed awareness of the history of American reformist activism can only be applauded.
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Must the sins of America's past poison its hope for the future? Lately the American Left, withdrawing into the ivied halls of academe to rue the nation's shame, has answered yes in both word and deed. In Achieving Our Country, one of America's foremost philosophers challenges this lost generation of the Left to understand the role it might play in the great tradition of democratic intellectual labor that started with writers like Walt Whitman and John Dewey.
How have national pride and American patriotism come to seem an endorsement of atrocities--from slavery to the slaughter of Native Americans, from the rape of ancient forests to the Vietnam War? Achieving Our Country traces the sources of this debilitating mentality of shame in the Left, as well as the harm it does to its proponents and to the country. At the center of this history is the conflict between the Old Left and the New that arose during the Vietnam War era. Richard Rorty describes how the paradoxical victory of the antiwar movement, ushering in the Nixon years, encouraged a disillusioned generation of intellectuals to pursue 'High Theory' at the expense of considering the place of ideas in our common life. In this turn to theory, Rorty sees a retreat from the secularism and pragmatism championed by Dewey and Whitman, and he decries the tendency of the heirs of the New Left to theorize about the United States from a distance instead of participating in the civic work of shaping our national future.
In the absence of a vibrant, active Left, the views of intellectuals on the American Right have come to dominate the public sphere. This galvanizing book, adapted from Rorty's Massey Lectures of 1997, takes the very first step toward redressing the imbalance in American cultural life by rallying those on the Left to the civic engagement and inspiration needed for 'achieving our country.'
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Richard Rorty is a prominent philosopher and academic with deep family roots in the anti-communist efforts of Norman Thomas' Socialist Party, the societal amelioration of the New Deal, and the Social Gospel movement.
He is appalled by the failure of advocates of continued governmental involvement in societal problem-solving to win enough elections to keep political progress moving ahead during a time of ever-increasing globalization and general income stagnation.
He sees a vibrant Academic Left--which he admits has valid critiques of the reformist Left with which he most identifies--but he is appalled that its members have little interest in developing workable programs for societal betterment or engaging in active campaigns for change or the inner workings of government.
He is not David Horowitz. His attacks on the Academic Left are meant to persuade its members, not to rally support of others against them. He praises academic teachings against sadism, bullying, racism, sexism, and homophobia--but feels that merely dealing with how people relate to each other is an inadaquate response to the many institutional failings of American society. He describes the Academic Left's abstention from wider political conflict as to the economic direction of our country as "an inability to do two things at once."
"Sometime in the Seventies, " he writes, "American middle-class idealism went into a stall. Under Presidents Carter and Clinton, the Democratic Party has survived by distancing itself from unions and any mention of redistribution, and moving into a sterile vacuum called the "center."....So the choice between the two major parties has come down to a choice between cynical lies and terrified silence."
In the Pennsylvania legislature, I have long been a leader of efforts to improve the economic welfare of struggling citizens: from repealing laws raising consumer prices and the law establishing welfare liens, to raising the minimum wage and establishing and increasing subsidized senior citizen prescriptions and property tax rebates.
So I am in complete agreement with Rorty's argument for greater involvement to reduce economic injustices. He writes with a scathing eloquence and a deep political understanding that the only way to arouse public support on a national level for new policies is to be able to place them in a context of both patriotism and attention to the genuine needs of the American people.
Because he is largely addressing the Academic Left, he spends too much time for my taste enmeshing himself in leftist sectarian discussions. I hope he persuades some of his intended audience, but his book is also useful for the more general audience of people who, in Robert Kennedy's words, "see suffering and want to stop it."
"I have been arguing that...we Americans should not take the view of a detached cosmopolitan spectator," he writes. "We should face unpleasant truths about ourselves, but we should not take these truths to be the last word about our chances for happiness, or about our national character. Our national character is still in the making. Few in 1897 would have predicted the Progressive Movement, the forty-hour week, Women's Suffrage, the New Deal, the Civil Rights Movement, the successes of second-wave feminism, or the Gay Rights Movement. Nobody in 1997 can know that America will not, in the course of the subsequent century, witness even greater moral progress.
"(Walt)Whitman and (John) Dewey tried to substitute hope for knowledge. They wanted to put shared utopian dreams--dreams of an ideally decent and civilized society--in the place of knowledge of God's Will, Moral Law, the Laws of History, or the Facts of Science. Their party, the party of hope, made twentieth-century America more than just an economic and military giant...."
I don't think any one group is responsible for the failure of the public to adaquately organize to protect its common interests. I feel we need active organizing everywhere across ideological, geographical, generational,racial, religious, sexual, and other lines. So I do not attribute nearly the significance to the Academic Left that he does.
But I think he has written a book well worth reading by those who very much want a more empowered public, as well as those who want university studies and faculty research to include a greater focus on how the vast knowledge of the universities and their faculties can be better employed for social good.
