Damek.

I gave before I read this at Shakesville, as I’ve always liked Doctors Without Borders, but it made me feel even better about my choice:

DWB was operating three medical centers in Haiti, providing some of the only accessible care in Port-au-Prince for poor pregnant women, new mothers, and infant children. All three of the medical centers were destroyed in the earthquake, yet DWB “has already treated more than 1,000 people on the ground in Haiti following Tuesday’s earthquake, but the needs are huge. An inflatable hospital with operating theatres is expected to arrive in the next 24 hours.” They really need support.

Also, from an interview with David Graeber:

I think though the world is starting to call our bluff — the radical academics, that is. More and more one has to choose between working for NGOs, or government, or marketing, or for departments that are run like corporations and openly trying to bust their unions — or, alternately, actually connecting in some way with real social movements that do not want us to simply impose ourselves as their vanguard. I think in a way that’s a good thing. Most of those people posing as wild postmodern radicals in the ’80s and ’90s were actually classic liberals: that is, interested in increasing personal freedoms and minority rights without actually challenging institutions like the state or capitalism. That’s fine. Who am I to tell people what they should think? But it does annoy me when people like that claim to be the super-radicals. Increasingly such people are starting to admit that, well, yes, actually, they are pretty much liberals. For me that’s refreshing. It’s like, finally we can start to have a real conversation.

Sounds about right to me. Richard Rorty argued that the classic liberal institutions are the best solutions we have (so far) to the problems of humanity, basically, and argued for liberals to feel patriotic about them, to own them, warts and all, to keep hammering away at piecemeal solutions towards ever greater equality, fraternity and liberty. To some extent, I’ve always felt he had a point.

However, I also always felt he was a bit short-sighted in that argument, and it somewhat contradicted his argument that people must always be trying to imagine better solutions, and that future generations would imagine better solutions than “ours.” Well, if that’s the case, those who try to imagine those and bring them into being also have a strong case to make.

Particularly, I personally am increasingly questioning the focus of so many on persistently petitioning authorities to give us political solutions at a time when grassroots, practical solutions are essential to our survival. This feeling is echoed in this post at eleven o’clock alchemy, where you’ll also find the excellent “Why I broke up with the anarchist community”

“Practical, community-based direct action, not magical solutions granted from on high, will get us closer to where we need to be.”

I feel ever more enamored with “people solving their problems and getting on with life.” I realized today that my entire job involves basically “problem solving” and “routine work” (getting on with life). It just so happens that neither interests me or is personally important. But I’m great at problem solving my own problems, and mostly great at doing the routine work that has personal relevance! How can I structure my life so that I am doing less and less work that is important to other people, and more and more that is important to me? This is the personal question.

For the extra-personal, I’ll return to Graeber: “There have to be buildings to make laws in, and someone has to clean them, and paper and transport and funky wigs…”

OK, I just wanted to quote the part about the wigs. But I do feel the passage I took that from, which touches on the processes of human living and how we create the world, relates to what I was talking about “people solving problems and getting on with life.”

More from “Against Bosses, Against Oligarchies: A Conversation with Richard Rorty,” available for free here (short 67-page PDF):

[p. 16] RR: …the Vietnam War, Watergate, and the loss of public confidence in the presidency and the government all conspired to move the student radicals into non-majoritarian politics. In other words, the Marxist claim that the system isn’t reformable came together with the widespread post-Watergate feeling that the American government is hopelessly corrupt. This made it very difficult for leftists to think of themselves as American patriots, hoping to achieve their country [Rorty-speak for America as representing hope and potential for enacting progressive ideals, basically]. But unless the left wraps itself in the flag, it hasn’t got a chance of practicing a majoritarian politics. Before the ‘60s wrapping yourself in the flag when you did leftist politics was as natural as breathing. But that became unnatural after the ‘60s.

Q: This is the certainly the sort of thing with which many readers will take issue—this exhortation to patriotism.

