Epilogue: Rethinking America in an Age of Globalization; or, The Conversation Continues

When historians use the word consensus to describe moral sentiments in a particular period, it is easy to think that they mean unanimity. But that is almost never the case. What they mean by consensus, rather, is that there are moments in American life when clearly identifiable concerns command the attention of a variety of Americans all along the social and political spectrum. At the turn of the twenty-first century, “globalization” became one of these consensus issues as Americans appreciated the degree to which their lives were affected by large-scale, transnational, and geopolitical developments. In many respects globalization was a new term for familiar concerns in American thought. It was yet another iteration of the meaning of America not as a given fact but as a question to answer.

In addition to the popular press, which regularly ran features on the growing interconnectivity of national economies and political orders, a virtual industry of books on the subject flooded the marketplace. Benjamin Barber’s Jihad vs. McWorld: How Globalism and Tribalism Are Reshaping the World (1995), Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order (1996), Noam Chomsky’s Profit over People: Neoliberalism and Global Order (1999), and Anthony Giddens’s Runaway World: How Globalization Is Reshaping Our Lives (1999) were among the major books on globalization and its discontents. College campuses also became disseminators of ideas and hubs for debate about what it meant to be both an American citizen and a citizen of the world. Campaigns in the 1980s for universities to divest from South Africa gave way to student boycotts of campus paraphernalia produced in Asian sweatshops, and to the omnipresent dorm room iconography of Amnesty International’s candle wrapped in barbed wire.

The perils and possibilities of globalization and its implications for American life became a shared focus of intense debate. What vexed so many thinkers was how globalization seemed to intensify nationalism around the world instead of breaking it down. They looked historically, economically, and sociologically at the forces that contributed to a national belonging, while assessing the need for twenty-first-century Americans to feel bonds of affiliation, obligation, and reciprocity beyond the nation. “Globalization” was thus a new framework and scale for long-standing and familiar ways of thinking about the boundaries of moral communities, and how or if to refashion identities in the face of a diverse world and uncertain future.

Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (1983) emerged as one of the foremost books shaping conversations about nationalism in the late twentieth-century United States. Though primarily a scholar of Southeast Asia, Anderson looked at various parts of the globe to consider the origins and integrative processes of a felt “deep, horizontal comradeship” with others far and wide. The questions he asked originated in his extended study of Indonesia, a patchwork of people with an intense sense of nationalism, but extended to all pluralistic nations. How do people from different ethnic and linguistic groups come to feel part of something larger called “the nation”? Under what circumstances does that larger national community hold together or fall apart? How could something so abstract as “the nation” inspire such love and devotion, making its subjects willing to kill and die for it? He answered by demonstrating how economic changes coupled with a revolution in communication (popularized by Marshall McLuhan two decades before) helped produce what he referred to as “print-capitalism,” which disseminated a sense of commonality or what he called an “imagined community.”1 Anderson’s idea of “imagined communities” became one of the most important concepts of twentieth-century political theory around the globe.

If national community was something people “imagined,” then wasn’t it subject to the very limits of those imaginers’ cognitive and moral maps? Though imagining communities could be a positive force, could it not also be a negative one, by imagining some people out of the national community? These questions concerned many observers of this period. The same year that Anderson’s study appeared, the Mexican American author Richard Rodriguez published his autobiography, Hunger of Memory, to explore what it was like for him, as a dark-skinned, bilingual child of immigrants, to try to become part of the American community. Almost seven decades after Randolph Bourne pushed for a “trans-national America,” his ideal still proved to be a distant dream for too many immigrants and their children.

It was also at this time that a growing number of predominantly male gay activists across the country tried unsuccessfully to get the federal government and their fellow citizens to consider homosexuals part of the American imagined community. Their most urgent issue was getting Americans to commit resources to fighting the AIDS epidemic, which was turning their community into what one observer at the time described as a “killing field.”2 But instead of help, they were greeted with ferocious homophobia, and instead of being treated as members of the American community, they were forced to perform do-it-yourself organizing and volunteering to save whatever lives they could.

