Michael Bérubé - American Airspace

The end of faith, part two

Last week I posted an excerpt from Sam Harris’s The End of Faith – an excerpt that I rather like. Harris’s aggressive secularism had a curious effect on me: I am so very sick and tired of Christians in the United States complaining that they are discriminated against, that their professions of faith are not permitted in the public sphere, that liberal “elites” do not give them their proper respect, et cetera, et cetera, that I felt a kind of guilty pleasure at Harris’s sweeping dismissals of most of the world’s religions.

And then I came to Harris’s chapter on philosophy, and his sweeping dismissal of American pragmatism:

The pragmatist’s basic premise is that, try as we might, the currency of our ideas cannot be placed on the gold standard of correspondence with reality as it is. To call a statement “true” is merely to praise it for how it functions in some area of discourse; it is not to say anything about how it relates to the universe at large. From the point of view of pragmatism, the notion that our beliefs might “correspond with reality” is absurd. . . .

If all of this seems rather academic, it might be interesting to note that Sayyid Qutb, Osama bin Laden’s favorite philosopher, felt that pragmatism would spell the death of American civilization. He thought that it would, in [Paul] Berman’s phrase, “undermine America’s ability to fend off its enemies.” There may be some truth to this assertion. Pragmatism, when civilizations come clashing, does not appear likely to be very pragmatic. To lose the conviction that you can actually be right – about anything – seems a recipe for the End of Days chaos envisioned by Yeats: when “the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” I believe that relativism and pragmatism have already done much to muddle our thinking on a variety of subjects, many of which have more than a passing relevance to the survival of civilization.

In philosophical terms, then, pragmatism can be directly opposed to realism. For the realist, our statements about the world will be “true” or “false” not merely in virtue of how they function amid the welter of our other beliefs, or with reference to any culture-bound criteria, but because reality simply is a certain way, independent of our thoughts. Realists believe that there are truths about the world that may exceed our capacity to know about them; there are facts of the matter whether or not we can bring such facts into view. To be an ethical realist is to believe that in ethics, as in physics, there are truths waiting to be discovered – and thus we can be right or wrong in our beliefs about them.

This, folks, is a simply stupefying passage. It would be one thing to come across it in a book that called for a return to the Eternal Verities and the restoration of respect for figures of authority; it is quite another to read it in a book that demands that we should have no beliefs of any kind for which we do not have empirical evidence. Look at that last sentence again: moral philosophy is to be construed as analogous to physics, and philosophers are the people who discover the objectively true principles of the moral universe (where “objectively true” means “existing independently of human perception and understanding”). In effect, Harris’s book demands that we get rid of all religious beliefs . . . and hand ultimate interpretive authority in moral matters over to the philosopher-kings who will “discover” the way morality “really” operates out there in the universe.

Especially fulsome is Harris’s suggestion that we should abandon the philosophical tradition that runs from John Dewey to Richard Rorty because Sayyid Qutb may have been right to consider it degenerate. I simply don’t see how this counts as a legitimate form of argument; after all, Islamists have disdain for any number of features of contemporary American life, and one does not see secularists of Harris’s stripe rushing to condemn homosexuality, clean-shaven men, and women wearing tank tops. It seems very strange that Harris would find “some truth” in Qutb’s understanding of American culture in this one respect, especially since pragmatism – in the words of its proponents, not the words of its enemies – represents nothing more or less than an attempt to secularize philosophy, to insist that moral principles are artifacts of our own invention, and not “discoveries” of previously unuttered statements floating around in the ether or buried deep within the Earth’s crust.

Once again, pragmatism is not relativism, and pragmatists are not barred from claiming that they are right about “anything.” Pragmatists simply insist that there is no antecedent, final goal toward which our moral principles are moving, and no moral principles that exist independently of all human perception. For some reason, many professional philosophers like to believe that we must consider philosophy as analogous to physics, and that we ordinary folk must agree with them that they are searching not merely for moral propositions that might prove to be both persuasive and beneficial to humankind – injunctions against slavery or torture, perhaps, both of which strike me as good ideas – but in fact for Platonic Ideas that are lying out there somewhere waiting to be discovered. I can understand why many professional philosophers would want to believe this, but I cannot understand why any one of them would propose this conception of Truth as an antidote to, of all things, religious fundamentalism.

And what happens to the person who believes that he has not merely invented a potentially persuasive and beneficial proposition, but, rather, discovered an objectively true fact about the moral universe? How does he deal with people who disagree with his interpretation of what is “really” true in the world? Does he understand them as people with competing plausible interpretations of what is really true, people who must be persuaded otherwise by means of discourse, or as people who are simply possessed by Error and who cannot be considered moral agents at all?

It’s worth remembering that one of the reasons Richard Rorty espouses Deweyan pragmatism is that he thinks of it as a check against precisely the kind of philosophical hubris Harris displays ~~here~~ in The End of Faith. As Rorty writes in “Trotsky and the Wild Orchids”:

Despite my relatively early disillusionment with Platonism, I am very glad that I spent all those years reading philosophy books. For I learned something that still seems very important: to distrust the intellectual snobbery that originally led me to read them. If I had not read all those books, I might never have been able to stop looking for what Derrida calls “a full presence beyond the reach of play,” for a luminous synoptic vision.

