Download - Fish in Harpers
-
8/3/2019 Fish in Harpers
1/9
E n \ X i A R [I S A InT H E H' L L Y o F S I 1\1r L IF Y IN l:; IS L AM
P OST M O DE RN W A R FA R EThe Ignorance of Our Warrior Intellectuals
By Stanley Fish
-----------+ -----------
T H E F OR E ST P RIM E V A L
A Month in Congo's Wildest Jungle
By Peter Canby
IN P R A IS E O F IM I T A TIO N
On the Sincerest Form of Flattery
By Nicholas Delbanco
B IG B E A R , C A L IF O R N IA
A story by Rebecca Curtis
-
8/3/2019 Fish in Harpers
2/9
E S SAY
POST~10DERNWARFARE
The ignorance of our warrior intellectuals
By Stanley F is h
W owould have thought, in those first few
minutes, hours, days, that what we now call 9/11
was to become an event in the Culture Wars?
Today, more than nine months later, nothing
could be clearer, though it was only on Septem-
ber 22 that the first sign appeared, in a New York
Times opinion piece written by Edward Roth-
stein and entitled "Attacks on U.S. Challenge the
Perspectives of Postmodem True Believers." A few
days later (on September 27), Julia Keller wrote
a smaller piece in the Chicago Tribune; her title
(no doubr the comriburion of a staffer): "After the
attack, postmodemism loses its glib grip." In the
September 24 issue ofTime , Roger Rosenblatt an-
nounced "the end of the age of irony" and pre-
dicted that "the good folks in charge of Ameri-
ca's intellectual life" would now have to change
their tune and no longer say that "nothing was
real" or that "nothing was to be believed in or tak-
en seriously." And on October I, John Leo, in a
piece entitled "Campus hand-wringing is not a
pretty sight," blamed just about everything on
the "very dangerous ideas" that have captured
our "campus culture"; to wit, "radical cultural
relativism, nonjudgmentalisrn, and a postmod-
em conviction that there are no moral norms or
truths worth defending."
Well, that certainly sounds bad-no truths,
no knowledge, no reality, no morality, no judg-ments, no objectivity-and if postmodemists are
saying that, they are not so much dangerous as sil-
ly. Luckily, however, postmodernists say no such
thing, and what they do say, if it is understood at
all, is unlikely to provoke either the anger or the
alarm of our modern Pau I Reveres. A full ac-
count or even definition of posrrnodemism would
be out of place here, but it may be enough for our
purposes to look at one offered by Rothstein,
who begins by saying that "Postmodemists chal-
lenge assertions that truth and ethical judgment
have any objective validity." Well, it depends
on what you mean by "objective." If you mean a
standard of validity and value that is independent
of any historically emergent and therefore revis-
able system of thought and practice, then it is true
that many postmodernists would denyethat any
such standard is or could ever be available. But :
if by "objective" one means a standard of validi-
ty and value that is backed up by the tried-and-
true procedures and protocols of a well-devel-
oped practice or discipline-history, physics,
economics, psychology, etc.-then such stan-
dards are all around us, and we make use of them
all the time without any metaphysical anxiety.
As Richard Rorty, one of Rothstein's targets,
is fond of saying, "Objectivity is the kind of thing
we do around here." Historians draw conclusions
about the meaning of events, astronomers present
models of planetary movements, psychologists
offer accounts of the reading process, consumers
make decisions about which product is best, par-
ents choose schools for their children-all ofthese things and many more are done with vary-
ing degrees of confidence, and in no case is the
confidence rooted in a conviction that the actor
is in possession of some independent standard of
Stanley Fish is dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chiw!!.o. He is the audlOrof many books, including, mostrecently, The Trouble with Principle an d How Milton Works (Harvard University
Press). The Stanley Fish Reader, edited by H. Aram Veeser, was published in J 999 ..
