Category Archives: Non-Fiction

Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America by Richard Rorty

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This short book from 1998 by the philosopher Richard Rorty gained attention recently because of this passage:

… members of labor unions, and unorganized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers — themselves desperately afraid of being downsized — are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else.

At that point, something will crack. The non-suburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for — someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots. …

One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past 40 years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion. … All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet [89-90].

Given our recent election, that sounds right in some respects. I’d make a few points, however. Democratic politicians have tried to increase wages for the working class and keep more jobs at home but have run into strong Republican opposition; it’s unlikely that 40 years of gains for various minorities (and for women) are unlikely to be wiped out any time soon; and the “strong man” we currently have isn’t actually strong, was rejected by most voters and is already highly unpopular. 

But the real focus of Rorty’s book is leftist thought in the 20th century. He draws a distinction between the “reformist” left and the “cultural” left. America’s left wing was dedicated to reform from the 19th century up until the 1960s.  Left-wing politicians, labor leaders, activists and intellectuals saw the United States as a land of promise. Rorty cites Walt Whitman and John Dewey as two proponents of this basically pro-American point of view. They were aware of many problems but believed those problems could be addressed through incremental reforms, eventually resulting in a country that lived up to its ideals. In Rorty’s words, they were dedicated to “achieving our country”. 

Rorty argues that the left lost its faith in America’s promise in reaction to the Vietnam War. Incremental reform was no longer enough. It was wasted effort, because America was too far gone. American culture needed to be remade. “The people” needed to take control in revolutionary fashion. Rorty says left-wing intellectuals began to focus on “the system” instead of fighting for specific reforms. In addition, too much emphasis was put on what’s now called “identity” politics:

To take pride in being black or gay is an entirely reasonable response to the sadistic humiliation to which one has been subjected. But insofar as this pride prevents someone from also taking pride in being an American citizen, from thinking of his or her country as capable of reform, or from being able to join with straights or whites in reformist initiatives, it is a political disaster. 

Rorty concludes that we should admit America’s faults but see ourselves as agents rather than spectators:

Our national character is still in the making. Few in 1897 would have predicted the Progressive Movement, the forty-hour work week, Women’s Suffrage, the New Deal, the Civil Rights Movement…. Nobody in 1997 can know that America will not, in the course of the next century, witness even greater moral progress.

Whitman and Dewey … wanted to put shared utopian dreams – dreams of an ideally decent and civilized society – in the place of knowledge of God’s Will, Moral Law, the Laws of History, or the Facts of Science. Their party, the party of hope, made twentieth-century America more than just an economic and military giant. Without the American Left, we might still be strong and brave, but nobody would have suggested that we were good. As long as we have a functioning political left, we still have a chance to achieve our country, to make it the country of Whitman’s and Dewey’s dreams.

I think that Rorty, spending his days in academia, over-emphasized the intellectual left-wing at the expense of the politicians and activists who continued to fight for reform in the late 20th century and continue fighting today. But the book was still worth reading for its analysis of Whitman’s and Dewey’s political ideals and the distinction Rorty draws between the reformist and the cultural left.

Hell’s Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga by Hunter S. Thompson

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Before he became famous as the “gonzo” journalist who wrote Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, and before he became the model for the drug-addled, gun-crazy Uncle Duke in Doonesbury, Hunter S. Thompson spent a year hanging out with the Hell’s Angels, the infamous California motorcycle gang. The resulting book was published in 1966. 

Much of it is devoted to downplaying the media coverage of the group as bloodthirsty savages who left a trail of destruction everywhere they went. On the other hand, Thompson depicts them as violent losers, not very bright, mostly interested in their motorcycles, being part of the gang and getting high. He got to know some of them fairly well, but that didn’t stop one of them from abruptly punching him one day, after which several more joined in, sending Thompson to the emergency room. That experience probably colored the last paragraph of the book:

It had been a bad trip … fast and wild in some moments, slow and dirty in others, but on balance it looked like a bummer….I tried to compose a fitting epitaph. I wanted something original, but there was no escaping the echo of Mistah Kurtz’ final words from the heart of darkness: “The horror! The horror! … Exterminate all the brutes!”