By now I am pretty sure that looking for such a presence and a 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 that 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.

Nothing in Rorty’s conception of pragmatism prevents one from condemning slavery or criticizing religious fundamentalism. And everything about this conception of pragmatism allows one to suggest that Harris’s espousal of “realism” is a recipe for moral intolerance and philosophical arrogance.

OK, I’m off to Washington, D.C. for a couple of days. Might blog, might not. If I happen to discover any universally true moral principles along the way, I’ll be sure to let you know.

UPDATE: For those of you who might be interested in such things, I published a pragmatist defense of disability rights/ citizenship rights a couple of years ago in Dissent, and it looks something like this.

Posted by on 04/25 at 09:49 AM

I felt a kind of guilty pleasure at Harris’s sweeping dismissals of most of the world’s religions.

And then I came to Harris’s chapter on philosophy, and his sweeping dismissal of American pragmatism

Reminiscent of the venerable churchgoing lady who sat in the first row on the young new minister’s first day:

He began by denouncing the evils of alcohol, and was exhorted by the lady: “Preach, man, preach! Tell it to them!”

Encouraged, he went on to condemn the iniquity of cigarette-smoking, to her loud praise: “Tell those sinners, preacher!”

On a roll now, he thundered against the takers of snuff. At which the old lady folded her arms, sniffed dismissively, and muttered to her companion, “Aw now, see, he done quit preachin’ and gone to meddlin’.”

Posted by Anderson on 04/25 at 11:05 AM
That’s so weird - because I read a lot of the W. James stuff as an attempt to keep religious thought relevant but not radicalized in the modern era, a strain of thought Harris might appreciate on some level.

I do like the idea of a joke starting “So Sayyid Qutb and Richard Rorty walk into a bar...”

potential punchline: “No, I said philosophy as a kind of writing!”

Posted by on 04/25 at 11:34 AM
Sad to say, Harris is representative of an significant strain of Anglo-American philosophy. Not all analytic philosophers think like this, but many do. This strain has blunted the critical moment of philosophical thinking, except for criticizing an article in the most recent issue of Analysis. They take for granted notions like “empirical,” “natural,” “physical,” and “descriptive” (all concepts central to one or another version of project of reductive realism like Harris’) and when asked to give clear definitions of them, or to give criteria by which their proper application can be guided, come up short. Many of the writings from the naturalist-physicalist-realist axis have a definite appearance of being mystical texts in which “descriptive” or “physical” plays the role of a kind of mantra, of being confessions of faith in naturalism, or theological attempts to give rational grounding to a given set of dogmas. Naturalism is the theology of analytic philosophers. So perhaps there is a subterranean link between Harris and Sayyid Qutb. It seems that aside from rejecting pragmatism (and let’s face it, the real boogeyman here, relativism), they reject unconditional critical thought. (I know, that’s perhaps too harsh. Of course, they have their dogma’s—don’t we all?)
To the credit of Anglo-American philosophy there are a number of critics (indirect and direct) other than pragmatists of this way of thinking, from Kantian constructivists like Korsgaard to quasi-Aristotelians like McDowell, as well as a number of critics that take on the physicalist’s use of concepts like “the physical” directly. What I find disturbing about Harris’ tribe is their dominance in Anglo-American philosophy and their sense of being on a mission to support a certain “programme” of naturalism and scientism. Criticism of naturalism and realism is painted as being “unprofessional” and “soft-minded.”
I think Harris would respond to your concerns that realism results, or could result, in moral intolerance by saying that the idea that there is something out there that makes our moral beliefs true or false and its “beyond” our beliefs somehow, supports a falliblistic attitude towards our own beliefs. It could go that way in the case of some persons; realism might make others intolerant. I think this has more to do with the moral psychology of the person involved than the metaphysical theses they tacitly hold or explicitly espouse.
When I read thinks like Harris’ comments I am reminded of Geertz’s remark about people who think that “reality is going to go away unless we believe very hard in it.”

Posted by on 04/25 at 12:09 PM
Michael,

“Once again, pragmatism is not relativism, and pragmatists are not barred from claiming that they are right about ‘anything.’”

So now that the new Pope takes it upon himself to go after relativism you put it up against pragmatism like a whipped dog.

Which relativists, not subjectivists, claim we cannot be right about anything?

Posted by on 04/25 at 12:20 PM
Michael,

I read your initial blog regarding the Harris book and actually went to pick it up this weekend. However, as I thumbed through it, I had the uncomfortable suspicion that this work is merely another attempt at usurping one “religion” for another. There is a saying in Spanish, “Un clavo saca el otro” which means “one nail pulls another.” Regarding morailty, it appears Harris is looking for another substitute. Be that as it may, a nail is just a nail and we can change philosophical or religious abstractions as guides for acceptable behavior forever but the problem is not the ideology, its the “human factor” that perverts and distorts. The problem lies in interpretation. Consequently, it is easy to understand, particularly regarding religion, that more people have been killed on this planet in the name of “God” than for any other reason. The root problem, at least to me, appears to be hatred, fear of change and moreover, reaction to percieved threats to such changes with vehemence and violence.