ES SAY 3
-
8/3/2019 Fish in Harpers
3/9
objectivity. Rather, the actor, you or I or anyone,
begins in some context of practice, with its re-
ceived authorities, sacred texts, exemplary
achievements, and generally accepted bench-
marks, and from within the perspective of that
context-thick, interpersonal, densely elaborat-
ed-judges something to be true or inaccurate,
reasonable or irrational, and so on.
lt seems, then, that theunavailability of absolutely
objective standards-the
thesis Rothstein finds re-
pugnant and dangerous-
doesn't take anything away
from us. If, as posrrnod-
ernists assert, objective
standards of a publicly ver-
ifiable kind are unavailable,
they are so only in the sense that they have always
been unavailable (this isnot, in other words, a con-
dition postmodemism has caused), and we have
always managed to get along without them, doing
a great many things despite the fact that we mightbe unable to shore them up in accordance with the
most rigorous philosophical demands. One of the
things we might be doing, for instance, when
we're not doing philosophy, is condemning some-
one or some group, though Rothstein seems to
think that we can't do that unless we have all
our philosophical ducks in a row-and in the
right row. Thus, he says, given postmodernist as-
sumptions, "one culture, particularly the West,
cannot reliably condemn another," which means,
according to him, that we in the United States
cannot reliably condemn those who attacked the
World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Again, it
depends on what you mean by "reliably," a word
that takes us right back to "objective" and to the
argument I have been making. If by "a reliable con-
demnation" you mean a condemnarion rooted in
a strong sense of values, priorities, goals, and a
conviction of right and wrong, then such a con-
demnation is available to most if not all of us all
of the time. But if by "a reliable condemnation"
you mean a condemnation rooted in values, pri-
orities, and a sense of right and wrong that no on e
would dispute and everyone accepts, then there isno
such condemnation, for the simple reason that
there are no such universally accepted values, pri-
orities, and moral convictions. If there were, there
would be no deep disputes.
Now, I would not be misunderstood. I am notsaying that there are no universal values or no
truths independent of particular perspectives. I
affirm both. When I offer a reading of.a poem or
pronounce on a case in First Amendment law, I
do so with no epistemological reservations. I re-
gard my reading as true-not provisionally true,
or true for my reference group only, but true. I am
as certain of that as I am of the fact that I may very
POSTMODERNISM IS A SERIES
OF ARGUMENTS, NOT A
WAY OF LIFE OR A RECIPE
FOR ACTION
34 HARPER'S MAGAZINE IJULY 2002
well be unable to persuade others, no less edu
cated or credentialed than I, of the truth so per
spicuous to me. And here is a point that is often
missed, the independence from each other, an
therefore the compatibility, of two assertions
thought to be contradictory when made by the
same person: (1) I believe X to be true and (2)
believe that there is no mechanism, procedure,
calculus, test, by which the truth of X can be necessarily demonstrated to any sane person who ha
come to a different conclusion (not that such
demonstration can never be successful, only tha
its success is contingent and not necessary). In or
der to assert something and mean it without qual
ification, I of course have to believe that it is true
but I don't have to believe that I could demon-
strate its truth to all rational persons. The claim
that something is universal and the acknowledg-
ment that I couldn't necessarily prove it are log
ically independent of each other. The second
does not undermine the first. .
Once again, then, a postmodern argument
turns out to be without any deleterious consequences (it is also without any positive conse
quences, but that is another story), and it certainly
does not stand in the way of condemning those
who have proven themselves to be our enemies
in words and deeds. Nor should this be surprising
for, after all, postmodcrnism is a series of argu
ments, not a way of life or a recipe for action. You
belief or disbelief in postmodem tenets is inde
pendent of your beliefs and commitments in any
other area of your life. You may believe that ob
jectivity of an absolute kind is possible or yo
may believe that it is not, but when you have t
decide whether a particular thing is true or false
neither belief will hinder or help you. What wi
help you are archives, exemplary achievements,
revered authorities, official bodies of evidence, re
evant analogies, suggestive metaphors-all avail
able to all persons independently of their philo
sophical convictions, or of the fac
Ithat they do or do not have any.
n the end, the post-9/11 flap about postmod
emism is the blowing of so much smoke, sound an
furysignifying very little apart from the ignorance
of those who produced it. There's no there there
This is not true, however, of what succeeded tha
flap in the popular and semi-popular media, th
question of whether this is or isnot a religious wa
That question was asked against the backdrop othe Bush Administration's desire that the war no
be characterized as a religious one. Any public
embrace of Samuel Huntington's clash-of-civi-
lizations thesis would have at least three bad con
sequences. First, key Islamic nations could not b
persuaded to support, or at least to refrain from de
nouncing, U.S. military operations. Second, mi
lions of U.S. citizens of the Islamic faith would be
-
8/3/2019 Fish in Harpers
4/9
come the large core of an antiwar coalition. And
lastly, the United Nations would become polar-
ized along religious lines, with the possible result
that any U.S. attack would be censured. In the
context of these and related anxieties, the official
party line emerged almost immediately: Although
Al Qaeda said that its warriors did what they did
in the service of Allah, theirs was a perverted ver-
sion of the Islamic faith, and therefore their claim
to be acting in its name wasfalse and illegitimate;
they simply did not represent Islam and had mis-
read its sacred texts.
