[MD] Neopragmatism isn't pragmatic.

[david buchanan]

Fellow MOQers:

Ant said:
.., a wider point about Rorty’s type of neo-linguistic analysis that 
particularly disturbs me is that it has largely hijacked the progressive 
pragmatic project of John Dewey.  Remember that Rorty was taught and 
strongly influenced by Richard McKeon towards Aristotle and Plato in the 
late 1950s rather than the work of Dewey (McKeon's predecessor at University 
of Chicago).  If one examines the history of Chicago University this move 
from the pragmatism of Dewey towards McKeon’s “safer” concerns with 
Aristotle and Plato occurred in the 1950s with the cold war.  This process 
(which is alarmingly echoed in Matt Kundert’s non-partisan writing on MOQ 
Discuss) was partly due to conservative concerns in removing radical 
politics from American colleges:

dmb says:
I'm glad you raised the issue of politics. It seems that the battle between 
liberalism and conservatism has played a large role throughout the entire 
history of pragmatism and continues even as we speak. James, for example, 
was concerned about the conservative, Spencerian social Darwinism among his 
victorian contemporaries. On the idealist side, there was a battle between 
right and left Hegalians. Pragmatism was born in a climate where the 
Victorian social values were just starting to crumble. Mark Twain wasn't the 
only post-victorian intellectual in that era. Its interesting to note that 
the University of Chicago was founded by Rockefeller, the quintessential 
victorian man. Dewey's giant influence there is a little ironic in that 
light and the cold war return of conservatism could almost be seen as a 
return to its origins. The neoconservatives that hold so much sway in the 
present administration can be traced to this period. A book from my old 
college days, THE CONSERVATIVE INTELLECTUAL MOVEMENT IN AMERICA SINCE 1945, 
is very explicit about the thinkers and ideas opposed by conservatism. John 
Dewey and pragmatism were chief among them. An entire chapter is devoted to 
the Straussians, which refers to Leo Struass, godfather of the 
Neoconservative movement. He was at the University of Chicago for nearly 20 
years, starting in 1949. (Perhaps he and McKeon were lovers.) Please keep in 
mind that this book is about conservatism from the conservative perspective, 
meaning the author isn't necessarily unfair or inaccurate, but George Nash 
most definately a conservative. I also happen to know that he's no fun at 
parties...

"The denial of everything transcending experience means inevitably ...the 
denial of truth. With the denial of objective truth there is no escape from 
the relativism of 'man is the measure of all things'." (quoting from 
Weaver's Ideas have Consequences, 40)

"The response to Weaver's audacious book was varie and sometimes venomous. 
'People seem to be for or against it violently,' he wrote to Donald 
Davidson. (Who would later join the staff on William F. Buckley's new 
conservative magazine, The National Review.) Paul Tillich, Reinhold Niebuhr, 
and John Crow Ransom praised it highly. ...another reviewer labeled him 'a 
propagandist for a return to the medieval papacy'In perhaps the most 
intemperate review, one critic denounced the book as a 'pompous fraud', 
'essentially evil', 'notorious', and part of a University of Chicago Press 
'chain of reaction'..." (41)

"On what basis could we erect a 'moral foundation for democracy?' By the 
secular, pragmatic, scientific intelligence personified by John Dewey, or by 
religous faith and the 'Great Tradition' of Western philosophy?" (42)

"The decline of old ways and values in the 1940s and 1950s could not, of 
course, be attributed solely to journals like the New Yorker. The relation 
between liberal ideologies and the emergent mass man was more complex than 
that. How had liberal errors become so pervasive? For many 'new 
conservative' intellectuals in the postwar decade, one solution to the 
puzzle lay in the widespread penetration of the American school system by 
the doctrine of the progressive education expoused by John Dewey.   One of 
the earliest examples of what became a minor genre of social criticism in 
the 1950s was Bell's "Crisis in Education". ...Although Bell mentioned John 
Dewey only rarely in his book, his antipathy to Dewey's ideas was obvious. 
Again and again, for example, he insisted on the necessity for religion and 
for religious educaton in the schools." (47)

