Stanley Fish's Antimoral Philosophy

I think we have a new frontrunner in the Stupidest Man Alive^TM contest: Stanley Fish with another case of this-is-so-funny-because-it's-so-sad.

Two "religions." One of them believes in free speech: that people who think differently should engage each other, learn from each other, and try to get along. The other believes that people who think differently should be hated, terrorized, and scorned. Stanley Fish declares he favors the second: that it is to the discredit of liberals that their faith doesn't hold that you should cut the throats of infidels who blaspheme. That it is to the credit of those he calls "Muslims" (but are, I believe, not so) that they believe in "fighting... to the death"--which would seem to imply killing others--for their faith:

Our Faith in Letting It All Hang Out - New York Times: [Some say] it is hypocritical for Muslims to protest cartoons caricaturing Muhammad... cartoons vilifying the symbols of Christianity and Judaism are found... in the media of many Arab countries.... [But] the difference is that those who draw and publish such cartoons in Arab countries believe... Jews and Christians follow false religions and are proper objects of hatred and obloquy.... [T]he editors who have run the [Muhammed] cartoons do not believe that Muslims are evil infidels... they [publsh them] gratuitously, almost accidentally. Concerned only to stand up for an abstract principle — free speech — they seize on whatever content happens to come their way.... The fact that for others the content may be life itself is beside their point.

This is itself a morality — the morality of a withdrawal from morality... different from the morality of those for whom the Danish cartoons are blasphemy and monstrously evil... the difference... is to the credit of the Muslim protesters and to the discredit of the liberal editors....

[C]alls for "dialogue," issued so frequently of late by the pundits with an unbearable smugness... depends on the assumption (central to liberalism's theology) that, after all, no idea is worth fighting over to the death....

[But] dialogue is not a tenet in his creed, and invoking it is unlikely to do anything but further persuade him that you have missed the point — as, indeed, you are pledged to do, so long as liberalism is the name of your faith.

The best way to deal with this is, I think, via cartoons:

And by a captioned picture of Stanley Fish:

"The splendrous blond beast, avidly rampant for plunder and victory"

---

But I suppose we have to use words as well:

Note that to Fish the problem with those he calls "liberals" is not that they are unwilling to die for their faith: it is that they are not willing enough to kill others--to "fight" for their faith, and to fight "to the death" for it. Fish admires rather than laughs at those whose theology is "Believe in a loving God, or die!" That's sad. That's perverted. That's funny.

That Gail Collins thinks this is worth publishing is, on the other hand, only sad.

Comments

[dewar]

thanks for the exegesis, brad. I couldn't get my head around that piece at all. the best I could come up with was "huh?"

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Yay for Terry Colon!

[John Emerson]

The cartoon needs a footnote. The "filioque" clause separated Orthodox and Catholic Christians after the Schism of 1054.

1204 (the Fourth Crusade) might have been a better date for the cartoon. The sly Venetians diverted this crusade to Orthodox Constantinople, and the Byzantine Empire came under temporary Frankish control.

The clause has to do with the relations of the three persons of the Trinity, specifically the status of the Son. Don't ask me more.

[Tad Brennan]

he doesn't even realize what WWII was about. Or the Civil War. Or the Revolutionary War. Every good war this country has fought, has involved our willingness to fight and die for the liberal values. And he doesn't get it.

[derrida derider]

Simply amazing - a call for a return to the 16th century. I personally think, like the Muslims, that "Jews and Christians follow false religions" (as do all religionists) but it certainly does not follow that any of them "... are proper objects of hatred and obloquy" because of that.

In fact, of course, we are tribal creatures, and there is something deeply attractive in a call to arms for us. We all thrill to Luther's "Ihr stand ich, icht kann nicht anders" after all the wishy-washy tolerance and good humour of Erasmus and his like (if, BTW, you object by saying that Luther only risked his own life, have a look at his stance on the Peasant's War - he advocated genocide, based on Old Testament precedents). Look how easy it is for politicans in all ages and all countries to bolster their domestic support by rallying the population behind a war - any war.

But I'd have thouht that an old intellectual like Fish would resist such atavistic urges.

[anne]

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/02/13/misunderstanding_muslims?mode=PF

February 13, 2006

Misunderstanding Muslims
By James Carroll - Boston Globe

WHEN THE KORAN was said to have been denigrated by American guards at Guantanamo last year, Muslims reacted with rage, but most observers in the West misunderstood why.