If you think about it for a moment, this is an
amazing line of argument that begs
the questions contained in its as-
sertions. Who is it that is autho-
rizedto determine which version of
Islam is the true one? What reli-
gious faith has ever looked outside
the articles of its creed for guid-
ance and correction? What is the
difference between the confident
pronouncements that the AlQaeda brand of Islam is a deviant
one and the excommunications
and counter-excommunications of
Catholics and Protestants, and
within Protestantism of Baptists,
Anglicans, Lutherans, not to men-
tion jehovah's Witnesses, Seventh-
Day Adventists, Mormons, and
Mennonites? Merely to pose these
questions is to realize that the spec-
ification of what a religion is and
the identification of the actions
that mayor may not be taken in its
name are entirely internal matters .. This is, after all, the point of a re-
ligion: to follow a vision the source
of which is revelation, ecclesiasti-
cal authority, a sacred book, a
revered person. One who adheres
to that vision does not accept de-
scriptions or evaluations of it from
non-adherents citing other revela-
tions, authorities, and texts; and
the fact that non-adherents regard
some of the convictions at the heart of the vision
as bizarre, and regard the actions generated by
those convictions as inadvisable or even evil, is
merely confirmation, again from the inside, of
the extent to which these poor lost souls are in thegrip of error and too blind to see. What this means
(and here we link up with the worries over post-
rnodernismlis that in matters of religion-and I
would say in any matter-there isno public space,
complete with definitions, standards, norms, cri-
teria, etc., to which one can have recourse in or-
der to separate out the true from the false, the
revolutionary from the criminal. And what that
means is that there is no common ground, at least
no common ground on which a partisan flag has
not already been planted, that would allow some-
one or some body to render an independent j udg-
ment on the legitimacy of the declarations that is-
sue from Bin Laden and his followers about the
reiigious bases of their actions.
Indeed, only if there were such a public space
or common ground could the question "Is this a
religious war?" be a real question, as opposed to a
tendentious thesis pretending to be a question,
which it is. That is to say, the question "Is this a
religious war?" is not a question about the war; it
is the question that is the war. For the question
makes assumptions Al Qaeda members are bound
to reject and indeed are warring against: that it is
possible to distinguish between religious and non-
religious acts from a perspective uninflected byany religion or ideology; or, to put it another way,
that there is a perspective detached from and
above all religions, from the vantage point of .
which objective judgments about what is and is
not properly religious could be handed down; or
that it is possible to distinguish between the oblig-
ations one takes on as a person of faith and the
obligations one takes on in one's capacity as a
Aqui es el centro, by Alfredo Castaneda, courtesy Mary-Anne Martin Fine Art, New York City E SS AY
-
8/3/2019 Fish in Harpers
5/9
citizen; i.e., that it is possible to go out into the
world and perform actions that are not related, ei-
ther positively or negatively, to your religious
convictions. And these assumptions make sense
only in the context of another: that religion is
essentially a private transaction between you and
your God and therefore is, at least in principle, in-
dependent of your actions in the public sphere,
where the imperatives you follow might be polit-
ical, economic, philanthropic, environmental-
imperatives that could be affirmed or rejected by
persons independently of their religious convic-
tions or of their lack of religious convictions.
What I have rehearsed for you, in a nutshell,
is the core of what has been called America's'
"Civic Religion," a faith (if that is the word)
founded on the twin rocks of Locke's declara-
tion that "the business of laws is not to provide
for the truth of opinions, but for the safety and se-
curity of the commonwealth" and Jefferson's more
colloquial version of the same point: "It does me
no injury for my neighbor to say that there are
twenty Gods or no Gods; it neither picks mypocket nor breaks my leg." Jefferson's further con-
tribution is the famous "Wall of Separation," a
metaphor that has lent constitutional force to
the separation of church and state, even though
it is not in the Constitution. In combination,
these now canonical statements give us the key
distinction between the private and the public,
which in turn gives us the American creed of
tolerance. It goes like this: If you leave me free to
believe whatever I like, I'll leave you free to be-
lieve whatever you like, even though in our re-
spective hearts we regard each other's beliefs as
false and ungodly. We can argue about it or pri-
vately condemn each other, but our differencesof belief shouldn't mean that we try to disen-
franchise or imprison or kill each other or re-
frain from entering into relationships of com-
mercial and social cooperation. Let's live and let
live. Let's obey the civil, nonsectarian laws and
leave the sorting out of big theological
Aquestions to God and eternity.
