This is the part of Fish's essay I liked, that made me think of FADG.
What must be protected, then, is the general, the possibility of making pronouncements from a perspective at once detached from and superior to the sectarian perspectives of particular national interests, ethnic concerns, and religious obligations; and the threat to the general is posed by postmodernism and strong religiosity alike, postmodernism because its critique of master narratives deprives us 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 religiosity because it insists on its own norms and refuses correction from the outside. The antidote to both is the separation of the private from the public, the establishing of a public sphere to which all could have recourse and 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 is no 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 irreconcilable, all dressed up and nowhere to go for an authoritative adjudication. ( from POSTMODERN WARFARE.
Source: Harper's Magazine, Jul2002, Vol. 305 Issue 1826, p33, 8p
Author(s): Fish, Stanley )
I think he's more entertaining on the subject of self-appointed moral clarificationist in chief William Bennett, though.
It would be pleasant to linger over these and other cases and tease out the doctrines they illustrate, but what finally interests me about them is their link to the pattern I have been describing, the pattern of demonizing the particularism of local and partisan perspectives (either philosophical or religious) in favor of a general perspective that claims to be universal and has the advantage of disturbing no one because it is at once safe and empty. The effort of those who would silence or dismiss professors who cross some invisible line is at bottom an effort to narrow the range of what can be said to a rote patriotic discourse that is a form of cheerleading rather than serious thought. This is in fact the naked thesis of Why We Fight: Moral Clarity and the War on Terrorism by former secretary of education--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 current moment but of the last forty years stem from the cultural ascendancy of those "who are unpatriotic" 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, "the diversity mongers [and] multiculturalists," mistaken 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 nevertheless in the spirit of deliberative democracy. On another reading, however, these cultural relativists are "among us" as a fifth column might be among us, servants of an alien power who prosecute their subversive agenda under the false colors 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 unpatriotism, 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 departments. Unfortunately (at least as he sees it), history departments are full of people like Columbia's Eric Foner, who draws Bennett's ire for wondering which is worse, "'the horror that engulfed New York City or the apocalyptic rhetoric emanating daily from the White House.'" Bennett 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 Bennett's epistemology does not allow for the possibility 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 history that do not square with the things Bennett and Donald Kagan (his hero-historian) say, it must be 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 practice "distortion," they "sow widespread and debilitating 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 justified in Bennett's eyes because the persons at whom it is directed would give different answers than he would to questions still being honestly debated after these many months. It is one thing to believe, 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 intellectuals who inhabit our universities were obliged to rehearse its lessons and recite its catechisms, lest they be drummed out of the Republic and cast into outer darkness. Live and learn.
There is a tension in Bennett's book--one common to jeremiads on the right--between his frequent assertions that our cultural condition 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 effective? 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 relativism." 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 conservatives. If the professoriat is predominantly liberal, let's do something about it and redress the imbalance. (Does this sound like multiculturalism and diversity?) David Horowitz--once a virulent left-wing editor of Ramparts and now a virulent right-wing editor of Heterodoxy--complains, 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, presumably, 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 university is a place of dialogue (and I certainly think it is) it is supposed to be a dialogue between persons of differing views on disciplinary issues--Is Satan the hero of Paradise 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 avoided?--and not a dialogue between persons who identify themselves as Democrats or Republicans. That dialogue takes place in the arenas of elections, lobbying, and political fund-raising, and while there may be some overlap between academic disagreements and disagreements in the realm of partisan politics, the overlap is not structural, even if it is statistically 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.
Personally, I'd have problems taking any former Drug Czar who professes to be the master of "moral clarity" seriously. |