Its interesting to notice how far back the right's antipathy for the 
so-called liberal media and public education goes, but more than that I want 
to draw attention to their emphasis on religion and the "Great Tradition". 
This, it seems to me, is basically a re-assertion of theism and 
essentialism. Dewey, by contrast, practically invented American Liberalism. 
He was involved in the founding of the American Civil Liberties Union and 
the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and was a 
friend to The Nation magazine on top of his role as leading pragmatist and 
public educator. Liberalism and pragmatism go together like peanut butter 
and jelly and always have. I'm not trying to draw uncrossable lines here, 
but I think its important for we MOQers to realize that there is a long 
history of conservative hostility toward pragmatism, both of which should be 
understood as representative aspects of a larger, fuller rivalry. Here Nash 
is quoting a 19th century French counterrevolutionary, Jospeh de Maistre to 
support postwar neoconservatism...

"Over the last two decades, authority, hierarchy, catholicism, aristocracy, 
tradition, absolutes, dogma, truths became related terms of onor and 
liberalism, naturalism, scientism, individualism, equalitarianism, progress, 
protestantism, pragmatism and personality became related terms of rejection 
and contempt." (57)

One issue that really pops out at me here is the issue of relativism. A lot 
of what Pirsig does in Lila can be seen as a defense of the "man is the 
measure of all things" doctrine and yet he wants to distance himself from 
relativism. He's rejecting theism and essentialism and realism, but without 
letting any of that make him into a relativist. In the MOQ, Quality "is the 
force that opposes capriciousness" (ZAMM 272) and everthing is an ethical 
activity (LILA 161)" More specifically, this concern with morals gives 
Pirsig the motivation to construtct the MOQ's rational and evolutionary 
moral system as a way to retain a form of classical pragmatism that didn't 
lead to relativism. You may recall Pirsig's complaints that there is no way 
to prevent the Nazis from using the pragmatism of William James, for example 
(LILA 364). This, finally, brings us back to the present, back to 
Hildebrand's book and back to the difference between Pirsig and Rorty. On 
page 167 he begins a section titled, "The Ethical Danger of Epistemological 
Relativism"...

"In RENEWING PHILOSOPHY, Putnam warns of the amoral turn he believes 
philosophy is taking; 'If the moral of deconstruction is that everything can 
be deconstructed, then deconstruction has no moral'. This ethical worry 
underscores Putnam's rejection of the Rortyan 'warrant' and the 
neopragmatism he builds atop it. If 'warrant' is without an epistemological 
anchor, then there is no evidence that warrant might not be used to support 
a loathsome set of values rather than a venerable set. Putnam writes, "It 
may be that we will behave better if we become Rortians - we may be more 
tolerant, less prone to fall for various varieties of religious intolerance 
and political totalitarianism. If that is what is at stake, the issue is 
momentous indeed. But a fascist could well agree with Rorty at a very 
abstract level - Mussolini, let us recall, supported pragmatism, claiming 
that it sanctions unthinking activism."

This is why Rorty's notion of truth, "agreement with one's cultural peers", 
is no better at preventing fascism than was the "cash value" notion of truth 
in the pragmatism in James. On top of the "reality check" we find in 
Pirsig's notion of truth, which demands agreement with experience, there is 
also the distinction between social level values and intellectual values as 
well as the fusion of ethics and science in the MOQ's general scheme. Again, 
the difference hinges on the distinctly different starting points used by 
Rorty and Pirsig, with the former starting in language and the latter 
starting with experience.

My point? Its important to realize that philosophy is NOT politically 
neutral. Be careful about which wagon you hitch yourself to so as to prevent 
your unwitting support for anti-pragmatic reactionaries.

Thanks for reading,
dmb

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