Regardless of whatever major religion that exists on this planet, I would venture the guess that tolerance is a major component. Curiously enough, tolerance becomes the first ballast ejected from the spiritual balloon for fundamentalists as they seek to impose their particular brand of religion on humanity.

I appreciate Harris indictment of fundamentalism but I am not yet ready to throw the religious baby out with the bath water as it were. My fear is that, as a society, we are apt to pursue agendas that best serve our particular interests regardless of how such interests may carry incidental damages (that could range from the innocuous to life threatening) for people who are not part of our agenda (just ask any Iraqi what they think about “smart bombs").

Regarding elimination of religion; I know sugar can kill but I just dont like the taste of saccharin. Moreover, adopting Harris’ mentality to me, seems akin to going into a vegetarian restaurant and ordering one of those soy burgers that “tastes just like beef.” I guess I’ll just continue to listen to John Lennon’s “Imagine” and opine for some time in the future when the next religion of the day doesn’t call for hatred and violence as part of salvation.

Posted by on 04/25 at 12:22 PM
In my opinion the best work that has come out of philosophy of religion in a good long while is _Capitalism and Religion: The Price of Piety_ by Philip Goodchild. It’s more Deleuzian than American pragmatist, but Deleuze really loved his William James and in many ways folks like West seem to be operating in a like manner as Deleuze and Guattari. You might be interested in it.

Posted by on 04/25 at 12:24 PM
I believe that Mr. Harris is simply providing an example for “On Bullshit”.

Posted by on 04/25 at 12:42 PM
Great post, Michael. Now here are my quibbles:

Especially fulsome is Harris’s suggestion that we should abandon the philosophical tradition that runs from John Dewey to Richard Rorty...

Uh, what about Charles Peirce and much more importantly in, William James, Dewey’s predecesors. I study religion and James is a giant, the history of the study of religion in academia as well as much of how religion is understood and discussed in popular culture would have been very different, and all for the better, had the foundational thought of James not been eclpsed by the pernicious influence of ~~Sayyid Qutb~~ Karl Barth. James pioneered the study of comparative religion, he’s also considered the founder of modern psychology, and this in addition to founding the distinctly American philosophy of Pragmatism.

...because Sayyid Qutb may have been right to consider it degenerate. I simply don’t see how this counts as a legitimate form of argument; after all, Islamists have disdain for any number of features of contemporary American life...

Indeed. I study Islam so I’m sure I’ve had a much longer acquaintance with the thought and writings of Sayyid Qutb than most of your readers. I therefore feel confident in asserting that when it comes to the ideas of Sayyid Qutb, the proper attitude may be found in the immortal words of one of the greatest yet mostly forgotten of the American Pragmatists, Prof. Quincy Adams Wagstaff, to wit, “Whatever it is, I’m against it.” You’ll be in good company. Sayyid Qutb despised some things more than secular American institutions and habits. And none was more detested than that which was Islamic, spiritual and truly traditional. I speak mostly of Sufism, one of the world’s richest, most vibrant, compelling, poetic, profound spiritual traditions.

Posted by on 04/25 at 01:00 PM
Yes, he seems to take “pragmatism” in the everyday (wrong) sense of “expedient” or “relativistic.” I can forgive a college freshman for that, but not a philosopher writing a book-length philosophical argument. He’s one of the literary pirates that, as C. S. Peirce lamented, would misuse philosophical terms and rob them of precise meaning. Ironically, pragmatism is exactly the philosophy that avoids pitting total relativism against Absolute Certainties Which Must Be Taken On Faith, and instead describes a kind of realism that doesn’t need absolute universal pronouncements of the Ulitimate Truth. Of course, all present company knows that and it’s the substance of Michael’s post, but I had to rant about this specific aspect.

Posted by on 04/25 at 01:16 PM
I can’t comment on Harris specifically, but there is a disturbing hubris among pragmatists as well, at least in the early 20th century. Venkatesh’s “Chicago’s Pragmatic Planners: American Sociology and the Myth of Community” (Social Science History 25, May 2001, pp. 275-317) describe how the attempted pragmatist definition of neighborhoods in Chicago (this was the Chicago School of sociology) became a priori definitions because those at the U of Chicago successfully argued their case about the utility (and truth, in the good pragmatist fashion) of defining neighborhood boundaries.

I suspect there is no epistemological frame that protects us from hubris.

Posted by Sherman Dorn on 04/25 at 01:25 PM
All right—that should be “describes,” not “describe.” Is there any way to go back and edit the comments, or are we stuck with recanting things in public?

Posted by Sherman Dorn on 04/25 at 01:26 PM
Call me a secular, relativistic, pragmatic son of Satan, but my attitude towards ethics is analogous to the two hunters trying to outrun the bear: It doesn’t matter whether my values are absolutely right; what matters is whether they are MORE right than the moral competition’s.

And when it comes to Sayyid Qutb, I’m pretty damn sure they are.

Posted by on 04/25 at 01:33 PM
Long live the philosopher prophets! We must do exactly as they say!