11of that is precisely what adherents of the
Al Qaeda version of Islam hate and categorical-
ly deny, which is why the question "Is this a reli-
gious war?" will make no sense to them, or, rather,
will make only the sense of a question issuing
from an infidel who is by definition wrong and an
enemy. Not only do Bin Laden and company failto make the distinction between religious and
civil acts; they regard those who do make it as per-
. sons without a true religion. If you're really reli-
gious, you're religious all the time, and no act you
perform-even the act of having or not having a
beard-is without religious significance and jus-
tification. It is the dividing of one's life into the
separate realms of the public and private that
3 6 HARPER'S MAGAZINE / JULY 2 0 02
leads, say the militants, to a society bereft of
moral center and populated by citizens incapabl
of resisting the siren call of excess and sin.
This refusal of Al Qaeda-style Islam to hono
the public/private distinction is the essence o
that faith, and not some incidental feature of
that can be dispensed with or moderated. Com
mentators who pronounced on the question "
this a religious war?" tended to see this and no
see it at the same time. They noted the fact bu
then contrived to tum it into a correctable mis
take, either by using words like "criminal," "fa
natic," and "extremist" or by implying that th
non-emergence of the public/private distinction
is some kind of evolutionary failure; they want t
be like us, but they don't yet know how to do i
Thus R. Scott Appleby, a professor at Notre
Dame and an expert on religion and violence
notes (in the November 2001 issue of Lingua
Franca), with an apparently straight face, tha
"Islam has been remarkably resistant to the dif
ferentiation and privatization of religion that o
ten accompanies secularization ... and has not undergone a reformation like the one experienced
by Christianity, which led to a pronounced sep
aration of sacred and secular." ("What's the mat
ter with these guys? Why can't they get with th
program?") But of course there is nothing re
markable in a faith's refusal of a transformation
that would undo it. Privatization and seculariza
tion are not goals that Islam has yet to achieve
they are specters that Islam (or some versions o
it) pushes away as one would push away death.
Appleby's characterization of Islam as a reli
gion stuck in some stage of arrested development
and self-blocked from reaching maturity ismatched
by Andrew Sullivan's condescending descriptionoflslam (in the October 7 issue ofThe New Yor
Times Magazine) as "a great religion that isnonethe
less extremely inexperienced in the toleration o
other ascendant and more powerful faiths." Pre
sumably, a good dose of John Stuart Mill or Joh
Rawls would do the trick and move Islam along o
.the way to health and modernization.
When Sullivan says of Islam that it is "a grea
religion," he means a potentially great religion
Islam will be fine when it rids itself of its impu
rities, the chief impurity being a stubborn insis
tence on a fidelity to a set of particular beliefs. I
the morality Sullivan shares with Appleby, par
ticularity is a sin, because it sets up barriers be
tween persons devoted to different particularsThe better way is the way of generality, of a re
ligious sense so large and capacious that anything
and everything can be accommodated within i
The only problem with such a religion would b
its total lack of content, but as it turns out tha
is just what Appleby, Sullivan, and company re
ally want. It is instructive to watch them as the
take the heart out of religion in the name of re
-
8/3/2019 Fish in Harpers
6/9
ligion-or, as they put it, "true religion." Of
course you can't have a true religion without a
false religion. A false religion, Jane Eisner tells us
in the Phi lade lph ia Inqu i rer of October 14, is a re-ligion that has "failed to master modernity," and
the sign of this failure is its insistence on a single
creed in an age of pluralism. The true religion iswhat Eisner calls "the American national reli-
gion," which she describes as "our nonsectarian
belief in the freedom of the individual to think,
speak, and act in his or her best interests." Here
Eisner is either disingenuousor unaware of the im-
plications of her own language. By nonsectarian
belief she would seem to mean, and probably
thinks she means, belief not limited to any par-
ticular religious denomination; but what the
phrase really means in the context of her essay is
a belief in the evil of anv sectarian belief what-
soever, of any belief th~t asserts itself strongly
and is jealous of its priority. She is not, as she
would have it, defending all beliefs against an
intolerant exclusionism but attacking belief in
general, at least as it commits you to the truth of
a conviction or the imperative of an action. The
only good belief is the belief you can wear light-
ly and shrug off when you leave home and stride
into the public sphere.