RR: One of them already has, [saying] basically, “Who needs patriotism if you have moral principles?” My response is that moral principles are terrific in Ethics 101, but not as spurs to political action.

I wish we could just replace ‘patriotism’ with something like ‘humanism’ or ‘globalism.’

[p. 20] Q: …what do you say to people who would argue that what Rorty is asking us to do is to repress a Marxist tradition.

RR: How about not repressing it, but taking it fairly lightly? You can argue that if it had not been for Marx, Engels and their friends, we wouldn’t have gotten the welfare state. You can argue analogously that had it not been for Luther and Calvin we would still be buying indulgences. Both claims are probably true, but do you really want to bother about whether you’re maintaining a Lutheran or a Calvinist tradition?

Q: So you see it as a ladder we have climbed so that it may be discarded afterwards?

RR: It’s a ladder that is covered with filth because of the marks of the governments that have called themselves Marxists. You have two reasons for forgetting it. First, it’s become a distraction. Second, it’s acquired a bad name.

Indeed. I’m ready to get off the “train of history.”

[p. 36] Q: …your writing seems directed toward those who are, relatively speaking, powerful. …the concern is with how the powerful should act toward the less powerful. In contrast, a lot of leftist cultural studies work seems to write from the other side of the equation — writing in solidarity with the less powerful. …it seems to result in a different kind of politics. [...] Is it possible to write with that kind of solidarity, or does it seem like a false kind of solidarity?

RR: Roosevelt said early in his first administration that, “If I were working for an hourly wage, I would join a labor union.” This was a very important moment in the history of the labor movement. Was he speaking from the side of the less powerful? No. I could say to the janitors at the University of Virginia, for God’s sake join a union. Would that be speaking from their side? No. But it’s good advice anyway, even if it can be viewed as condescending.

This whole idea of solidarity with the oppressed on the part of the bourgeois intellectual strikes me as one of the many phony problems that we inherited from Marxism. John Stuart Mill didn’t worry about whether he was solid with the women or the workers—he just gave his views. The Marxist trope of “Jones is just a bourgeois intellectual” never did anybody any good. It isn’t something anybody should spend their time worrying about.

Q: …you make an unabashed defense of top-down initiatives. But what about the idea that all knowledges are partial, imminent knowledges, and that the things you think should be done are in part a product of where you’re speaking from?

RR: …Everybody’s always taken this for granted. The first thing you say when you hear a political speech is something like “well, that’s what it looks like to him.” But I can’t see that Foucault or anybody else has given us new insight into the tediously familiar fact that your views are usually a product of your circumstances.

Q: How can one acknowledge this point in one’s writing and still say something useful, though?

RR: Why bother? Why not let my audience acknowledge it for me? Everybody knows that I’m an overpaid, privileged humanities professor. They knew it before they read my stuff. Why should I bother with self-flagellation?

I think there’s something useful to dropping “cultural” judgements of “bourgeois”/privileged, middle-class type folk. The important thing should be, are they aware of their various privilege (class, feminist, etc.), do they honor the values of liberty, equality and fraternity, or are they blind? Who cares of rich folk buy expensive wines and enjoy elitist movies, or whatever it is that bothers you about them, so long as they’re socially aware and supporting helpful policies, that sort of thing?

That said, shouldn’t one’s views correspond somewhat to one’s actions? Meaning, if you purport to hold egalitarian, fraternistic values, you shouldn’t do things that work against them. Not it’s always easy to make the right choices.

Also, it seems a little like jumping the gun to declare everyone is “tediously familiar” with the idea that your views are a product of your circumstances. It often seems to me that 30-51% of Americans believe their views are very much obvious, normal and expected, and if you don’t share them there’s something wrong with you.

But I also feel there’s something to his suggestion that you just speak your views and don’t waste too much time worrying about where they come from. If you think they’re good and useful, it’s almost a matter of respect to treat others as capable of understanding them, and just explain what seems to be misunderstood.

