"Take care of freedom and truth will take care of itself..."
Friday, June 15, 2007
1. Richard Rorty just died. Why did he mean anything to me at all? He used normalized philosophical speech, which is probably what attracted so many layman such as myself to his writing. It's strange. He makes a lot of sense when you're disinterested. Rorty wanted to uncomplicate our relationship to ultimate truth by getting rid of the question of ultimate truth all together. He liked smaller truths, formed by (in the best cases, democratic) consensus. In other words, he said that we do not believe that a woman has a right to equal pay in the workplace because it's an undying truth inherent in the idea of womanhood, but because we've all decided it's true and have worked towards making that truth a reality.
2. So, say an ideologue poses a question. Pat Robertson comes out and says. Hey, jeez, look at this. I just happened to find incontrovertable evidence that a woman should make 86 cents to every dollar a man earns. Look, I'll admit that I'm a religious nutjob who hates women, but I just happened across this information, it didn't come from me, and it fits all the categories of consensus (i.e. scientific and economic proof, a 51 per cent majority, etc.). Baffled and angry, you hire disinterested observers to prove them wrong, but, amazingly, they come back and confirm that, while they hate to admit it, being democrats themselves, it's all true--that while before there was every reason to believe that a woman should recieve equal pay for equal work, now evidence suggests that a woman should make 86 cents to the dollar and work just as hard as a man. It's inconcievable, they say, but the math works out.
Then Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton comes forward and says, no, that's not true at all, and we say, I'd like to believe that, but what's your evidence? And Obama-Clinton says, satisfyingly, screw the evidence. Equal pay for equal work is a part of our tradition and what's more, God wills it.
The point is that what comes after is not an interesting philosophical question. But as a political question it's all we have.
3. Though I have rarely been unemployed in the nearly 20 years of my working life, I still have not found the sort of work that's best suited to me. This is not the best precondition for someone who thinks of himself as a follower of Richard Rorty's brand of social-democratic pragmatism. One must agree with him that political and intellectual freedom is the precondition for any reasonable consensus. But he has nothing to offer those who would say that freedom to choose between one type of miserable, stressed-out bureaucratic machine, and still yet another, or poverty, can be a miserable slog. One tries not to decide but is ultimately forced to.
4. That being said, Rorty's ideas are beautiful for those at the wheel of the bureaucratic machine. Or at the head of some art. I wish all such bosses godspeed.
posted by Greg Purcell @ 4:06 PM, ,
