Truth [is] What Is Better

There Is Nothing To Be Known About Anything Except An Initially Large, And Forever Expandable, Web Of Relations To Other Things. Everything That Can Serve As A Term Of Relation Can Be Dissolved Into Another Set Of Relations, And So On For Ever. There Are, So To Speak, Relations All The Way Down, All The Way Up, And All The Way Out In Every Direction: You Never Reach Something Which Is Not Just One More Nexus Of Relations.

Truth Is What Your Contemporaries Let You Get Away With.

Complaints About The Social Irresponsibility Of The Intellectual Typically Concern The Intellectual's Tendency To Marginalize Herself, To Move Out From One Community By Interior Identification Of Herself With Some Other Community - For Example, Another Country Or Historical Period... It Is Not Clear That Those Who Thus Marginalize Themselves Can Be Criticized For Social Irresponsibility. One Cannot Be Irresponsible Toward A Community Of Which One Does Not Think Of Oneself As A Member. Otherwise Runaway Slaves And Tunnelers Under The Berlin Wall Would Be Irresponsible.

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.

Well, What There Ought To Be Is An International Labor Organization, A Confederation Of The Trade Unions Of All The Countries Speaking For The Workers Who Are Competing With One Another, And Talking About The Difference In Wage Levels Between, Say, Europe And Indonesia.