[p. 39] Q: There’s a tension between different sides of the left concerning what we should do in the age of global capitalism: do you keep borders open, or do you close them?

RR: Right. Do you save the working classes of the advanced old democracies by protectionism, or do you give up protectionism for the sake of the Third World? Do you try to keep the standard of living in the old democracies up in order to prevent a right-wing populist, fascist movement in the USA, or do you try to re-distribute the wealth across national borders? You probably can’t do both. I wish I knew how to resolve the dilemma, but I don’t.

When I was a kid, I knew just what I would do in foreign and domestic policy if I were President. Nowadays I don’t. I think this is a fairly widespread phenomenon. Forty years ago, you could believe that the U.S., through the U.N., could export democracy, squeeze the evil empire to death, create industrialization, and promote a rising standard of living throughout the world. I don’t believe that anymore. It can’t be done. How do you save the Asian economies without giving all the money to American and Japanese banks? I have no idea. Or consider Mexico. We in effect ruined the Mexican middle class by paying off American banks. There ought to be a way to avoid this, but I don’t know what it is.

Well, if you read other Rorty and his love of the enlightenment ideals of freedom, equality and fraternity, of ironists who are aware of how contingent their selves are, and have a sense of sympathy for their fellow humans… If you read his marriage of post-modernism with enlightenment values, and believe in those values and that ironism yourself, it seems to me there’s a clear solution.

The only pragmatic, and moral, solution, is to open borders, reduce barriers, and do your best to grapple with right-wing populist movements. You have to trust your ideals. You have to trust that if you help the rest of the world attain some of that freedom and equality, and education and democracy, that they will in turn help you and others as needed.

Rorty strikes me as someone worth listening to, who, however, is situated in an America where the left has lost its faith in “America” as a force for those enlightenment values. He’s tried to argue some of that faith back, at a time when it seems it’s starting to be better to argue for global efforts rather than many nation-specific efforts. But I suppose there’s reason for both, still – for reform and progress within nations, as well as between, and outside of them.

[p. 46] RR: …I think of the intellectual left as dominated by the notion that we need a theoretical understanding of our historical situa-tion, a social theory which reveals the keys to the future development, and a strategy which integrates everything with everything. I just don’t see the point. I don’t see why there shouldn’t be sixteen initiatives, each of which in one way or another might relieve some suffering, and no overall theoretical integration.

Q: It might be that some of this thinking is that the left isn’t quite sure what those initiatives should be, and that while the theorizing may occasionally become a fetish, it can also be a way of stepping back to one remove from the situation in order to get a clearer view, so we can then see what the more specific initiatives should be.

RR: It never worked before. Why should it work now?

Q: But what about the Marxist insight of taking a step back from the economy and saying, the economy in a big way works this way, thus our specific local practices should be unionizing the workers and organizing them.

RR: It didn’t take Marx for that. Cobbet knew that, I’m not sure that the Roman plebes didn’t know that. I think the idea that Marx burst upon an astonished world with the thought that the rich were ripping off the poor is weird.

Q: But isn’t it more than just the rich ripping off the poor? It’s that it’s being done in a certain way, so to stop it, we’re going to have to address the certain way it’s happening.

RR: But he didn’t address it. He said that nothing could change without a total revolution… The rhetoric was entirely one of “No piecemeal solutions.” The left got hooked on this no piecemeal solutions idea… But most of the good has been done by piecemeal initiatives that came out of left field. Stonewall came out of left field. Selma came out of left field.

…Most of the good is done by opportunistic moral entrepreneurs… Later on the academic moralists and social theorists come along and tie everything up in a neat package. But this latter activity usually doesn’t lead to political results.

I’m not sure I agree completely with this, but I think I basically do. Most of the best things humans do seem to come from trying to solve specific, piecemeal problems. That said, I consistently feel that there’s “something correct” about criticisms of things like “capitalism” or “state power” that place these in models containing systemic faults. But, short of bloody, tragic revolution, there doesn’t seem to be a solution aside from gradual, piecemeal solving of specific human problems. Sometimes tweaking the existing society, sometimes perhaps creating a new one out of the shell of the old.