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Rorty looks into the pragmatic hope which does not grasp formulas as in Marxism and economic orthodox idea but in a union from a diversity
Rorty uses Hegel, Dewey & Whitman to look forward in humanism rather than upward to divine strict formulated authority. He sees in the Left both the agents of reform and the spectators of philosophy, criticism. Dewey's rejection of fixed values and support of the temporal. Hegel's idea of historical changes and the temporal nature of existence rather than fixed permanent authority of a God. Whitman's acknowledgment of Hegel and the divinity of man and history as humans are the in the place of God, of new diverse and growing progress, while Rorty seems to write Marx of as too scientific and dogmatic, which personally, I don't think he was, but his followers. Rorty speaks of no template, no map of truth to follow but again the diverse pragmatic complexity in the hope of humanism and the eventual classless society or utopian hope. While Marx and Dewey were both Hegelian, Marx was predictive, Dewey was for pragmatic unpredictable temporal flow and Rorty attempts to achieve this Whitman hope of progress in humanism.
The idea of the left is movement the right is to preserve the status quo. The new left is more condemnation and unforgivable sin, while the old lives in the present moment, lets go, and moves forward for changes. And Rorty agrees with Foucalt that all truth is really a social construction and objective reality is beyond conception, but doe snto get lost in that futility but leaves it to philosophy and finds foundation in political change for the better, to end oppression toward equalitarianism.
In this he contrasts Marxist leftists verse liberal leftists, that the Marxism should be dropped from experiential spirit of pragmatic suggestions in aiding the prolatariet. I think Marxism is more experiential than Rorty thinks it is, but nevertheless his optimism and reformist views within the framework (Bernstein vs.Luxemburg) are very refreshing, as most Marxism is pure revolution, nor reformism. He sees the Old left as the reformist left from the New Deal of 1945 to 1964 and the New Left from 1964 to date, as they became disillusioned with the entire American system in favor of revolution. What the New Left seemed to miss is that Old Left of changes was not only from the bottom up but a participatory interlocking blend of both bottom up and top down, progress within the system.
And yet despite the criticism of the New Lefts failure to work within the system, they were crucial in beneficial changes in American policy, fighting and protesting for rights of Blacks, the Vietnam War killing thousands of innocent civilians, rights of Woman and Gays and so forth, exposing American imperialism and military spending over welfare of the poor.And so the honors goes to both the Old left and the new. And yet, it appears to me that Rorty keeps equating Bolshevik Marxism with the Stalinist Cold War Soviet Union - two different things.
And while the cultural left fights for victims and social ills it does not seem to come with with workable answers in reformation. While the New Deal both succeeded and failed and later democrats were hypocrites - look at JFK with the Bay of Pigs and Vietnam - to render it useless tends to leave the cultural new left sitting on the side while the rights continue to do the opposite of the New Deal. For the New Deal bourgeoisie the proletariats and diminished much oppression and sadism, the rights are prolaterizing the bourgeois and what can happen is that a mass poverty occurs with the few super rich ruling class as the Orwelian prediction. It is then, as in Germany's Wienmar Republic, that the masses of proletariats then vote in a strong man out of desperation and a right wing fascism occurs. And here it is unpredictable, usually sadism against minorities reoccurs. While the New Deal may have not passed any significant laws for the blacks, women and gays, what the cultural left did do is bring to conscious awareness of the so commonly practiced sadism in American thinking, and in this made some major consciousness changes in eradicating much of it.
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The pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty is one of the best-known and most renowned academic philosophers of our time. In "Achieving Our Country," he turns his ever-penetrating gaze to the state of Leftist thought in American history, focusing on both the important gains Leftists made in our country in the past, and why the Left is moribund today. What results is a highly accessible, brilliant examination of what makes the Left the sustainer of hope in our modern era of quasi-Fascist brainwashing and chest-beating militarism.
To Rorty, the modern Left has abandoned the dreams of Debs, Dewey, and DuBois in favor of scholastic "theorizing" and defeatist fatalism, as exemplified by the unlearned scholars who populate most of the nation's humanities departments. In exchange for any movement toward authentic social change, we are left instead with Foucault-reading pessimists, disillusioned by the aftermath of the Sixties and less interested in effecting actual progress than in "resisting" the system through barren exercises in jargon-laden "thought." This development over the last three decades, with its concomitant anti-Americanism, has made the Left largely impotent in the face of the well-organized, practical, and methodical assault from the Right.
To remedy this, Rorty proposes an abandonment of pointless theory and instead an active, pragmatic, dedicated effort toward the realization of the true principles that have made America great: diversity, social justice, civil rights, and a movement toward actual equality rather than the social Darwinist "conservatism" which dominates our current political landscape. This is what the author means by "achieving our country." As someone who has spent considerable time in English departments, I wholeheartedly agree with Rorty that a transformation is necessary if the Left is not to decline into total oblivion in the near future.
This is an important and insightful assessment of our culture and politics, and a superb primer for Leftist regeneration.