I also want to make a really obvious political point. The Republicans need to be pasted with the term “moral relativists.” They want the 10 commandments up in court rooms, they call themselves “pro-life,” they support any republican-led war and vehemently support the death penalty. No two ways about it - they are rabid moral relativists.

Posted by on 04/25 at 01:37 PM
My concern about “Dewey” pragmatism is that it a priori posits ethical considerations as a balance of defined differences of self-interest. Human solidarity is thus reduced to contractual obligations.

A good philosophy for business, academic and legal ethics. For living a fullfilling life, not so good.

Meanwhile, the actual unfolding of the gross development of human moral and spiritual evolution proceeds in its own way, unimpeded by the commentary of philosophers.

Posted by on 04/25 at 02:03 PM
I’d like to point out, too, that if anyone ever explicitly wanted to be a mystical philosopher-king, it was W.B. Yeats. That citation certainly isn’t as egregious as using Qutb to prove the destructiveness of pragmatism, but I think it is a little ironic that he quotes a poem about the birth of the anti-Christ to characterize the current situation of American civilization.

I wouldn’t accuse Harris of believing that the rough beast is slouching towards Bethlehem as we speak, but I do think the apocalyptic tone of the critique is probably in keeping with the “believe my transcendental truths or we’re all doomed!” rhetoric that others have identified.

Posted by Lee on 04/25 at 02:10 PM
You write: “It’s worth remembering that one of the reasons Richard Rorty espouses Deweyan pragmatism is that he thinks of it as a check against precisely the kind of philosophical hubris Harris displays”

Actually, this was precisely the point I was trying to make in your (Michael’s) pomo Am Lit course (Fall ‘98, I think, at U of I), when I referred to the aggregation of philosophies that have come to be called the postmodern critique of knowledge as “a politics of humility.” What could possibly be wrong with a continual willingness to entertain the proposition that one’s position on anything--be it the ontology of human consciousness or the best recipe for bouillabaisse--might, just might, not be perfect?

Posted by on 04/25 at 02:57 PM
I saw Mr. Harris on CSPANs booktv and bought his book (had to hold my nose with a blurb from Alan Dershowitz) the next day. I really liked his premise that being tolerant of intolerance is dumb because they never return the favor. I’m perfectly fine to let fundies alone in their ignorance but, they are now flushed with power and are calling for our heads. Fuck them.

He makes some great points about holding “people of faith” to the same standards we would hold an airline pilot. ex: if the pilot “believes” that Tennessee is on the Pacific coast, no one will hire him. The same should apply to these idiots who claim the Founding Fathers were god-fearin’ men or that they can “reclaim” America for God. They’re full of shit and should be exposed.

Didn’t like the rest of the book and Michael explains it better than I could. His remedies are in many ways just as naive as the fundies, imo.

Posted by on 04/25 at 03:12 PM
Almost bought the book this weekend, but decided I’d stick around Michaelberube.com for further review. Glad I did. Thanks for the analysis, Michael.

Posted by Glenn on 04/25 at 03:28 PM
What a can of worms to leave us earth-strewn minions with, Monsieur Bérubé! This calls for a bottle of wine at least and some looking for words. I cannot resist to humiliate myself with a response and damn the bandwidth… (long blogs beget long comments)

More importantly, your key paragraph:

“And what happens to the person who believes that he has not merely invented a potentially persuasive and beneficial proposition, but, rather, discovered an objectively true fact about the moral universe? How does he deal with people who disagree with his interpretation of what is “really” true in the world? Does he understand them as people with competing plausible interpretations of what is really true, people who must be persuaded otherwise by means of discourse, or as people who are simply possessed by Error and who cannot be considered moral agents at all?” (how do I italicise these things?)

If Rorty takes pragmatism merely as a ‘check’, if he learnt “to stop looking for what Derrida calls “a full presence beyond the reach of play,” for a luminous synoptic vision”, does he not miss precisely a critical step by following immediately that such looking 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 that (sic) the tolerance and decency of your fellow human beings.”

What I’m trying to indicate is that what is being perhaps conveniently ‘forgotten’ is precisely the meaning of ‘faith’, i.e. of not-knowing, of the full awareness not only of the necessary failure of finding ‘it’, but of the very possibility-conditions whereby such looking could be a “bad idea.” The option ‘I believe because/even though I know it is not true’ is here simply not allowed for, which I nevertheless think is the case for most properly modern human beings.

That is to say solidarity as such is not necessarily all that much for people to go on, and it is, as far as concepts go, very vague. The critical question is here what to do; even if people are ‘simply possessed by Error’ (which I believe is simply the case, although I would phrase it differently) this being in error is precisely what potentially gives meaning to being a ‘moral agent’. It seems to me, with all due respect, Rorty conflates quite a few key issues here.

If tolerance and decency is all one has to go on, and one is not allowed to take a blind chance (“Stop looking for ‘it’!”), why should anyone bother to be either decent or tolerant? If a blind leap of faith is occluded, to wit, how pragmatic can one be?

