(Editors note: Read part one two and three)In the first three parts of this essay, I offered a portrait of American life as viewed from the top, and I suggested that the deeply rooted sense of exceptionalism, found wide spread in our leadership class, in fact, pervades all levels of society. I’ve also argued that this exceptionalism is especially problematic in our era of a global crisis due to climate change. The questions that remain are what we should do and what we can do to face up to the greatest problem ever to confront humanity.

What should be done is fairly obvious: introduce policy that rapidly phases out fossil fuel emissions. The most straight-forward approach that would unleash our strength as a society of entrepreneurs would be to cap emissions due to industrial and land use activities and issue carbon permits that can be traded on an open market. Fossil fuels should also be taxed at their source. The tax revenues should be redistributed to society’s poorest to minimize the impact of carbon taxation on the population. No one can predict the precise changes in the economy or social organization that would result from such a policy, but in broad outlines, the effects of such policy can be discerned. Certainly there would be an extended period of austerity for the middle class, and even the wealthy might feel the pinch as the economy retrenched in a green, sustainable mode. Many existing large corporations would fail and new enterprises rise to replace them.

At this moment there is little political support for such a program. Most Americans strongly prefer to continue life consuming at the level to which they have become accustomed, and the large corporations that provide the items of consumption will certainly struggle to hold onto their positions. For these reasons, no candidates for president advocate such a program, and instead offer programs that fall below the threshold of even being labeled bandaids. You can be assured that in the run-up to the 2008 elections the “American exceptionalism” card will be played time and time and again to justify doing little or nothing about global warming. We will be told that pie-in-the-sky technology will come to the rescue, or that it is up to individuals to reduce their carbon footprints on a voluntary basis. And American exceptionalism will implicitly assure that there will be no suggestion to examine or imitate what is being done in Europe, where nations are already capping emissions and changing their energy infrastructures. In fact, dealing with global warming has become the centerpiece of creating greater European unity.

In the final analysis, it is not a question of what should be done here in the US, but of what can be done. To begin exploring that question, a review of three centuries of Western philosophy will reveal the dimensions of the problem. You may be thinking, “What bearing could philosophy have on this issue? Isn’t it just a question of getting a message out and going through the normal democratic political process of persuasion to effect the necessary changes?”

It is common to think of philosophy as an effete parlor game with no relevance to how life is actually lived. Nothing could be farther from the truth; for throughout the ages it has been a serious enterprise and has had a profound influence on what we think and believe, our perceptions of reality, and how we live. The following review will demonstrate how philosophy has sought to criticize culture and society. The question for philosophy is what can be our hopes for freedom? Is there any potential for us to be more than manipulable objects in the production process of class society? Finding effective cultural criticism is the holy grail of this effort; it could be the harbinger of the future; it would tell us what is possible. This part of the essay will explore the current status of the relation of philosophy to cultural criticism in the hope that it may offer a useful approach. Praxis, the realization of the truths discovered through philosophical enquiry, validates the search for truth.

The project of eighteenth century continental philosophy, particularly that of Kant and Rousseau came to be called the Enlightenment. They built a metaphysics that posited the primacy of the individual subject, and the relation of subject to object. The individual, endowed with a priori knowledge is rational in his subjective knowledge and understanding of an objective world. Rousseau fell asleep under a tree and dreamed of the goodness of Natural Man, and awoke with his clothes soaked in tears. Then he wrote, “Man is born free, but we find him everywhere in chains.” Kant identified truth (rationality) with the ethical category of freedom. A metaphysics and idealism based on the idea of human freedom and rationality is in stark contrast to lives actually lived as people are forced into conformity of thought by the need to survive in rigid social orders. Social criticism is implicit in continental metaphysics.

Hegel, as the true heir of Enlightenment, defended Kantian idealism, arguing that the world is infused with spirit. History moves by dialectical steps, but each step is an advance in the consciousness of freedom. These advances in thinking provided the theoretical underpinnings of two major new forms of life. They launched the project of modernity by giving language and justification for democratic revolution and secular society (Our founding document contains the words, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal . . .”), on the one hand, and communist revolution on the other.