This issurelywhat Sullivan means (whether he
knows it or not) when he declares that this "is a
war of fundamentalism against faiths of all kinds
that are at peace with freedom and modernity."
A faith at peace with freedom and modernity is
a faith that has given up its franchise and has
made itself into something occasional and cos-
metic. It is only in the name of such a faith-i-emp-
tied of all content and committing you to noth-
ing but the gospel of noncommitment-that
Sullivan can say, again with a straight face, that
by denying "the ultimate claims of religion" we
"preserve true religion itself"; that is, we preserve
this vague, nonbinding, light-as-air spirituality,
the chief characteristic of which isthat it claims-
and believes-nothing.
Although it may not at firstbe obvious,the sub-
stitution for real religions of a religion drained of
particulars is of a piece with the desire to exorcise
postmodernism. In both instances, what isfeared
isthe absence of a public spaceor common ground
in relation to which judgments and determina-
tions of value can be made with no reference to
the religious, ethnic, racial, or national identities
of the persons to whom they apply. It should, to
Sullivan's way of thinking, be obvious to all,
including those Muslims not blinded by fanati-
cism, that Bin Laden and his followers are crim-
inal terrorists and not religious freedom fighters;
and if they quote the Koran at us and rehearse his-
tories in which we are the oppressors and vil-
lains, that just means that they are misreading
h i i i i h i hi
tory, and we have the experts at Johns Hopkins,
George Washington, and Yale universities to
prove it. This can't be a religious war. It must be
a war of common sense or common ground
against the fanatical and the
"T irrational.
, 'hat must be protected, then, is the gener-
al, the possibilityof making pronouncements from
a perspective at once detached from and superi-
or to the sectarian perspectives of particular na-
tional interests, ethnic concerns, and religious
obligations; and the threat to the general is posed
by postmodernism and
strong religiosityalike,post-
modernism because its cri-
tique of master narratives
deprivesus of a mechanism
for determining which of
two or more fiercely held
beliefs is true (which is not
to deny the category of true
belief, just the possibility
of identifying it uncontroversially), strong reli-
giosity because it insists on its own norms and re-
fusescorrection from the outside. The antidote to
both is the separation of the private from the pub-
lic, the establishing of a public sphere to which all
could have recourseand to the judgments of which
all, who are not criminal or insane, would assent.
The point of the public sphere is obvious: it is
supposed to be the location of those standards
and measures that belong to no one but apply to
everyone. It is to be the location of the universal.
The problem is not that there isno universal-the
universal, the absolutely true, exists, and I know
what it is. The problem is that you know, too,
and that we know different things, which puts us
right back where we were a few sentences ago,
armed with universal judgments that are irrec-
oncilable, all dressedup and nowhere to go for an
authoritative adjudication.
What to do? Well, you do the only thing you
can do, the only honest thing: you assert that
your universal is the true one, even though your
adversariesclearly do not accept it, and you do not
attribute their recalcitrance to insanity or mere
criminality-the desired public categories of con-
demnation-but to the fact, regrettable as it may
be, that they are in the grip of a set of beliefs
that is false. And there you have to leave it, be-
cause the next step, the step of proving the false-
ness of their beliefs to everyone, including those
in their grip, is not a step available to us as finite
situated human beings. We have to live with the
knowledge of two things: that we are absolutely
right and that there is no generally accepted mea-
sure by which our rightness can be independently
validated. That's just the way it is, and we should
" I S THIS A RELIGIOUS WAR?"
NOT A QUESTION ABOUT THE
WAR; IT IS THE QUESTION
THAT IS THE WAR
-
8/3/2019 Fish in Harpers
7/9
true beliefs (what else could we do?) without ex-
pecting that some God will descend, like the
duck in the old Groucho Marx TV show, and
tell us that we have uttered the true
rJ" and secret word.
