Rorty's Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity and the possibility of cultural integration

The philosopher of pragmatism Richard Rorty has a lot to say liberal politics across cultural divides that are difficult to bridge. Here's a good summary:

"In his later and most accessible work, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989), Rorty considers the consequences of...inevitable ethnocentrism and the tendency towards 'solidarity' with like-minded world-makers. The recognition that all claims to truth and knowledge of reality are contingent upon our spatial and temporal position in the world leads us to speak of what we believe with a strong sense of irony. The committed ironist accepts that the language of any other community could be just as real or true as our own. If this hint at relativism sounds alarm bells at the threat of might is right, then Rorty prescribes what he sees as the only social construction robust enough to avoid the threat of ethnocentric impasse: political liberalism.

Part of the problem, as Rorty sees it, is the repeated attempt to fuse the private domain of self-realisation, fulfilment, and perfectionism with the public domain of morality and justice. The ideal liberal society limits its concerns to the balancing of freedom, wealth, and peace whilst allowing its members the scope and opportunity to pursue their own ideas of how they ought to live. Any attempt at a fusion of the private and public tends in fact to privilege the public over the private and either redefine the private in terms of the public - and generally suppress many private practices - or make public the private practice of the strong or the majority.

Rorty denies the possibility that humanity could one day be united by a common realisation of the truth of how we ought to live. Indeed, he accepts that the best we can possibly hope for is a consensus amongst a very large percentage of the population. What matters most is that there is a 'them' opposed to 'us' and that we are open to the possibility of changing our historical, contingent language-game to expand it to include others. Liberalism is the only political philosophy, to Rorty's mind, that allows alternative language-games to co-exist side-by-side and thus keep open the possibility of us hearing the 'unfamiliar noises' of others and incorporating them into our world view. Inevitably then, he has drawn the wrath of neo-Marxists in particular from whose ranks come the strongest critics of his political philosophy. However, Rorty has continually rebutted and refuted his 'enemies' and, in public debate, he is a formidable opponent, well worth handing over real money to see and hear.