Achieving Our Country? Part 2

Varieties of Political Experience

American Gothic

At the end of the last post, I indicated that I was going to try to build on or amend Rorty’s critique of the American left, but I actually think there are few more interesting parts of his argument that I should go back and attend to first.

First is his conception of the “cultural Left,” which he opposes to the “reformist Left” that predominated before the end of the 1960s. They have two different institutional loci: the reformist left was centered in unions, political parties, and government agencies, while the cultural left is mostly a creature of academia. Rorty characterizes the cultural Left as focusing on the “sadism” part more than “selfishness” part:

With this partial substitution of Freud for Marx as a source of social theory, sadism rather than selfishness has become the principal target of the Left. The heirs of the New Left of the Sixties have created, within the academy, a cultural Left. Many members of this Left specialize in what they call the "politics of difference" or ..of identity" or ..of recognition." This cultural Left thinks more about stigma than about money, more about deep and hidden psychosexual motivations than about shallow and evident greed.

As I mentioned last time, Rorty is pretty sanguine and friendly to many of the accomplishments of this cultural Left, crediting them with actually diminishing a lot of sadism in American life. But he speaks of a “dark side" to the cultural Left: its tendency to view the world as governed by vast abstract powers—“ubiquitous specters,” he calls them—that fundamentally cannot be shifted. It comes by this by the applications of the conceptual apparatus of European theory combined with some very American preoccupations:

In its Foucauldian usage, the term ‘power’ denotes an agency which has left an indelible stain on every word in our language and on every institution in our society. It is always already there, and cannot be spotted coming or going. One might spot a corporate bagman arriving at a congressman's office, and perhaps block his entrance. But one cannot block off power in the Foucauldian sense. Power is as much inside one as outside one. It is nearer than hands and feet. As Edmundson says: one cannot ..confront power; one can only encounter its temporary and generally unwitting agents . . .

[it] has capacities of motion and transformation that make it a preternatural force. Only interminable individual and so­cial self-analysis, and perhaps not even that, can help us es­cape from the infinitely fine meshes of its invisible web.

This creates an environment that Rorty, borrowing from his friend Mark Edmundson, calls “Gothic:”

The ubiquity of Foucauldian power is reminiscent of the ubiquity of Satan, and thus of the ubiquity of original sin­ that diabolical stain on every human soul. I argued in my first lecture that the repudiation of the concept of sin was at the heart of Dewey and Whitman's civic religion. I also claimed that the American Left, in its horror at the Vietnam War, rein­vented sin. It reinvented the old religious idea that some stains are ineradicable. I now wish to say that, in committing itself to what it calls “theory” this Left has gotten something which is entirely too much like religion. For the cultural Left has come to believe that we must place our country within a theoretical frame of reference, situate it within a vast quasi­ cosmological perspective.

Let’s set aside for whether or not this is a fair reading of Foucault; It does seem to reflect the reality of how the insights of European theory are internalized and popularized in the United States. But I wonder how impotent or self-defeating it always really really is? There is a veritable panic on the Right about the evils of “theory.” And some members of the Right make similar complaints to Rorty when they say things like “Wokeness is a religion.” This notion is mocked a lot on the Left, and for good reason because it’s become a thoughtless cliché, but there’s something to it: there is a legacy of the Protestant reform movements in the “woke” Left.

Before there was theory, there was religion. American social movements in the 19th century that we’d recognize today as precursors to the Left today, were explicitly religious in orientation, coming from Church groups. In the slave South and under Jim Crow, the church was often the only institution available and it provided both the social infrastructure and ideological inspiration for resistance. It’s hard to imagine John Brown, one of the few heroes all left-leaning Americans can agree on admiring, being so adamantly principled without the inspiration of religion. Temperance, abolition, suffrage, prison reform, etc. all can trace their origins in the Second Great Awakening. Even a soul as self-ironical as Abraham Lincoln believed he was guided by divine providence. (It’s worth remembering here that the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison burned a copy of the Constitution and called it “a covenant with death and an agreement with hell.” Extremely woke stuff.) As we know from Max Weber, anxiety about personal sinfulness or belief in ones own election does not always lead to paralysis, but can be a spur to intense practical activity.