. ! h e distinction I am trying to make here is notbetween affirminguniversalsand denying them but
between affirming universals because you strong-
ly believe them to be such and affirming univer-
sals because you believe them to have been cer-
tified by an independent authority acknowledged
by everyone. Andrew Sullivan teeters between
these different affirmationswhen he declaresin the
concluding paragraph of his
essay that "Weare fighting
not for our country ... or for
our flag.Weare fighting for
the universal principles of
our Constitution." Is Sulli-
van here identifying and
standing by his conviction
. of what the universal prin-
ciples are, or is he claiming that it is not his con-
viction but the world itself that has identified
them? If he is doing the first, he is acknowledging
that this is a religious war and that it is our reli-
gion (embodied, he thinks, in the Constitution)
against theirs, not their religion against common
sense. If he is doing the second, he is saying that
this is a war between the world's religions and
those crazy outlaws the world universally con-
demns. His penultimate sentence removes the
doubt: "Weare fighting for religion against one of
the deepest strains in religion there is."The deep-
est strain in a religion is the particular and par-
ticularistic doctrine it asserts at its heart, in the
company of such pronouncements as 'Thou shalt
have no other Gods before me." Take the deep-
est strain of religion away,as Sullivan wants us to
do, and what remains are the surface pieties-
abstractions without substantive bite-
to which everyone will assent because
Ithey are empty, insipid, and safe.
t is this same preference for the vacuouslygen-
eral over the disturbingly particular that informs
the attacks on college and university professors
who spoke out in ways that led them to be brand-
ed as outcasts by those who were patrolling and
monitoring the narrow boundaries of acceptable
speech. Here one must be careful, for there are
fools and knaves on all sides. On the fool side,
there is the case of Richard Berthold, the hapless
University of New Mexico professor of history
who said in class,on September II, "Anyone who
can blow up the Pentagon has my vote"-and
then in the wake of the subsequent protest ac-
knowledged that he had been a jerk to say it, but,
f ll " h Fi A d i h
To SILENCE PROFESSORS WHO
CROSS AN INVISIBLE LINE IS TO
NARROW THE DISCOURSE TO A
FORM OF CHEERLEADING
to be a jerk." Well, yes and no; the First Amend
ment does protect him from prosecution by th
government-unless his formof jerkiness could b
characterized as libel, incitement to violence, o
treason-but it does not necessarily protect him
from disciplinary action by his university if it can
be determined that what he said amounted to using class time and state dollars to propagate hi
own political views and thereby undermined hi
ability to fulfill his appointed duties.
On the knave side, there isthe politicallymurk
but conceptually clear case of Sami Al-
Arian, a professor of computer engineering at the
University of South Florida, who has been sent
letter of dismissal because he appeared on Th eO'Reilly Factor, a crime of which I am also guiltyThe university saysthat he is being dismissed no
because of the views he expressed over a decade
ago but because the public airing of them pro
duced a hostile response that took the form othreats from individuals, potential donors, politi
cians, and trustees;but this iswhat isknown as th
"heckler's veto" argument-speech is to be si
lenced or punished because of the actual or po
tential hostile response to it-an argument re
jected by a long line of Supreme Court decision
and almost certain to be rejected again.
Closer to my home, the University of Illinoi
at Chicago and Northwestern University hav
been more adept than South Florida in dealing
with the cases of Bill Ayers and Bernardine
Dohrn-one-time Weathermen, fugitives, and
most-wanted celebrities, and now married,
middle-class, and distinguished professors-who
are under firefor actions performedthirty yearsag
and no longer the object of judicial attention. A
both universities saw,the only question iswhethe
Ayers and Dohrn are currently living up to thei
contractual duties and doing their jobs; and sinc
the evidence saysclearly that they are, there is n
case. Contrition for acts long past and not presen
ly under indictment is not a legal or even a mora
requirement for university teaching.
It would be pleasant to linger over these an
other cases and tease out the doctrines they il
lustrate, but what finally interests me about them
is their link to the pattern I have been describ
ing, the pattern of demonizing the particularism
of local and partisan perspectives (either philo
sophical or religious) in favor of a general per
spective that claims to be universal and has th
advantage of disturbing no one because it is a
once safe and empty. The effort of those wh
would silence or dismiss professors who cros
some invisible line is at bottom an effort to nar
row the range of what can be said to a rote pa
triotic discourse that is a form of cheerleading
rather than serious thought. This is in fact th
naked thesis ofW hy We Fight: Moral C larity an
h b f f d
-
8/3/2019 Fish in Harpers
8/9
cation-and author, at least by his own claim, of
all the Virtues-William Bennett. In this book
we learn that the problems not only of the cur-
rent moment but of the last forty years stem from
the cultural ascendancy of those "who are unpa-
triotic" but who, unfortunately, are also "the most
influential among us." The phrase "among us" is
a nice illustration of the double game Bennett
plays throughout the book. On one reading, "thediversity mongers [and] rnulticulturalists," mis-
taken though they may be in their views, are part
of "us"; that is, they are citizens, contributing to
a national dialogue in ways that might provoke
Bennett's disagreement but contributing never-
theless in the spirit of deliberative democracy.
