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


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


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


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


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


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


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


8/9

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


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.

fish in harpers

Documents