To borrow from his great pragmatist forebear William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience, Rorty would just prefer us to engage in the “The Religion of Healthy-Mindedness,” with its sense of serenity and composure, than the religion of “The Sick Soul,” with its constant preoccupation with sinfulness and evil. In this one is tempted to say that Rorty is heir to the other side of WASP ideology than Puritanism: the humanistic, optimist side, the one that believes in putting on a smile and getting down to some kind of vigorous activity rather than wallowing in gloom. No wonder F.D.R. is part of his pantheon.

Someone should write “The Varieties of Political Experience” to accompany James’s book that acknowledges a plurality of moods can lend themselves to efficacious politics. I don’t think the Right would not be making such a fuss about “wokeness” if it didn’t actually pose a threat to some of the social hierarchies it exists to defend. But I think on the balance, the preoccupation with the contents of the inner-life, the constant effort to purge evil, or see in each clumsy statement the presence of Satan, is not good practice for generating political energy; it too often leads to demoralization, alienation, and becomes a great tool for counterproductive infighting: you can always invent some new sign of the devil that your opponent supposedly demonstrates: “Oh, they said such and such, that’s a sign that they are under the control of the demon called misogyny, or the demon called white supremacy.” Then you just have a series of bitter recriminations and very little forward movement. It also then becomes a vector of sadism rather than one if the cures: it is very easy to torment someone who is predisposed to feel guilty or ashamed. It offers even smaller rewards: just looking slightly smarter being the person who can point out the “problematic” past of some institution or idea, often without really knowing anything about it.

I would just point out, the great energy put into interrogation of one’s own or others’ privilege, which we’re sometimes told is the sine qua non of right-thinking politics, has done very little to stanch the right-wing onslaught we’re now experiencing.

Myth or Utopia?

While Rorty does not like what he calls the “religious” residue of the cultural Left, he openly calls his preferred notion of the country “mythological,” “utopian,” a kind of “faith,” or a “civic religion.” He approvingly cites William James in this respect:

"Democracy, " James wrote, "is a kind of religion, and we are bound not to admit its failure. Faiths and utopias are the no­ blest exercise of human reason, and no one with a spark of reason in him will sit down fatalistically before the croaker's picture."

Of his two saints, Dewey and Whitman, he writes:

They both hoped that America would be the place where a religion of love would finally replace a religion of fear. They dreamed that Americans would break the traditional link between the religious impulse, the impulse to stand in awe of something greater than oneself, and the infantile need for security, the childish hope of escaping from time and chance. They wanted to preserve the former and discard the latter. 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 social justice to be the country's animating principle, the nation's soul.

First of all, this is a lot to ask of people to subscribe to. For religious people, it’s quasi-idolatrous. For non-religious people, it can sound both terribly corny and a little nuts. But with his emphasis on the power of animating myth ironically puts Rorty into ironic proximity to a figure I’ve written a bit about on this blog, and who otherwise does not share many of Rorty’s political commitments: Georges Sorel. Sorel, who wrote around the same time as the founders of pragmatism and shared many of their philosophical inspirations, and like Rorty, was a non-Marxist socialist who believed moral sentiments were more important than scientific objectivity. Sorel believed the kind of politics that could fundamentally change an entire society required extra-rational myths. In his Reflections on Violence, he proposes:

…men who are participating in great social movements always picture their coming action in the form of images of battle in which their cause is certain to triumph. I proposed to give the name of ‘myths’ to these constructions, knowledge of which is so important for historians: the general strike of the syndicalists and Marx’s catastrophic revolution are such myths. As remarkable examples of myths I have given those which were constructed by primitive Christianity, by the Reformation, by the Revolution, and by the followers of Mazzini.

