Richard Rorty's Contingency, Irony and Solidarity - Video 7: The unforeseeable us 

A very insightful (especially 20:30 on) lecture in a very enjoyable series. Thank you for your work on this! ...and for the opportunity to make my humble contribution... Perhaps Rorty means by "we can't ask if our society is moral" in the same way that "we can't ask if reality is real." Because when we try to ask such questions, whatever answer we come up with is subject to the same criticism that motivated the original question. And yet the "plurality" implicit in society compels us to keep asking anyway, and always with the sincere expectation that something new may come of it. - this is irony. Perhaps Rorty is pointing out that we always recognize someone as speaking our language before we judge their morality. For example, we don't declare lions immoral for infanticide not because we think infanticide is moral, even for lions, but because we know they don't speak our language, and trying to talk about lion morality is just meaningless. In this way, to declare the action of another immoral is to imply that we speak the same language; calling someone "immoral" is an act of solidarity. Which means that there is a point where the actions of another person are so appalling that they cease to be immoral and become simply "other." Which is not to say we tolerate them, but only that we don't bother trying to understand them. It is in this sense that "there is no such thing as someone who doesn't speak our language."

as lewis gordon would say, pushing the possibilities of the future, access to power, creation of culture, evolving human potentiality and interrelationships

something else that lewis gordon always emphasizes is that in our ignorance (be it epistemic, ontological, ethical) is to do good things now, to provide for the future... as neither pessimists nor optimists know the future, the humanely 'rational' thing is to improve 'reality' for the future ... this is something we do terribly currently based on our short-term thinking and toxic narratives about how consumptive/extractive ideologies are beneficial or at best innocuous... they are not

After first reading the book, I couldn't help but think something was wrong with it. Like the Enlightenment, Rorty kind of undermined his work within the work. Seems like a lot of irony.

aren't nfts art and somewhat utopian? haha ... one of our largest problems in our culture is marginalization of the young ... exploitation of them thrives (in consumptive means), but not cultivating them humanistically and inherently listening to their novel views, their humane responses to what they freshly see in our world