Extended Phenotype

I just finished Richard Rorty’s Philosophy and Social Hope (PaSH) and loved it. Finally, a nonessentialist philosopher who combines an understanding of the post-Darwinian natural sciences with a realistic yet hopeful view of human experience! I picked up PaSH after reading the first couple of chapters of Posner’s Law, Pragmatism, and Democracy (of which more in a later post), and Rorty’s Achieving Our Country.

Richard Rorty is a controversial figure, and in particular it’s easy to see how those trained in the analytic or Platonic tradition will be frustrated by what they will see as “relativism” in Rorty’s work. He attempts to address this concern in the book’s first essay, “Relativism: Finding and Making,” rather successfully in my view. The core of Rorty’s work is to discover the consequences for social life of dropping the notions of privileged truth and Aristotelian essentialism (1). That is, if what we perceive as “reality” is in large part a social construction, mediated by language and socially produced “common sense,” what happens to our inquiries into what it means to be human?

Rorty shares the preceding question with Continental “post-modernists” such as Foucault and Derrida, but he takes care to distinguish his own approach as deriving almost exclusively from a Deweyan pragmatism, backed by Darwinian natural science. In this way, his answer can be approximated by the following. If there is no privileged truth, experimentalism in our dealings with the world is our only epistemology. Experimentalism, and the pragmatism that motivates our experimentation, is equally valid to our ventures into the natural sciences and our efforts to build moral and political philosophy.

The only “catch” is that we will not find absolute principles by which we can ground ethical or moral theory, nor a means of determining the “best” way to organize political life. Instead, we must ground morality in experiments aimed at continually increasing the scope of our empathy and sympathetic action towards others. Said differently, morality consists of continually expanding the membership of the group we consider “ourselves,” and treating them accordingly. Democracy, in the Deweyan account of political life, is “not founded upon the nature of man or reason or reality but as a promising experiment engaged in by a particular herd of a particular species of animal — our species and our herd.” (2) Democracy is thus one way in which we expand our moral community; other means are surely both possible and necessary. I would nominate, for example, the concept of “rule of law” which forms part of the Enlightenment’s political legacy.

Such an account of democracy and political life is unlikely to satisfy those who, training in the Platonic and Kantian philosophical tradition, are looking for absolute definitions, moral absolutes, and historical certainties. Nor will it satisfy those who draw upon religion as their source for moral and political authority. Nevertheless, as a (former?) natural scientist trained in evolutionary biology and anthropology (3), I found Rorty a breath of fresh air. My studies in political and moral philosophy over the last several years have left me somewhat split intellectually, studying essentialist philosophy for purposes of characterizing and understanding the development of liberalism while maintaining a commitment to a non-essentialist, Darwinian and Deweyan account of human social life. Rorty serves as a unifying influence, which I find both satisfying and amazing. I can’t wait to read his Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity.

NOTES:

(1) Rorty’s project is consistent — and even continuous — with Darwinian evolutionary biology, which is the direct consequence of dropping Aristotelian essentialism in the examination of biological history.
(2) Rorty, PaSH, p. 119.
(3) Sociocultural anthropology has long absorbed the “postmodern” side of the anti-essentialist critique, but seems to have skipped the Deweyan pragmatist side of the critique, which would have led almost directly to a Darwinian evolutionary view, perhaps earlier than has been the case. In any case, I detect little influence from Dewey on my own subdiscipline, archaeology, except possibly via Wilfrid Sellars through Robert Dunnell (my former advisor).

Book three is Richard Hofstadter’s Age of Reform (hereafter, AoR), a classic history of the Populist and Progressive Eras in American politics. My purpose in picking up AoR was to learn more about Populism and Progressivism, and specifically, look for historical parallels between each movement and modern liberalism. I’m not quite ready to digest everything I learned into a review yet, but I do find it fascinating that populist movements in the late 19th century were a mix of “progressive” reformism and some fairly ugly nativism and racism. Essentially, people who were losing their prosperity and livelihoods to the industrializing economy were pissed off, and willing to blame the rich, foreigners, or minorities within the U.S. for their troubles. Throw in support from conservative religion in some regions, and Populism doesn’t look very different than conservatism in the Midwest and South.

Progressivism, on the other hand, seemed to originate in the industrializ(ed|ing) middle class, in a dissatisfaction with the corruption, inefficiency, and excessive greed displayed by giant industrial corporations, political “machines,” and what used to be called “plutocrats.” (Now, we call ’em Bush Pioneers…ok, bad joke). Progressivism was born in spite of prosperity, not because of hardship. Interestingly, the New Deal appears to grow out of a mix of each.

As I said, I’m not quite ready to draw conclusions about the relationship between populism, progressivism, and modern liberalism (but stay tuned); nevertheless, I do recommend AoR as a place to start reading about a crucial period in our democracy.

I’m keeping myself honest here. I read a stack of books towards the end of the year which spanned both late December and early January. So I’ll summarize the lot of ’em as “Book Two” and then move on.

Christopher Hitchens, Love, Poverty, and War: Hitchens’s latest collection of essays was surprisingly interesting, given that he’d excised most (but not all) of the Iraq material and focused instead on material prior to 9/11 on the themes of — surprise — love, poverty, and war. Here’s my deal with Hitchens. I love reading him. I often agree with him, he’s often incredibly perceptive, and he often jars my mind out of familiar ruts in the same way that Orwell was capable of (a capacity which Hitchens consciously cultivates, no doubt). I simply disagree with him about the wisdom of letting Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and the rest of their Merry Men run amok throughout the world in their neocon fantasy of spreading something they confuse with liberty at the point of a gun. If you ordinarily love Hitchens, I heartily recommend his latest. If you have the kind of relationship I have with Hitchens’s work, I recommend the book, along with a bottle of wine and box of antacids.

Bernard Lewis, The Crisis of Islam: don’t get me started. An excellent example of how the “Clash of Titans” (oops, civilizations) school of historical analysis can seem so superficially rational and scholarly. Seriously, I had to pick this up after reading Gilles Kepel’s fine book The War for Muslim Minds, which I recommend highly. Lewis, on the other hand, seems to have turned the breadth of a lifetime of scholarship into a laser-focus on proving that there’s one simple story playing itself out in the Muslim world today. There are numerous problems with Lewis’s recent work, among which is a lack of appreciation for the incredible diversity within “fundamentalist” Islam itself, ranging from the quietism of clerics like al-Sistani to the apocalyptic jihadism of Qutb. It is by no means a foregone conclusion how the struggle within Islam itself is going to play out, but one thing seems clear: if Americans listen to Lewis, Samuel Huntington, and liberal hawks like Paul Berman, Hitchens, and Peter Beinart, we may very well end up facing an Islam united behind the hardest of the hard-line. Kepel believes this is avoidable; Lewis less so. Sad to say, however, it is Lewis that lunches at the White House and gives lectures to Vice President Cheney.

Jasper Fforde, Something Rotten: A Thursday Next Mystery: OK, I’ll admit it, I was re-reading this over the holidays, along with the three previous Thursday Next novels. Hey, if you were reading Bernard Lewis over the holidays, you’d need some comfort and comic relief, too. What can I say…the man is a genius. The notion of a world where fiction needs to be policed from within in order to keep books from being subverted by evil masterminds is both wacky and sublime. If you love books, and love British humor, you’ll disappear inside Fforde’s four Thursday Next novels and emerge with a crooked smile and a warped mind. The only sad thing about the most recent novel, Something Rotten is the vague possibility that the series is wrapping up, given how many loose ends Fforde ties up. Say it isn’t so!