Meanwhile, at the outermost edges of the American imagination, record numbers of people became homeless, some of whom were featured in Mike Davis’s dystopian City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (1990). Davis’s postmodern Los Angeles exhibited glitz and grotesqueness in equal measure, as its wealthy inhabitants built private fortresses to protect their luxurious lifestyles from the urban poor. In disturbing detail, Davis showed how, in creating an imagined community of happy, white, rich Los Angelinos, urban planners had so fetishized private privilege that they drafted public spaces out of the American urban imaginary.

As American observers continued to wonder about the “us” and “them” and the “me” versus “we,” it was rare for them to turn to professional philosophers in the academy to help them answer their questions. Since midcentury, academic philosophy had increasingly come to focus its attention on logic and linguistic analysis. Professional philosophers had by and large dispensed with questions about ethics, aesthetics, and, most especially, the “meaning of life.” This type of inquiry seemed fuzzy, sentimental, and unable to stand up to the rigors of scientific analysis. It was in this atmosphere of logical analysis free of varieties of intellectual fuzziness that Richard Rorty, arguably the most important and influential American philosopher of the second half of the century, got his start. He and his fellow philosophical analysts would never have addressed issues of group belonging and identity nor used phrases as imprecise as “the national imaginary.”

But beginning with his landmark study Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979), this sort of philosophy, which sought with ever greater precision and force to capture “reality” with a dispassionate mind and tools of rationality, lost its appeal for Rorty. What captured his attention—and soon his formidable philosophical talents—was good old American pragmatism, drawn primarily from John Dewey. Over the course of the 1980s, in a very writerly, though unfussy and even anhedonic kind of way (which earned him the nickname “Eeyore”), Rorty began reviving pragmatic theories to show the limits of analytic philosophy and the need for inquiry that can move beyond epistemology and back into the “problems of men [and women].”

Rorty’s point here was not necessarily to make philosophers more responsive to the needs of nonphilosophers, but to get Americans to readopt a way of thinking that could better help them meet the challenges of late twentieth-century life.

Ironically, Rorty became one of the most prominent and widely read living American philosophers by trying to even further circumscribe professional philosophers’ influence on society. As he put it in 1986, “imagine . . . [that] you open your copy of the New York Times and read that the philosophers, in convention assembled, have unanimously agreed that values are objective, science rational, truth a matter of correspondence to reality” and that they “have adopted a short, crisp set of standards of rationality and morality.” Rather than praise the heavens, Rorty surmised, readers would be outraged by their unilateralism and arrogance. For Rorty, this is as it should be. No matter how much Americans get involved in (and worry over) contestations of truth, beauty, morality, and justice, they do not really want philosophers—or any professional intellectuals for that matter—to settle the debates once and for all. That is what a totalitarian society looks like, not a vibrant, if messy, democratic one.

What Rorty proposed, in books including Consequences of Pragmatism (1982), Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1988), and Achieving Our Country (1998), was instead something he called “pragmatism,” “left-wing Kuhnianism,” “solidarity,” and even “ethnocentrism,” and he described practitioners of this way of antifoundational ethical and epistemological reasoning, like himself, as proud “fuzzies.”3 Rorty, following the American pragmatists and German antifoundationalists (most especially Nietzsche and Heidegger), insisted that there are no timeless absolutes of knowledge, no ethical universals, and that all discourses—humanistic, artistic, and even scientific (à la Kuhn)—are always invariably linguistically mediated and culturally dependent. Period. Full stop. If this was a difficult concept for James’s and Dewey’s contemporaries to understand or accept, it should no longer be the case with Rorty’s contemporaries thanks in large part to Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). After all, Kuhn had (to Rorty’s mind at least) sufficiently demonstrated that even science isn’t a privileged domain of objectivity, nor are its conclusions absolute truths corresponding to a timeless reality. Period. Full stop. As a result, argued Rorty, humanists and moralists should stop trying to ape a discredited notion of objective inquiry in their pursuits of peaceful, liberal communities.

