The Communitarian Impulse

Colorado College's 125th Anniversary Symposium
Cultures in the 21st Century: Conflicts and Convergences

Delivered at Colorado College on February 5, 1999 at 3:00 PM
in a discussion forum with the same title.

by

Richard Rorty

What I have to say about Huntington’s book is substantially what Roy Mottahadeh said last night in the last sentence of his remarks when he quoted Huntington as saying, "It would be immoral of the West to shove its stuff on the rest of the world." And Roy said, "It would be immoral not to!" So I’m going to be supporting that proposition.

The non-West has a lot of justified complaints to make about the West, but it does owe a lot to Western ingenuity. The West is good at coming up with devices for lessening human suffering. The most conspicuous of these devices are of two sorts. The first sort includes ether, aspirin, codeine, various morphine derivatives, and a whole battery of recently developed, more sophisticated anesthetics. The second includes such sociopolitical institutions as free elections, a free press, free trade unions, a free judiciary, free colleges and universities, and various other time-tested devices. These devices are used to prevent the strong from having their way with the weak and, thereby, to prevent the weak from suffering as much as they would have otherwise. When the West hears of a great natural disaster in the non-West, lots of Westerners reach for their checkbooks and send money to organizations like Doctors Without Borders, hoping that part of the money will pay for anesthetics. When the West hears that the results of a free election have been annulled by a military junta or that a publisher has been forced to write a self criticism or that a poet is being held by the secret police or that professors are being told that their jobs depend on getting certificates from the ruling party, lots of Westerners reach for their checkbooks and send money to organizations like Human Rights Watch or Amnesty International. These Westerners hope that their checks will give foreign governments reason to complain that their internal affairs have been subjected to outside interference.

Suppose that both sorts of checks stopped being written, not for lack of money, but because Westerners had ceased to care. Suppose that our grandchildren are surprised that such checks ever were written and wonder why the money was not used to diminish suffering closer to home. Then the worst we’ll be is in a situation like that described by Philip Larkin in the last stanza of his poem, "Homage to a Government." I quote Larkin: "Next year we shall be living in a country that brought its soldiers home for lack of money. The statues will be standing in the same tree-muffled squares and look nearly the same. Our children will not know it’s a different country. All we can hope to leave them now is money." Substitute "put away our checkbooks for lack of fellow feeling" for "brought its soldiers home for lack of money," and you see what I’m driving at.

The worst fate I can imagine for the West is becoming a place in which the idealistic youth of each rising generation no longer dream of a global utopia, a world in which the sick and injured always have pain killers ready at hand and in which the downtrodden always have ready access to the newspapers, the courts, and the ballot box. Imagine a West in which nobody ever volunteered for the Peace Corps and its various analogues; a West in which young people have come to mock the vision common to Star Wars and Star Trek. In that vision, human beings finally get their act together, establish a world federal government which abolishes both war and inequality of opportunity, and turn their eyes toward the surrounding galaxy. A West without idealism is not one any of us would wish to live in, nor should we wish to live in an America whose government did not do everything in its power to export the various devices which have made our country the envy of foreign idealists like Simón Bolívar and Ho Chi Minh.

The idealistic Americans who sign up for the Peace Corps loathe the thought that our government not only did not come to the rescue of democratic institutions in Guatemala in 1952 and Chile in 1973 but cooperated in destroying these institutions. But they don’t feel this loathing because they think that, in Huntington’s words, "the culture of the West is and should be the culture of the world." They are not interested in spreading a culture but simply in decreasing human suffering.

Maybe someday there will be non-Westerners who turn down Western anesthetics on cultural grounds. Baffling as we may find that refusal, we will not force aspirin down their throat. Maybe someday there will be non-Western fighters against injustice, defenders of the weak against the strong, who turn down free elections, a free press, free universities and the like, on cultural grounds. But until some such people turn up, it is a waste of time for us to worry about whether we’re practicing cultural imperialism by doing our best to export these devices. As long as there are persecuted dissidents who think that Western devices are the only way to break the power of the local oligarchs, Western governments should continue doing everything they can to keep those dissidents out of jail, in the news, and on the Net. Ceasing to try to get dissidents out of jail, like ceasing to fly in planeloads of anesthetics, would mean that the West had become just a moneymaking enterprise. All we would be able to leave our children would be money.

