“To say that it [literature] is more fruitful is just to say that, when you weigh the good and the bad the social novelists have done against the good and bad the social theorists have done, you find yourself wishing that there had been more novels and less theory.” –from Rorty’s Essays on Heidegger and Others
I would first offer one criticism before I throw myself in with Rorty. This isn’t totally fair in that it seems to be the theory itself that caused the problems. But as I like to say: ideology (therefore theory (does nothing; people, on the other hand, do. And we can assume here that he is mainly reacting to what happened in communist countries under the banner of Marx. But the atrocities committed were not the result of theory itself. They were, rather, the result of baser impulses reading what they wanted into theory and using that to do what they would have naturally done without the theory. This is the result of trickle-down nature of theory –that which always involves misinterpretation. For instance, Marxism did not exterminate 6 million plus people. (Marx would have been appalled.) Stalin did. And I would note this for all the American Republicans that happen to read this. When the Russian people voted in Stalin to bring in the communist revolution, they did so for very same reason that many Americans vote in Republicans: he seemed, being an ex-military man, like the tight-fisted can-do kind of guy that could get the job done.
That said, I tend to agree with Rortys nominalist sentiment here in that, first of all, literature (as well as cinema (does tend to have more effect on the general population for the very reason he describes: it gives us an opportunity to get into the lives of people unlike us; it allows for empathy which, to me, is the only moral or ethical code we need work by. But more importantly, to me at least, it confronts the issue of theoretical inertia: the tendency of a body to resist a change in motion. This involves static inertia (a body standing still (or dynamic: a body in motion. And from a nominalist perspective we have to work in between the two as concerns social and political policy. On one hand, we have theoretical laziness (static inertia (which we can see in Stalin and Trump and his followers. On the other, we have theoretical overreach (such as can sometimes be seen in Zizek and extreme leftist interpretations in which the eight-ball being black takes on sinister connotations (I actually heard this theory posed (that have no practical application to the problems at hand. Now granted: we need people to think a little more. This is pointed out in American talk shows in which people are offered questions about actual facts (geographical, political as concerns our system (and get them wrong; or, in the case of Jimmy Kimmel, asked to comment on false information to which the respondents act as if they are true. But I personally don’t need every worker in the world to read Das Kapital in order to know they are being exploited.
Of course, there is nothing wrong with the conceptual play of theory. It’s what we turn to philosophy for. Our poetry. But when it comes to social and political policies, we need to set our esoteric egos aside, give up the ether-speak, and start speaking clearly in terms of real world solutions to real world problems. We simply cannot expect everyone to rise to the level of philosophical discourse. Therefore, it is up to us to disseminate it. It’s what we’re made to do.