Microsoft Word - Postmodern warfare.mht

Postmodern warfare :

the ignorance of our

warrior intellectuals

Stanley Fish

July, 2002

Who would 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 September 22 that the first sign appeared, in a New

York Times opinion piece written by Edward Rothstein and entitled

"Attacks on U.S. Challenge the Perspectives of Postmodern True

Believers." A few days later (on September 27), Julia Keller wrote a

smaller piece in the Chicago Tribune; her title (no doubt the

contribution of a staffer): "After the attack, postmodernism loses its

glib grip." In the September 24 issue of Time, Roger Rosenblatt

announced "the end of the age of irony" and predicted that "the good

folks in charge of America'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 taken seriously." And on October 1, 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,

nonjudgmentalism, and a postmodern 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 judgments, no objectivity--and if postmodernists are

saying that, they are not so much dangerous as silly. 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 Paul Reveres. A full account or even definition of

postmodernism 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 "Postmodernists challenge 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 revisable

system of thought and practice, then it is true that many

postmodernists would deny that any such standard is or could ever be

available. But if by "objective" one means a standard of validity and

value that is backed up by the tried-and-true procedures and

protocols of a well-developed practice or discipline--history, physics,

economics, psychology, etc.--then such standards 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,

parents choose schools for their children--all of these things and many

more are done with varying 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 objectivity. Rather, the actor, you or I

or anyone, begins in some context of practice, with its received

authorities, sacred texts, exemplary achievements, and generally

accepted benchmarks, and from within the perspective of that

context--thick, interpersonal, densely elaborated--judges something to

be true or inaccurate, reasonable or irrational, and so on.

It seems, then, that the unavailability of absolutely objective

standards--the thesis Rothstein finds repugnant and dangerous--

doesn't take anything away from us. If, as postmodernists assert,

objective standards of a publicly verifiable kind are unavailable, they

are so only in the sense that they have always been unavailable (this is

not, in other words, a condition postmodernism has caused), and we

have always managed to get along without them, doing a great many

things despite the fact that we might be 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 someone 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 assumptions, "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

condemnation" you mean a condemnation rooted in a strong sense of

values, priorities, goals, and a conviction of right and wrong, then such

a condemnation 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, priorities, and a sense of right and wrong that no one would

dispute and everyone accepts, then there is no such condemnation,

for the simple reason that there are no such universally accepted

values, priorities, and moral convictions. If there were, there would be

no deep disputes.

Now, I would not be misunderstood. I am not saying 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

regard 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 well be unable to persuade others, no less

educated or credentialed than I, of the truth so perspicuous to me.

And here is a point that is often missed, the independence from each

other, and 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) I believe that there is no mechanism, procedure, calculus,

test, by which the truth of X can be necessarily demonstrated to any

sane person who has come to a different conclusion (not that such a

demonstration can never be successful, only that its success is

contingent and not necessary). In order to assert something and mean

it without qualification, I of course have to believe that it is true, but I

don't have to believe that I could demonstrate its truth to all rational

persons. The claim that something is universal and the

acknowledgment that I couldn't necessarily prove it are logically

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

consequences, 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, postmodernism is a series of arguments, not away of life or a

recipe for action. Your belief or disbelief in postmodern tenets is

independent of your beliefs and commitments in any other area of

your life. You may believe that objectivity of an absolute kind is

possible or you may believe that it is not, but when you have to decide

whether a particular thing is true or false, neither belief will hinder or

help you. What will help you are archives, exemplary achievements,

revered authorities, official bodies of evidence, relevant analogies,

suggestive metaphors--all available to all persons independently of

their philosophical convictions, or of the fact that they do or do not

have any.

In the end, the post-9/11 flap about postmodernism is the blowing of

so much smoke, sound and fury signifying very little apart from the

ignorance of those who produced it. There's no there there. This is not

true, however, of what succeeded that flap in the popular and semi-

popular media, the question of whether this is or is not a religious

war. That question was asked against the backdrop of the Bush

Administration's desire that the war not be characterized as a

religious one. Any public embrace of Samuel Huntington's clash-of-

civilizations thesis would have at least three bad consequences. First,

key Islamic nations could not be persuaded to support, or at least to

refrain from denouncing, U.S. military operations. Second, millions of

U.S. citizens of the Islamic faith would be come the large core of an

antiwar coalition. And lastly, the United Nations would become

polarized 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 version of the Islamic faith, and therefore

their claim to be acting in its name was false and illegitimate; they

simply did not represent Islam and had misread 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 assertions. Who is it that is

authorized to determine which version of Islam is the true one? What

religious faith has ever looked outside the articles of its creed for

guidance and correction? What is the difference between the confident

pronouncements that the Al Qaeda 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 mention Jehovah's Witnesses, Seventh-