On another reading, however, these cultural rel-
ativists are "among us" as a fifth column might be
among us, servants of an alien power who pros-
ecute their subversive agenda under the false col-
ors of citizenship. That the second is the reading
Bennett finally intends (though he wants to get
moral credit for the first) is made clear when he
charges these peddlers of "relativism" with un-patriotism, and in that instant defines a patriot as
someone who has the same views he has.
This also turns out to be Bennett's definition of
honesty and truth-telling. As the remedy for what
he and his allies see as the moral enervation of the
country, Bennett urges "the reinstatement of a
thorough and honest study of our history," where
by "honest" he means a study of history that tells
the same story he and his friends would tell if
they were in control of the nation's history de-
partments. Unfortunately (at least as he sees it),
history departments are full of people like Co-
lumbia's Eric Foner, who draws Bennett's ire for
wondering which is worse, "'the horror that en-
gulfed New York City or the apocalyptic rhetoric
emanating daily from the White House.''' Rennett
calls this sentiment "atrocious rot." Maybe it is,
maybe it isn't, but even if it were atrocious rot, it
could be honest atrocious rot; that is, it could be
Foner's honest attempt, as a citizen and historian,
to take the truthful measure of what the events of
September 11 and their aftermath mean ..But Ben-
nett's epistemology does not allow for the possi-
bility that someone could honestly put forward as
the truth of a matter an account that differed
from his. If Foner and all the other "Foners of the
United States" say things about American histo-
ry that do not square with the things Bennett and
Donald Kagan (his hero-historian) say, it mustbe because they are self-conscious enemies of the
good and the true. They are not merely mistaken
(which is how we usually characterize those on the
opposite side of us in what John Milton called
the "wars of truth"); they are "insidious," they are
engaged in "violent misrepresentation," they prac-
tice "distortion," they "sow widespread and de-
bilitating confusion," they "weaken the country's
resolve," they exhibit "failures of character," they
drown out "legitimate patriots" (guess who), they
display a "despicable nature," they abandon, yes,
"the honest search for truth."
This long list of hit-and-run accusations is jus-
tified in Bennett's eyes because the persons at
whom it is directed would give different answers
than he would to questions still being honestly de-
bated after these many months. It is one thing tobelieve, and believe fervently, that someone has
got something wrong; it is quite another to believe
that the someone you think to be wrong is by
virtue of that error unpatriotic, devoted to lies,
and downright evil. It has often been the case that
religions have identified sacred texts and sacred
persons as the repositories of wisdom and truth
and have consigned to the deepest circles of hell
persons who read from another book or assert
truths contrary to those declared necessary for
salvation. But I did not know that there was now
a Book of Bennett, and that the teachers and in-
tellectuals who inhabit our universities were
obliged to rehearse its lessons and recite its cat-echisms, lest they be drummed out of the
Republ ic and cast into outer darkness.
~ Live and learn.
Lere is a tension in Bennett's book--one
common to jeremiads on the right-between
his frequent assertions that our cultural condi-
tion couldn't be worse and his equally frequent
assertions that the vast majority of Americans
thinks as he does. How can the enemy at once
be so small in number and so disastrously ef-
fective? The answer is to be found in the fact
that this small band controls our colleges and
universities, and the result is the "utter failure
of our institutions of higher learning," a failure
the product of which is a generation of college
students ignorant of our history and imbued
with the virus of "cultural and moral rela-
tivism." What to do? One proposal put forward
by some of Bennett's allies-and a surprising
one given the free-market propensities of this
crowd-amounts to affirmative action for con-
servatives. If the professoriat is predominantly
liberal, let's do something about it and redress
the imbalance. (Does this sound like rnulticul-
rural ism and diversity?) David Horowitz-
once a virulent left-wing editor of Ramparts
and now a virulent right-wing editor of Hetero-
doxy--eomplains, for example, that there are"whole departments in the social sciences
where there are no conservatives," despite the
fact that "the point of a university is that it
should be a place of dialogue" (as long, pre-
sumably, as it is not a dialogue about this war,
in which case what we want is uniformity of
opinion, one-sided opinion). But if the univer-
sity is a place of dialogue (and I certainly
E SS AY
-
8/3/2019 Fish in Harpers
9/9
think it is) it is supposed to be a dialogue be-
tween persons of differing views on discipli-
nary issues-Is Satan the hero ofParadise Lost?
