April 23, 1998

BOOKS OF THE TIMES / By CHRISTOPHER LEHMANN-HAUPT

'Achieving Our Country': How the American Left Lost Hope

ACHIEVING OUR COUNTRY

Leftist Thought in 20th-Century America

By Richard Rorty

159 pages. Harvard University Press. $18.95.



n his philosophically rigorous new book, "Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in 20th-Century America," Richard Rorty raises a provocative if familiar question: Whatever happened to national pride in this country? Not what he terms "simple-minded militaristic chauvinism," but the sort of pride that "is to countries what self-respect is to individuals: a necessary condition for self-improvement."

What in particular has happened to the pride instilled by Walt Whitman and John Dewey that, Rorty says, "was ubiquitous on the American left prior to the Vietnam War"?

This was a pride that envisioned the American experiment as secular, anti-authoritarian and infinite in possibilities that Whitman idealized as loving relationships and Dewey as good citizenship. It was a pragmatic pride, demanding action rather than mere spectatorship, which is why it was essential to what motivated the "Old Left," or what Rorty prefers to call the "reformist left."

What happened to this activist pride? Rorty, the neo-pragmatist philosopher who teaches at the University of Virginia, offers an answer in "Achieving Our Country," which is based on the William E. Massey Sr. Lectures in the History of American Civilization that he delivered last year at Harvard University. He argues that in the 1960s the reformist left was eclipsed by the New Left, which rejected it for supporting the Cold War and, by extension, Vietnam.

But because of the Marxist strain in its thinking, Rorty writes, the New Left was too pure to take up the reformist left's causes, which demanded a willingness to compromise principles "in order to form alliances with groups about whom you have grave doubts."

While crediting the New Left for being instrumental in ending U.S. involvement in Vietnam, Rorty blames it for retreating from pragmatism into theory. This has led members of the left "to give cultural politics preference over real politics, and to mock the very idea that democratic institutions might once again be made to serve social justice," he writes. "It leads them to prefer knowledge to hope."



RICHARD RORTY

Credit: Christopher Bierlein Photography/Random House

While he credits what he calls "the new cultural left" for ameliorating the harm done by sadistic treatment of women, racial minorities and homosexuals, he also blames it for working to preserve "otherness" instead of ignoring it, for stressing the one issue to the exclusion of others, for cutting itself off from the remnant of the reformist left and for clinging to a view of America quite the opposite of national pride.

So what does Rorty offer as a solution besides exhorting the left to change its ways, get involved and shed what he calls its "semiconscious anti-Americanism, which it carried over from the rage of the late Sixties"? Not really very much. "Achieving Our Country" is more a critique of the left than a prescription for its rehabilitation in his terms, and given the sharpness of the critique, the book is unlikely to win over those who are the subject of his disapproval.

Trying to reform the left, Rorty even resorts to a form of intellectual bullying. He warns that if the cultural left continues to ignore what he calls the declining economic condition of American workers, they will become vulnerable to the demagogy of some fascist strongman, who will play on their fears and prejudices with the result that "all the sadism which the academic left has tried to make unacceptable to its students will come flooding back."

Yet earlier he argues that such sadism has turned out not to be the result of "economic inequality and insecurity," and that the belief of the American left in such economic determinism was "too simplistic."

At the same time, so uncritical is his celebration of the left as "by definition, the party of hope" and the right as inevitably selfish and committed to the status quo, that independent thinkers are unlikely to be persuaded by his reasoning.

He writes: "The right thinks that our country already has a moral identity, and hopes to keep that identity intact. It fears economic and political change, and therefore easily becomes the pawn of the rich and powerful -- the people whose selfish interests are served by forestalling such change." Yet it never seems to occur to him that the left, in seeking change for its own sake, by peaceful means as well as violent, might as easily become the pawn of the nihilistic and destructive.

Still, if Rorty doesn't quite lead the way to a revival of national pride on the left, he offers a persuasive analysis of why such pride has been lost. As a philosopher, he is particularly thought-provoking in his readings of Whitman and Dewey as prophets of the American religion. Speaking of acts like the massacring of American Indians who stood in the settlers' way and our conduct in Vietnam, he asks, "is there then nothing incompatible with American national pride?"

He responds: "I think the Dewey-Whitman answer is that there are many things that should chasten and temper such pride, but that nothing a nation has done should make it impossible for a constitutional democracy to regain self-respect. To say that certain acts do make this impossible is to abandon the secular, authoritarian vocabulary of shared social hope in favor of a vocabulary which Whitman and Dewey abhorred: a vocabulary built around the notion of sin."

For Rorty, like Whitman and Dewey, the sin is suicidal guilt and despair. Anything short of such sin permits hope in the darkest hour and the beginnings of self-forgiveness, which leads on to a renewal of pride.