I've been reading this book my man Franz laid on me. It's less a book than a collection of essays, all by the recently deceased philosopher Richard Rorty, who calls himself a protege of the old-school American Pragmatist, and favorite of mine, John Dewey. It's been getting me thinking quite a bit.

Franz was the one who originally turned me on to Dewey. He gave me The Public and Its Problems when we first met in mid 2003; reading this book in the thick of the Dean campaign created the cornerstone of my positive political idealism (as opposed to my reactionary anti-war activism). I've long wanted to try and write this out as a kind of manifesto, and someday I probably will, but that's a bit off the track for this post.

So Rorty's book is a bit more unabashedly heady than the stuff of Dewey's that I've come to know. He's addressing an academically philosophical audience, so it's more obtuse and answers a bunch of questions that most of us take for granted. Still, those questions underly a lot, and I like the way he deals with them.

The first essays outline the concept of pragmatism as a romantic polytheism, which breaks down as follows:

• Metaphysical debates -- are we really alive? what is truth? -- are largely pointless. There is no conceivable end to inquiry or end to history (sorry Fukiyama), so the only thing that really matters is solving the problems before us and then the problems which emerge from those solutions, and so on.
• The concept of a Absolute Truth (or, in an older context, God), in addition to being fruitless to pursue, is often really a dodge for authoritarianism. Coincidentally, people tend to appeal to God or Absolute Truth when it supports their side in an argument.
• To the extent that we ever know Truth, we do so via a social process of consensus. Even hard science works this way (peer review), so we should embrace this concept, and resist the notion that this consensus can be created by an individual and enforced through the power of it's own (self-referential) validity ala Monotheism or Fascism.
• Democracy is better, both in terms of individual liberty and in terms of effectiveness in producing human happiness. Per utilitarianism, maximizing human happiness is really the only outcome that makes sense to pursue.
• Likewise, the only meaningful definition of Reason is, "can you participate in the intersubjective process of communal inquiry as to how to maximize human happiness?" The idea that Reason is aligned with Absolute Truth or God is another rabbit-hole/authoritarian danger zone.
• With the demise of God (or a notion of Absolute Truth) as a provider of meaning for Human Life -- what are we supposed to be/do? what does it all mean? -- artifacts of culture become the new Source. The philosophers like to use poetry as the example here, but it seems very clear than any compelling work of culture high or low will work.
• In this context, a kind of friendly polytheism emerges. Should one have to choose between Emerson and Yeats? Different poets illustrate different aspects of human divinity.

Pragmatism rejects the notion of Absolute Truth as just a form of Secular Monotheism, and instead we turn to the process of communal intersubjective inquiry (Science/Democracy) and the infinite varieties of human divinity as realized through our various individual and social endeavors (Culture) as the guiding lights of our lives.

So, I don't quite have a handle on this yet, but I feel there's a personal connection for me here, somewhere between my hard earthly ambitions and the more ephemeral sense in which I seek to transcend my current conception of self. The idea that people, ultimately, are the source of the post-God meaning in life fitting in with the "Thou Art God" line from Stranger in a Strange Land fitting in with the experience of being so fucking on that you feel like a saint for however long it lasts.

If Thou Art God, Democracy is the path to heaven, and poets are the new prophets, what's a boy to do? I'm not quite sure yet, but I think I like the paradigm.