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willow
raymond geuss on richard rorty, nationalism, and catholicism. “richard rorty at princeton: personal recollections” in politics and the imagination, 159 Constructing Our Country, though, represented a step too far for me. The very idea that the United States was "special" has always seemed to me patently absurd, and the idea that in its present, any of its past, or any of its likely future configurations it was in any way exemplary, a form of gross narcissistic self-deception which was not transformed into something laudable by virtue of being embedded in a highly sophisticated theory which purported to show that ethnocentrism was in a philosophically deep sense unavoidable. I remain very grateful to my Catholic upbringing and education for giving me relative immunity to nationalism. In the 1950s the nuns who taught me from age five to twelve were virtually all Irish or Irish-American, with sentimental attachment to certain elements of Celtic folklore, but they made sure to inculcate into us that the only serious human society was the Church, which was an explicitly international organization. The mass, in the international language, Latin, was the same everywhere; the religious orders were international.
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