But closing the accounts of foundationalism in no way meant foreclosing the promise of—and deep need for—a shared moral life in the United States, as well as a durable cosmopolitanism in an era of increased globalization. All Rorty suggested is that late twentieth-century aspiring problem solvers do it the way practicing scientists actually do it: by seeking “intersubjectivity” (mutual understanding between two or more subjective perspectives) rather than “objectivity,” and “unforced agreement” as the basis for group solidarity rather than “truth.” Rorty proudly referred to this way of solidarity-seeking problem solving as “ethnocentric,” which, of course, raised the eyebrows of his critics on both the left and right. But what he meant was simply that there is nothing anyone can establish about truth that does not derive from some group’s (whether one’s own “ethnos” or another’s “paradigm”) customary ways of doing so. Rorty rejected calling this “relativism” and instead called it what it was, namely, “ethnocentrism”—not a “pig-headed refusal to talk to representatives of other communities,” but rather a recognition that one’s own community, as with all communities, works by its “own lights. . . . [E]thnocentrism is simply that there are no other lights to work by.” Those lights will be idiosyncratic, perhaps even quirky, particular to that group’s own history and experience. By the pragmatists’ light, that is no problem at all; indeed, it is to be expected. All the pragmatist “fuzzies” hope for is that once people can recognize and even welcome the differences between the self and the group, and the group and other groups, they can try to cultivate cultures that foster private fulfillment and (inter)group “reciprocal loyalty” necessary for human flourishing.4

In his only autobiographical reflection, “Trotsky and the Wild Orchids” (1992), Rorty joked that if being considered a pariah by both the Left and the Right meant that a thinker was on to something, then he was probably “in good shape.”5 His list of friends and friendly and even unfriendly critics reads like a “who’s who” of late twentieth-century thought: Jürgen Habermas, Martha Nussbaum, Jacques Derrida, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Alasdair MacIntyre, Cornel West, and Charles Taylor. Some took up similar foundation-free ethical positions on how to build liberal communities at home and around the world. Others shared his humane, liberal commitments but worried that he, like the early pragmatists before him, could not achieve them without a correspondence theory of truth. Some found the precision of his argumentation lacking and suggested that was why he was such a cultural hero among liberal humanists and lived in exile from his earlier tribe of analytic philosophers. Others disagreed, arguing that Rorty’s epistemology was perfectly robust, but that it actually pointed him to antidemocratic positions, not the fuzzy liberalism he was after. But all could agree on the risks involved in his foundation-free, postmodern effort to “achieve,” not inherit, an America that could be home to all Americans.

Postmodernist thought raised difficult, urgent questions then, and it remains to be seen what the answers are or if they will ever come. Should the United States be American citizens’ primary allegiance, or in the era of globalization, should they aspire instead to be citizens of the world? If we cannot even get intergroup reciprocal loyalty in the United States, how can we possibly achieve it internationally? How can the nation safeguard its most precious ideals by way of solidarity and not truth? Has 9/11 proven this intellectual vision bankrupt once and for all, or has it only proven why it is our last best hope for a peaceful world? Until twenty-first-century Americans can find what William James called a “moral equivalent for war,” they will—and should—keep posing these questions and collaborating to find answers. This intellectual collaboration is what British philosopher Michael Oakeshott hoped for when in 1959 he recommended “the conversation of mankind.”6

Is the cause of America the cause of all mankind? And what is that cause after all? From distant glimmerings of “America” (the Waldseemüller map of 1507) to “City upon a Hill” and “Magnalia Christi Americana,” into the nineteenth century with “American Scholar” and the “[slaves’] fourth of July,” and continued throughout the twentieth century with “double-consciousness,” “Trans-national America,” “settlement ideal,” “American Dream,” “I have a dream,” “Postethnic America,” “Achieving . . . America,” and the “heyday of the fuzzies,” Americans have been trying to figure this out for quite some time. Over the course of the centuries, Americans learned and self-taught, native born and immigrant, religious and secular, and left and right have contributed to this long conversation by offering new arguments and key terms for Americans to think about the world, themselves, their truth, and their America. No one, so far, has been successful in answering these questions once and for all. They only came up with provisional explanations and then posed new questions. Perhaps we should not want it any other way. And so the conversation of American thought continues.