It was easy for Christians and Jews -- the other ''people of the Book" -- to think that such an insult to the Koran was like an insult to the Bible. That would be sacrilege enough, but it was worse than that.

Drawing analogies between religions can mislead, but the Koran stands in Islamic belief more as Jesus does in Christian faith than as the Bible. As this Christian understands it, the Koran embodies the incarnational principle, with the chanting of the holy words that came from God to Mohammed as the way God's presence is experienced again.

Non-Muslims tend to think that the Prophet is to Islam something like what Jesus is to Christianity (which is why non-Muslims have mistakenly called the religion ''Mohammedanism"), but it is the Koran that holds such a central place. Hence, Islamic visual celebration is calligraphy, not images. Therefore when the Koran is disrespected, the insult Muslims feel is nothing less than insult to God.

Insult, of course, is the issue that has been put so explosively before the world recently. The Danish cartoons were a flame applied to a primed fuse, and the extraordinary reactions to the images from across the whole House of Islam point beyond the immediate provocation to a far broader sense of insult that Muslims have been made to feel.

One need not excuse the indiscriminate violence of mobs in the streets, nor dismiss the good question of why such rage is not directed against the blasphemy of suicide-murders carried out in the name of Allah to take a lesson from what has happened. The Islamic world seems astoundingly united in sending a stern message to ''the West," and instead of focusing again on ''what went wrong" with Islam Europeans and Americans would do well to take that message in....

[JK]

Tad Brennan:

"he doesn't even realize what WWII was about. Or the Civil War. Or the Revolutionary War. Every good war this country has fought, has involved our willingness to fight and die for the liberal values."

Although the experience of the Civil War gave liberalism a powerful kick away from Absolute Truth toward Pragmatism. See Louis Menand on The Metaphysical Club.

[Charles]

Donald Luskin will be crushed!

How can this upstart take away the one thing Luskin thought he *owned*, the title of World's Stupidest Man(TM)

Brad, could you clarify the point about the caption on the photo of Fish? Is he actually calling himself the Splendrous Blond Beast or is this your description?

This phrase has a remarkable similarity to "The Splendid Blond Beast." An excerpt from the book, available on Amazon, attributes the phrase to Nietzsche, about the "aristocratic predators who write society's laws" and are above morality.

[Yep. Fish's argument comes from Nietzsche. That's Fish's argument: that all this Christian "do unto others" and liberal "greatest good of the greatest number through human progress" stuff is bullshit, and that the *true* morality is that of the herrenvolk--of the powerful ones willing to struggle and kill for his ideas and his cause.]

It's a bit too close to implying the man's a Nazi for my taste, and if it's not his own self-description, fairness requires that the caption be clarified.

Well, I think so, anyway.

[Anderson]

The classic refutation of Fish, if one were needed, is Schumpeter:

"To realise the relative validity of one’s convictions and yet stand for them unflinchingly is what distinguishes a civilised man from a barbarian."

Quoted from Berlin's "Two Concepts of Liberty"; original in "Capitalism, Socialism & Democracy." Berlin's follow-up is on point:

"To demand more than this is perhaps a deep and incurable metaphysical need; but to allow it to determine one's practice is a symptom of an equally deep, and more dangerous, moral and political immaturity."

Stanley Fish to a T.

[ScroopMoth]

Stanley Fish criticizes the "withdrawal from morality in ANY strong, insistent form," [emphasis mine] not, as you say, withdrawal from cutting throats.

I don't think Fish advocates violent excess. He praises the facility of loyalty and commitment to a code of life. He is talking about people who can be offended by blasphemy, not (necessarily) terrorists. Fish "credits" people who are engaged with the emotional components of rhetoric--love and hate.

His article is too short, however, and begs a lot of questions, including what he means by willingness to fight to the death for an idea.

[Really? I would say what he means by willingness to "fight to the death" was crystal clear.]

[joe o]

If there is a conflict between liberalism and fundamentalism, what side is stanley fish on? He has no positive arguements for any version of fundamentalism other than a reflexive anti-liberalism.

[sm]

This is the best a famous American intellectual can come up with?

[Marc]

I fail to see how a Nietzche reference is calling Fish a Nazi. I rather suspect Stanley would find it amusing.

I do find Fish utterly elliptical in everything that he writes. He's very fond of postmodernism, and making a coherent argument is, I suppose, merely a modern thing.

