All together now
Much of Michael Bérubé’s What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts is relevant to all this – not surprisingly: it’s about higher education (and education more broadly), Bhattacharyya’s piece is about higher education (and education more broadly), and Dawkins’s work is partly about higher education (and education more broadly).
He talks in chapter 6 – ‘Postmodernism’ – about the difficulties of grounding moral intuitions, via Lyotard’s disagreement with Habermas about consensus and difference, and via feminist epistemology and local and ‘situated’ knowledge (with a reference to Meera Nanda), and Rorty’s antifoundationalism (about morality rather than epistemology). He quotes (page 256) from an essay of Rorty’s that I’ve always liked, despite disagreeing with much of it, ‘Wild Orchids and Trotsky’:
The democratic community of Dewey’s dreams is…a community in which everybody thinks that it is human solidarity, rather than knowledge of something not merely human, that really matters.
I don’t buy it. I think I might have, once, but I don’t now. I’ve become too suspicious of all those words – too aware of the need to ask for further details on all of them: democratic, community, and solidarity. Democratic – well, it depends: is this a democratic community of narrow parochial authoritarian people who hate fags and independent women and ruffians and atheists and elitist intellectuals? Is it the kind of community that expects and demands that everyone fit in and conform? Is it the kind of solidarity people feel when they unite against a putative enemy who is in fact merely different in some harmless way? Perhaps it’s the kind of democratic community that finds solidarity in voting to make the public high school teach ID in its biology classes.
Human solidarity is only as good as it is. Sometimes human solidarity can be murderous, even genocidal; often it can be coercive and limiting. And to at least some people, it is knowledge of something not merely human that really matters – cosmologists, physicists, artists, geologists, poets, musicians, mountaineers; many people. It’s of course true that grounding morality is very difficult, but recourse to solidarity is…dubious.
Michael makes a similar point himself earlier, on pp 222-3, in discussing Lyotard’s disagreement with Habermas:
Habermas imagines the “ideal speech situation” as something oriented not merely toward understanding, as I said above, but toward consensus. This…basically says, “We will all sit down and deliberate as equals – and then, when we’re done deliberating, we will agree.”…[I]n suggesting that consensus is the goal of the discussion, Habermas has left himself wide open to the charge that he does see universalism as the eradication of difference – that universalism will have done its job only when there is no one left to dissent from it. And that, Lyotard insists, puts us right back on the road to Terror.
Same thing. Consensus, too, is only as good as it is. So is agreement; so is universalism. They’re all – democracy, community, solidarity, consensus, agreement, universalism – only as good as they are. They’re all capable of being merely agreement to do bad things, consensus that outsiders are the spawn of the devil. Bertrand Russell’s grandmother was fond of the Biblical saying, ‘Thou shalt not follow a multitude to do evil.’ I quite like that myself.
But I would read Rorty’s remark as implying that ‘human solidarity’ was a value that rose above mere group solidarity — that it meant solidarity [of some rather vague kind, perhaps] with all people.
Whether that necesarily means you have to have agreement with them all, I’d be unsure. Though given how unlikely that would be, it seems unlikely Rorty meant it to be taken strictly in that sense. Anyway, universal agreement that, for example, Article One of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights ought to be taken seriously would be hard to see as a proto-totalitarian move, wouldn’t it?
You could make it one, of course — sometimes the interpretation of ‘Human Rights’ in this country is beyond satire — but it’s hard work, unless you’re really having one of those glass-half-empty mornings…
Solidarity, consensus, universalism; call it what you will. I would be suspicious, mainly doubting that it was genuine.
In this great wide world we can no longer be an insular group that keeps everyone in “our group” the same and everybody else at arms length. Globalisation, in all its cultural and economic forms, is exposing more and more people around the world to all the possibilities that exist in the world. The best we can hope for, I believe, is that nearly all can exercise enough toleration not to go delibrately killing each other. If that is a consensus, then OK.
Habermas goal of consensus doesn’t lead to terror so long as people follow the rule of his ideal speech situation that there should be no coercion of any speaker.
There’s nothing wrong with the eradication of difference as a goal, so long as it is through Habermas’s ideal speech situations, based on the free exchange of uncoerced equals with the goal of final agreement. When we argue with someone in good faith, aren’t we trying to reach some consensus? A consensus based on reason? Otherwise all dialogue would just me a clash of monologues; unfortunately, too many arguments are just that.
If you take a pragmatic view of knowledge, then reasoned solidarity is nothing to be afraid of. It may not be a goal we can achieve overnight, but as an ideal it leads to theories of the world that are more and more universally useful.
Can we not just all agree that we don’t all have to agree?
“with the goal of final agreement”
That’s a very good point. (Dammit, I need to read Habermas!) That’s a veryvery good point. It could be said that if you’re not arguing with the goal of final agreement then you’re not really arguing. There’s a difference between having it as a goal of argument and planning to coerce anyone.
I might ask Michael what he thinks of that. It sounds right to me.
“Can we not just all agree that we don’t all have to agree?”
Not always, no, because sometimes we have to decide on action, we have to do or not do, we have to do this and not that; so there has to be (coerced if necessary) agreement on action in the end. Otherwise there is just permanent civil war.
But at other times, agreement as the goal of (genuine) argument but not coerced seems to be the ticket.
Super! Now all we need to do is explain it to everyone else in the blogosphere, who mostly think that argument is about finding the shortest route to a really juicy insult….
Habermas has left himself wide open to the charge that he does see universalism as the eradication of difference – that universalism will have done its job only when there is no one left to dissent from it. And that, Lyotard insists, puts us right back on the road to Terror.
The road to terror? From what I recall of Habermas, he is more likely to put us ‘right back on the road to some boring old left-of-left-of-centre social democracy with policies based on the outcome of deliberative discourse of a group of Oberseminar students who are totally clueless as to the porkbarrel-ing and logrolling tactics that are part and parcel of the decision making process in real existing democracies.’
Terror? What has Lyotard been smoking?
There are a million paths to Terror. And porkbarrelling, logrolling cynical realists are as likely to take them as oberseminar students. For every Himmler there’s a Goering. For every Leo Strauss, conversely, there’s a Dick Cheney. And given the latest legislation in the USA on military commissions, I’d be distinctly wary of attributing too much virtue to the nudge’n’wink good ol’boy politics of well-fed and well-established republics.