From the preface to a conversation with Richard Rorty (A pragmatist philosopher who argues basically that “Truth” is just the description of the world which most people agree on as the most useful at the moment, and who also is a big fan of liberty, equality and fraternity as the best moral guides we have):

The sort of intellectual Rorty prefers, then, is one who makes herself familiar with as many vocabularies and language games as possible by acquainting herself with as many novels and ethnographies as she can get her hands on. In doing so, this intellectual becomes an “ironist” about her own vocabulary, recognizing it as a contingent product of the time and place in which she was born. Furthermore, Rorty asserts, in his desired post-metaphysical culture, “novels and ethnographies which sensitize one to the pain of those who do not speak our language must do the job which demonstrations of a common human nature were supposed to do.”

That is, the job of building human solidarity. Hence [...] one doesn’t refute [a] world-view; one offers a redescription of the world which makes their description look untenable. [...] the properly ironist intellectual, with her wide range of acquaintance, will have read too many novels and ethnographies to fall for a vocabulary which imagines itself to have some privileged relationship to Truth, and which ignores the pain of others.

[For lack of a better word, I'll adopt Rorty's "ironist" as a description of a sort of worldly outlook on life embracing such humanist values and goals as the old "liberté, égalité, fraternité."]

I sometimes think about the best ways for parents, or society, to nurture and sustain this sort of worldview in children/new members. There doesn’t seem to be any way short of constant dialog, and encouraging the sort of “widely read” person as an ideal.

I am thinking of this as I read Yes Means Yes and idly think of my nieces and nephews and how it sometimes seems everyone entering adolescence should be exposed to books like these, and frank talk, and perhaps be a bit more enlightened and empowered and free than we were given the opportunity to be.

Personally, I feel I spent a lot of time in life looking just for what felt best to me, and surrounding myself with that. This may tie in to general cultural beliefs that there is one Right way “out there somewhere” and that it’s good to look for that, rather than just seeking out a lot of different ways to become acquainted with them. It could also just be that most humans tend to stick to what’s comfortable unless pressured.

And I’m losing track of my thoughts now so I’ll just trail off and say “food for thought” or something and perhaps revisit notions of “nurturing an ironist appetite as opposed to Truth-seeking” at a later date.

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.

TL;DR version: “Truth” is beyond the ken of human experience; we just tell stories and do the best we can. To me, some definition of adulthood should include awareness of life as consisting largely of a number of scripts, and a realization that we can write our own. Connoisseurship of wine is an example: we seek to learn a sense of taste, as described by experts, and perhaps eventually learn it’s all made up, and that we can make up our own sense of taste of what we like, or more accurately, imagine ourselves liking. Also, the distinction between “philosophy” and “the rest of culture” needs to die, and I love anthropology. OK, that’s the short version, now on to the full, boring, not-greatly-edited text.

—

In The Accidental Connoisseur, Lawrence Osborne writes at one point of a winemaker who describes the modern world as an acceleration, that we are like children without patience, with childish appetites. Hence, for example, the proliferation of screw-tops for wine bottles. Osborne asks, is the search for taste a search for adulthood? In fact, a general theme of the book might be the question of whether connoisseurship (in anything) is one of the markers of adulthood.

This winemaker also says, “too much wine refers not to where it came from, but where it wants to be. See the difference?” For me, this relates to my sense of my own maturity over time, as I’ve learned I live too often in future, imagined moments, rather than being present where I actually am. I desire to to challenge myself to think less of some future “when I’ll be who I want to be,” but instead to think, “if I were in that imagined place and time, what would I be doing?” and then say, “Why not just do it now?”

At the same time, there’s something to be said for children playing at being adults, being too serious and not thinking enough of “what might be.” Perhaps losing the positive aspects of childhood: playfulness, a cheerful unattachment to tradition, things like that. As in wine, many of its traditions are relatively young and were brought about by almost revolutionary change.