On the other hand, the West should try to export only that portion of its own culture which gives people in the non-West a chance to choose a different culture or to reconstruct their own. Whether we export capitalism or Coca-Cola™ or Hollywood movies is optional; whether we export democratic institutions is not. Exporting these institutions is a duty we Westerners cannot avoid any more than we can avoid our duty to export anesthetics and to stop exporting automatic rifles and jet bombers. This is not because such initiatives are dictated by transcultural human reason—in my view there is no such thing as transcultural human reason—it’s because we Westerners have talked ourselves into being the kind of people who cannot live with themselves if we neglect those duties. My reference to choosing a different culture may give rise to objections. It will certainly do so if it suggests a naked, not yet acculturated, Sartrian will making a choice behind a Rawlsian veil of ignorance. But that’s not the picture I have in mind. I’m happy to grant to the communitarians that the difference between abnormality and humanity is acculturation. Yet once a person has been created by acculturation, the result is someone who can say to herself, "The culture which made me what I am turns out to be inferior in the following specific respects to the culture I’ve been reading about or seeing on television." She is in a position to pick and choose elements from various cultural traditions, using the tools of her home culture to grasp the limitations of that very culture. Some cultures, of course, make this kind of criticism harder than others. We call a culture primitive just in so far as persons acculturated in it find such critical reflection difficult. We call a culture advanced just in so far as people raised within are articulate and reflective enough to make intercultural comparisons without much strain.

This invidious distinction is, of course, Eurocentric, but it is none the worse for that. For the European enlightenment invented the doctrine that cultures are means for the happiness of individuals rather than ends in themselves. That doctrine seems to me irrefutable. To deny it would be to adopt the perverse view that every culture has intrinsic value just by virtue of being a culture. I call this view perverse because it seems to rely upon an inference from the uncontroversial premise, every culture affords a means to human happiness, to the obviously false conclusion that human happiness can never require the modification or the extinction of a culture. There are lots of cultures we are lucky to have seen the last of—those of Nazi Germany and of William Faulkner’s Mississippi, for example—just as there are lots of human beings whom we wish had never been born. The idea of the intrinsic dignity of a culture is as useless as that of the intrinsic dignity of a human being. For intrinsic, in both cases, is merely a conversation stopper. It’s a word which signifies its user’s refusal to debate further the issue of whether human happiness would be increased by getting rid of that culture or that person.

As I see it, the much-discussed quarrel between liberal individualism and communitarianism is a tempest in a philosophical teapot. One reason for my thinking this is that America’s greatest liberal thinker, John Dewey, was also a fervent communitarian. Another is that the communitarian-individualist quarrel is about abstractions which cannot be made relevant to any actual political choices. The philosophical quarrel would only seem relevant to politics if you think that the human rights culture, which has grown up since the Helsinki Declaration, needs backup from a theory about the nature of human beings. But I think it no more requires a philosophical foundation than does a recommendation to take an aspirin if you think you’re coming down with a migraine. Nobody, except a few philosophers, cares whether human rights are intrinsic to every member of the biological species or whether they’re rendered by God or whether they’re just recent Western social constructions. Nobody needs a theory about how many of these rights there are or about which takes precedence over which. All we need to know is that, where there is a well-organized and vocal Helsinki watch committee, the strong have a slightly harder time inflicting unnecessary suffering on the weak than they would have had otherwise. The proof of the analgesic is the fast relief; the proof of the human rights culture is that it has made it a little more difficult for the strong to increase their own wealth and power by grinding the faces of the weak.

