Response to Randall Peerenboom Richard Rorty Philosophy East and West, Vol. 50, No. 1. (Jan., 2000), pp. 90-91. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0031-8221%28200001%2950%3A1%3C90%3ARTRP%3E2.0.CO%3B2-%23 Philosophy East and West is currently published by University of Hawai'i Press.

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/about/terms.html. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/journals/uhp.html. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission.

JSTOR is an independent not-for-profit organization dedicated to and preserving a digital archive of scholarly journals. For more information regarding JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

http://www.jstor.org Thu May 24 14:14:51 2007

Response to Randall Peerenboom Richard Rorty

Comparative Literature Department, Stanford University

I do not disagree strongly with anything that Randy Peerenboom says. His essay offers a very knowledgeable and sympathetic account of my own line of thought, and this line of thought does indeed have the "limits" he describes. Peerenboom is right in saying, in endnote 20, that I spend most of my time "shadow boxing with metaphysical phantoms." M y only excuse is that I am a philosophy professor, and that within contemporary analytic philosophy-my working environment-metaphysics keeps raising its ugly head. He is also right in saying that my "ethnocentric endorsement of the bourgeois freedoms and our culture of rights does not seem to be founded on a particularly close study of other traditions and cultures." That is an understatement. It is based on no study at all of those traditions and cultures, but only on my impression that wherever bourgeois freedoms and the culture of rights have gotten a grip, people have liked the results pretty well. N o country has tried them and willingly given them up again, any more than any patient whose headaches have been relieved by aspirin has ever decided to cease using it. If I were a Chinese intellectual, I, too, would want to find, somewhere in the Chinese past, lines of thought that could be construed as favorable to bourgeois freedoms and a culture of rights. I am too ignorant to know whether there are any such lines of thought, but I quite agree that it would be a great rhetorical advantage if some could be discovered. But I resist the suggestion that anything in the past of China could cast doubt on the claim that greater human happiness will result from the introduction of those freedoms and that culture. That claim is an empirical prediction. I suspect that the differences between Chinese and Western cultures are no more relevant to evaluating it than they are to evaluating claims about the efficacy of aspirin. The Chinese students are right to be afraid of giving votes to illiterate peasants. The American Founding Fathers had the same sort of doubts, and so built in all sorts of safeguards against the dangers of illiterate and easily purchasable voters. The nineteenth-century debates in Europe and the Americas about property qualifications for voting, and similar topics, may show the need, in China, for a gradual transition from the rule of literate elites to rule by whoever happens to win the favor of the electorate. But this necessary gradualism does not militate against the fact that no way has ever been found to prevent the elite from enriching itself at the cost of the masses except to institute a free press, a free judiciary, free universities, an apolitical civil service, a rich fabric of strong and interlocking nongovernmental institutions, and so on. As the rampant socioeconomic inequality in the United States today (and the resulting crime rate) shows, these institutions can fail to do their job. Nevertheless, their presence in the U.S. is the only reason why well-off Americans are unable completely to immiserate their fellow citizens who are doing the dirty work. Throughout the history of Soviet Russia, apologists for Stalinism told us that the

90

Philosophy East & West Volume 50, Number 1 January 2000 90-91

0 2000 by University of Hawai'i Press

"Russian soul" was different from the "Western soul" and that Stalin and his murderous henchmen understood this soul better than Stalin's Western critics. N o w we are getting the same kind of rubbish from Western businessmen-businessmen who are getting rich by negotiating deals with the mercenary and corrupt sons-in-law of Chinese generals. W e are also getting the same kind of admiration for Chinese efficiency that apologists for Mussolini displayed when they praised him for making the trains run on time. It is important for Westerners not to betray the Chinese dissidents by once again becoming apologists for corrupt tyrants. But the sheer size and potential power of China-the fact that the twenty-first century is likely to be the Chinese Century in the same sense that the twentieth was the American Century-makes apologias tempting. Peerenboom takes the putative clash between communitarianism and liberalism (lately refurbished and presented as the clash between republicanism and liberalism) more seriously than I do. He is certainly right that "without a more robust sense of social solidarity than that based on the minimal requirement of avoidance of cruelty, it is unlikely that ironic liberalism will prove any more amenable than its Enlightenment predecessor as a basis for the development of liberal democracy and human rights in Asia." But its Enlightenment predecessor was just the philosophical frosting on the cake. The cake consisted of a sense of social solidarity and social purpose among those who shared the hope that their individual country could, in its own individual way, realize a new birth of freedom.' The leftist movements that led to the Reform Acts in Britain, the abolition of slavery in the U.S., and the like did not owe much to Enlightenment rationalism. Similar future movements in Asia are not going to owe much to philosophical pragmatism, and certainly not to my own particular flavor of philosophical frosting. M y hunch is that if China ever gets a free press and free universities-if Chinese who have views about what Li Peng is doing wrong and about what he should do instead are no longer put in jail, and if their writings are available to anybody who wants to read them-then social solidarity and cultural change will take care of themselves. Certainly we will never know whether the forms of social solidarity that have held China together in the past can be melded with, and gradually modified by, bourgeois freedoms and a culture of rights until China is willing to give these freedoms and that culture a try. The chief obstacle to their getting a try is the greed and selfishness of a ruling oligarchy, just as was the case in nineteenth-century Western Europe and America and in twentieth-century Russia. I would hope that some of the generals' sons-in-law combine their greed and selfishness with a certain amount of idealistic hope for a better China, a China in which the gap between the powerful and the weak is less abyssal than it is now. If none of them do, then the Chinese Century will probably be a disaster for the entire world. Note 1 - I discuss American national pride in some detail in the first chapter of my Achieving Our Country (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998).

Richard Rorty

91