Vale Richard Rorty
US philosopher and mensch Richard Rorty died this month, aged 75. He observed that "philosophy occupies an important place in culture only when things seem to be falling apart."
A reluctant pragmatist, Emeritus Professor Rorty saw a path to realising human rights by appealling to hearts rather than minds:
‘If, like many of us, you teach students who have been brought up in the shadow of the Holocaust, brought up believing that prejudice against racial or religious groups is a terrible thing, it is not very hard to convert them to standard liberal views about abortion, gay rights and the like . . . You do this by manipulating their sentiments in such a way that they imagine themselves in the shoes of the despised and oppressed. Such students are already so nice that they are eager to define their identity in non-exclusionary terms. The only people they have trouble being nice to are the ones they consider irrational – the religious fundamentalist, the smirking rapist, or the swaggering skinhead . . .
But it is not a good idea to encourage these students to label “irrational” the intolerant people they have trouble tolerating . . . The bad people’s beliefs are not more or less “irrational” than the belief that race, religion, gender and sexual preference are all morally irrelevant . . . The bad people’s problem is that they were not so lucky in the circumstances of their upbringing as we were . . . We should treat them as deprived [of] security and sympathy. By “security” I mean conditions of life sufficiently risk-free as to make one’s difference from others inessential to one’s self-respect, one’s sense of worth . . . By “sympathy” I mean the sort of reaction that . . . we have more of after watching TV programs about the genocide in Bosnia. Security and sympathy go together . . . The tougher things are, the more you have to be afraid of, the more dangerous your situation, the less you can afford the time or effort to think about what things might be like for people with whom you do not immediately identify. Sentimental education only works on people who can relax long enough to listen.
. . . But it is revolting to think that our only hope for a decent society consists in softening the self-satisfied hearts of a leisure class . . . Why does this preference make us resist the thought that sentimentality may be the best weapon we have? . . . We resist out of resentment. We resent the idea that we shall have to wait for the strong to turn their piggy little eyes to the suffering of the weak. We desperately hope that there is something stronger and more powerful that will hurt the strong if they do not – if not a vengeful God, then a vengeful aroused proletariat, or, at least, a vengeful superego . . .’
A professed atheist, Rorty none the less had this to say in his 2005 book, The Future of Religion:
"My sense of the holy, insofar as I have one, is bound up with the hope that someday, any millennium now, my remote descendants will live in a global civilization in which love is pretty much the only law. In such a society, communication would be domination-free, class and caste would be unknown, hierarchy would be a matter of temporary pragmatic convenience, and power would be entirely at the disposal of the free agreement of a literate and well-educated electorate."
“We resent the idea that we shall have to wait for the strong to turn their piggy little eyes to the suffering of the weak. We desperately hope that there is something stronger and more powerful that will hurt the strong if they do not – if not a vengeful God, then a vengeful aroused proletariat, or, at least, a vengeful superego . . .”
I’m for the aroused proletariat! Or at least enough people to get the strong really, really, scared. Or maybe just a bit scared.
Not changing the minds of the strong, but making injustice cost the strong more than justice costs them – that’s when injustice stops. The Iraq war will stop when it costs the powerful more to keeping it going, than it would cost them to stop it.