We assume that adopting a political position is a matter of being awakened—of peering behind the curtain and seeing the hidden Truth. From Marxism’s historical materialism to Curtis Yarvin’s so-called “red pill,” radically different ideologies have all claimed to reveal a political truth that is discovered, not created. In this article, philosopher Marianne Janack argues this is a radical mistake. Philosophy cannot ground any political theory, and by invoking a non-human authority—whether God, Reality, or Truth—to ground our politics, we evade responsibility for the world we live in and create. We must instead recognize that values are made, not found.

When Donald Trump won the American election in 2016, lots of people called and emailed me to say that Richard Rorty seemed to be a prophet—that he’d predicted something like this in his book Achieving Our Country, which had been published nearly 20 years before. In that book, Rorty predicted that:

The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for—someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots. A scenario like that of Sinclair Lewis’ novel It Can’t Happen Here may then be played out. For once a strongman takes office, nobody can predict what will happen… All the sadism which the academic Left has tried to make unacceptable to its students will come flooding back. All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet.

Since Rorty had been dead nearly ten years when Donald Trump was elected, the book seemed to predict exactly how Americans would respond: they would look for an avatar of reaction—a strongman who could set things right.

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By invoking a non-human authority (God or Reality or Truth) to legitimize our hopes or justify our political or social arrangements, we are evading responsibility for the world we live in and create.

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But if Rorty seemed to be prescient in this case, he is also seen as an avatar in his own right—an avatar of the threat posed by a rejection of the idea of truth and reason in politics. Much of the controversy surrounding Rorty was prompted by his claims about Truth and Reality: that appeals to these concepts were part of the theological hangover that the Enlightenment had tried to replace with the idea of a secular good. But the Enlightenment project was not finished, Rorty thought, as long as humans continued to think that there was something like Reality-as-It-Is-in-Itself (Ding an sich) and Truth as correspondence with the way things really are. Realists no longer think that God underwrites the Good and the True, but Rorty claimed that they’d replaced God with a non-human Reality. And the idea that human beings have rights which are God-given, Rorty warned, is another piece of religious dogma. Though it might have had rhetorical value in the fight for civil rights and against colonialism, Rorty warned, it won’t work forever. And indeed, as he seemed to predict in Achieving Our Country, those gains could provoke a backlash.

Red pills