Marx utilized the Hegelian dialectical process, but substituted materialism for spirit, and class consciousness for individual consciousness as the ontological categories of his critique of capitalism. Engels, as a disciple of Marx, continued the criticism, and following Marx’s dictum to “realize philosophy”, formulated practical programs for instituting communism. In Russia in 1917, Lenin, as a disciple of Marx and Engels, led the Bolsheviks to overturn the liberal democratic reformist revolution of Alexander Kerenski and institute a communist state based on serving the class interests of workers. Instead of peace and social equality, there followed 70 years mass deportations, a secret police state, secret executions, and the Gulag. Was this a case of Weberian unintended consequences, an instance of “the iron cage of modernity” trapping its victims? The program of the Enlightenment philosophers and Marxists had been to provide insights for the rationally grounded individual to enable him to oppose the stifling social conformity of oppressive regimes. Instead, regimes forged rationality into an instrument of oppression. While the oppression was plainly visible in the Stalinist and Maoist communist states, in the Western democracies an even greater conformity has been attained with instrumental reason acting through the social sciences and psychology. The human body has become an object of domination by the networks of power that constitute the power structure of society. The body is disciplined and punished by the schools, the military, the prisons, and the insane asylum, all of which are institutions founded on rational efficiency. Eventually, it is rendered a docile conforming body. As lived experience, reason has become violence.

The foregoing account of the Enlightenment illustrates the basic operations of philosophical discourse. Its goal is immanent criticism of appearances, of what seems to be, by bringing them into opposition with essences, or what actually is the true state of affairs. All strong evaluations of this sort need to stand on a foundation, a normative basis, or metaphysics, to unmask the deceptions imposed by culture and society. Social criticism must begin with a declaration and defense of the norms from which analysis proceeds.

For such a project, The Institute of Social Research, was endowed and established in Frankfurt Germany in 1923 by a wealthy philanthropist, Felix Weil in the hope that greater understanding of the German workers’ movement would help progressive political forces in Germany. By 1930, its research program was in disarray because the normative basis upon which German society could be criticized had been irretrievably lost. Marxist social criticism was built on the idea that workers possessed a consciousness of their social class and class interests in distinction from and opposition to that of the bourgeoisie. The reality of the consciousness of the German and the rest of the European proletariat was quite different. The German workers seemed to carry the Marxian notion of false consciousness to an extreme by supporting the fascist right in such great numbers as to render useless the distinction between “ascribed” and “empirical” class consciousness. In his essay, History and Class Consciousness, Georg Lukacs formally abandons class-consciousness as the normative basis of social criticism. He accounted for the psychological and cultural integration of the working class into German society as a consequence of changed historical circumstances.

The Institute, entirely staffed by Jewish intellectuals, by 1932 was under concerted attack by the Nazis. On January 30, 1933, the day Hitler ascended to Chancellor of Germany, Storm Troopers seized its director’s house and later closed down the Institute and confiscated its library. Shortly thereafter the Frankfurt School decamped to New York City.

The Frankfurt School’s mission changed with the triumph of fascism all over Europe, as it became clear that all prospects for social emancipation had been blocked. Its new program was to cautiously revitalize rational philosophy as the normative basis of social critical theory, and to utilize its own social research as the factual basis of theory. In the full knowledge that their work had no practical application at the time, the inner circle of the Frankfurt School produced some remarkable work in the spirit of sending messages in a bottle to an imaginary future witness.

There is an important distinction to be made between Frankfurt School research and the sort of research that emanated from the logical positivists of the Vienna Circle. Logical positivism, as a philosophy, strips away all issues of metaphysics, and value. Its focus is a rational empiricism, a method of deciding the truth of statements through verification by observation. Its relation to science and technical rigor brought logical positivism to great prominence in American universities, to the extent that logical postivists dominated the philosophy departments of the Ivy League, Stanford, and Berkeley from the 1950s through the 1980s. Since logical positivism makes no judgments of value, it lends itself well to technical enterprises whose goal may be to control and manipulate people. For example, the science of manipulation of consumers through advertising, if verifiable by the data, is truth, according to the tenets of logical positivism.

In contrast, Frankfurt School research was conducted not for the aimless accumulation of facts, but from a critical perspective. One pressing question it began to address while still located in Germany was, “What were the conditions responsible for the social integration of the German working classes into the authoritarian state?” The results of a survey of social attitudes of German workers, together with a theoretical interpretation was published as Studies on Authority and the Family. What the data showed, as analytically interpreted by Eric Fromm, were the critical influences on the child from the family. The internal emotional relationships in the family were conditioned by the social structure in which it was rooted. It is worth quoting Fromm at length because the insight that character is socially constructed will become central in later parts of this essay.