[Anonymouse]

Well, this is just the same fascist/totalitarian argument from the 20th Century nightmare; liberalism is too weak to defend the Homeland, and too elitist (and non-violent) to lead the proletariat. I'm sure Fish has a much better idea....

I would enjoy hearing his views on the larger scope of human existence, outside such a narrow, nationalistic worldview. What would he say of the weakness of a Martin Luther King Jr as compared to the strength of a tyrant like Adolph Hitler?

People too easily confuse the (fraudulent) strength of killing for one's cause with the actual power found in the willingness to die for one's cause. Fish may be falling into this trap.

[Robin]

This is the best a famous American intellectual can come up with?

No, and fortunately, very, very, very few people believe him to be so.

[Robin]

"Him" should read "it".

No one is that stupid.

[Delicious Pundit]

You can diss Gail Collins (who I think doesn't even run Op-Ed) all you like, but you're talking about that article. The NY Times is a nationwide enterprise that must move units, so any kind of sizzle is OK sizzle.

[Viacondotti]

Fish styles himself a contrarian and provocateur. I remember that about the time he was recruited away from Duke to the U of Illinois at Chicago for a staggering price in the double six figures, he rewarded them by saying something like if he weren't paid such to do so, he would never read poetry again. There's no text in this class, blah, blah, blah, blah.

[bakho]

Anyone who knows anything about Europe knows about the racial tensions between Europeans and Muslim immigrants. In the early 1900s, US newspapers commonly published racial cartoons about blacks, Irish, Italians, Jews and other groups. Fortunately, we in the US have come to our senses and the public more or less no longer tolerates cartoons depicting racial stereotypes of these groups (with the exception of Mallard Fillmore).

If a newspaper today published a racist cartoon depicting any one of the above groups as a threat to the rest of society and implied it was OK to attack these groups, the newspaper would be the subject of boycotts, protests and probably see large readership declines. Given the right circumstances it could even touch off a riot. Maybe people in the US are so used to riots after football and basketball games that they think all riots should be sports related?

I think the pundits are missing the larger point is that the cartoons published in Denmark depict Muslims as dangerous fanatics. The purpose of these cartoons (overtly or not) is to encourages ill treatment of these groups. The cartoons and their racist message have no place in a pluralistic society and should be roundly denounced by everyone committed to pluralism.

[david]

"That's Fish's argument: that all this Christian "do unto others" and liberal "greatest good of the greatest number through human progress" stuff is bullshit, and that the *true* morality is that of the herrenvolk--of the powerful ones willing to struggle and kill for his ideas and his cause."

I've never cared for Fish's work, though his friends all say he's nice enough; but as a summary of his argument, the above is tendentious bullshit. The argument is bad enough as it is -- why feel compelled to go round the bend?

[CapitalistImperialistPig]

Stanley Fish is probably the most famous English professor in the US, which is a bit like being the most famous snow plow driver. His fame, as nearly as I can tell, is based on saying and doing somewhat obtuse things, and convincing others [other English teachers] that they are deep and subtle.

I think Don Luskin is safe - though come to think of it, that does sound a bit like his MO also.

[Dale]

Liberalism isn't value free. But liberal values include pluralism, recognizing fallibility, de-otherizing the Others. It's post metaphyical- understanding that its unreasonable to expect widespread agreement or acceptance of fundamental religious and cultural worldviews- yet striving to find ways we can live peacefully with our differences.

Some post-modern types see liberalism as just one among other strong world views. But it seems to me it is different. More of a process of experimenting with ways to stop killing one another over our differences.

[massacio]

Fish says that liberals do not believe in their moral/philosophical standards to the same extent as Muslims. Muslims believe so firmly that they are willing to kill and die to enforce their views, and he says that liberals are not willing to do so. Maybe he wants to draw some kind of line favoring the "morality" of George Bush: who quite obviously is willing at least to kill and to let others die to enforce his understanding of liberalism.

[marky]

Thanks for bringing this up for discussion. I really loathe Fish.
A few points:

1) Fish doesn't care about facts. It's not true that the cartoon was published by liberals who didn't care about offending people. It was published by reactionaries who were going out of their way to be offensive.

2)He presents no argument for calling liberalism a religion.
The structure of his argument would apply equally to show that mathematics is a religion, for instance. A tool so dull is worthless.

