Rorty being Rorty, and why I like him (sometimes)
I found this quote in his Wikipedia entry...and it reminds me why there's something honest and sincere about Rorty that I can't help but admire. (and a funny anecdote about Rorty after the jump)
It seems to me that the regulative idea that we heirs of the Enlightenment, we Socratists, most frequently use to criticize the conduct of various conversational partners is that of ‘needing education in order to outgrow their primitive fear, hatreds, and superstitions’ . . . It is a concept which I, like most Americans who teach humanities or social science in colleges and universities, invoke when we try to arrange things so that students who enter as bigoted, homophobic, religious fundamentalists will leave college with views more like our own . . . The fundamentalist parents of our fundamentalist students think that the entire ‘American liberal establishment’ is engaged in a conspiracy. The parents have a point. Their point is that we liberal teachers no more feel in a symmetrical communication situation when we talk with bigots than do kindergarten teachers talking with their students . . . When we American college teachers encounter religious fundamentalists, we do not consider the possibility of reformulating our own practices of justification so as to give more weight to the authority of the Christian scriptures. Instead, we do our best to convince these students of the benefits of secularization. We assign first-person accounts of growing up homosexual to our homophobic students for the same reasons that German schoolteachers in the postwar period assigned The Diary of Anne Frank. . . You have to be educated in order to be . . . a participant in our conversation . . . So we are going to go right on trying to discredit you in the eyes of your children, trying to strip your fundamentalist religious community of dignity, trying to make your views seem silly rather than discussable. We are not so inclusivist as to tolerate intolerance such as yours . . . I don’t see anything herrschaftsfrei [domination free] about my handling of my fundamentalist students. Rather, I think those students are lucky to find themselves under the benevolent Herrschaft [domination] of people like me, and to have escaped the grip of their frightening, vicious, dangerous parents . . . I am just as provincial and contextualist as the Nazi teachers who made their students read Der Stürmer; the only difference is that I serve a better cause.
Take THAT critical pedagogues!
This reminds me of a story I heard from PB, via CR (allegedly) about an interaction
between Henry A Giroux and Rorty.
As one can imagine, Rorty and Giroux probably had no love lost between each other. Rorty was highly critical of the "critical left," and instead espoused his own version of a pragmatic left. Of course, the "critical left" accused Rorty of being naively enchanted with the romantic era and its emphasis on the individual and the heroic individual...you know how these things are.
ANYWAY
Giroux had some sort of journal he edited. Rorty submitted an article to it, and Giroux returned it to him for revisions. Rorty, being Rorty, then returned the resubmit request with his own request for clarification. GO RORTY! Of course, I would have to assume that this request for clarification was itself a defense of his original article. Giroux, in a perhaps not so uncharacteristic move, simply replied to Rorty "FUCK YOU" or "FUCK OFF."
Of course, I have NO proof of any of this, but it's a fun fiction to think about when one is strapped trying to navigate challenging intellectual waters.