Day Adventists, Mormons, and Mennonites? Merely to pose these

questions is to realize that the specification of what a religion is and

the identification of the actions that may or may not be taken in its

name are entirely internal matters. This is, after all, the point of a

religion: to follow a vision the source of which is revelation,

ecclesiastical authority, a sacred book, a revered person. One who

adheres to that vision does not accept descriptions or evaluations of it

from non-adherents citing other revelations, 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 the grip of error and too blind to see. What this means (and here

we link up with the worries over postmodernism) is that in matters of

religion--and I would say in any matter--there is no public space,

complete with definitions, standards, norms, criteria, etc., to which

one can have recourse in order 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 someone

or some body to render an independent judgment on the legitimacy of

the declarations that issue from Bin Laden and his followers about the

religious 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 by any 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 obligations one takes on as a person of faith

and the obligations one takes on in one's capacity as a citizen; i.e.,

that it is possible to go out into the world and perform actions that

are not related, either 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, independent of

your actions in the public sphere, where the imperatives you follow

might be political, economic, philanthropic, environmental--

imperatives that could be affirmed or rejected by persons

independently of their religious convictions 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 declaration that "the business of

laws is not to provide for the truth of opinions, but for the safety and

security 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 my pocket nor

breaks my leg." Jefferson's further contribution 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 believe

whatever you like, even though in our respective hearts we regard

each other's beliefs as false and ungodly. We can argue about it or

privately condemn each other, but our differences of belief shouldn't

mean that we try to disenfranchise or imprison or kill each other or

refrain from entering into relationships of commercial and social

cooperation. Let's live and let live. Let's obey the civil, nonsectarian

laws and leave the sorting out of big theological questions to God and

eternity.

All of that is precisely what adherents of the Al Qaeda version of Islam

hate and categorically deny, which is why the question "Is this a

religious 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 fail to

make the distinction between religious and civil acts; they regard

those who do make it as persons without a true religion. If you're

really religious, 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 justification. It is the dividing of one's life into the

separate realms of the public and private that leads, say the militants,

to a society bereft of a moral center and populated by citizens

incapable of resisting the siren call of excess and sin.

This refusal of Al Qaeda-style Islam to honor the public/private

distinction is the essence of that faith, and not some incidental feature

of it that can be dispensed with or moderated. Commentators who

pronounced on the question "Is this a religious war?" tended to see

this and not see it at the same time. They noted the fact but then

contrived to turn it into a correctable mistake, either by using words

like "criminal," "fanatic," and "extremist" or by implying that the non-

emergence of the public/private distinction is some kind of

evolutionary failure; they want to be like us, but they don't yet know

how to do it. 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, that "Islam has

been remarkably resistant to the differentiation and privatization of

religion that often accompanies secularization ... and has not

undergone a reformation like the one experienced by Christianity,

which led to a pronounced separation of sacred and secular." ("What's

the matter with these guys? Why can't they get with the program?")

But of course there is nothing remarkable in a faith's refusal of a

transformation that would undo it. Privatization and secularization are

not goals that Islam has yet to achieve; they are specters that Islam

(or some versions of it) pushes away as one would push away death.

Appleby's characterization of Islam as a religion stuck in some stage of

arrested development and self-blocked from reaching maturity is

matched by Andrew Sullivan's condescending description of Islam (in

the October 7 issue of The New York Times Magazine) as "a great

religion that is nonetheless extremely inexperienced in the toleration

of other ascendant and more powerful faiths." Presumably, a good

dose of John Stuart Mill or John Rawls would do the trick and move

Islam along on the way to health and modernization.

When Sullivan says of Islam that it is "a great religion," he means a

potentially great religion. Islam will be fine when it rids itself of its

impurities, the chief impurity being a stubborn insistence on a fidelity

to a set of particular beliefs. In the morality Sullivan shares with

Appleby, particularity is a sin, because it sets up barriers between

persons devoted to different particulars. The better way is the way of

generality, of a religious sense so large and capacious that anything

and everything can be accommodated within it. The only problem with

such a religion would be its total lack of content, but as it turns out

that is just what Appleby, Sullivan, and company really want. It is

instructive to watch them as they take the heart out of religion in the

name of religion--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 Philadelphia Inquirer of October 14, is a religion

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 is

what Eisner calls "the American national religion," 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

disingenuous or unaware of the implications of her own language. By

nonsectarian belief she would seem to mean, and probably thinks she

means, belief not limited to any particular religious denomination; but

what the phrase really means in the context of her essay is a belief in

the evil of any sectarian belief whatsoever, of any belief that 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 lightly and shrug off when you leave home and

stride into the public sphere.

This is surely what 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 cosmetic. It is only

in the name of such a faith--emptied of all content and committing you

to nothing 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 is that it claims--and believes--nothing.

Although it may not at first be obvious, the substitution for real

religions of a religion drained of particulars is of a piece with the

desire to exorcise postmodernism. In both instances, what is feared is

the absence of a public space or common ground in relation to which

judgments and determinations 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 fanaticism, that Bin

Laden and his followers are criminal terrorists and not religious

freedom fighters; and if they quote the Koran at us and rehearse

histories in which we are the oppressors and villains, that just means

that they are misreading their own scripture and distorting their own

history, 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 irrational.

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.