I read Hell’s Angels after reading an article in The Nation that said Thompson had predicted the rise of Trumpism, i.e. a movement of “left-behind people motivated only by ‘an ethic of total retaliation'”. There are, in fact, a few places in the book where Thompson takes a step back and provides that kind of sociological overview. Thus:

… nobody who has ever spent time with the inbred Anglo-Saxon tribes of Appalachia would need more than a few hours with the Hell’s Angels to work up a very strong sense of dĂ©jĂ  vu. There is the same sulking hostility toward “outsiders”, the same extremes of temper and action… [159]

The attack [on a 1965 anti-war demonstration] was an awful shock to those who had seen the Hell’s Angels as pioneers of the human spirit, but to anyone who knew them it was entirely logical. The Angels’ collective viewpoint has always been fascistic. [248]

To see the Hell’s Angels as caretakers of the old “individualist” tradition “that made this country great” is only a painless way to get around seeing them for what they really are – not some romantic leftover, but the first wave of a future that nothing in our history has prepared us to cope with. The Angels are prototypes. Their lack of education has not only rendered them completely useless in a highly technical economy, but it has also given them the leisure to cultivate a powerful resentment … and to translate it into a destructive cult which the mass media insists on portraying as a soft of isolated oddity, a temporary phenomenon… [258]

A toad who believes he got a raw deal before he even knew who was dealing will usually be sympathetic to the mean, vindictive ignorance that colors the Hell’s Angels’ view of humanity. There is not much mental distance between a feeling of having been screwed and the ethic of total retaliation, or at least the kind of random revenge that comes with outraging the public decency….[258-59]

Sociologists call it “alienation” or “anomie”. It is a sens of being cut off, or left out of whatever society one was presumably meant to be a part of…. In the terms of our Great Society the Hell’s Angeles and their ilk are losers – dropouts, failures and malcontents. They are rejects looking for a way to get even with a world in which they are only a problem… The difference between the student radicals and the Hell’s Angels is that the students are rebelling against the past, while the Angels are fighting the future. [260]

Certainly, many Trump supporters are indeed fighting the future. Although the average Trump voter had a higher income than the average Clinton voter, many of Trump’s supporters are struggling and feeling left behind (as are many of Clinton’s). But just as many of his supporters are trying to hold on to what they have (e.g. nice lives in the suburbs) or what they think they deserve as white, “Christian” Americans (i.e. better lives than everyone else).

So the book was usually interesting, if a bit repetitious, and Thompson could certainly write, but as a guide to modern America, it doesn’t deliver much.

The Quartet: Orchestrating the Second American Revolution, 1783-1789 by Joseph J. Ellis

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The “Second American Revolution” in the title refers to the adoption of the U.S. Constitution. Before that, during most of the Revolutionary War, America was governed by the Articles of Confederation, a loose arrangement that Ellis compares to the European Union. Under the Articles of Confederation, the thirteen colonies operated as separate nations. They cooperated in order to defeat the British, but few of the colonists expected to become one nation after the British left.

Ellis focuses on the four men he thinks did the most to convince their fellow colonists that the United States needed a real central government. They were Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, John Jay and George Washington. Ellis writes well and tells a fast-moving, almost suspenseful story, which is divided about equally between describing the histories and psychologies of his four Founding Fathers (and a few others) and the issues that confronted them.

From his conclusion:

Perhaps the best way to describe their achievement … is to argued that they maximized the historical possibilities of their transitory moment. They were comfortable and unembarrassed in their role as a political elite, in part because their leadership role depended on their revolutionary credentials… They were unapologetic in their skepticism about unfettered democracy, because that skepticism was rooted in their recent experiences ass soldiers and statesmen…

They straddled an aristocratic world that was dying and a democratic world that was just emerging… The Constitution they created and bequeathed to us was necessarily a product of that bimodal moment and mentality, and most of the men featured in this story would be astonished to learn that it abides, with amendments, over two centuries later…

Their genius was to answer the political challenges of their own moment decisively, meaning that the confederation must be replaced by the nation, but also to provide a political platform wide enough to allow for considerable latitude within which future generations could make their own decisions. 

Ellis concludes with the words of Thomas Jefferson, written decades later, not because Jefferson played much of a role in creating the Constitution (he was Ambassador to France at the time) but because he wrote so well:

Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence, and deem them like the ark of the covenant, too sacred to be touched. They ascribe to the preceding age a wisdom more than human, and suppose what they did to be beyond amendment. I knew that age well; I belonged to it and labored with it. It deserved well of its country…. But I know also that laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered … institutions must advance also and keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him as a boy as civilized society to remain ever under the regime of their barbarous ancestors.

PS: Anyone who reads this book will understand that the Founders would have expected the Electoral College to reject a demagogue like the current President; and that they intended the 2nd Amendment to make sure we would be protected by a well-regulated militia, not a standing army, and not to guarantee everyone the right to own the weapon(s) of their choice.