3)He writes the same thing in every column, which is that everything is relative, and he doesn't care, but he's definitely above the fray.
I have read that postmodernism is based on linguistic fallacies---I know of a professor of linguistics who has travelled and lecture on this thesis. From my point of view, that seems an accurate summation of Fish's problem: he believes that linguistic ambiguities must have corresponding ontological ambiguities. Rather than admitting that language is imprecise, he concludes that the world is imprecise because language is.
I fully agree that he is Luskinesque. As a matter of fact, I would say that Luskin has had more ideas than Fish.

[john c. halasz]

My illustrious elder sister finally dragged her ass back into academia and took some courses at Hopkins grad school from Stanley Fish. ("Here is Mr. Milton. Now jump through hoops.") Years later, when she'd snagged a tenure track position and was re-writing her boring-to-tears dissertation (on early Elisabethan/Jacobean prose/print pamphlets), she met him in the local college bookstore, and happened to mention that she was reading Habermas on the public sphere. "Habermas", he said, "is the stupidest man alive." I actually thought that was pretty funny, having dealt with some of the obtusenesses in Habermas. But it's nice to know that the epithet is like one of those tribal tokens that circulate among the kinship systems of academia.

Stiil, it's worth noting that this "cartoon" brouhaha, less in terms of specific incidents than in terms of the general context, and less in terms of extremist positions or manipulations than in terms of the seepage into the general climate of public opinion, as far as "we" can gauge it, in the Arab/Muslim world, occurs over against a massively violent assault upon a Muslim/Arab country, which was all too readily advanced by a propaganda campaign orchestrated in terms of the "free speech" rights of our established (corporate) media. So perhaps reaching for one's gun together with one's virtue is not exactly in order. I further noted, in a comment over at CT, that it is notable that Western secular liberal types, whose outrage over the alleged violation of the sacrosanct norms of "free speech",- (which, as per Fish' standard schtick, always involves implications and consequences),- tend to gloss over and ignore what might be at stake in the Muslim concern over idolatry/blasphemy, since, I'm guessing, what's at stake, in ways not altogether different from our own ancestral monotheistic traditions, is the "proper" status and dignity of the human, by way of the criticism of the pagan sacrificial submission to the mythified "natural" order, which "they", not without empirical warrant, might feel that "we" aim to deprive them of.

[Dale]

John c.h
I can't remember being more excited while reading a book - and it is a difficult and even obtuse book- than I felt while reading the Theory of Communicative Action. I have learned more from Habermas than any other philosopher I have ever read.

I would often just have to put the book (and I'm mainly thinking of vol 2) down and let what I'd read settle it.

I wouldn't know where to begin when responding to someone who claimed JH was the studipest man alive- even given ample room for rhetorical hyperbole.

[wkwillis]

Dale, while under the handicap of never having read either Fish or Habermas, may I suggest that Fish is not saying that Habermas is mistaken in what he believes, but that Habermas is mistaken in believing that whatever Habermas believes is important, is, in fact, important.
I have dealt with trolls before.

[Ari]

Dale, there is no answering a bizarre troll. Stanley Fish is simply pretending to know what he does not know as always. In this case, to know the shape of beliefs and hopes of 1.5 billion Muslims about the world.

[Mr. Waggish]

Some context that Fish didn't provide: Fish's essay is, more or less, a summary of German philosopher Carl Schmitt's attack on liberalism. In the 1920s Schmitt claimed that liberalism hurt democracy because liberalism prevented a state from endorsing any political/moral views whatsoever in tolerating them all.

More than Heidegger, Schmitt aggresively embraced the Nazis after they came to power, indulged in anti-semitic rhetoric, and gained state positions under the Nazis' patronage. Like Heidegger, he never repented post-war.

Schmitt, who was one of Leo Strauss's primary influences, has lately been very popular amongst the anti-liberal left-wing of academia (e.g., Fish). Rorty and Habermas represent the pro-liberal side of the academic debate, and there's apparently no shortage of bad blood between the two sides.

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/18/books/review/18schlesinger.html?ex=1284696000&en=c7225b818a2f5ced&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

September 18, 2005

Forgetting Reinhold Niebuhr
By ARTHUR SCHLESINGER JR.

