Contingency, eloquence and solidarity

When is a speech not merely a speech? If Obama's presidential bid is built in no small measure upon his prescient oratory; it is fair to ask, as Sen. Clinton and the Republicans would have us do, where that power comes from and whether it is meaningful.  

Obama, after all, first put himself on the national map in 2004 when he was still a candidate for the Senate in his now-famous debut at the Democratic National Convention. It is easy to remember his "improbable" bi-racial biography and his message that:

We worship an "awesome God" in the Blue States, and we don’t like federal agents poking around in our libraries in the Red States. We coach Little League in the Blue States and yes, we’ve got some gay friends in the Red States. There are patriots who opposed the war in Iraq and there are patriots who supported the war in Iraq. We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.

The recent, self-aggrandizing declaration by James Dobson, that may be quiting the GOP, brings hope to all that the menace of casual cruelty may once again recede into the shadows of American life.

Since the 1960s, Americans had worked hard to teach our children that both calculated and unthinking pain inflicted on others--be it through violence or humiliation--is a blight on our country.  To be a good person, we have taught our children, is not only to reject casual cruelty, but to help build a society that rejects it.  And America has become a better place as a result of that effort.

This is a political engagement with the writings of Richard Rorty, to add to LithiumCola’s wonderful obituary here.  Here I wish to contrast Rorty’s attitude toward academic discourse with that of "academic writing as real estate," which renounces democratic impulses because it has "an insensitivity to the dialogue requirements of public speech and prose," (Agger 123).  Against the concept of academic writing as real estate, Rorty sought to debunk the absolutist claims of academic conversationalists of all stripes.

In concluding, I wish to address Rorty’s later political stance, especially as regards his assertion on p. 15 of Achieving Our Country that "The academic Left has no projects to propose to America, no vision of a country to be achieved, by building a consensus on the need for specific reforms."  This should be read, I argue, as a provocation to act, and in this context I would like to propose an academic Left with a political project: a global, ecologically-sustainable society.

Richard Rorty died of pancreatic cancer on June 8, 2007.  He was one of the two or three living American academic philosophers whose name had some cash-value outside of the discipline.  A sign says there will be a talk tomorrow by Rorty at the auditorium?  Expect a lot of non-philosophers to show up.  Rorty, West, certainly Chomsky (although already we're fudging: Chomsky is only tangentially a philosopher) . . . and it becomes difficult.  It is a scandal of late Twentieth century American academic philosophy that it does not speak to its country, much.  Rorty did.