Moving on…

I recently watched The Limey, and Cleo from 5 to 7, and Breathless. All make use of clever editing to cut up what would otherwise be perceived as “continuous” scenes. The Limey goes particularly far, overlaying audio from one scene on visuals from another, often disassociating people and events from linear time completely. For me each film, especially the first two, delightfully represent a truth about how we experience reality: how our memories are cut-up pastiches of feelings and moments, informing our choices with non-linear irrationality. Our experience of life is not continuous, any more than a film is not composed of still pictures viewed in rapid succession. And we make ourselves up as we go along.

Also…

I am reading some Richard Rorty, whose contribution to philosophy extends the work of the likes of Nietsche, Foucault, and Dewey. He basically argues a so-called “relativistic” view of reality, my reading being that, sure, there’s a real world out there, but we are a part of it and can only tell our stories about it. He exhorts us to “take care of freedom, and truth will take care of itself.” He even suggests that pragmatist, non-Platonic thinkers need to reject even the language of Platonic dualism and invent a whole new language to communicate their ideas, for reasons reminding me of George Lakoff and the concept of frames, but moreso reminding me of the next thing…

Which is…

Kristina’s anthropology studies are reminding me of E. E. Evans-Pritchard and the early British anthropologists. He argued that anthropology should be placed in the humanities, rather than the natural sciences, and argued that the main issue facing anthropologists was one of translation – finding a way to translate one’s own thoughts into the world of another culture and thus manage to come to understand it, and then to translate this understanding back so as to explain it to people of one’s own culture. And this strikes me as exactly correct, and in fact, strangely resonant on a personal level as I’ve often felt myself drawn to figuring out how other people understand the world, and the challenge of trying to use that understanding to communicate about my understanding, or even someone else’s. But I digress, and grow incoherent.

I have recently been discovering how wedded I have always been to ideas of hard science and rationality. I was so because I felt there were definitely perfect choices. Best choices. And hard facts about reality. There’s a current of American culture, and geek culture, which is definitely in love with this. Reason! Objectivity! Etc.

Well, for some things, there kinda are “bests” and “truths,” etc., and we can get some sense of them over time. I believe there is definitely a “true” reality… but we’re all embedded in it, and it’s bigger than all of us, and the best we can do is illuminate everything as best we can, and for many things the scientific method is the best tool. But it’s a means to an end: to aid in better decision-making and to better engineer our world. In fact, why do we do anything at all except with the aim of improving ourselves and our institutions such that our descendants will be still better able to trust and cooperate, and will be more decent, happy people than we ourselves have managed to be?

This is Rorty’s argument: science not as an end, but as one means amongst many to the great ends of humanity, which begins and ends with trust, social cooperation, and social hope.

I begin to find myself drawn even more to social & cultural anthropology – the only field that consciously uses subjective narrative to unravel understanding of different peoples’ experiences and existences, and, well, simply, describe humanity and what it is to be human. It’s practically a “non-fiction literary discipline,” an extension of the humanities that keeps us informed as to who we are, constantly telling us an absolutely liberating truth: we can be who and what we want to be. We can choose our own culture, write our own story.

A screw-top might preserve the wine better, but perhaps experience tells us we just don’t care. Uncorking a bottle might be uniquely pleasurable.

And then what ultimately interests me: how do you teach each new generation that it’s all just scripts and they can do what they want? While maintaining a reasonably stable, free, egalitarian society, itself made up of scripts?

Rorty, in discussing “our chances of achieving a democratic utopia,” writes, “For various reasons [...] I think these chances are pretty dim. But I do not think that is a reason to change our political goal. There is no more worthy project at hand; we have nothing better to do with our lives.”

Too right!

And, not unrelated, as Eddie Argos says, “Pop music transmits all of our culture’s most valued ideals from one generation to the next; let’s make sure we get it right. Vive le Resistance!”