I’ve finished the first two chapters of Richard Rorty’s Achieving Our Country. In my previous post, I discussed Rorty’s belief that national pride is a necessary condition for national progress, and why I think this view needs to be particularly emphasized to those who work in tech and care about the state of our country.

The plan for this post is to discuss another interesting way that I think Rorty’s ideas might apply, in this case not to American politics overall, but to the direction of tech itself. Namely, I want to give one potential answer to the question: how can progressives within tech help ensure that it becomes/remains (verb choice depending on one’s current perspective) a force for good in our society?

As I began writing though, I realized I needed much more length than expected. This is since I’m basing my thoughts on Rorty’s view of national pride within the American left, so I felt I needed to give a decent sketch of his thoughts, so that I could draw a proper analogy to my own. So this post will just focus on Rorty’s ideas, and next time I will discuss my extension.

When considering the current[1] political landscape, Rorty observes that national pride is not a central component in leftist thought. In fact, national pride often is anathema to the leftist view of American history, which is often an accounting of the atrocities of the country’s past. Rorty acknowledges that seeing the past for what it is is important, but also points out that shunning any notion of national pride is actually a deviation from the historical norm of leftist reform movements. In surveying past thought and action, Rorty gives Walt Whitman and John Dewey as examples of people who incorporated their own versions of American exceptionalism into a progressive view of the country’s future.

If that’s the case, then what’s the cause for the current deviation? Rorty attributes this to certain “unforgivable” mistakes made by the country, which were supported by the more nationalistic members of the left. The Vietnam War is the paramount example. According to Rorty, disillusioned leftists see such events as proof that the history of America is not one of expanding liberty and justice, but rather one of using these ideals to mask more insidious intents.

Rorty acknowledges the value of this skepticism and the resistance inspired by it:

America will always owe an enormous amount to the rage which rumbled through the country between 1964 and 1972. We do not know what our country would be like today, had that rage not been felt.

At the same time, Rorty finds the rejection of the pejoratively termed “managerial liberals” unfair (emphasis mine):

A battered and exhausted Left, a Left too tired to experience rage when only rage will work, and too chastened by knowledge of the results of revolutions elsewhere to urge a revolution in America, is not the same as a Left that has sold out or become discredited.

Rorty worries that intellectual leftists who hold on too strong to disillusionment are handicapping their ability to effect positive change. It is one thing to resist the bad actions of a government, and another to push an alternative agenda. For in surveying the history of progressive reform, Rorty finds a pattern of activists whose work is driven by a genuine belief in America’s potential as a nation of justice, even while being deeply disappointed with its past and present.

James Baldwin photo

One powerful example Rorty cites is James Baldwin. In The Fire Next Time, Baldwin harbors no illusions of American purity:

This is the crime of which I accuse my country and my countrymen, and for which neither I nor time nor history will ever forgive them, that they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it.

Yet, rather than rejecting his identity as an American, Baldwin places himself ever more in it: “I am not a ward of America; I am one of the first Americans to arrive on these shores”.

There’s obviously a lot more complexity to Rorty’s argument, but I just want to sketch it enough to illustrate in what sense Rorty considers national pride to be valuable. Next time, I want to take the relation of pride between a citizen and her country, and consider how it might extend to that between a tech worker and the tech industry. That is to say, a tech worker today could read many of the mistakes her industry has made much like a disillusioned leftist might read the past and present injustices committed by America. But just as Baldwin finds a way to embrace his identity as an American, I wonder if the way out for the tech worker is, rather than being disillusioned with tech, to find some new understanding of “pride” within the tech industry itself.

I don’t expect to figure that out soon, but I hope to really begin digging in next time!

[1] The book was actually published in the 90s, but I think the descriptions are still relevant 2018.