The Predictor of Trumpism: Richard Rorty

The Predictor of Trumpism? Richard Rorty (1931-2007)

The US philosopher Richard Rorty achieved a species of  posthumous and retrospective fame, outside of academic circles, by “prediciting”, in 1998, the advent of Trumpisim. 

In Rorty’s view, the left-wing tradition in the US had swerved away from the dirty-hands business of practical politics, attentive to the political and economic needs of the blue collar classes. What the left had swerved towards was an academic-inspired tendency to “give cultural politics preference over real politics, and to mock the very idea that democratic institutions might once again be made to serve social justice.”

Because of this retreat from “real politics”, leaving the field to globalisation and finance, Rorty warned: “something will crack.. the nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed [in terms of security and wages] and start looking for a strongman to vote for – someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureuacrats, tricky lawyers, overpriced bond salesmen and postmodern professors will no longer be calling the shots”.

(One might say now, mid December 2019, that his prediction was also good for the UK…)

Rorty also has another claim to prescience, of a sort. In philosophy circles he is notorious for denying, in a very postmodern professorial way, the concept of Truth, in the sense of there being accessible to us a Reality that conclusively validates our knowledge. Rorty claims that what is accepted as “truth” at any one time or in any one area of human activity is no more than a contingent consensus (or very often an imposed doctrine).

It is a fruitful approach, derived from Nietzsche., at least when considering the history of ideas. Religious people suppose that there is a supreme reality, revealed in sacred texts. Clerics and scholars, and political leaders, for that matter, have ferociously and often lethally debated the proper truths of their religion; whilst all the while, of course, another set of religionists quarrel over another set of truths underwritten by their infallible revelations.

The “truth” about the divinity of Christ, on a Rortian reading, is a question to be decided by Christian scholars and believers. It is not a question which has much purchase outside that community..

Even in more earthly matters, Rorty can find support. Science changes or rejects theories of reality over the centuries. Consensus forms round a “truth”, only for it to be abandoned later. Think of many areas of modern science: physics, astrophysics, climate change. Any notion of absolute truth is perhaps beyond our grasp, even though, as Rorty concedes, we may progressively have better and better “warrant” for our beliefs (Rorty says we avoid descent into relativism, where anybody’s truth is as good as any other’s, by paying attention to good arguments and best evidence – even in political and social matters, where some arrangements promote more human happiness and flourishing than others).

Like many radical theorists, jealously guarding their pet, Rorty may stretch too far, indulging sometimes in mere redescription:

“[The Rortian] pragmatist ..says ‘talking about positrons gets us what we want.. The realist.. says: ‘there really are positrons”.

There is the often-cited example of good maps, which accurately chart land and oceans, in the cause of greater safety and accuracy. Are they not an example that goes beyond contingent consensus to a level where theory does indeed map reality? And one may hope that aeronautical engineers have mastered the realities that allow machines to fly. (Rorty rather feebly dismissed such counter-examples as “trivial”.)

These interesting speculations apart, can Rorty be considered to be the parent of the notion of “post-truth” in today’s cultural and political discourse? The notion that ideas are not answerable to any tribunal of objective truth, but, in the notorious words of Karl Rove, the powerful and influential can “create [their] own reality”?

I think that it is best to be careful about an easy connection between Rorty’s ideas and “post-truth”. The latter is more about indifference to truth, the cynical acceptance and exploitation of lies and half-truths, banking on the matching cynicism, or indifference, or distrust, of the political audience. Rorty, as I have noted, believed in good argument and good evidence, even if he rejected “truth” in any absolute, unvarying sense. 

This is a world away from the shamelessness of modern politics.

Dec 2019