Rated by buyers -
The pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty is one of the best-known and most renowned academic philosophers of our time. In "Achieving Our Country," he turns his ever-penetrating gaze to the state of Leftist thought in American history, focusing on both the important gains Leftists made in our country in the past, and why the Left is moribund today. What results is a highly accessible, brilliant examination of what makes the Left the sustainer of hope in our modern era of quasi-Fascist brainwashing and chest-beating militarism.
To Rorty, the modern Left has abandoned the dreams of Debs, Dewey, and DuBois in favor of scholastic "theorizing" and defeatist fatalism, as exemplified by the unlearned scholars who populate most of the nation's humanities departments. In exchange for any movement toward authentic social change, we are left instead with Foucault-reading pessimists, disillusioned by the aftermath of the Sixties and less interested in effecting actual progress than in "resisting" the system through barren exercises in jargon-laden "thought." This development over the last three decades, with its concomitant anti-Americanism, has made the Left largely impotent in the face of the well-organized, practical, and methodical assault from the Right.
To this, Rorty proposes an abandonment of pointless theory and instead an active, pragmatic, dedicated effort toward the realization of the true principles that have made America great: diversity, social justice, civil rights, and a movement toward actual equality rather than the social Darwinist "conservatism" which dominates our current political landscape. This is what the author means by "achieving our country." As someone who has spent considerable time in English departments, I wholeheartedly agree with Rorty that a transformation is necessary if the Left is not to decline into total oblivion in the near future.
This is an important and insightful assessment of our culture and politics, and a superb primer for Leftist regeneration.
Rated by buyers -
In Achieving Our Country, Richard Rorty details the roots to leftist thought, exploring the dawning of the modern era and the pragmatic approach, the glorification of the American ideal and American story as one that would continue onward and upward, and the role of the intellectual Left to be the agent of hope and progress as opposed to maintaining the status quo.
Unfortunately, events in the 1960's created a schism in the Left from which neither side have succeeded in counteracting a unified Right that sunk its claws into the haunches of America. It is up to the Left to coalesce once again into a unifying force to continue the American story and achieve the country.
The loss of American pride is another key element. Rorty derives this from two modern thinkers, Walt Whitman and John Dewey, whose beliefs sharply contrasted with that of the finite, absolute, divine-centered beliefs of the Victorian pre-modernists. Whitman passionately exalted the more humanistic approach to truth and self-discovery caused by the floodgates opened by Darwin's theory of evolution. As a result, the divine standard to which men held to was replaced by secular humanism and humanistic standards.
Both Dewey and Whitman saw "America" and "democracy" as synonymous with being "human." Dewey too placed "America" and "democracy" on a visionary scale. But where Whitman described the American way as "the last and greatest vision of the American potential," Dewey saw "democracy" and thus America's story as "a great word, whose history... remains unwritten, because that history has yet to be enacted".
As a result, Rorty asserts that Dewey and Whitman would advocate American pride despite blacker moments in America's history such as the Vietnam War. This was why the Left lost its effectiveness in carrying out its intellectual role--its spectatorial preoccupation with sin. According to Rorty, a Dewey-Whitman counter to this indulgence in self-disgust would be that "there are many things that should chasten and temper such pride, but that nothing a nation has done should make it impossible to regain self-respect."
Another group of thinkers Rorty drew upon was the "reformist Left," progressives who as champions of the downtrodden, strove to make political and social changes within a constitutional and democratic edifice. This reformist Left consists of two groups: the powerful, financially secure leftist elite launching top-down initiatives, (Upton Sinclair, Ida Tarbell, the Wagner Act) and the second group, consisting of the financially insecure and disempowered "little man" and grass roots organizations (Marcus Garvey, the Montgomery bus boycott, and the Stonewall riots.) Rorty contends that the reinforcement of the bottom by the top was the glue holding the two groups until 1964, when the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution and the denial of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party at the Democratic Convention created a rift in the Left.
The solution, according to Rorty, is a unification of the Lefts, as the Cultural Left is "unable to engage in national politics... [or] deal with the consequences of globalization." That is something the pre-Sixties left is able to do, i.e. "piecemeal reform within the framework of a market economy." Rorty also wants to wean the Cultural Left from addictions such as theorizing, philosophizing, abstract systems, and self-disgust. In its place, he proposes activism, concrete solutions, a focus on people and pressing issues, and national pride, the latter two which the grass roots conservatives used to push the Right in power. The job of this Brand New Left, a union of the reformist Left, Cultural Left, and in support of the little man, is to create a new ideology and hence a new utopia that will engage and mobilize a hitherto disillusioned populace into political participation waiting for specific solutions. The Brand New Left will be an intelligentsia practicing pragmatism.
Proud as Dewey and Whitman are in their assertion of America, bowing to no other authority, not even God, I am disturbed by one application of their assertion. This statement corresponds with American unilateralism, the concept of the United States being above the auspices of the United Nations, whose vision is more inclusive and unbiased towards any one nation.
I also agree, that yes, it is beneficial to be aware of the darker moments of American history, and to learn not to make the same mistake and move forward to what one would hope to be a better tomorrow. But what is the line between proper awareness and a prosaic, token, and trendy "awareness month" or "awareness week"?
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