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

adversaries clearly do not accept it, and you do not attribute their

recalcitrance to insanity or mere criminality--the desired public

categories of condemnation--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, because the next step, the step of proving the

falseness 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 measure by which our rightness

can be independently validated. That's just the way it is, and we

should just get on with it, acting in accordance with our true beliefs

(what else could we do?) without expecting that some God will

descend, like the duck in the old Groucho Marx TV show, and tell us

that we have uttered the true and secret word.

The distinction I am trying to make here is not between affirming

universals and denying them but between affirming universals because

you strongly believe them to be such and affirming universals because

you believe them to have been certified by an independent authority

acknowledged by everyone. Andrew Sullivan teeters between these

different affirmations when he declares in the concluding paragraph of

his essay that "We are fighting not for our country ... or for our flag.

We are fighting for the universal principles of our Constitution." Is

Sullivan here identifying and standing by his conviction of what the

universal principles are, or is he claiming that it is not his conviction

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 religion

(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 condemns. His penultimate sentence

removes the doubt: "We are fighting for religion against one of the

deepest strains in religion there is." The deepest strain in a religion is

the particular and particularistic doctrine it asserts at its heart, in the

company of such pronouncements as "Thou shalt have no other Gods

before me." Take the deepest 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 they

are empty, insipid, and safe.

It is this same preference for the vacuously general over the

disturbingly particular that informs the attacks on college and

university professors who spoke out in ways that led them to be

branded 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 11, "Anyone who

can blow up the Pentagon has my vote"--and then in the wake of the

subsequent protest acknowledged that he had been a jerk to say it,

but, after all, "the First Amendment protects my right to be a jerk."

Well, yes and no; the First Amendment does protect him from

prosecution by the government--unless his form of jerkiness could be

characterized as libel, incitement to violence, or 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 his own political views and thereby

undermined his ability to fulfill his appointed duties.

On the knave side, there is the politically murky but conceptually clear

case of Sami Al-Arian, a professor of computer engineering at the

University of South Florida, who has been sent a letter of dismissal

because he appeared on The O'Reilly Factor, a crime of which I am

also guilty. The university says that he is being dismissed not because

of the views he expressed over a decade ago but because the public

airing of them produced a hostile response that took the form of

threats from individuals, potential donors, politicians, and trustees;

but this is what is known as the "heckler's veto" argument--speech is

to be silenced or punished because of the actual or potential hostile

response to it--an argument rejected by a long line of Supreme Court

decisions and almost certain to be rejected again.

Closer to my home, the University of Illinois at Chicago and

Northwestern University have 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

fire for actions performed thirty years ago and no longer the object of

judicial attention. As both universities saw, the only question is

whether Ayers and Dohrn are currently living up to their contractual

duties and doing their jobs; and since the evidence says clearly that

they are, there is no case. Contrition for acts long past and not

presently under indictment is not a legal or even a moral requirement

for university teaching.

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 18327 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.

But what about affirmative action? someone might ask. By this

argument, it isn't the business of the academy to assure proportional

representation of women, blacks, and Hispanics either. No disciplinary

concern demands such a correction, so what's the difference?

The difference is an historical one. For decades and indeed centuries,

women, blacks, and Hispanics 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 excluded, and in fact were once greatly in the ascendancy,

and who are no longer in the ascendancy 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 bringing 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 spectrum, from Stanley

Kurtz, a contributing editor for the National Review, to David Glenn,

writing in The Nation. It is the argument that the professoriat is

reaping what it sowed in those years when so many of its members

(including, no doubt, some now facing criticism and discipline) worked

for the implementation of campus speech codes. The chickens are just

coming home to roost. (Exactly the line of thought so vehemently

rejected by the gatekeepers of our patriotism.)

Aside from a certain historical inaccuracy--most speech codes were

never implemented, and none has survived judicial scrutiny--the logic

deployed 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 of the relevant historical differences. The equivalence is

supposed to be between disciplining and/or stigmatizing persons

because they have produced speech hurtful to women, blacks,

Hispanics, and gays, and disciplining and/or stigmatizing persons

because they have produced speech deemed to be politically

inappropriate. If you were for the first kind of regulation, the logic

goes--i.e., if you supported speech codes--you have no complaint

when you become the object of the second. But this works only if one

assumes that all restrictions on expression have the same status (a

universalizing, flattening assumption that generated the category of

reverse racism), and that assumption runs up against the tradition of

the First Amendment, in which one restriction--the restriction on

speech critical of government policies--has always been regarded as a

violation of the amendment'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 its heart, while the other is

arguably faithful to its spirit, though the point is contested--and are

not 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 constitutional status. So

if a professor were for speech codes but against restrictions on

pornography, he might be asked to address what would seem to be a

contradiction. But there is no contradiction in being against

restrictions on speech critical of the government and in favor of

restrictions on pornography, because speech critical of the

government stands alone as indisputably protected and therefore

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 what the Constitution says and has

always said.

A summary, then, and a scorecard :

Is postmodernism either dead or one of the causes of our present

distress? No.

Is this a religious war? You bet.

Are professors as a class unpatriotic and thus 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 situations be captured by the

abstract vocabulary of so-called universals? No, in thunder.