Richard Rorty, Cancel Culture, Political Fallibilism, and Achieving Our Country

Richard Rorty’s 1998 book Achieving Our Country enjoyed a burst of attention after the 2016 elections. As law professor Lisa Kerr first observed, Rorty seemed to predict Donald Trump’s victory. He wrote that unless systematic economic inequality is addressed, people

… will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for—someone willing to assure them that, once elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots.

Rorty also predicted some of what has happened since:

One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past forty years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion.

Passages like these obviously get one’s attention. They certainly get my students’ attention. But after assigning this book a couple times over the last few years I’ve also realized that there’s more to it than Rorty’s Cassandra-like powers of prognostication. He also makes several trenchant points about nurturing a democratic community that are just as important as we chart a course for the future. Importantly, these points hold regardless of our political orientation.

This claim may seem surprising, because Achieving Our Country is written as a somewhat nostalgic defense of the “reformist” Left against the cultural tactics of what Rorty calls the “revolutionary” Left. This could lead one to think that his main audience is frustrated liberals, and to some extent that’s true. After all, he expects us to share his visceral horror of a right-wing strongman coming to power. But from another perspective Rorty’s comments are aimed at anyone concerned with the current state of American political discourse, right or left. In other words, they’re aimed at all of us, even those we might fiercely disagree with.

That’s important because one of Rorty’s points is about fallibilism. How should we respond to the mistakes that we and others will inevitably make? Some of these mistakes will be minor but some will be more serious. To be a moral being, Rorty claims, is for there to be “some acts we believe we ought to die rather than commit. … to be a moral agent is to be unable to imagine living with oneself after committing these acts.” (Here and elsewhere, Rorty credits Dewey with this idea, though I’m not sure Dewey actually says this. It’s fair to give Rorty the credit.)

What, then, are our options? Rorty identifies three: “suicide, a life of bottomless self-disgust, and an attempt to live so as never to do such a thing again.” He recommends the third for pragmatic reasons. The first two options, he argues, prevent us from regaining our self-respect. Without self-respect we will be less effective agents and less able to make things right. If we want to make things right, then we need to choose the third option. Significantly, this holds not just for us as individuals but also for us as citizens. Without the ability to take pride in our nation’s accomplishments—despite also facing up to its crushing failures and disappointments—we risk losing the will to, in James Baldwin’s words, “achieve our country and change the history of the world.”

Rorty is certainly right that a commitment to personal redemption is preferable to suicide or bottomless self-loathing. But there are three other points that deserve to be mentioned.

First, we shouldn’t take Rorty completely literally. While some actions are so heinous or evil or vile that death might be preferable, we should not overlook a range of lesser actions. Some of these might be quite trivial: e.g., I might say I’d rather die than mix plaids or spend Thanksgiving with my crazy uncle. But I’m being metaphorical, not literal. Between the completely literal and the completely metaphorical are all the interesting cases: deep commitments—albeit not to the point of death—that give shape to our moral lives, that help define us as moral beings, and that we might conceivably violate, perhaps in a moment of moral cowardice or when a situation takes us by surprise. Somewhere between mixing plaids and committing cold-blooded murder are the moral failures that still have the power to haunt and shame us. I read Rorty as talking about these cases too, perhaps when we let a classroom discussion get out of hand or fail to stand up for, or stand up to, one of our colleagues. In these cases, too, we should try “to live so as never to do such a thing again.” Rorty’s pragmatic point is that our moral commitments become real at the point of action.

But, second, we should apply this attitude not just to ourselves but to others as well. After all, we’re not the only ones who make mistakes, or periodically fail to live up to our best intentions and sincere commitments—or may even have bad intentions and appalling commitments. When others fall short in these ways, it may sometimes be tempting to wish them “a life of bottomless self-disgust” or even some kind of social death. (This might be the impulse behind “cancel culture.”) But Rorty is clear on this point: Just as these attitudes, when self-directed, hamper our own ability to redeem ourselves through action, they can have the same effect when directed at others. Restricting people’s actions can, in some situations, be the point: sometimes there just aren’t “very fine people on both sides.” But it can’t always be the point because, as Rorty suggests, we live in a democracy, democracies require compromise, and compromise requires that we view others as agents with whom we can work. “An urge for purity” is something we are “better off without” because “in democratic countries you get things done by … form[ing] alliances with groups about whom you have grave doubts.” Or, as José Medina has written in his essay on William James, truth, and solidarity, “becoming aware of the interdependences that compose our life is crucial for maintaining an epistemically and politically responsible agency in the multicultural societies and the globalized world of the twenty-first century.”

Third, we should recognize that Rorty’s fallibilism runs deep. While he focuses on shameful acts—acts that we know we should not commit and that we commit in moments of fallible weakness or confusion—he should also speak of acts that we might realize, on reflection, weren’t so bad after all. Not every mortal sin is really mortal, and some aren’t even sins. Take, for example, Megan Phelps-Roper, a former spokesperson for the Westboro Baptist Church who, as Michelle Moody-Adams notes, came to the realization that, in fact, God does not hate gays, lesbians, Jews, veterans, famous celebrities, and many politicians. Despite the fear, ostracism, and sense of dislocation, Phelps-Roper cut ties with her family’s church and now writes about the value of empathy and the dangers of extremism. For her, being a moral agent meant questioning and ultimately rejecting her deepest, self-defining moral beliefs. This might also remind us of Wesleyan University President Michael Roth’s observation in his 2019 book Safe Enough Spaces that a main reason colleges need to foster “safe enough spaces” is so that people can actually change their minds.

There is of course a flip-side that should give us some pause. As Rorty says elsewhere, we don’t want to be so open-minded that our brains fall out. Likewise, we shouldn’t sacrifice our moral commitments nonchalantly. Small misdeeds have a way of snowballing into larger ones (a sort of moral death by a thousand cuts) and can sweep away the hard-earned progress—especially the decrease in “socially accepted sadism”—that Rorty rightly sees as a source of American pride. Fallibilism doesn’t mean that we take our commitments less seriously, nor does it mean that we can excuse our lapses just this once.

So, while Rorty deserves some credit for predicting the 2016 election, I think the real value of Achieving Our Country is in how it sets a path forward. The project of achieving our country is as essential now as it was in 1998, or in 1963 when Baldwin coined the phrase. As Rorty observes, it requires that we address both the economic inequality and the non-economic sources of humiliation and sadism that separate Americans. In addition, it requires that we embrace fallibilism so that we can continue to act despite our flaws, act in concert, and work toward compromise with others. That is how we achieve a country that is, broadly and inclusively, ours.

Photo: On March 7, 2020, US Rep. John Lewis and US Sen. Kamala Harris lead a procession over the Edmund Pettus Bridge between Selma and Montgomery, Alabama, on the 55th anniversary of the Selma to Montgomery protest marches.

John Capps

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John Capps is Professor of Philosophy at Rochester Institute of Technology. His main areas of research are Pragmatism (especially Dewey), epistemology (especially theories of truth and justification), and the history of 20th century Anglo-American philosophy. He and colleagues have also been working on developing “discussion-intensive” courses across the RIT philosophy curriculum.