“The degree of fear and intimidation that small children experience is for the most part conditional upon the measure of fear that adults have vis-à-vis society. . . It is the social helplessness of the adult that leaves its mark on the biological helplessness of the child and that allows the super-ego and authority to attain such importance….”

From this Fromm develops his theory of the sadomasochistic character type as the prototype for the authoritarian personality. He argues that in an era of monopoly capitalism, when the mass of adults becomes very dependent on a few economically powerful oligarchs, there develop widespread feelings of social helplessness and a resultant creation of nonautonomous ego identities –society becomes full of immature adults. The social super-ego strongly influences character formation, doing away with individual moral responsibility or conscience, with negative consequences for family life. Parents no longer have the capacity to socialize their children or to protect them from state authority, and the socialization of children is accomplished directly by institutions, such as schools and churches. Under these conditions the character types that emerge are compliant and uncritical of the patterns of social authority. The comportment of the sadomasochistic personalities, who emerge in great numbers in authoritarian societies, is deference to superiors and contempt for inferiors. With the proliferation of this type, individuals fit perfectly into an all-encompassing hierarchical system of dependencies, from the international corporation down to the family.

The foremost obstacle today to social criticism is not the threat of violence from an authoritarian state, but swift dismissal by the current crop of academic philosophers. Effectively, to level any social criticism, one must deal first with the fact that as philosophy now stands, any critique that begins with a foundational claim to truth cannot be sustained. Post-structuralists, such as Richard Rorty dismiss all foundationalist claims to truth. Rorty has completed the work of Heidegger, Dewey and Wittgenstein in demolishing metaphysics or any other universal, timeless categories as valid normative bases of philosophical investigations. Rorty sees the search for universal truth claims to be nothing more than a human yearning for certainty, similar to religious impulses. Rorty’s position that all truth is simply a product of the historical conditions in which it originates, and, thus, only relative truth, leads to profoundly conservative political views.

Rorty argues against strong truth claims. In his view, the truth claims of an Islamic cleric are as valid for his culture and society as a secular Westerner’s conflicting claims of value are valid for hers. It is all simply a matter of preferences, historically conditioned within the insular and impermeable contexts of distinct cultures. Rorty’s counsel is to abandon interest in strong truth claims and ideologies. He prefers promoting greater managerial and technical efficiency in post-industrial societies as the proper course of action. His dislike of context-transcendent claims to truth leads to his endorsement of a neoconservative position: “what is real is rational and what is rational is real.” And this, in turn, leads to his being an ardent apologist for the status quo. He cites a maxim of another pragmatist, William James: “Truth is what is good for us to believe.” It is easy to see that this definition gives legitimacy to whatever beliefs happen to be dominant. If in a society the persecution of minorities is thought to be good for maintaining social order, Rorty’s neopragmatic contextualism denies us the means of criticizing such practices. One may oppose such practices as a person of taste or as a reformer, but his philosophy destroys any other rational basis on which to appeal for change.

The foregoing summary of the philosophical discourse of the past two centuries encapsulates the conundrum faced by anyone who enters public debate in the US over the question of what is to be done about global warming. What politicians can say is severely circumscribed by the limitation that nothing can be offered that in any way impugns American ideology. Such statements will be automatically dismissed as “unrealistic” or “un-American.” Even though at this date there has been a flurry of activity in the political arena on the issue of global warming, all public pronouncements by politicians, upon just cursory examination, appear wanting. They fail to come close to addressing the question in any realistic fashion for the reason that the problem cannot be addressed effectively without bringing to the table serious reconsideration of the truth claims of American culture. Such reconsideration is blocked by the deep vein of philosophical pragmatism and logical positivism that grounds all our discourse.

Rorty and his forebears, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and Dewey did philosophy a great service by demolishing metaphysics. The continental systematic philosophers lead the world into new forms of life – both rationalist individualist liberal democracies and communist states – that have proven to be as problematic as the monarchies they replaced. The arguments of reason grounded in the notion of immutable universal truth have led to untold human suffering. But, Rorty goes too far in his view that objectivity, itself, always has metaphysical roots. In the parts of this essay that will follow, I will offer a method of critical discourse that avoids the pitfall of relying on foundationalist statements and I will argue for a limited version of objectivity and provide a more factual account of historico-cultural contextualism than Rorty’s. I will also take on the task of setting the conditions under which the socially constructed character of Americans could be reconstituted to correspond better to objective conditions. Are there grounds for hope, or are we doomed to great suffering?