Rorty: Achieving our Country

Richard RORTY: achieving our country

National pride is to countries with some perspectives to individuals: a necessary condition or self-improvement. Too much national pride can produce bellicosity in imperialism, just as excessive self-respect and produce arrogance. The just is too little self respect makes it difficult for a person to display moral courage, so insufficient national pride makes energetic and effective debate about national policy unlikely. Emotional involvement with one's country–or glowing pride feelings of intense shame aroused by various parts of its history, and by various present-day national policies--is necessary and political deliberation is to be imaginative and productive. Such a liberation will probably not occur unless pride outweigh shame.

The need for this sort of involvement remains even for those who, like myself, hope that the United States of America will someday yield up sovereignty to attend the so-called “the Parliament of Man, the Federation of the World.” Presented Federation will never come into existence unless the governments of the individual nation states cooperate in setting up, and unless the citizens of those nation states take a certain amount of pride (even rueful and hesitant pride) in the government's effort to do so.

Those who hope to persuade a nation to observe itself need to remind their country of what it can take pride in as well as what it should be ashamed of. They must tell inspiring stories about episodes and figures and nations past--episode and figures to which the country should remain true. Nations rely on artists and intellectuals to create images of, and to tell stories about, the national past competition for political leadership is in part a competition between differing stories about a nation self-identity, and between differing symbols of its greatness.

In America, at the end of the 20th century, few inspiring images and stories are being proffered. The only version of national pride encouraged by American popular culture is a simpleminded militaristic chauvinism. But such chauvinism is overshadowed by a widespread sense that national pride is no longer appropriate. In both popular and elite culture most descriptions of what America will be like in the 21st century are written in tones either a self-mockery or of self-disgust.  Considered two recent novels: Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, the seller and Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead, a critical firm is not as widely read. Both are powerful novels. Readers of either may well think it absurd were Americans to continue to take pride in country. Snow crash kills of the 21st-century America in which the needs of the entrepreneurs hand won out over hopes of a free and egalitarian society. The country has been divided into small franchise enclaves, within each of which is a single Corporation--IBM, the Mafia, Gen-Tech--holds the rights of high and low justice. US government has gone into business for himself as one more corporate entity, running its own little enclaves. There is no overall political entity, much less any sense of citizenship, that binds the Eastern and Western states together, with links even the various districts of the big cities.

In Snow crash, the relation of the United States to the rest of the world is symbolized by Stevens most frightening creation--what he calls "Raft.” This is an enormous agglomeration of floating hulks, drifting endlessly round around the Pacific Rim, inhabited by millions of Asians who hope to jump ship and swim to North America.  The Raft is a sort of vast international slum ruled by cruel and anarchic criminal gangs; it is quite different from the orderly franchises run a profitable business prices, respecting each other's boundaries and rights, and what used to be the United States of America. Pride in being an American citizen has been replaced by relief at being safer and better fed the nose on the raft. Lincoln and Martin Luther King are no more present in imagination Stephenson's Americans that our men were Cromwell or Churchill to the imagination of the British Orwell described in his book 1984.

Snow Crash capitalizes on the widespread belief that giant corporations, and the shadowy behind-the-scenes government acting as an agent of the corporations, now make all the important decisions. This belief finds expression in popular thrillers like Richard Condon's Manchurian Candidate and Winter Kills, as well as in more ambitious works like Thomas Pynchon's Vineland and Norman Mailer's Harlots Ghosts. Find