And here the word ‘islamist’ links to the label ‘liberal’: the heathen categorical imperative of the extreme-right (see, I kid you not: http://www.paganfed.org ) plaguing my little country and most of Europe is literally: “Eight words the Wiccan Rede fulfill: An ye harm none, do what ye will”. (This refers to the ‘underbelly’ of extreme-right-wing under-cultures in Europe). Is this not precisely the creed of liberalism (perhaps over-determined on this continent, and under-so on yours – or was that the other way around?): “Do what you want (whatever you think is reasonable, rational, or whatever) as long as you do not harm another?” This is, precisely, the old question (ref. The Pop Group) “who guards the guards, who polices the police?” What does it mean to be ‘tolerant’ or ‘decent’ (which together with ‘freedom of expression’ and ‘real democracy’ are what the extreme right in Belgium continuously insist on)? From a euro-perspective it makes all too much sense to describe the religious-right in the US today as primarily ultra-liberal. The answer is then not per definition some other more secret or superior police, but something that merely appeals to imagination, triggers desire as what allows for identification; as I think, Derrida and others would say: a no-thing will do just fine.

So it’s not about no longer looking for ‘it’, but about allowing for ‘it’ to not be there, precisely, in its full luminosity. That is why B17 is so contested among the (properly) conservative Catholics as well: they know and understand all too well that mandatory celibacy, pro-life fundamentalism, anti-abortion fundamentalism, the denouncing of anti-conception, etc…(all those fine 19th century rationalist inventions and perversions) are not only unchristian in a very general sense; they are an utter perversion of basic catholic dogma. Catholics worldwide now face yet another anti-catholic pope (much worse for most than a mere unchristian pope.)

So yes, quite a can of worms and we might want to be pragmatic about these things, why not? (Just allow me not to get into the whole ‘authority’ thing right now; a can of vipers… ) Thanks for a wonderful evening…

Posted by on 04/25 at 04:18 PM
Y’know, Michael, the facts tells me you are right, but my heart knows that Bush is beyond any shadow of a doubt an objectively awful and immoral president.

note to rightwingers: There are several layers of sarcasm here. Can you find them all?

Posted by tristero on 04/25 at 05:31 PM
What kind of “politics of humility” has Richard Rorty for one of its leading lights?

That word, I don’t think it means what you think it means.

Posted by Anderson on 04/25 at 05:45 PM
"What kind of “politics of humility” has Richard Rorty for one of its leading lights?

That word, I don’t think it means what you think it means.”

Which word, “humility?” If so, then I don’t think you think it means what I think it means. “Humility” doesn’t necessarily apply to a person--say, Rorty--so much as it stands for a kind of cultural value. And, I would argue, there is a culturally-valuable humility-meme built into American pragmatism. I think James Clifford said it best in the intro to *Writing Culture*: “a rigorous sense of partiality can be a source of representational tact.” If there are two things the enemies of so-called relativism lack, it is 1) a rigorous (or any other kind) sense of partialilty and 2) tact.

In fact, to those who would say that pragmatism “undermine[s] America’s ability to fend off its enemies,” I would point to a plethora of feminist work in sociology, anthropology, composition, writing studies, and other (inter)disciplines that is *heavily* informed by pragmatism of the Rortyan variety. And it is precisely *because* of the sense of humility that accompanies the knowledge (or at least the inkling) that one does not have all the answers that such feminist work has done so much to fend off American “enemies” like ignorance, hatred, and bigotry: when research ceases to be something that belongs only to academics, who always and forever know best, then it can become more active and responsive to the communities it gets involved in, and it can become more activist in its explicit aims, thus benefitting both researchers and participants--and often in surprising ways.

In my humble opinion.

Posted by on 04/25 at 06:25 PM
I want to second Anthony’s reading recommendation, and support luminous beauty’s remark about Dewey’s appliability. It needs to be remembered that Dewey went on to form much of the philsophical basis for public education in this country; as LB says, his philosophy was good for that.

I have always tried to encourage my students to become philosophically engaged, as part of being a citizen in the US. I don’t think it really matters so much what strain/ thread/school one chooses, as much as how one applies what one has learned to their own skill sets in their lives, and in their childrens lives. In many ways, i hold that the failure of public education is that it doesn’t train future citizens in methods of critical philosophical inquiry, which encourages the on-going generations to tacitly accept the preaching of the Texas Taliban priesthood without challenging their facts, religious and otherwise. With priests like Bush, DeLay, Cronyn, Rove et al, even fundamentalism gets abused.

Posted by on 04/25 at 06:43 PM
I don’t think that a philosophy which operates by telling people that their “metaphysical” beliefs are sadly outmoded and impractical is particularly “humble.”

That was the running objection that I had to RR in Contingency Irony & Solidarity, that he utterly ignored the rhetorical value of “metaphysical” argument; I would submit that the whole purpose of “metaphysics” in the CIS sense is this rhetorical appeal.

Compare Nietzsche in BG&E, saying that the philosophers will not wish to abandon the language of religion, as it’s so very useful when dealing with the vast majority of the population. On this point, I think N. is a lot more “pragmatic” than Rorty.

