Huxley, Rorty, and the American Dream

Aldous Huxley is one of my personal heroes, and as much as it pains me to have someone besmirch his good name, I believe it's done fairly here.

If [Huxley] had dramatized the conflicts that were inherent in his concepts, he might have arrived at the higher reality that was already all around him. He might have helped to defend its confusing multiplicity against the attack that would be a long time coming but is now here: the attack from the imposers of harmony, the adepts of the All. Alas, he was one of them, because of his ineradicable belief that the mass of mankind was too dense to see the inner light.

Where Huxley was in political outlook a transcendentalist, idealist, and elitist, Richard Rorty is unashamedly championing the Everyman view of just-getting-on-with-things. I'm of two minds about Rorty. On the one hand, he's just too glib, too smug in his pragmatic fence-sitting. On the other hand, he seems to be charting an honest course through the murky post-modern waters, and I respect him for it. Simon Blackburn makes some good comments on the Rorty Phenomenon in this article for Prospect Magazine.

The best way to understand Rorty is simply to see him as generalising this [pragmatic] view of literary criticism across the board. In science or history, law or psychology, politics or ethics the same model applies. There is the community of interpreters, and the aim of getting them to be of one mind. There is invention and innovation. But just as a text allows for multiple readings, so does the world. Truth, and reason as the anointed method of sifting it, disappear. No wonder serious scientists and historians, priding themselves on their accuracy, are outraged.

Finally, Edward Said weighs in on the Ideal vs. the Real USA. Snarky, oh yes, with a veneer of even-handed saintliness that smells vaguely rotten. Yet a fine piece of prose and a meaningful point. (This link available unless the Al Ahram site follows Al Jazeera into the ground.)