John, You're procrastinating on your comps. Get to work!!
That said, I think you're overlooking a serious problem with Rorty's theory of community-enlarging. Yoshie touched on it when he asked you if, for Rorty, "gays don't count as people." Actually, I think he might have been calling you a homophobe, but I'm going to ignore that.
Now, Rorty suggests, in CIS that sympathetic stories are the best ways to get people to bring into their circle of moral concern those who have previously been marginalized by said people. You'll remember that he suggests such "sad sentimental" stories provide a good alternative to Kantian moral absolutes. Now, we also know that Rorty is unapologetically ethnocentric. He is willing to listen to and speak with people from non-liberal bourgeois cultures, but only to a certain degree. Otherwise, the liberal runs the risk of losing or finding corrupted his/her "cherished, un justified" liberal beliefs.
So we have sad, sentimental stories, and we have ethnocentrism. So, we can assume that the only sad, sentimental stories that will be heard by liberals are those that will not challenge the bourgeois liberal beliefs. To return to the example of gays wanting to be heard by the dominant het culture, they would, according to Rorty, have to tailor their stories to liberal tastes. Stories of "suffering AIDS victims" would fly, stories of fucking around in the Rambles would not. So, which story do you tell? Obviously, you tell the story the liberals will appreciate, and marginalize yourself in the process. I'm giving a paper on this very topic in a couple of weeks, so I could go on and on, but I'm going to stop myself now.
I shall leave you with another scary Richard Rorty quotation:
To rely on the suggsions of sentiment rather than on the commands of reason is to think of powerful people gradually ceasing to oppress others, or ceasing to countenance the oppression of others, out of mere niceness, rather than out of obedience to the moral law. But it is revolting to think that our only hope for a decent society is in softening the self-satisfied hearts of a leisure class. We want moral progress to burst up from below rather than waiting patiently upon condescension from above..." "Human Rights, Rationality, and Sentimentality."
Cheers, Frances
On Sun, 24 May 1998, John St. Clair wrote: >
> "In that book I claim that "theory" cannot do much to bring the excluded in
> from the margins--to enlarge the community whose consensus sets the
> standards of objectivity--that that other kinds of writing (notably novels
> and newspaper stories) can do quite a lot."
>
> I think that the last bit, novels, etc., is what's really important for
> Rorty. Of course, it makes him a bit old fashioned for most. But, I think, I
> would agree that a film like _And the Band played on_ (or the book of
> course) can get more people to _accept_ the idea of dialogue with gays, than
> any paper in Radical Philosophy. If you think that the theoretical critique
> of the system is the shit, then the latter appeals to you. If you have a
> "Rortyian" notion of politics, then the former is your thing.
>