Edward Rothstein finds resonance between, of all things, the mindset of pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty, who passed away recently, and a senescent tribal culture, the Caduveo of Brazil.

Rothstein cites Claude Lévi-Strauss’s view that the tribe, which he studied in the 1930s, believed in its transcendent authority to such an extent that it disdained nature, was impervious to natural feelings, and was disposed to exploit and dominate others.

“In Mr. Lévi-Strauss’s telling,” Rothstein writes, the Caduveo actually take on a strangely postmodern flavor, shedding the very idea of natural law or constraints…the tribe was not countercultural but counternatural. It refused to defer to external forces or commands.

Rorty – in Rothstein’s telling – held that “it is impossible to step outside our skins — the traditions, linguistic and other, within which we do our thinking and self-criticism.” He argued that we are always dealing with multiple and conflicting claims of truth, none of which can be conclusively established. We choose what to believe based on what is useful for us to believe…His pragmatism was postmodern, tolerant to a fault, its moral and progressive conclusions never appealing to a higher authority.

At the heart of Rothstein’s unlikely but in the end insigtful comparison of postmoderns like Rorty and the Caduveo is the sense that they both resist understanding “forces” that exist beyond the limits of their “familiar world.” In the case of pragmatism, for example, one inclination might be to so focus on the ways in which one’s own worldview is flawed that trauma is more readily attributed to internal failure than to external challenges. In one of his last interviews Mr. Rorty recalled the events of 9/11: “When I heard the news about the twin towers, my first thought was: ‘Oh, God. Bush will use this the way Hitler used the Reichstag fire.’ ”

If that really was his first thought, it reflects a certain…inability fully to imagine what confrontations over truth might look like, possibly even a resistance to stepping outside of one’s skin or mental habits.

Because of their rejection of the natural world, including even the process of procreation, the Caduveo are gradually fading into oblivion. “Such a fate of denatured inconsequence,” concludes Rothstein,”may eventually be shared by absolutist postmodernism.”