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prominence when his move from Princeton to the University of Virginia
was accompanied by one of the prestigious five-year MacArthur fellow–
ships. Both now contribute to public discourse by opposing currently
popular intellectual fashions, pugnacity in the case of Rorty and scientific
realism in the case of Putnam.
The United States has for decades been dominated by a fashionable
fallacy that might be called a "Pugnacity Syndrome," since its first re–
sponse to a dissident or trouble-maker is to drive out, beat down, or
beat up the alien or unwholesome opposing element. The pugnacity
is
normally moralized through a self-righteous indignation at the
evil
of the
Other, but intractable opposition is the defining characteristic. We see
this syndrome at work not only in Reagan's characterization of the So–
viet Union as the "Evil Empire," but also in the epidemic of litigation
and incarceration, the enormous popularity of zero-sum sports (both
amateur and professional), the inviolability (practical undiscussibility) of
the Pentagon budget, and the dependence on armed force as the
mainstay of foreign policy - all of which consume vast resources, exclude
dialogue, and reject cooperative or integrative strategies. High time for a
critique.
Pugnacity is more of an intellectual problem than one might think.
Each instance has its rationalization, phrased in terms of necessity, practi–
cality, prudence, rights, and so on. Traditional wisdom distinguishes be–
tween valid and invalid ("rationalizing") justifications, but in practice
relativism dominates: local and cultural variations override any consensus.
The mainstream of contemporary philosophy in both Europe and
America, culminating in "postmodernism," suggests that the notions of
truth and justice are altogether too vulnerable to sustain the weight of
brutality and hardship that is thereby put upon them - indeed to sustain
any weight at
all.
They are vulnerable because each claim about truth or
justice must make some presuppositions, which (at some point) cannot be
justified. Since reliance on any justification whatever reduces to reliance
on some unexamined dogmatism, there can be no distinction between
valid and invalid justifications. Such contemporary criticism undermines
rationalizations for brutality by undermining
all
claims for justice, effec–
tively equating pugnacity and authority. Waldenfels'
O,dnung
im
Zwielicht
is a fine recent European exposition of this view.
Traditional philosophical thought would propose some distinctions
to reinstate judgments between valid and invalid justifications of force
and coercion. Rorty, however, opts for the more radical alternative. He
concurs with the postmodernist dogma that the only way to avoid ra–
tionalizations is to give up the "pretense" ofjustifying actions and beliefs,
and proposes a liberal ideology that dispenses with ')ustifications" alto–
gether. The core idea of Rorty's liberalism is the definition (adopted