THE recent outburst of popular religiosity in the United States is a most dramatic and unforeseen development in American life. As Europe grows more secular, America grows more devout. George W. Bush is the most aggressively religious president Americans have ever had. American conservatives applaud his "faith-based" presidency, an office heretofore regarded as secular. The religious right has become a potent force in national politics. Evangelicals now outnumber mainline Protestants and crowd megachurches. Billy Graham attracts supplicants by the thousand in Sodom and Gomorrah, a k a New York City. The Supreme Court broods over the placement of the Ten Commandments. Evangelicals take over the Air Force Academy, a government institution maintained by taxpayers' dollars; the academy's former superintendent says it will be six years before religious tolerance is restored. Mel Gibson's movie "Passion of the Christ" draws nearly $400 million at the domestic box office.

In the midst of this religious commotion, the name of the most influential American theologian of the 20th century rarely appears - Reinhold Niebuhr. It may be that most "people of faith" belong to the religious right, and Niebuhr was on secular issues a determined liberal. But left evangelicals as well as their conservative brethren hardly ever invoke his name. Jim Wallis's best-selling "God's Politics," for example, is a liberal tract, but the author mentions Niebuhr only twice, and only in passing.

Niebuhr was born in Missouri in 1892, the son of a German-born minister of the German Evangelical Synod of North America. He was trained for the ministry at the Synod's Eden Theological Seminary and at the Yale Divinity School. In the 1920's he took a church in industrial Detroit, the scene of bitter labor-capital conflict. Niebuhr's sympathies lay with the unions, and he joined Norman Thomas's Socialist Party. Meanwhile, New York's Union Theological Seminary, impressed by the power of his preaching and his writing, recruited him in 1928 for its faculty. There he remained for the rest of his life. He died in 1971.

Why, in an age of religiosity, has Niebuhr, the supreme American theologian of the 20th century, dropped out of 21st-century religious discourse? Maybe issues have taken more urgent forms since Niebuhr's death - terrorism, torture, abortion, same-sex marriage, Genesis versus Darwin, embryonic stem-cell research. But maybe Niebuhr has fallen out of fashion because 9/11 has revived the myth of our national innocence. Lamentations about "the end of innocence" became favorite clichés at the time.

Niebuhr was a critic of national innocence, which he regarded as a delusion. After all, whites coming to these shores were reared in the Calvinist doctrine of sinful humanity, and they killed red men, enslaved black men and later on imported yellow men for peon labor - not much of a background for national innocence. "Nations, as individuals, who are completely innocent in their own esteem," Niebuhr wrote, "are insufferable in their human contacts." The self-righteous delusion of innocence encouraged a kind of Manichaeism dividing the world between good (us) and evil (our critics).

Niebuhr brilliantly applied the tragic insights of Augustine and Calvin to moral and political issues. He poured out his thoughts in a stream of powerful books, articles and sermons. His major theological work was his two-volume "Nature and Destiny of Man" (1941, 1943). The evolution of his political thought can be traced in three influential books: "Moral Man and Immoral Society" (1932); "The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness: A Vindication of Democracy and a Critique of Its Traditional Defense" (1944); "The Irony of American History" (1952).

In these and other works, Niebuhr emphasized the mixed and ambivalent character of human nature - creative impulses matched by destructive impulses, regard for others overruled by excessive self-regard, the will to power, the individual under constant temptation to play God to history. This is what was known in the ancient vocabulary of Christianity as the doctrine of original sin. Niebuhr summed up his political argument in a single powerful sentence: "Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible; but man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary." (Niebuhr, in the fashion of the day, used "man" not to exculpate women but as shorthand for "human being.")

The notion of sinful man was uncomfortable for my generation....

[Steve LaBonne]

Fish's anti-liberal brand of leftism kind of helps one understand how so many French former Socialists managed to end up as some of the most virulent collaborators.

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/11/29/reviews/981129.29marcust.html

November 29, 1998

Both Fox and Hedgehog: Isaiah Berlin's Big Idea was That There Isn't Any Big Idea.
By STEVEN MARCUS

ISAIAH BERLIN
A Life.
By Michael Ignatieff.

When Isaiah Berlin died last year, obituary notices on both sides of the Atlantic were long, appreciative and respectful. Not all of them, however. Snipings from the ideological left and right made it clear that this philosopher and historian of ideas, who was also the chief voice of liberalism in the second half of the 20th century, would not depart unscathed. They were a reminder, too, that the middle ground on which classical modern liberalism stands is narrower now than most of us suppose, that it has shrunk as it has been contested, and that liberalism is indeed an embattled perspective.

