David's Blague

Growing up, I was thoroughly and lovingly indoctrinated by Fundies. My favorite story about this is from just before I went to college. Fern Williams (God rest her soul) took me aside the week before I left, and gave me an earful. I'm not sure, in retrospect, if Fern was prophesying or just talking, but she said something like this:

"David, they're going to teach you things at college. They're going to teach you that people evolved from monkeys, and homosexuals are not sinners. They're going to teach you that abortion is not murder. They're going to teach you that the truth is all relative."

Even for people who haven't heard me tell this story, the punch line is pretty easy to guess. Evolution was first to go: after the first day of my first biology class, I thought, "Oh, so that's what was missing." The second one was harder, but I had a few gay friends in high school, a few more in college, and cognitive dissonance eventually overwhelmed prejudice. Abortion- still a tricky one for me, but the idea that a fertilized egg has the same moral standing as a person has always felt absurd, and the idea that a full-term baby doesn't is equally absurd.

But none of those are the point of this post- they're just a bit of background to show that I was already three-quarters of the way down Fern's list when I encountered Richard Rorty.

Richard Rorty calls himself and his ilk pragmatists. Yes, he's one of those: he has an "ilk." If you look up pragmatism on Wikipedia, it sounds suspiciously like something academics argue over, and little else. But if you read Philosophy and Social Hope (thanks, Ed), you get a better feel for it as a pretty eclectic set of tools for approaching thinking about and talking about What We Ought to Do. If you read a little further (and you were also indoctrinated by Fundies), you will find yourself exclaiming,

"Oh noes! Rorty is a relativist."

Now, before you stop reading, let me give you a list of four people who dislike this philosophical (if you can even use the word) bent: Richard Dawkins, His Holiness Pope Benedict, Plato, and James Dobson. Oh, and Richard "I'm-not-a-relativist-I'm-a-pragmatist" Rorty.

So what's this all about?

Well, the only answer I can give right now is that I'm not entirely sure (haven't finished reading Rorty's book yet), but I have a sneaking suspicion that poor Fern Williams (God rest her soul) was on to something.