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Democracy Is Our Hope For A Better Future

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Index to posts in this series

In The Nation That Never Was, after telling us his version of a better story of America, Kermit Rosevelt writes:

We Americans are not perfect, either. Some of us are bad. Some are indifferent and unwilling to sacrifice for others. Some are easily distracted, misled, manipulated. We go forward and we go back. We elect Reagan, we elect Obama, we elect Trump. But what makes us American—our deepest ideal—is that we keep trying. America is born in an attempt to find a new and better way, to escape the stale and oppressive monarchies of Europe. We don’t get it right immediately. Yet we keep going. We’re looking for America, and we know that the America we’re looking for isn’t something that’s given to us by Founding Fathers. It’s something we make, something we find inside ourselves. The true America is not handed down from the past but created anew by each generation, created a little better, and what we can give the future is the opportunity to get just a little closer than we did ourselves. That’s the promise that makes us American. That’s the promise we have to keep. P. 205.

It’s not exactly a reason his better story is better, but Roosevelt thinks the better story supports his theory of democracy. Compare that passage with this from one of my favorite books, Philosophy and Social Hope, by Richard Rorty:

Pragmatists … do not believe that there is a way things really are. So they want to replace the appearance–reality distinction by that between descriptions of the world and of ourselves which are less useful and those which are more useful. When the question ‘useful for what?’ is pressed, they have nothing to say except ‘useful to create a better future’. When they are asked, ‘Better by what criterion?’, they have no detailed answer, any more than the first mammals could specify in what respects they were better than the dying dinosaurs. Pragmatists can only say something as vague as: Better in the sense of containing more of what we consider good and less of what we consider bad. When asked, ‘And what exactly do you consider good?’, pragmatists can only say, with Whitman, ‘variety and freedom’, or, with Dewey, ‘growth’. ‘Growth itself,’ Dewey said, ‘is the only moral end.’

They are limited to such fuzzy and unhelpful answers because what they hope is not that the future will conform to a plan, will fulfil an immanent teleology, but rather that the future will astonish and exhilarate.… Pp. 27-8, fn omitted.

The connection is obvious. Roosevelt says democracy is about the future. He says the better story fits with his view of democracy. Rorty says that Pragmatism is about the future. Later on he says that Pragmatism is well-suited to democracy, because the growth of freedom leads naturally to a democratic form of government. Both think we can have a better future.

The relation between philosophy and forms of government

Rorty calls himself a Pragmatist, after the only truly American philosophy, founded by the Americans C.S. Peirce, John Dewey, and William James. Here’s a short series discussing some of the basic elements of Pragmatism: Method, Truth, and Applications.

In Rorty’s first sentence, “a way things really are” is a reference to the traditional philosophical problem called the appearance-reality dualism. It’s based on the fact that we only have the evidence of our senses. Therefore we cannot know the reality of the thing we perceive as it truly is. Pragmatism teaches that all we know is what our senses tell us, and there’s nothing beyond that, no Platonic forms, no hidden reality. For a fuller discussion, see the post on Truth linked above.

The older forms of philosophy searched for universal truths, unchanging verities, the way things really are. The results of that search establish a static universe based on the theory of everything created by one or more human beings. There is one answer to any problem, and it can be found by consulting the fixed principles — or the ruler’s command. As Roosevelt puts it, universal verities lead to “… the stale and oppressive monarchies of Europe.”

Pragmatism and democracy are not necessarily connected. As Rorty points out, a Nazi could agree with and apply Pragmatic thinking. But there is a decisive difference between a society living with eternal verities, and one open to change.

A Problem

After reading Roosevelt’s book, I’ve begun to think the the real contest is between Americans dedicated to democracy in the Rorty/Dewey sense, and those committed to the unchanging verities they find in history or their sacred books or handed to them by authoritarian demagogues. The futurists want to make the future better for everyone. The traditionalists think everything is just fine as it is, or as it was at some date in the past, or as it would be in a new society built to effectuate their theory of everything. The futurists, as Rorty says, want the future to be amazing. The traditionalists can’t even handle the latest scientific achievements, like mRNA vaccines. The futurists think the economic status quo must be improved to benefit everyone. The traditionalists think the status quo is the best we can do.