Such an observation would have come as no surprise to Berlin. As he conceived of it, this view of the world included philosophical doctrines, political convictions and social theories about what constituted being human. He also referred to it as pluralism, and he never tired of setting it forth. In essay after essay, he delineated it as a minority view, standing outside of, and resisting and confronting, the mainstream of the Western tradition of philosophical beliefs. That tradition was, according to Berlin's spirited accounts and summaries, formed in two heroic episodes: the first embodied by Plato and the classical Greeks; the second, the grand modern resumptions of the mathematical and scientific revolutions of the 17th century, played through in the philosophical and social theories of the Enlightenment. A number of interconnected presuppositions are organized into this mighty intellectual fabric. First, as in the natural sciences, ''all genuine questions must have one true answer''; in Berlin's amiable formulation, the answers must be true for everyone, everywhere, all the time. Second, a reproducible path toward the discovery of these truths must be in principle accessible to everyone. Third, ''the true answers, when found, must necessarily be compatible with one another and form a single whole.''

To be sure, opinions differed dramatically on how to find the right way: some found it in churches, others in laboratories; some trusted in intuition, others in experiment; some invested in visions, others in mathematics. All shared the fundamental belief that there is a system that weaves everything together. As Berlin remarked in a characteristic passage of galloping hyperbole: ''The answers must be known to someone: perhaps Adam in Paradise knew; perhaps we shall only reach them at the end of days; if men cannot know them, perhaps the angels know; and if not the angels, then God knows. These timeless truths must in principle be knowable.'' Ultimately the grand narrative of culture and history would progress to the best of all possible worlds....

[Julian Elson]

I think the irony here is that if Fish's accusation is that liberalism is a valueless meta-morality rather than a real morality (and in that charge, I think he's partially right: liberalism is a political viewpoint, not a complete moral one, but most liberals also have moral views independent of their liberalism, which is all for the best), the accusation could easily be turned around on Fish himself. His view seems to be not that the Muslim militants' views are correct, or that liberalism somehow makes a deep moral error, but that by golly, at least those Muslims believe in *something.* This is exactly the kind of valueless meta-morality that he decries.

[James]

One minor corrective: Fish is not blond, but white: that is, he had black hair until increasing age took away his hair colour.

I had him as a teacher in grad school at Hopkins. He already had the reputation, richly deserved, of being the nastiest man in Academia (I later met someone who had known him as a graduate student who told me that he hadn't changed much).

The sad thing is that he really was brilliant at the outset: Surprised by Sin is one of the really good books on Paradise Lost. But he's a contrarian and a worshipper at the shrine of various forms of Theory which are not tightly connected to reality, let us say.

[Buce]

Obtuse, sic? Or Abstruse?

A deLong/Fish celebrity smackdown woult be something to see.

[Charles]

David: For the record, the material in the square brackets in my post which you deplore is not mine. It has been added by a later editor.

I have been trying to swear off swearing, at least in public, and do not think that I have posted the unasterisked version of "b******t" in a decade.

I am even trying to swear off asterisks, since I do believe all that stuff about "Do unto others," "blessed are the poor" yatta yatta.

______

Marc, a reference to Nietzsche is of course not, per se, a reference to Nazism. In this case, the phrase is probably better known through the book, which is about genocide, with a heavy focus on Nazism.

There is a straight line between the belief that only material power matters and totalitarianism, brutality, and mass murder. Many self-described atheists and agnostics actually believe in supernatural entities that they call "Justice" and "Compassion," (and which People of the Book call "YWVH" and "Jesus") while many self-described religious people believe in nothing *except* very mundane entities like "War" and "Torture."

In that sense, Brad's comment is fair. Once one ceases to believe the unprovable proposition that what we do to others actually matters and adopts instead the proposition that all that matters is what we do for ourselves, one has joined the very worst people in history, in spirit if not in deed. This holds whether he is referencing Nietzsche or, as I suspect, the book.

My point is that Hitler in 1930 was not Hitler in 1945. And Fish, by his deeds if not by his words, is not either one.

[david]

I can't believe I have to play Fish defender. I've been Fish basher for years. But to say that Fish had the reputation as being the nastiest man in academia at Hopkins is a bit much -- Hopkins had some very nasty people all across the Humanities, and no doubt elsewhere thougth I wouldn't really know. And Wolfowitz used to run SAIS.

[CVWoodward]

Joseph Schumpeter's wonderful quote comes to mind:

‘To realise the relative validity of one’s convictions and yet stand for them unflinchingly is what distinguishes a civilised man from a barbarian.’

