Damek.

The “second summer of love” in England has had a profound impact on my life. The rave/dance scene that grew out of it bequeathed the world most of the music I found fascinating for about a decade from 1997 to, say, 2006-ish. Certainly much about me morphed and changed over that period, but electronic and dance music in various forms was arguably my anchor.

I never participated in rave culture. I never made music of my own. I never really knew anyone who made music. No, I acquired recordings and listened to them in the cave of my mind, wishing I could meet others who loved it as much as me. I tried to share my favorite music with others, always believing it inevitable that it would grab them as much as it had me, for clearly, the music I loved was objectively superior and special! And so I also came to admire rave culture from afar, for a represented ideal of “like-minded people coming together spontaneously to just enjoy music and have fun.” Something like that. I admired the implied embedded ideals of basic human decency. Thus I have since had a fondness (from afar!) for things like Burning Man culture.

Of course, I always somewhat ignored the empty part of these subcultures, and the way drugs permeate them. That’s not for me. Just the good stuff is for me. And I suppose that’s why, eventually, Saint Etienne became one of my favorite bands, because their music grew out of the rave culture music, blended perfectly with the grooviness of Sixties London – a combination of selective-memory nostalgia destined to suck me in.

In his somewhat autobiographical essay, “Trotsky and the Wild Orchids,” Richard Rorty talks about growing up in a socialist family, believing strongly in people basically needing to be decent to each other, and also having an obsessive love of wild orchids, and of going to college hoping to find a way to tie his idiosyncratic loves together with universal moral truths.

For, of course his favorite wild orchids were morally superior to, objectively “better” than, the commercial orchids sold in common shops, right?

He describes his philosophical journey as demonstrating to him that ultimately this search for universal objectivity in everything is futile, if not impossible.

I found this intensely personal.

In a way, I’ve spent a lot of my life looking for a family of people whose social beliefs and moral attitudes will “feel like home,” but I’ve used a strategy of hunting for people who share my cultural tastes. And being repeatedly disappointed, both in the people I find, and in the inability of the things I loved to appeal as much to others.

Rorty’s message is simple, and painfully obvious to me now. I have somewhat learned it on my own over the past few years, and it’s delicious to see it described by another (in a language that appeals to me).

It is the attempt to see yourself as an incarnation of something larger than yourself (the Movement, Reason, the Good, the Holy) rather than accepting your finitude. The latter means, amongst other things, accepting that what matters most to you may well be something that may never matter much to most people. Your equivalent of my orchids may always seem merely weird, merely idiosyncratic, to practically everybody else. But that is no reason to be ashamed of, or downgrade, or try to slough off, your Wordsworthian moments, your lover, your family, your pet, your favourite lines of verse, or your quaint religious faith. There is nothing sacred about universality which makes the shared automatically better than the unshared. There is no automatic privilege of what you can get everybody to agree to (the universal) over what you cannot (the idiosyncratic).

This means that the fact that you have obligations too other people (not to bully them, to join them in overthrowing tyrants, to feed them when they are hungry) does not entail that what you share with other people is more important than anything else. What you share with them, when you are aware of such moral obligations, is not … “rationality” or “human nature” or “the fatherhood of God” or “a knowledge of the Moral Law,” or anything other than ability to sympathize with the pain of others.

As I read Rorty, he means to say, basically, that empathy and acting from it is perhaps the best moral view, but there’s no way to objectively argue for it, and everyone who generally comes to agree with that view comes to it through a variety of paths. I think I agree with this. It certainly jives with my experience. People I like on a deep level often share little of mutual casual interest, and people I find who share casual interests can sometimes sport such glaring moral differences.

This has been, at times, quite painful to recognize. But there’s also something beautiful and pleasurable about learning to recognize and appreciate the human in others without sharing all their interests. And it makes those you meet who share more in common all the more special.

But you can still look for philosophical universals if you wish. Rorty suggests “there are still ‘philosophical slop-shops on every corner’” that will confirm your conceits.

But there is a price. To pay the price you have to turn your back on intellectual history and on what Milan Kundera calls “the fascinating imaginative realm where no one owns the truth and everyone has the right to be understood… the wisdom of the novel.” You risk losing the sense of finitude, and the tolerance, which result from realizing how very many synoptic visions there have been, and how little argument can do to help you choose among them.

[...] By now I am pretty sure that looking for such a presence [what Derrida calls "a full presence beyond the reach of play," ...a luminous, self-justifying, self-sufficient synoptic vision] …is a bad idea. The main trouble is that you might succeed, and your success might let you imagine that you have something more to rely on than the tolerance and decency of your fellow human beings. The democratic community of Dewey’s dreams is a community in which nobody imagines that. It is a community in which everybody thinks that it is human solidarity, rather than knowledge of something not merely human, that really matters. The actually existing approximations to such a fully democratic, fully secular community now seem to me the greatest achievements of our species. In comparison, even Hegel’s and Proust’s books seem optional, orchidaceous extras.

This means that, in looking for community or what I might call “human family,” you have to do two things: look for people who share a reliance on tolerance and decency as their guideposts, while at the same time recognizing you may share nothing else in common. And of course, in looking, you will find people who are struggling as you once were to share with you their own idiosyncratic loves that they feel are somehow objectively superior exemplars. Which, if they’re not something that stokes your own interest, the best thing you can do is to tolerate and smile at the enthusiastic love of a fellow human for something they found in the path of their existence.

I feel I should add, as I continue reading Rorty, as much as he appeals to me I feel like he is somewhat naive in one important area. I feel as he does about the “existing approximations” to fully democratic societies. Except, I also think there’s something to the leftist critique of imperialism that consists of very powerful people who are somewhat above the rules and boundaries of those societies. And I’m not sure what to do about that. Perhaps the wave of global progress which they heretofore seem to have ridden will someday simply overcome and drown them in a crash of post-imperial societies of human decency. Much as the aristocracy once appeared to have crashed.