The Reformation: A History by Patrick Collinson

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A few weeks ago, I read a startling article called “The Calvinist Roots of American Anti-Intellectualism” on a site called 3:AM Magazine. Here’s a selection:

…the Reformation was an open revolt against the Renaissance, against science, against any form of culture, activity, and political or scientific thought that was not directly and irreducibly grounded in some religious leader’s (*cough* Calvin’s *cough*) literal reading of the Bible. It had no truck with religious freedom, and its penalties for going off program only involved decapitation if you were LUCKY…. 

Famously, Voltaire wrote about Calvin and the theocracy he established in Geneva (and about Luther and the reformer Zwingli, who set up a similar operation in Zurich), “If they condemned celibacy in the priests, and opened the gates of the convents, it was only to turn all society into a convent….

The sanitized story about Protestantism that has been passed down to us is that it represented a revolt against corruption in the Church and brought a focus on Biblical writing rather than Church traditions as a source of authority. And it was indeed about those things. Partly. But more than that it was a revolt against an idea, espoused by [St. Thomas Aquinas], that we can come to know nature without the aid of religion (in the insider terminology, we can understand nature without the help of grace). The idea that part of the world could be known and understood without aid of religion helped ignite the Renaissance, but was an idea that Calvin in particular could not tolerate. In his view, separation of grace and nature would lead to no end of troubles; every aspect of our lives (science, culture, etc.) needed to be brought under religious control.

Wanting more information, I took The Reformation: A History off the shelf. It’s a relatively short book written by Patrick Collinson, the Regius Professor of Modern History, Emeritus, of Cambridge University. As you might expect, Collinson treats the subject differently than the author of the 3:AM article.

What I mainly learned from the book is that the Reformation was too complicated to easily summarize. For example, it was helped along by the invention of the printing press and movable type in the 15th century. Although Martin Luther and John Calvin (actually a Frenchman named Jean Calvin) were the two principal figures, many others played important roles, including preachers, theologians, church officials, authors, soldiers, princes and kings, from one end of Europe to the other. Collinson’s chronology begins with the Great Schism of 1378 (which resulted in there being three Popes) and ends with England’s “Glorious Revolution” of 1688 (which gave more authority to Parliament).

Maybe this passage sums up the book and reinforces the thesis of the 3:AM article:

The Reformation was awash with words. The historian who tries to catch its essence finds his net breaking under the weight of words… The formulation “Word of God”, which among Protestants especially became a synonym for the Bible, made the elusive abstraction “the Word” hard and fast, more concrete, anchoring it in biblical texts, which were given a new and absolute authority…The Church was to be validated by the Bible; not the Bible by the Church… Words became as tablets of stone. [pp. 33-34]

There was a shorter passage I couldn’t find, something to the effect that truth was only to be discovered in the Bible. A strange and disturbing idea if you think about it.

The Subject’s Point of View by Katalin Farkas

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In a nutshell, Professor Farkas argues that meaning is in the head after all. That’s the “internalist” position that most academic philosophers have rejected in favor of a newer position called “externalism”. That’s the idea that, in Hilary Putnam’s well-known phrase, “meaning ain’t in the head”.

Putnam argued for his position by describing a thought experiment in which two guys named Oscar are exactly the same in every way and live on two Earth’s that seem to be the same in every way too. They both call the clear, tasteless liquid around them “water”, but it’s years before anyone on either planet has figured out what water is made of. The thing is that, without anyone knowing it yet, the water on Earth is H2O (as we now know) but on Twin Earth it’s XYZ (i.e. not H2O). The question is: “What do Oscar and his twin mean by the word “water”?” Putnam and the other externalists think that they mean different things when they each use that word. (You can read more about the thought experiment here.)

Farkas, on the other hand, thinks that the great 17th century philosopher RenĂ© Descartes was basically right. Meaning is a psychological phenomenon. If Oscar and his twin on that other Earth have the exact same conscious thoughts about what they both call “water”, the word has the same meaning for both of them, regardless of what water’s (unknown) molecular composition happens to be. 

Here’s the last paragraph of the book:

I have defended a certain conception of the mental, one I regard as developing Descartes’s fundamental insight about the mind: that the mind is essentially revealed from the subject’s point of view. I have shown that this conception lies at the heart of contemporary internalist theories. I have considered an objection against the notion of internally individuated content [or meaning] and found it wanting. Hopefully, we can now give back the subject and her point of view the proper place they deserve.

I also accept the internalist position, which is probably the main reason I enjoyed the book. The author’s discussion of sense and reference was especially helpful, but it’s not a book for anyone unfamiliar with the topic.