Thank goodness not all postmodernists are as bootless as Fish when presented with barbarism. Richard Rorty's _Achieving Our Country_ is a good argument on how and why even the most relativistic among us must put away "theory" and pick up liberal ideals when it comes to practical politics.

[anne]

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9901E1DF1231F934A25756C0A96E958260

May 17, 1998

The New New Left
By ALAN RYAN

ACHIEVING OUR COUNTRY
Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America.
By Richard Rorty.

Richard Rorty is a scandal to his profession. He is a philosopher who thinks that philosophy is a distraction from more important matters. He has for years argued that the pursuit of Truth -- as distinct from the humbler search for usable truths -- is fueled by self-deception. He has insisted that even if humanity all too often behaves cruelly and sadistically, we would be better off without a sense of sin. Nevertheless, Rorty has a substantial streak of filial piety. It was his hero, John Dewey, who first scandalized his philosophical readers almost a century ago by urging them to turn away from ''the problems of philosophy'' to ''the problems of men.'' ''Achieving Our Country'' is an appeal to American intellectuals to abandon the intransigent cynicism of the academic, cultural left and to return to the political ambitions of Emerson, Dewey, Herbert Croly and their allies.

What Rorty has written -- as deftly, amusingly and cleverly as he always writes -- is a lay sermon for the untheological. Walt Whitman, another of his heroes, memorably wrote, ''And I call to mankind, Be not curious about God, / For I who am curious about each am not curious about God.'' Rorty's gloss on this is that ''there is no standard, not even a divine one, against which the decisions of a free people can be measured.'' We do not need to know what God wants but what we are capable of wanting and doing. Americans, at any rate Americans pre-eminently, have embarked on a voyage into uncharted waters. They have set out to realize the American dream, knowing that they will change their minds about what it is, but sharing a religious attachment to the idea of a society devoted to earthly happiness, freedom, tolerance and mutual affection.

In fact, Rorty's argument against intransigent leftists and superstitious conservatives has a still longer pedigree. At the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789, a London Dissenting minister, the Rev. Richard Price, preached a ''Discourse on the Love of Our Country,'' which provoked the greatest of conservative tracts, Edmund Burke's ''Reflections on the Revolution in France.'' Price defended a rational love of country. A democratic country that cared for all its people, and governed them equitably and intelligently, we might justly take pride in. Habitual allegiance to kings and aristocrats was no condition for a free person. Price was so comprehensively buried by Burke's ragings against revolutionary excess that it has been difficult ever since for the left to express pride in country.

But Rorty thinks that national pride is the political equivalent of individual self-respect. Without it, nothing can be achieved. The obvious corruption of national pride occurs when it turns into national self-aggrandizement or into a brutal enthusiasm for simple military might....

[john c. halasz]

The article was just more of the standard schtick Fish has been doing for years, probably since he first read Milton and discovered that John Milton had balls, at once a champion of "free speech" and a condemner of heresies. It not the most apposite, nor constructive, nor accurate intervention in the controversy at hand. (For one thing, the originators of the cartoons were scarcely "liberals"). But the pay-off is in the wierd inversions his ditzy provocations set off. So now the liberals get to don the mantle of the ethics of conviction, sloughing off the ethics of responsibility that's their usual excuse, while, of course, it's the "Muslims", reduced to the stereotype of medieval backwardness, who fail to appreciate the superiority of our "values", the ingrates, and are committing all the torture and slaughter. You'd think a moment's reflection might catch a glimpse of the denegation and reproduction of the whole FUBAR situation involved. But, of course, it only leads the good professor to deduce that, since Nietzsche disliked Christians and utilitarians, he was an adulator of the herrenvolk,- (citation please), and an advocate, (rather than an observer) of dominating violence. It doesn't occur to him that Nietzsche was a philosophical critic of foundational metaphysics and that the "will-to-power" was a device for uncovering and criticizing philosophical/existential presuppositions and their connections with mechanisms of social repression and domination, which they at once cover over and subtend. So he can hardly be seen as a celibrant of the ruling elite of the day. The main effect of Nietzsche's work is to unmask claims to an absolute, timeless, ahistorical and universal world of "values" as a self-deception and to confront one with the real relativities of the world, which is just as much, for any self-consciously reflective individual, a rigorous responsibility to choose one's "values". So there might be some reason for his rejection of utilitarianism, since the reduction of the world to a calculus of the greatest number with the largest common denominator might just be antithetical to such responsibility and such choice.