In my capacity as a philosopher rather than a citizen, I’d plunk for the view that human rights are, like anesthetics, recent, ingenious, Western inventions. As a good pragmatist, I think everything is a social construct and that electrons, human rights, the Internet, and Doctors Without Borders are among the better things we Westerners have cobbled together lately. I have no use for the idea that rights are an intrinsic property of humans because, as a Deweyian, I have no use for the term "intrinsic" at all. I think everything is what it is by virtue of its relations to everything else. I also have no use for the idea that there is a deep, human core which is unaffected by culture. I think, unless our culture goes all the way down, there’s nothing inside us unaffected by language except the physiological arrangements we share with the beasts.

But, although I share many of these philosophical views with David Hall and Roger Ames, I heartily disagree with them when they say, "The intellectual culture of the modern West is in sufficient disarray as to be practically unusable as a resource for the development of coherent models of cultural accommodation." This sentence would be plausible only if one identified the intellectual culture of the modern West with Ronald Dworkin’s worst rhetorical excesses. But the core of that culture is a conviction common to Rawls, Kant, Marx, John Stuart Mill, John Dewey, and practically every interesting modern Western philosopher you can mention, except Nietzsche—namely that every human being has a prima facie duty to come to the help of any member of the species who is suffering unnecessarily. I don’t think we need coherent models of cultural accommodation, any more than we need coherent models of cross-cultural intermarriage. People who fall in love and marry across cultures work things out without the benefit of models, and populations which are raised in one culture and exposed to another do the same. Even if we wanted to avoid exposing non-Western cultures to the West, we wouldn’t be able to, thanks to the globalized economy and modern communications. So I think we should stop worrying about whether such exposure is going to make people unhappy and just make sure that the strong don’t use non-Western cultural traditions as an excuse to continue their oppression of the weak.

When cultural traditions start making people unnecessarily miserable, they have outlived their usefulness and need to be replaced by other cultural traditions. In the United States, in 1950, white males were making the lives of blacks and women unnecessarily miserable. Thanks, among other things, to a free press, a free judiciary, and the like, American culture changed dramatically in the course of fifty years. We have no idea whether African cultures, which cut off the labia and clitoris of young women, or Asiatic cultures, which refuse to put aged parents in nursing homes, would change once these particular traditions had been freely, and widely, debated for a few decades. But this is my central premise. The value of free discussion of possible changes by participants in a culture should always take precedence over the value of preserving cultural identity. Without such discussion, nobody will ever know which cultural traditions are excuses for the strong to oppress the weak and which are traditions that even the weak would, given the option, prefer to preserve. It doesn’t matter if readers of Kant and Rawls call something "respect for human rights," readers of Confucius call it "respect for cosmic harmony," and readers of the Christian scriptures call it "respect for the brotherhood of man under the fatherhood of God." What does matter is that every culture incorporates at least one tradition whose founders inculcated what Nietzsche called "slave morality." In each culture, some famous teacher urged his or her disciples to work here below in order to make it harder for the strong to inflict unnecessary suffering on the weak. It’s not only the West’s duty to help create a world conforming to this transcultural imperative, it’s our duty to export both aspirin and a free press in order to aid in its creation—at least until the non-West comes up with some better devices.

In conclusion, let me offer one qualification of what I’ve been saying. I don’t think that either Britain or India or China had a duty to expose the Tibetans to foreign ways on the suspicion that the lamas were oppressing the peasants. If there is a Stone Age culture somewhere we haven’t yet meddled with, I hope we’ll leave them alone. But I do think that, once the West has made itself known in a non-Western region, then the West has a duty to the weak within that region. It has a duty to see that the benefits of exposure to the West are spread around the population rather than being reserved for the rich or the males of the higher castes. The West’s attitude should be that any non-Western elite that treats itself to such modern Western conveniences as Swiss bank accounts, organ transplants, and jet travel cannot use preservation of cultural identity as an excuse for keeping democracy out of the reach of the masses.

© 1999 by Richard Rorty