According to Sorel, these myths embody in a series of images the entire world-view of a movement and provide it with a basis of action, “they are not descriptions of things but expressions of a will to act,” they cannot be refuted with fact-checking, they are fundamentally pragmatic like Rorty’s ideal of America. Sorel’s chosen myth for the Left of his time was the “myth of the general strike”:

…the myth in which socialism is wholly comprised, i.e. a body of images capable of evoking instinctively all the sentiments which correspond to the different manifestations of the war undertaken by socialism against modern society. Strikes have engendered in the proletariat the noblest, the deepest and the most moving sentiments that they possess; the general strike groups them all in a coordinated picture and, by bringing them together, gives to each one of them its maximum intensity; appealing to their painful memories of particular conflicts, it colours with an intense life all the details of the composition presented to consciousness. We thus obtain that intuition of socialism which language cannot give us with perfect clearness – and we obtain it as a whole, perceived instantaneously.

It doesn't matter if the prophecy doesn’t actually come to pass, like the early Christian myth of the apocalypse, it can have a focusing and organizing force:

…even supposing the revolutionaries to have been wholly and entirely deluded in setting up this imaginary picture of the general strike, this picture may yet have been, in the course of the preparation of the revolution, a great element of strength if it had embraced all the aspirations of socialism and if it had given to the whole body of revolutionary thought a precision and a rigidity which no other method of thought could have given.

Where do we see this kind myth today in American politics? I would say on the Right. In "Birtherism,” “QAnon,” and the “Stolen Election,” etc. we get a series of myths, which is really actually just one myth: the other guys aren’t really citizens, they are part of an evil conspiracy to disenfranchise and dispossess the real Americans. This is why they are impervious to the liberal fact checking; they are not really descriptions of state of affairs at all, but the imaginative expression of an entire world-view. Understanding this seems to me more essential to understanding our current situation than all of the tepid liberal books about “polarization” and populism you see at the airport. But I’ve dealt with this elsewhere.

Unlike Rorty, Sorel differentiates myth and utopia, even though in practice he admits they are often mixed up together. According to Sorel, utopias, as specific programs, are too rationalistic and lead to lead to reformism rather than revolutionary cataclysm:

Whilst contemporary myths lead men to prepare themselves for a combat which will destroy the existing state of things, the effect of utopias has always been to direct men’s minds towards reforms which can be brought about by patching up the system; it is not surprising then that so many believers in utopias were able to develop into able statesmen when they had acquired greater experience of political life.

Rorty would say, “great.” It is exactly this sort of reformist left he explicitly wants, while Sorel’s entire project is a critique of reformist socialism and its engagement with the institutions of liberal democracy. And, for Sorel, the pessimism of myths is actually a source of strength:

In primitive Christianity we find a fully developed and completely armed pessimism: man is condemned to slavery from birth – Satan is the prince of the world; the Christian, already regenerated by baptism, can render himself capable of obtaining the resurrection of the body by means of the Eucharist; awaits the glorious second coming of Christ who will destroy the rule of Satan and call his comrades in the fight to a heavenly Jerusalem. This Christian life was dominated by the necessity of belonging to a holy army constantly beset by ambushes led by the accomplices of Satan; this conception produced many heroic acts, engendered a courageous propaganda and was the cause of considerable moral progress. Deliverance did not take place; but we know by innumerable testimonies from this time what great things the march towards deliverance can bring about.

Rorty complains about the “Gothic” mythology of the cultural Left, and we can see we are beset now by dark visions from the Right, as well. But he is perhaps not sensitive enough to the attractions and even advantages of such myths. With the exception maybe of Reagan, American conservatives are extraordinarily dour and pessimistic—even apocalyptic—and yet they’ve politically accomplished much. So, I don’t think it’s merely a question of adopting an attractive and hopeful utopian vision that can explain the weakness of the Left vis-a-vis the Right. But again, this is getting long, so I’ll have to deal with that next time.