By T. M. Moore|Published Date: August 23, 2010
American Visions (4)
Not in Kansas anymore?
We’ve been looking at contenders for a renewed vision for the American experience. The country has lost its way, many insist, and the people are looking for a new direction for the future. Winds of change have blown us off course, and the moral and social terrain beneath our feet has changed dramatically. We’re not in Kansas, anymore.
Some, as we have seen, insist that the only way to renew the future is by recovering much of America’s past. Whether the emphasis is on a stricter moral life, grounded in traditional institutions, or on recovering the vision of “out of many, one” that guided the country’s early development, some late-20th century thinkers argued that only by getting in touch with our past greatness will the nation be able to secure the same for its future. Each of these views – renewed morals or recovered “melting pot” – has its supporters today.
A second group of spokespersons we might refer to as holding to a “Somewhere, Over the Rainbow” view of the American vision. In the view of those whom we’ll be considering, America has not yet defined its true vision. That remains to be articulated. Thus, the future that we long for is still within our grasp. All we have to do is agree that where we want to go is somewhere we’ve never been before, somewhere vastly more interesting and desirable than anywhere we’ve been thus far, and then we can bring the institutions of society to bear on the task of getting us there. The yellow brick road to an American Oz awaits our defining it.
Once again, we will consider two camps within this orientation toward the American vision, one a purely secular vision and one, closer to home, which emanates from a particular sector of the American evangelical Church.
We begin with the secular version of this “Over the Rainbow” approach to articulating the American vision.
Renewing the party of hope
A primary spokesman for a renewed secular vision at the end of the last century was the late philosopher Richard Rorty. In one of his last books, Achieving Our Counrty,[1] Rorty argued passionately for a vision of American to emerge out of a refortified political left. He believed that the recovery of a meaningful vision for the nation is the peculiar challenge of the political left, “the party of hope,” which “insists that our nation remains unachieved.”[2]
He lamented the fragmentation of the left which occurred over the generation before him, during which time activists and academicians split into two separate groups opposed to the status quo. The activists insisted on working from the bottom up to organize the downtrodden and oppressed into effective political action for social change. Academics sought to work from the top down, focusing mainly on a cultural leftism that insists on greater individual freedom.
Rorty believed that, “If the intellectuals and the unions could ever get back together again, and could reconstitute the kind of Left which existed in the Forties and Fifties, the first decade of the twenty-first century might conceivably be a Second Progressive Era.”[3] He looked to these two groups to generate “suggestions about how to make ourselves wonderfully different from anything that has been,”[4] so that we might become the country which would pride itself as one in which governments and social institutions exist only for the purpose of making a new sort of individual possible, one who will take nothing as authoritative save free consensus between as diverse a variety of citizens as can possibly be produced. Such a country cannot contain castes or classes, because the kind of self-respect which is needed for free participation in democratic deliberation is incompatible with such social divisions.[5]
Religion need not apply
Rorty’s was a completely secular vision. He did not believe that a religious outlook had anything to offer the future of the American Vision, and he had only scorn for those who do. Nor, he insisted, must fixed principles be allowed to stand in the way of defining a new vision for America, either. As he wrote, “In democratic countries you get things done by compromising your principles in order to form alliances with groups about whom you have grave doubts.”[6] Rorty hoped to reunite the activist, or reformist, left and the academic, or cultural, left by calling all members of the left to “put a moratorium on theory.” The left, he wrote, “should try to kick its philosophy habit.”
Further, he called the left to look back to Lincoln, Whitman, and Dewey to consider what might be achieved in the light of their ideals and accomplishments.[7] In other words, as Rorty saw it, the theories and philosophies that brought the left into being in the first place were good enough and ought to be recovered in order to re-activate the left once again for the sake of a future yet to be determined.
Political activism
Political activism on a small scale is the key to achieving the country that Rorty envisioned – activity on a community-organizer scale. The effect of his approach, he hoped, would be to exalt individual liberty around the world, celebrating the individual and liberating persons from the constraints of the past and the confines of chauvinistic nationalism:
Someday, perhaps, cumulative piecemeal reforms will be found to have brought about revolutionary change. Such reforms might someday produce a presently unimaginable nonmarket economy, and much more widely distributed powers of decision making. They might also, given similar reforms in other countries, bring about an international federation, a world government. In such a new world, American national pride would become as quaint as pride in being from Nebraska or Kazakhstan or Sicily. But in the meantime, we should not let the abstractly described best be the enemy of the better. We should not let speculation about a totally changed system, and a totally different way of thinking about human life and human affairs, replace step-by-step reform of the system we presently have.[8]
Hope and change
Except for Rorty’s gradualism, this vision almost precisely summarizes the “hope and change” agenda of President Barack Obama and the neo-progressive movement he represents.
Richard Rorty would surely have rejoiced to see the ways President Obama has tried to soften the image of America in other countries; used his academic background and community-organizer experience to forge an alliance bridging the disparate interest groups of the political left; increased the reach of government into more of the private sector, in the name of redefining individual American life; and continued to vilify a previous Administration which Rorty would have seen as the very embodiment of everything he believed America needed to leave behind. And, while Mr. Obama’s push for major overhauls, comprehensive legislative programs, and grand, sweeping change might have caused Richard Rorty to raise an eyebrow, in the main, I believe the late philosopher of pragmatic postmodernism would see in the President the embodiment of his hopes.
But what began with such promise – an Administration and agenda aggressive and effective across many fronts – has, in the face of a tenacious recession and a rapidly-mounting national debt, stalled and bogged down; and it is not all certain that this vision of “hope and change” is what will guide the Republic into its next season of life.
A bumper sticker I noticed in a parking lot not long ago captures the growing skepticism over the viability of this approach to renewing the American vision: “So How’s That ‘Hope and Change’ Workin’ for Ya?”
For Study or Discussion
- What kinds of policies and positions do you associate with the “political left”? Why do such views appeal to people?
- How can you see that Richard Rorty’s approach to renewing the American vision has some things in common with the “Back to the Future” thinkers? What does this suggest for Christians as we begin to re-think the American vision?
- Do any aspects of the vision of Richard Rorty trouble you? Which? Why?
- Is it possible to articulate a compelling vision and construct a stable society apart from spiritual and moral convictions? Explain.
- How would you begin to formulate a response to this “hope and change” vision for America’s future?
For more insight to this subject, get the book, Scaling the Secular City, by J. P. Moreland, from our online store. Or read the article, “Three Meanings of Secular,” by Douglas Farrow.
[1] Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998).
[2] Ibid., p. 14.
[3] Ibid., p. 56.
[4] Ibid., p. 24.
[5] Ibid., p. 30.
[6] Ibid. p. 52.
[7] Ibid., pp. 91, 92.
[8] Ibid., p. 105.
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