Posted by Anderson on 04/25 at 07:12 PM
>>>I am so very sick and tired of Christians in the United States complaining that they are discriminated against<<<

Could we point out that not ALL Christians in the United States are complaining that they are discriminated against? A shrill, theocratic, ironically bigoted segment of evangelicals and fundamentalists do not speak for all of us - contrary to what they believe.

Posted by MizM on 04/25 at 07:19 PM
Michael—I was doing a little googling of Moral Rearmament and was reminded of something I once knew but had forgotten: Frank Buchman of Moral Rearmament/Oxford Group started at Penn State. Weird.

Posted by PW on 04/25 at 07:31 PM
Anderson,
I’m not sure that one can rebut Rorty’s hubris, if you accept that term, by appealing to the claim that people’s metaphysical beliefs are a matter of rhetoric. That claim seems just as hubristic as the one “outmoded and impractical” you ascribe to Rorty.

Posted by on 04/25 at 07:36 PM
“Especially fulsome is Harris’s suggestion that we should abandon the philosophical tradition that runs from John Dewey to Richard Rorty because Sayyid Qutb may have been right to consider it degenerate.”

Hear, hear!

Could I add that I’ve recently become highly annoyed by the left/right European refugee philosophers (Leo Strauss, Adorno) who contemptuously dismissed the indigenous philosophy of the nation which saved their sorry European asses?

Starting pretty early on (before WWII, and escalating afterward), the philosophical tradition of James, Dewey, and George Herbert Mead (to whom I would add Kenneth Burke, Alfred North Whitehead, and Thorstein Veblen) has been squeezed out of the American university.

As far as I’m concerned, in every field, what replaced them is absolutely worse.

Posted by John Emerson on 04/25 at 09:41 PM
Menand ("Metaphysical Club” and an anthology) alerted me to one big issue with pragmatism. One strain of pragmatism (represented especially by Justice Holmes, and to a degree perhaps by Henry Adams) argued that ethical principles in politics were useless if not harmful. This line of thought led to the opportunistic and cold-blooded pragmatism of post-WWII American foreign policy. To me this is something different than what James, Dewey, and Mead were talking about, albeit related to it.

Posted by John Emerson on 04/25 at 09:54 PM
<objectively true fact about the moral universe?</i>

He becomes an <objectivist.</A>

Posted by on 04/25 at 10:45 PM
Was it Weston La Barre who compared Plato to the Dancing Sorcerer in the caves of Lascaux?

Plato—a civilized shaman?

Posted by on 04/25 at 11:22 PM
Michael: (warning: I am a moral philosopher; discount appropriately): I think a lot of the trouble with Harris, as you report him, comes from having a naive view of what truth is, not from thinking that moral truths might exist, and that (if so) we should try to find them. IF you think that moral truths have to exist independent not just of human perception, but also of human thought, then you’re in trouble. But there are alternatives that don’t involve either giving up the idea of moral truth or weakening it, I think. (Korsgaard has one.)

There is no reason at all, that I can see, to think that a person who thinks she has found a moral truth would have to think that those she disagrees with are ‘not moral agents’. She might think that the truth in question is hard to figure out, for instance. (In many areas of thought, many disagreements do not involve thinking that the person you disagree with is stupid. It’s not clear why morality should be different.)

I have always thought that if you think there is a moral truth, and that it matters to find it, then you have a very strong reason to care whether or not you have accurately identified it, and to be on the lookout for self-deception. Just as, if you believe in God, you have a very strong reason to worry that you might have misidentified His will. Why so many of the noisier Christians don’t seem to get this is, to me, a complete mystery. (Not being ironic here.)

Posted by hilzoy on 04/25 at 11:33 PM
Ok, last comment, I promise.

Here’s the thing: pragmatism *is* a kind of relativism, but a relativistic stance toward truth, knowledge, morality, or whatever, is not the same thing as saying that they don’t exist, nor does it necessarily weaken the power that the ideals they uphold wield. Relativism simply places all such standards within a context; it’s up to us to determine the appropriate contexts for determining those standards are.

So, the relativism of pragmatism serves as a guarantee (or should) that, given that it’s a dangerous thing to fix such standards once and for all, we should commit to continual public debate about what is right and good. And, by “we,” I mean citizens of towns, states, countries, and planets. The kind of relativism espoused by pragmatism ought to be thought of, then, as the best friend, not the worst enemy, of productive civic discourse. (See also discussions of Kairos among historians of rhetoric.)

Coda: that’s why movies like *Independence Day* are so powerfully attractive: the “context” in which to derive mutual interest is suddenly thrust from a national to a global scale, thus enabling the fantasy that, really, we all can just get along--provided most of our metropolitain centers are obliterated by locust-like aliens.

Posted by on 04/26 at 08:08 AM
Echoing Lance’s point at #22, it always makes me laugh when people try to identify any given philosophy as specifically inimical to civilization, when even a casual glance at history tells us that all civilizations fall eventually. Given that there’s no ideological constant we can point to as a consistent cause for national dissolution, I think it’s safe to say simply that error and weakness are at fault in every case for bringing societies to ruin. When people aren’t willing to put in the necessary work to support their way of life, and when their leadership is incompetent and counterproductive, is when the decline begins.

