Rorty’s bastard children

Charlie Warzel:

The truth is, it’s getting harder to describe the extent to which a meaningful percentage of Americans have dissociated from reality. As Hurricane Milton churned across the Gulf of Mexico last night, I saw an onslaught of outright conspiracy theorizing and utter nonsense racking up millions of views across the internet. The posts would be laughable if they weren’t taken by many people as gospel. Among them: Infowars’ Alex Jones, who claimed that Hurricanes Milton and Helene were “weather weapons” unleashed on the East Coast by the U.S. government, and “truth seeker” accounts on X that posted photos of condensation trails in the sky to baselessly allege that the government was “spraying Florida ahead of Hurricane Milton” in order to ensure maximum rainfall, “just like they did over Asheville!”

The sentence from this paragraph I want to focus on is this: “The posts would be laughable if they weren’t taken by many people as gospel.” I think very few people take such posts as gospel. Or at least not in the sense that Warzel means it.

Warzel errs here in assuming that when people in MAGAworld make declarative statements, and endorse or amplify the declarative statements of others, they do so because they believe those statements to be true. They don’t; nor do they believe or know them to be false. In my judgment, truth and falsehood do not at any point enter the frame of reference — such concepts are non-factors, and it is a category mistake to invoke them.

In MAGAworld, declarative statements are not meant to convey information about (as Wittgenstein would put it) what is the case. Declarative statements serve as identity markers — they simultaneously include and exclude, they simultaneously (a) consolidate the solidarity of people who believe they have shared interests and (b) totally freak out the libtards. That’s what they are for. They are not for conveying Facts, Truth, Reality — nobody cares about that shit. (People who call themselves Truth Seekers are being as ironic as it is possible to be.) Such statements demarcate Inside from Outside in a way that delivers plenty of lulz, and that is their entire function. In that sense only they articulate a kind of dark gospel.

Thus it is pointless to insist that Democrats have not in fact unleashed weather weapons on Florida and the Carolinas; even more pointless to argue that if Democrats had such weather weapons they would have used them when Donald Trump was President in order to discredit him. Whether it is factually true that Democrats have and deploy weather weapons could not be more irrelevant; what matters is that this is the kind of thing we say about Democrats — so if you want to be part of this “we,” you’d better say it too.

And the account I am articulating here is, at least sometimes, openly acknowledged by the leaders of MAGAworld. Think of Steve Bannon’s famous “flood the zone with shit” comment. And when confronted with his long chain of fantastical statements about immigrants in Ohio, J. D. Vance said, “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.” Because that’s what we do; that’s how we get what we want.

The pundits and shitposters and, yes, elected representatives in our government whose real home is MAGAworld are in a strange and perverse way the bastard children of Richard Rorty. When, nearly forty years ago, Rorty rejected “systematic” philosophy for “edifying” philosophy — those terms come from his earlier book Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, but the essay linked to refines that essential distinction — he thereby rejected philosophy that wants to “correspond to the way things really are” for philosophy that builds “solidarity.” Such a philosophy in action “is changing the way we talk, and thereby changing what we want to do and what we think we are.”

Rorty thought that this model of philosophical language would be a way of building a new, more just, more generous society — would help us “achieve our country.” What he never imagined was a huckster-turned-damagogue who thinks of language — every kind of language, every imaginable use-case — as a way for him to get what he wants and change who he thinks he is, and who by his example teaches tens of millions of Americans to use language for the same purposes. They want to achieve their country too. That is, they have a vision of what the-country-they-call-theirs should be and employ language to affirm and strengthen that vision. What do truth or falsehood have to do with it? Not a damn thing.

UPDATE: This essay by Joshua Rothman — with the telling title “Do They Really Believe That Stuff?” — is a useful addendum to this post.