Is there such a thing as Universal Grammar?
What historical factors led to the Reform Bill
. of 1832? Could World War I have been avoid-
ed?-and not a dialogue between persons who
identify themselves as Democrats or Republi-
cans. That dialogue takes place in the arenasof elections, lobbying, and political fund-rais-
ing, and while there may be some overlap be-
tween academic disagreements and disagree-
ments in the realm of partisan politics, the
overlap is not structural, even if it is statisti-
cally significant; moreover, altering it is not an
academic imperative, because it is not the
business of the academy to assure proportional
representation of different political positions.
But what about affirmative action? someone
might ask. By this argument, it isn't the business
of the academy to assure proportional represen-
tation of women, blacks, and Hispanics either. No
disciplinary concern demands such arJ"' correction, so what's the difference?
~e difference is an historical one. For decades
and indeed centuries, women, blacks, and His-
panics have been actively excluded from the
academy, and while one might debate whether or
not universities have an obligation to redress past
inequities, the effort to do so can be given at
least a plausible historical justification. No such
justification is available to support affirmative
action for conservatives, who have never been ex-
cluded, and in fact were once greatly in the as-
cendancy, and who are no longer in the ascen-
dancy in some disciplines because they have
chosen to go into others. It would be interesting. to study why humanities departments do not by
and large attract the politically conservative, but
I would bet that such a study would not reveal that
they have been denied entry or badly treated
when they have attained it. The case for bring-
ing more conservatives into the humanities and
social sciences is a nonstarter.
The second, and related, argument invoked
to justify the current spate of professor-bashing has
a bit more going for it, as evidenced by the fact
that it has been made across the political sp~c-
trum, from Stanley Kurtz, a contributing editor for
the National Review, to David Glenn, writing in
The Nation. It is the argument that the professo-riat is reaping what it sowed in those years when
so many of its members (including, no doubt,
some now facing criticism an.ddiscipline) worked
for the implementation of campus speech codes.
The chickens are just coming home to roost. (Ex-
actly the line of thought so vehemently rejected
by the gatekeepers of our patriotism.)
Aside from a certain historical inaccuracy-
40 HAR PER' S MAGAZINE! JULY 2002
most speech codes were never implemented, and
none has survived judicial scrutiny-the logic de
ployed by Kurtz and Glenn is flawed in what
should now be seen as a familiar way: it depends
on a general equivalence that takes no notice o
the relevant historical differences. The equiva-
lence is supposed to be between disciplining and/or
stigmatizing persons because they have produced
speech hurtful to women, blacks, Hispanics, andgays, and disciplining and/or stigmatizing persons
because they have produced speech deemed to
be politically inappropriate. If you were for the firs
kind of regulation, the logic goes-i.e., if you sup
ported speech codes-you have no complaint
when you become the object of the second. Bu
this works only if one assumes that all restrictions
on expression have the same status (a universal-
izing, flattening assumption that generated the
category of reverse racism), and that assumption
runs up against the tradition of the First Amend-
ment, in which one restriction-the restriction on
speech critical of government policies-has al
ways been regarded as a violation of the amend-ment's core.
What this means is that restraints on political
speech and restraints on what has been called
hate speech are simply not the same thing--one
restraint nullifies the First Amendment at it
heart, while the other is arguably faithful to it
spirit, though the point is contested-and are no
interchangeable as pieces of cultural currency.
The real equivalent to hate-speech restriction
would have to be a restriction on a form of speech
that, like hate speech, has a disputed constitu-
tional status. So if a professor were for speech
codes but against restrictions on pornography, hemight be asked to address what would seem to b
a contradiction. But there is no contradiction inbeing against restrictions on speech critical of the
government and in favor of restrictions on pornog
raphy, because speech critical of the government
stands alone as indisputably protected and there-
fore cannot be in a relation of equivalence to
speech of any other kind. No matter what those
professors thought or didn't think about speech
codes, their right to be critical of their government
remains their undoubted possession. That is wha
the Constitution says and has alway
Asaid.
summary, then, and a scorecard: Is post
modernism either dead or one of the causes of oupresent distress? No. Is this a religious war? You
bet. Are professors as a class unpatriotic and thu
deserving of the condemnation William Bennett
and so many others rain down on them for the
crime of saying things these pundits don't like?No
again. Can the complex reality of particular sit
uations be captured by the abstract vocabulary o
so-called universals? No, in thunder.