[piotr]

I think that Stanley Fish illustrates the following point very well:

Christian, Jews, Hindu etc. are better that fanatic Muslim (and fanatic Christians, Jews and Hindu) only when they admit moral inputs to their wordviews that do not originate in their religions. [I will delete Bhuddists from the list of "major religions", which will not alter the point I am making about the remaining religions.]

For example, no major religion provides a convincing justification for tolerance, and yet probably most of the adherents of each of them are tolerant (to varying degree). Yet, each major religion has a notion of blasphemy and offers examples of blasphemers being punished with death.

If it would be left to people like Fish, we would have some kind of Iranian quasi-democracy with theologians having the last word. We have to decide if we want to export our values or import them

[Timothy Francis Sullivan]

What's weird about this Fish article is that he's criticizing (a not very clearly defined) "liberalism" for resembling something that a lot of people would call relativist postmodernism, ie that all beliefs are roughly equal in their weightlessness, a school of thought of which Fish is regarded as a major proponent.

I think, if you restrict it to certain quarters of our culture, it's a valid critique, given the practiced relativism newspapers exhibit, to say nothing of the non-reality-based Bush Administration. But it would be nice if he got a clue about the tremors the cartoon bit sent through what, in practice, we think of as the left. How could the violent cultural pressure from religious fundamentalists, Christian, Muslim, whatever, not make us willing to fight--in some fashion--for recognition of the right to live in a society whose institutions don't afflict us with their mysticism?

It may be that some Op Ed columnists just think it's cool to act like they're into free speech but if Fish thinks a display of anger validates a groups devotion to its professed ideals, he should check out Brad's response to his own decadent Op Ed article, to say nothing of all these comments.

[Jeff]

This may be coming in a little late...but I had an encounter with Stanley Fish some years back. He was an invited speaker at a conference on Post-Structuralism in Caldwell Idaho (insert joke) near Boise.

I can't remember much about the conference...but I do remember that some people I hung out with there took me to a gym where we got to play ball with - guess who! Stanley Fish. He actually had a mean two-hand set shot.

Then some kid fell and broke his arm. I ended up driving him to a clinic. Stanley Fish disappeared within 30 seconds.

That's it; but to me he should have hung around long enough to see if somebody needed some help. I mean, we had played ball for several hours with him. I understood that he had things to do, but I still decided he was a jerk on the basis of that incident.

[Dale]

Tim,
I think we are all of necessity afflicted with mysticism. That all men (and women) are created equal. The inherent dignity and worth of each person. These are not just empirical observations but mystical intuitions of unity or interconnectedness.

It seems to me that liberalism is founded upon this mysticism. That's a good thing.
But it gets worked up into social philosophy and loses its mystical grounding and becomes more of a secular civic religion of democracy, human rights, civil liberties, pluralism and tolerance.

[diana]

In Carroll's litany of Muslim grievances against the west, he never mentions Israel.

A puzzling omission.

[Timothy Francis Sullivan]

Dale,

I think there's a case to be made that a liberal mindset is a natural outcome of a built-in sensitivity to unsocialized (non-narrative?) reality. I feel comfortable with the idea that liberal ideas about the world are less fantastic than those of a religious literalist. Whether that comfort results from sensitivity to the real or from an intuition which is mystical--and I don't think it is if by mystical we mean unapprehendable--it's a faculty that people really need to keep alive in themselves.

[Dale]

Tim,
Thanks for such a thoughtful response.
I agree with your comments on sensitivity. I also think the sort of mysticism I'm thinking of may be related to a sensitivity or empaphy to suffering and injustice.

Then one can look at it from a post conventional moral development stage as well.

[Chad Haker]

Sorry Brad DeLong, but I'm afraid that your blog is absolutely wrong. Stanley Fish's article isn't about how liberal ideology is evil, but about how it's stupid. For better or worse, muslim ideology is situated such that there is only one possible way of thinking related to dogma, and that to question this way of thinking is blasphemous. Thus, Muslim Ideology CANNOT fit into the construct of liberalism, which contains the constraint that EVERY ideology must "respect" the existence of the other. These two ideologies cannot fit into the same space, that's what Fish is saying; and people who try to make them fit, or who think that liberal ideology is the best way of doing things will only end up making things worse.