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Presidential Scholar Richard Rorty Speaks on the “Double-Mindedness” of Leftists

The contradictions in American leftist thought and the contribution of American leftist action to social justice were the subjects of Richard Rorty’s talk, “American Universities and the Hope for Social Justice. Rorty—philosopher, public intellectual, and Stanford professor—spoke as part of a two-day visit for the Presidential Scholar series on Nov. 5 and 6.

Rorty noted that universities have been home to American leftists such as himself, “people who agonize over the vast disparity in chances for happiness between both the rich nations and the poor nations and between middle-class Americans and poor Americans.”

Leftists experience what Rorty calls “double-mindedness” in their love of democracy and simultaneous distrust of populism. “We spend half our time claiming that only leftist political measures can bring about true democracy and the other half regretting that most of the voters are too stupid to support such measures, for we’re only in favor of populism when it’s on our side, when it’s the protest of the weak against the strong,” Rorty said. For example, no leftist supports Hitler or Jesse Helms, both populist leaders.

Universities contribute most positively to the larger society “when the dominant political emotion on campus is whole-hearted admiration for heroic actions undertaken outside the university. They are at their worst … when they are filled with disdain for the failure of the rest of the middle class to live up to the university’s example,” Rorty said. Disdain has prevailed more often than admiration for the last several decades.

When there is admiration for heroes like Martin Luther King, Jr., Cesar Chavez, and Nelson Mandela; when faculty and students support movements like the fight against U.S. imperialism in the Spanish-American War, and the unionization efforts of Eugene Debs and others; when universities refuse to serve grapes in support of the farm workers or support divestment in corporations doing business in South Africa, then the university is at its best in spreading support for social justice, Rorty said. “We balance dread of the resentful and ignorant masses with the thought that in the past century appeals to American public opinion have made a great difference for the better,” he noted. “Such appeals eventually gave women the vote, ended the lynching of black men, and opened the universities to both women and blacks.”

In the recent past, three leftist movements—multiculturalism, protests against the World Trade Organization and International Monetary Fund, and the Justice for Janitors campaign—have gained attention on university campuses. Multicul-turalism, Rorty believes, laid a false claim, namely that “every culture is worthy of respect.” What multi-culturalism was actually about was gaining attention for oppressed groups in the United States, he said. As such, multicultural programs helped improve the country because they “produced a whole generation of white, male, heterosexual college graduates, still the segment of America that retains most of the economic and political clout, whose notions about and attitudes towards blacks, women, Hispanics, and gays are appreciably different from those of their parents and grandparents.”

On the negative side, the focus on cultural recognition drew leftist attention away from focus on economic inequality and redistribution of wealth. The protests against the WTO and IMF are directed at these core leftist issues. “Nothing is a more appropriate object of leftist concern than the monstrously unjust arrangements that drain off most of the labor of people outside Europe and America in order to permit the Europeans and Americans to fill their homes with still more consumer goods. But leftist protests against injustice only get off the ground if they’re incorporated into a program for change, a description of a concrete set of alternative arrangements, and a road map showing how we might get there from here,” Rorty said, claiming that the anti-WTO protests fail to do so.

Rorty said that the Justice for Janitors campaign, which seeks to improve the wages of universities’ blue-collar workers, combines all the elements of successful leftist movements. Low wages are a clear social injustice, and the path to improvement is well defined as increased wages. The increased gap between rich and poor must be addressed in a time when support for the labor movement has dropped, and neither Democrats nor Republicans have acted. “Some other institution has to take the lead … The universities seem as good a place to start as any,” Rorty concluded.

Barbara Alderson