Posted by on 04/26 at 10:12 AM
even a casual glance at history tells us that all civilizations fall eventually.

Yeah, but them Egyptians with their Pharoahs sure lasted close to an eternity (about 3000 years to be precise). Maybe a casual glance at history is seriously misleading.

I think it’s safe to say simply that error and weakness are at fault in every case for bringing societies to ruin

It’s not safe, as Dustin Hoffman said to Laurence Olivier in Marathon Man. There are a number of possible reasons for the decline of a civilization of which “decadence” is but one.

Maybe simply a stronger invasive force (the white invaders of America). Or a volcano or other ecological issues (island civilizations, the ancient civilizations of the American West). Or a plague. And I’m sure clever commenters here can think of plenty more.

One thing’s certain: All generalizations are too broad.

Posted by tristero on 04/26 at 10:55 AM
I’m following this thread with great interest, but not being a philosopher, the Rorty quote was unknown to me. What’s the provenance? I’d love to read the fuller work…

Posted by Christopher Tassava on 04/26 at 11:32 AM
Mizm,

>>A shrill, theocratic, ironically bigoted segment of evangelicals and fundamentalists do not speak for all of us - contrary to what they believe.

Even paranoids have true enemies.

Posted by on 04/26 at 01:08 PM
Lance in #33 wrote: “we should commit to continual public debate about what is right and good. And, by “we,” I mean citizens of towns, states, countries, and planets. The kind of relativism espoused by pragmatism ought to be thought of, then, as the best friend, not the worst enemy, of productive civic discourse. “

And herein lies the essence of the problem. In order to generate the conversation, to engage the continual debates, we need populations that are educated, to some degree, in the hermeneutics(i use this loosely) of philosophical traditions/strains/schools. The relativism is an outgrowth, both of the top down rhetoric(such as that which is occuring on this thread above) and the struggles of the larger population to embrace the nomenclature and semiotics within the rhetoric. I think Dewey envisioned an approach to public education that would initiate the discussions(particularly the “productive civic discourse) through encouraging the teaching of philosophy(esp the history of philosophy) in schools beginning with the children. We are a far cry from that, and getting further away with NCLB and ESEA and such.

I don’t see many high school kids, even those scoring in the 2300’s on the new SAT’s, comfortable reading Rorty, Dewey, Adorno, Foucault, James, Rawls, etc. They may have a familiarity with Plato and Aristotle, but that generating more from their overview of world history rather than a commitment to understanding salient philosophical issues. More so, these students feel an affinity for the works of people like Harris and for their peers who spout biblical verses. These they consume with little regard for the necessary critical inquiry.

Our discussion here is extremely important, yet i think in some ways we are preaching amongst the choirs and not engaging the future generations. It would be helpful if Michael published a defense of pragmatism as a parenting model.

re: Ellen1910… shamen work in communities, and it is easy to comprehend Plato in a like-minded village of 400 people.. more difficult to conceive of him in that role for a society of 4000.

Posted by on 04/26 at 01:23 PM
Two observations:

The USA “saved Europe from fascism *only* because Japan attacked Pearl Harbor (and invaded the Philippines) and Hitler had German declare war on the USA even the terms of the treaty with Japan did not obligate Germany to do so unless Japan was attacked. If those events had not occurred, I have *no* doubt that this country as a whole would have behaved much as did the people who turned up their televisions and radios to drown out the screams of Kitty Genovese as she was raped and murdered.

All displays of humility are false.

Posted by on 04/26 at 02:42 PM
Ed,

I’m not a historian, but what I do know about this suggests to me that your point is reductive. Among the various factors that made it possible for the US to fight that war was the strength of the left at the time. The Popular Front was one of the stronger leftist coalitions in 20th century history. While I don’t have hard data on this, my impression is that this strength prevented American politics from turning toward fascism. Fascism in Europe, on the other hand, gained a lot of ground as a direct response to the same kinds of economic hardship that energized the left in this country. Everyone knows about Italy and Germany, but the ultra-nationalist Croix de feu made a lot of headway in France, as well. Now, obviously there were a lot of important people in America who, in the ‘30s, were sympathetic to Hitler and Mussolini. If this kind of response had become more popular and were seen as a viable way of combating economic depression, who knows where we would have headed.

Now, I realize this “who knows” remark is weak, and I don’t mean to re-write history to make my point. But I do think I’m on solid ground if I say that the Popular Front helped to stay any serious fascist movement in this country. It also bears saying that this Front was pretty much a pragmatist one. It forged alliances between populism and socialism—and just think how inconceivable that would be today. But it did this on the grounds that an alliance based on mutual ethical principles would be more effective than divisions based on absolutist ethical principles. And there’s the humility: “Hmm. I like Lenin, but he might be wrong—let’s make sure Il Duce doesn’t get elected.” Moreover, it had undeniable ties to thinkers in the pragmatist tradition. Kenneth Burke, for one.