And, not to put too fine a point on this, the people who really want things to remain as they are are the filthy rich; and the people who really want to return to the past are the religious fundamentalists. Both groups are apparently willing to sacrifice democracy to get what they want.

Left Theory

Perhaps you have noted that posts at Emptywheel are categorized. Most of mine are in the category Left Theory. I think the left needs a set of ideas about society and government that can be persuasively explained to non-lefties, and that link all our policy positions into a reasonably coherent whole. I offered a tentative economic theory here. In that post I say that a useful economic theory should be based on observation and experience, not on some grand theory of humanity, or, for that matter any other grand theory. It would serve as a tool for reaching our goals. It would change as we learned more new things. In this sense it would be Pragmatic.

Democracy is a broad theory about how governments should work. It’s a system that works for all people of good faith, giving everyone the opportunity to participate in the process of building the future. In that sense it is Pragmatic.

In the absence of eternal verities, we have to justify all of our beliefs. Why then do I believe democracy is the way forward? First, I believe that the Golden Rule, “do unto others as you would have others do unto you”, is the best guiding principle humans have ever developed. I firmly believe that application of this principle would massively reduce the amount of pain and misery in the world, and that that would be a good thing. To do that, we need to get as many different ideas as we can about our future, both for deciding what we should be as a nation, and for solving problems. Democracy does that.

Also, I want to be part of the decision-making, so I should insure that others can and do participate if they want to.

Second, I agree with Jefferson that government derives its just powers from the consent of the governed. That desire, that insistence, that we give consent to the government is effectuated by majority rule in a democracy.

And that’s where the conflict lies. In the US the minority party holds power despite the will of the majority. The current system of government makes that easy, especially with the rogue majority on SCOTUS.

Our current challenge is to make our democracy work.

The Conservative Lie About Moral Relativity

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Periodically leftists get blamed for creating a moral relativism that is destroying society. Here’s one Marcy caught:

And here’s a piece from Dan Dreezner, tongue-in-cheek, but still:

Traditionally, commentators have tended to assume that those articulating “there are no facts, just opinion” views came from the left. No longer!

Well, those commentators can just fuck right off.

1. Patrick Chovanec seems to think the dominant class never thought of using its position to control the definition of facts, and to write history to show that they deserve to be dominant until philosophers and then leftists started talking about the nature of truth. [1] Rightists say the left is responsible for the decline of morality for pointing out that the dominant class are self-serving liars and haters.

Political conservatives deflect with harpy shrieks that the left denies the existence of all facts and history. No. Leftists deny the fabrications of the dominant class. Lefties reject the facts that the tobacco industry created denying that cigarettes cause lung cancer. Lefties deny the manufactured facts about climate change spread by the fossil fuel industry. Why, some lefties even deny the truth of Parson Weems’ stories about George Washington.

There have always been people who contested the facts asserted by the dominant class; for example, Galileo. The Catholic Church made him deny his own factual observations on the ground that he must be wrong because he contradicted their interpretation of the Bible. That contradicted the claim of the church hierarchy that it possessed the sole power to interpret scripture. This is mirrored by the decision of Catholic prelates to handle child rapist priests in-house rather than through the justice system.

The right wing thinks academics are leftists. These scholars are writing histories that recover and include the voices of working people in the labor movement and other dissidents who are canceled by the dominant class in their histories. [2] Making new factual observations and finding old records to incorporate into histories is the exact opposite of denying the existence of facts and histories.

2. In this post I take up a not so post-modern view of facts and truth, that espoused by Charles Sanders Peirce and Henry James. Truth is a property of our beliefs: do they correspond with reality in ways that are useful for some human purpose. Peirce and James and other pragmatists do not deny that there are facts. They know that things exist in the world, separate from individual human beings. But they deny the existence of non-corporeal things that only a few people can perceive. They reject the Platonic idea of the “forms” external to the reality we can experience directly or indirectly. They say that what we can sense is all there is for us of that external reality. [3]

Those who take the other view insist that there are absolutes like the Platonic Ideal Chair of which the chair I’m sitting in is merely an exemplar. But that’s just pretend. What they mean is that there is an external source for absolute morality. In the US, most of them mean that their Christian Bible establishes absolute morality, and anyone who questions that is wrecking society.

