Orwell in a lighting storm.
James Conant’s essay, “Rorty and Orwell on Truthâ€, included in On Nighteen Eighty-Four: Orwell and Our Future, made my late evening thunderstorm.
Conant takes Rorty to task for misunderstanding Orwell– a misunderstanding made likelier if you buy into Conant’s thesis that Rorty’s epistemological doctrines do not match his proclaimed liberal politics as neatly as they match “radically illiberal politics”. According to the “doctrine of Rortian liberalism” (Conant’s decsription), “cruelty is the worst thing we can do”, and morality shouldn’t be taken to include anything apart from our abilities “to notice, identify with, and alleviate pain and humiliation”. Think of this as morality cum empathy, joined by the consequent questions of what constitutes valid or justifiable pain (will we reward every crybaby with cookies) and how to decide what sort of action is required given different particulars (crybabies should only be given cookies by their parents).
Rorty shuns mainstream morality for many interesting reasons (see James Ryerson’s excellent profile of Rorty for Lingua Franca), but it is Rorty’s disdain for objective truth that upsets Conant. In 1984, Winston is required to form beliefs about how things are in a way that is no longer beholden to how things are. The ability to assess the truth of various claims keeps individuals from being oppressed and used as tools for others’ purposes (otherwise known as the “higher purpose”). Self-regard and critical thought lie at the heart of the liberal commitment to human flourishing.
Rorty believes the point of 1984 is to defend the idea that cruelty is the worst thing we do. Conant believes that the point of 1984 was, as summed by Orwell himself in an essay about the novel, to display “the intellectual implications of totalitarianism”. (Orwell’s definition of totalitarianism refers to “the abolition of freedom of thought”. ) Conant faults Rorty for brushing aside Orwell’s concerns about the denigration of “objective truth” in favor of a reading that emphasizes political freedom– a political freedom that came second to Orwell’s concern for intellectual freedom following his experience as a soldier in the Spanish civil war.
In Orwell’s own words, “The really frightening thing about totalitarianism is no that it commits atrocities but that it attacks the concept of objective truth.” Conant puts it this way:
The really frightening case, for Orwell, is one in which you continue to form perfectly determinate beliefs about happenings in the world, yet the mechanisms by means of which those beliefs are formed are no longer guided by the happenings that form the subjects of those beliefs.
Thus, Winston is deprived of the ability to think critically– and thereby deprived of the ability to know what he wants or prefers. (It might be interesting to ask if Winston’s inability to know his own preferences will lead to a preference-simple Winston.) For those of us who like to read or write or spend countless hours conversing with total strangers about the impact of Aldous Huxley on leftist politics in America, a society without critical thought would be a cruel one indeed.
(Cross-linked at totalitarianism today. )
Comment by Paul Davidson —
July 16, 2005 @ 10:02 pm
Critical thought is the basis of every new idea or breakthrough. Without it, society does not evolve but become stagnant without anyone actually even realizing it. Without challenging the thought process, no one believes it’s possible.
You can break it down to the moment parents start telling their children what is “real” and what is “not.” I.e., you’re having a nightmare, that would never be possible in the real world. Without us knowing it, we are indirectly fulfilling a prophecy where a world exists where no one attempts to learn outside the current constraints.
Just a fleeting thought, but what the hell.
Comment by Protagoras —
July 17, 2005 @ 6:41 am
I think I have to take Rorty’s side on this dispute with Conant. Dennett is right that Rorty exaggerates, and his critics generally are right that he’s a dubious scholar, but his opposition to objective truth is not this confused (though it is rather confusing). Objective truth is a highly problematic philosophical concept, and having doubts about the usefulness of that concept in no way requires abandoning critical thinking. Those who practice critical thinking well don’t compare their beliefs to the Platonic form of objective truth; they examine the evidence. And to the claim that only evidence grounded in objective truth should be considered relevant, again, in practice, the best we can do is look for evidence that we’ve got the right evidence. What Rorty criticizes us for looking for really isn’t there; if there’s a serious problem with Rorty’s rejection of objective truth, I think it’s that many of those he sees as opponents are not committed to the kind of objective truth he rejects.`
Comment by Nancy Lebovitz —
July 17, 2005 @ 8:39 am
I’d say the point of 1984 is that critical thinking, comfort, pleasure, freedom, and decent behavior are entangled–a hard attack on any of them attacks all of them.
Jim, is there any way to get your site to remember my name, email, and url?
Comment by Jim Henley —
July 17, 2005 @ 4:24 pm
Nancy, what browser do you use? I use firefox and just double-click. But I’ll try to install some cookie system while I’m on light duty.
Comment by Nancy Lebovitz —
July 17, 2005 @ 8:54 pm
I’m using Firefox, and doubleclicking isn’t that much trouble–I hadn’t been doing it efficiently.
Comment by Samurai —
July 19, 2005 @ 11:57 am
For my Senior Thesis for honors in Philosophy, I wrote a paper refuting some of Rorty’s ideas. I guess the point of it was that there is a real world out there, and our ideas about it better be pretty close to how it really works, or we won’t survive very long. Holding desperately to ideas that have no relationship to the real world is a talent only Republicans have mastered properly.