As the Worm Turns

Earlier I mentioned the importance of distinguishing between relativism and pluralism without ever getting around to defining pluralism; an oversight due to laziness on my part.

Luckily, a recent skerfuffle between Damon Linker and Matthew Yglesias over the late Richard Rorty can act as a nice little primer on pluralism and its grounds. Linker claims that Rorty thought one had to be an anti-metaphysical pragmatist to be a good liberal pluralist:

Rorty advocated a form of liberalism that is pure negation — the vacuum that is left over once people stop believing that any “truth” (always in scare quotes) is worth killing or dying for.

According to Linker, Rorty’s claim is that people — the guy in the street, the voter in the booth, the worshipper in the pew — are the ones who should “stop believing” in any scare-quoted ‘truth.’ On this reading it is an intellectual virtue to be agnostic about the big answers to life, the universe and everything.

Yglesias disagrees; he thinks Rorty was fully in the John Rawls tradition of being politically — but not personally — indifferent to grand unifying schemes. The guy, the voter and the worshipper can believe what they want, so long as the set of political institutions in which they are embedded is itself metaphysically neutral:

Rawlsian political liberalism doesn’t say that individual people — especially including political liberals in good standing — must be indifferent to the comprehensive views of other. It’s not as if in Rawls-land the priests and imams and rabbis and art critics and yoga instructors of the world are all supposed to stop offering opinions about good and evil, beautiful and ugly, because “hey, we’re political liberals, we’re indifferent to that stuff.”

The goal is to hive off an autonomous political domain in which we bracket our views on broader, deeper questions and engage one another on the basis of a much-shallower but more widely held set of views about the conception of a citizen.

I’m not going to weigh in on who is right in their reading of Rorty. I do know that Rorty plays the public role of the pragmatist who tipped over into a kind of bland relativism where personal beliefs are about as important as clothing choices — whether one believes in god or not is just as meaningful as whether you shop at Express, The Gap or Banana Republic.

Even if close textual exegesis refutes this, we need someone to point at, to wear the scarlet letter R (for ‘relativist’) and act as a warning to the kids about the dangers of taking good old-fashioned pluralism too far. Like it or not, fair or not, true or not — Rorty nominated himself for the role.

[Update: John Holbo of Crooked Timber has an excellent diagnosis of the above dispute, well worth reading. Check it out here.]

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Post-modern, Relativism, Pluralism, Politics, Richard Rorty, Matthew Yglesias, Damon Linker, Philosophy