Posted by Lee on 04/26 at 03:23 PM
I’m bloggin’ on the run and thus can only address matters of fact rather than of value (dang! that hoary old distinction again!), but in response to Christopher Tassava, the Rorty passage is from an essay called “Trotsky and the Wild Orchids.” But perhaps an even better passage—in which, notably, Rorty does not tie himself up in the self-contradictory position of arguing that the metaphysical tradition is wrong (for this would be another meta-metaphysical claim about the way the world really is)—is the one near the end of the introduction to Consequences of Pragmatism in which he writes, “The question of whether the pragmatist view of truth--that it is not a profitable topic--is itself true is thus a question about whether a post-Philosophical culture is a good thing to try for. It is not a question about what the word ‘true’ means, nor about the requirements of an adequate philosophy of language, nor about whether the world exists ‘independently of our minds,’ nor about whether the intuitions of our culture are captured in the pragmatists’ slogans.” And yeah, Anderson, I can see why anyone would object to Rorty’s rhetorically off-the-cuff suggestions that the metaphysical tradition is no longer “interesting.” I believe, however, that the more common charge against Rorty (levelled by Simon Blackburn, among others) is that he licenses a politics of “ironic” complacency, not of hubris. I don’t buy it, myself, but I can see where it’s a plausible reading, especially of Rorty’s charactertistic rhetorical demeanor. . . .

Oops! I started in on matters of value instead of keeping to matters of fact. Weird how that always happens. And hi Lance! Good to hear from you.

Posted by Michael on 04/26 at 03:55 PM
Odd that you should cite the bit of Harris that quotes Yeats’s “Slouching”: my favorite Platonists at _The Daily Howler_ have been hammering that poem recently. Of course, their “rough beast” is none other than Ann Coulter. . .

http://www.dailyhowler.com/dh042205.shtml

Posted by on 04/26 at 05:39 PM
I got about halfway through Sam Harris’ book before feeling like I was being lectured to rather than persuaded, and I gave up.

Maybe it was the ghost of John Galt. Sam Harris and Ayn Rand seem to be close philosophically. They both abhor anything relative and squishy. Like Michael says, Harris proceeds from the presumption that ethics is like Newtonian physics, derivable, predictable. As a teenager, that Randian absolutism, different than the Catholic type I’d grown up with, it fit the bill. As an adult, reading Harris made me feel like his rejection of religion was just a new religion itself, like Objectivism seemed after a while.

No thank you. Not all rational people are bound to come to the same universal ethical truths. I’ll use my own mind, make my own decisions, and as long as you play nice, you can decide for yourself, too.

Posted by on 04/26 at 09:21 PM
Mike, this is a terrible sentence:

“It’s worth remembering that one of the reasons Richard Rorty espouses Deweyan pragmatism is that he thinks of it as a check against precisely the kind of philosophical hubris Harris displays here”

I assume from the context that you are quoting Rorty in opposition to Harris hubris that you decry elsewherre in your essay. However, one can easily read the sentence that I quoted as leading to a quote from Harris.

Posted by on 04/28 at 11:22 AM
lol - an almost complete misunderstanding of the nature of the “issue” between realism and pragmatism on all sides…

Start with Kuhn (SSR) and Quine (Two Dogmas). Then read some Brandom (MiE) - at least the introductory sections (~50-100 pages). (The first two serve to disabuse the initiate of the somewhat intuitive idea that there’s an interesting difference between “invention” and “discovery”.)

The issue is not “which one is right”, but rather which direction of explanation is preferable. Rendered, it may be described as follows: do we explain *what we do* by reference to *what we know*, or contrariwise, do we explain what we know in terms of what we do? The former is realism, the latter, pragmatism.

Relativism charges are just red herrings, typically put out by analytic philosophers trying to “spin” pragmatists into relativists (Rorty was close to the first one to be so pilloried). Nothing could be further from the truth (!). Pragmatists - at least the cognizant ones - are fully aware of the need to account for a full-blooded notion of reality and objectivity.

Posted by on 04/28 at 01:56 PM
Oops, bill, you’re right. Sorry about that—I’ll go fix it. And thanks, Chris, for chipping in.

Tom Hamill, I think you’re right about the creeping Objectivism in The End of Faith. Or is it slouching?

Posted by on 04/28 at 02:17 PM
Look at that last sentence again: moral philosophy is to be construed as analogous to physics

Of course, Chris’s version of the distinction between realism and pragmatism at 45 allows equally well for realist and pragmatist descriptions of physics.

I also think this discussion dovetails nicely with some of what Billmon gets into <a href=http://billmon.org/archives/001854.html>here.</a>
If the difference between “pragmatism” and “realism” as Harris describes them isn’t an “inside the Beltway issue” a la Billmon, I don’t know what is.

There’s also a bit of the smell of a “noble lie” about the argument he’s making, isn’t there? I mean, what’s the difference between his pragmatism and his realism? In one, it’s tautologically impossible to be right. In the other, it’s part of the human condition that one lacks the ability to tell who’s right. Sure, there’s a distinction there, but I fail to see how it’s of any consequence to non-philosophers who understand it. And Harris, it seems to me, is implicitly conceding this point, but emphasizing how very important it will be in cultivating a desired frame of mind among those who do not understand it. Which strikes me as a bit slimy.

Posted by on 04/28 at 10:20 PM

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