Redemptive Hope by Lerner Akiba J.;

Author:Lerner, Akiba J.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fordham University Press

POSTMETAPHYSICAL SOLIDARITY

According to Rorty, the march of democracy follows the cadence set by taking “certain distinctions less seriously than our ancestors.” Recognizing the contingency of our norms has the social consequence of viewing “traditional differences as unimportant,” and therefore, allowing for greater plurality.65 Moral progress advances, according to Rorty, when “a people’s imaginative ability to identify with people whom their ancestors had not been able to identify with” takes hold.66 Embracing a sense of commonality with others is more important than establishing epistemic conditions for when we are justified in including others. Once we “stop asking for universal validity” through a “willingness to live with plurality” a greater number of people once considered alien can now be included as part of the liberal democratic sense of we.67

Concerns for establishing “universal validity” within both religious and secular humanistic traditions overlook the importance of “smaller and more local” sentiments when including, or excluding, others from the solidarity embodied in concepts like “one of us.”68 In his essay “Justice as a Larger Loyalty,” Rorty proposed that we drop a metaphysical ideal of justice that stands outside of history and circumstance and reinterpret justice as “the name for loyalty to a certain very large group.”69 The tension between our local loyalties and our ideal of global justice largely revolves around the very difficult task of determining how much we are willing to view the stranger as deserving of the same bonds of care we expect from our local, familial, and tribal or nationalists associations. Drawing on Michael Waltzer’s political philosophy, Rorty argues that the relevant “thickness” or “thinness” of our loyalties boils down to the “detailed and concrete stories you can tell about yourself as a member of a small group” versus those “relatively abstract and sketchy stories you tell about yourself as a citizen of the world.”70 The more we can tell stories that break down ontological polarities between social conventions of higher and lower within the civil realm, the more expansive our circles of care.71

Both universal justice and local loyalties represent social goods that often exist in perpetual tension with one another, thus we are constantly faced with the dilemma of whether or not we should “contract the circle for the sake of loyalty, or expand it for the sake of justice.… The moral tasks of a liberal democracy are divided between agents of love and agents of justice.”72 Agents of love are devoted to generating creative, penetrating, and thick cultural venues for enriching our social relations in ways that cannot be addressed by large liberal institutions. Conversely, agents of justice are more concerned with satisfying the bare minimum of cultural identity so that a maximal number of people can receive justice through state institutions while infringing upon the least number of freedoms.

Living within large diverse democratic cultures, according to Rorty, we are often required to sacrifice local sentiments of love for more abstract notions of justice. Nevertheless, universal notions of justice that strip individuals of their thicker identity affiliations have the benefit of extending the boundaries of basic human rights.

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