I Think You Can Have A Left

I Illustrate With A Quotation From The Atheist Philosopher Richard Rorty, Who Died Recently And Is, I Suspect, Now Having A Lengthy Conversation With His Maker. Rorty Argued That Secular Professors Ought “to Arrange Things So That Students Who Enter As Bigoted, Homophobic Religious Fundamentalists Will Leave College With Views More Like Our Own.

[walt] Whitman And [humanist Educator John] Dewey Tried To Substitute Hope For Knowledge. They Wanted To Put Shared Utopian Dreams - Dreams Of An Ideally Decent And Civilized Society - In The Place Of Knowledge Of God's Will, Moral Law, The Laws Of History, Or The Facts Of Science.... As Long As We Have A Functioning Political Left, We Still Have A Chance To Achieve Our Country, To Make It The Country Of Whitman's And Dewey's Dreams.

To Say That Truth Is Not Out There Is Simply To Say That Where There Are No Sentences There Is No Truth, That Sentences Are Elements Of Human Languages, And That Languages Are Human Creations.~ The Suggestion That Truth~ Is Out There Is A Legacy Of An Age In Which The World Was Seen As The Creation Of A Being Who Had A Language His Own.

At 12, I Knew That The Point Of Being Human Was To Spend One's Life Fighting Social Injustice.

The Usual Picture Of Socrates Is Of An Ugly Little Plebeian Who Inspired A Handsome Young Nobleman To Write Long Dialogues On Large Topics.