A lesser person that I am might point out that it’s a strange religion that teaches that character is the only important factor in voting for president, so adherents must not vote for any Clinton; but also teaches that a different adulterer and liar who is also a corrupt businessman is an instrument of the Almighty, and that it’s sinful to believe otherwise.

I’ll just say I can’t understand why anyone would pay attention so someone claiming that they are receiving directions from the Almighty, directions no one else can perceive. [3] For example, when people tell us they killed their children because God told them to, we consider them criminal or insane. Why is it different when similar people abuse our LGBTQ brothers and sisters because God told them to? [4] Why should they be allowed to enact laws to enshrine their hate-filled views like the laws that wrecked the life of the genius Alan Turing? So, yes. Some lefties and lots of other people really do reject the idea of absolute morals.

3. Conservatives are convinced that if there is no source for absolute morals, no God, then everything is permitted, as Dostoevsky puts it in The Brothers Karamazov. This is a shocking proposition. It implies that people will only act morally if there is some form of punishment or reward. But that is not the way we live. We are all raised to understand our obligations and responsibilities in our families, in our schools and in society at large. We know the rules, and we know why we have those rules. This is true of Pakistani Muslims, Israeli Ultra-Orthodox Jews, Indian Hindus, Chinese Confucianists, US atheists, and Bolivian Catholics, Native Americans, in fact, in avery society ever. There are customs, mores, rules of etiquette, rules about food, hierarchies of respect, funerary customs, laws, and institutions to teach and enforce all of these and more.

This is from an essay by Richard Rorty titled Moral Relativism, 1996.

In his more recent book Thick and Thin, [Michael] Walzer argues that we should not think of the customs and institutions of particular societies as accidental accretions around a common core of universal moral rationality, the transcultural moral law. Rather, we should think of the thick set of customs and institutions as prior, and as what commands moral allegiance. The thin morality which can be abstracted out of the various thick moralities is not made up of the commandments of a universally shared human faculty called ‘reason’. Such thin resemblances between these thick moralities as may exist are contingent, as contingent as the resemblances between the adaptive organs of diverse biological species. [5]

In other words, we can’t reason our way to an absolute morality, any more than we can have it handed to us by people claiming they know the will of the Ineffable. We inherit a morality by osmosis and direct teaching, and we inherit ways of judging our actions based on that morality. That suffices for many. But we can learn about other cultures and their moralities, and we can make value judgments about both our own and other cultures. Further, we are able to question our own standards for judging moralities. As Rorty puts it,

The pragmatist view of what opponents of pragmatism call ‘firm moral principles’ is that such principles are abbreviations of past practices – ways of summing up the habits of the ancestors we most admire. P. xxix.

I don’t admire those of my ancestors who thought that enslaved people are not human beings, or that Jews are cursed, or that women are chattel or that the LGBTQ community is an abomination. I admire my ancestors who fought against those firm moral principles, trying to wreck the morality taught by the then dominant class.

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[1] I discuss this use of power to create a kind of reality here, with links to other aspects of Pierre Bourdieu’s ideas. Of course, my citation to a French scholar makes me utterly irrelevant.

[2] For example, Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the US and Ibram X. Kendi’s Stamped From the Beginning, both of which I highly recommend.

[3] For a different view, see Thomas Merton’s book Mystics and Zen Masters.

[4] I urge readers to consider Kierkegaard’s Fear And Trembling carefully. And maybe watch the excellent 1991 movie The Rapture.

[5] Philosophy and Social Hope, p. viii, at xxxi; it’s aimed at lay readers, and is very accessible. On the subject of what Walzer calls transcultural moral law, see Karen Armstrong’s book, The Great Transformation. I liked this book, but reviewers are less favorable. Roughly, Armstrong discusses the idea of The Axial Age, put forward by Karl Jaspers, noting similar reactions across cultures to the dislocations of the period 1000-200 BCE.