Stanley Fish, Arizona and the Depoliticized Classroom

Dr. Stanley Fish has an interesting post on one particular element of the new Arizona anti-illegal immigration efforts, Arizona the Gift that Keeps on Giving. Arizona now wishes to ban ethnic studies classes in public schools, which are designed to promote "race consciousness." One of the things that I admire about Fish is his willingness to stand up for a depoliticized academia and he is on form in this piece as he attacks the pedagogical theories of Paulo Freire and the Mexican American Studies Department of the Tucson Unified School District for using them as the basis for their Social Justice Education Project. Fish, though, turns around and attacks the new law for proposing "that public school pupils should be taught to treat and value each other as individuals and not be taught to resent or hate other races or other classes of people."

As readers of this blog know, I am an opponent of any attempt from either the left or the right to politicize education. When I teach history, I teach the historical method of thinking and use it to consider the who, what, when, where, and why of history; I do not teach moral or political values. I see this as part of the bargain we strike together to allow us to have the sort of free society in which one can receive the sort of meaningful education that might down the road turn someone to the right or left. My objection to someone like Freire has little to do with what I might think about the existence of hegemonic cultures and thought structures and their malicious influence. My problem is that Freire not only attacks proponents of these hegemonic cultures, who we have to assume are real people and not just theoretical constructs but delegitimizes them as well. If these proponents of hegemonic cultures are as dark and as dangerous as Freire claims, then there can be no meaningful discourse with them. Any time you take discussion off the table you have put guns on the table. In essence, the pedagogy of Freire is a call for the disenfranchisement, political slavery, and even murder of ideological opponents like me, all while being hypocritical enough to deny this fact and having the gall to ask people like me to financially support my own destruction.

While I support widening the circle of people whom, while I may disagree with them I still view as legitimate, as much as possible, there are going to be people who fall outside this circle, who believe things that not only go against the free society but make it impossible for them to take part in it and still have a free society in any meaningful sense. This leads to a situation where the free society must insist, as the price of admission, on the acceptance of certain beliefs. This is no different than the situation of rational skepticism, which allows you to question everything else, but the premises underlying itself. This is the price of belief you pay in order to be a skeptic. As a Jew, I am not capable of ever debating whether or not I am a member of an Elders of Zion organization. I ask that you accept on faith that I am a good American citizen and give me the benefit of the doubt and in return I agree to give you the benefit of the doubt. Since American society has decided to accept people like me into its bosom, it has had no choice but to expel white supremacists from its midst and banish them to places like rural Idaho. This would even apply to the government. I could not be an equal part of an American politics in which white supremacists are also allowed to take part in a meaningful way. As such, having me in the system means that we are forced to use all means, Constitutional and extra-Constitutional to make sure white supremacists are not. Nothing personal against white supremacists, but our views are so mutually exclusive that we have no choice, in essence, but to kill each other.

Because I recognize this sort of bargain we make with each other. I have no objection for the government to come in and openly insist on certain ground rules in order to take part in the system. Particularly, everyone has to accept the authority of the government, obey the law, and respect the legitimacy, as opposed to liking or agreeing with them, of all other signers of this pact. In a multi-racial United States, one has to be willing to accept, at least ex post facto, that people of all races can be legitimate American citizens. This is all of course superfluous since I oppose government-funded education in the first place. I would, though, support similar language in a bill targeting who can run for public office. Yes, it would be an ideological test, but one, in essence no different than swearing to uphold the Constitution.

My Problem with Terry Eagleton

One of the newest entries into the debate over the New Atheism of Richard Dawkins is Terry Eagleton’s Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate. Eagleton is on the “God” side of this debate and his book is an attack on Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, dubbed by Eagleton as Ditchkins, in particular. Considering the highly polemical nature of this debate Eagleton has certainly received many supportive and hostile reviews. Two very useful examples of this are Stanley Fish in support and PZ Myers in opposition. Fish's glowing review of Eagleton is particularly interesting as Eagleton takes a swipe at him twice in this very book. I find the book to be well written and at times, when defending the beauty of faith, Eagleton comes almost to the level of C. S. Lewis. I must, in the end though, side with Myers in opposing this book, even if it is for very different reasons.

While most of the attention regarding Eagleton has been about the reason and faith parts of the book, Eagleton’s real focus is on revolution. For Eagleton, as unapologetic Marxist, revolution here means the defeat of global Capitalism. Dawkins and the New Atheist movement like the religious fundamentalists, they love to mock, are products of late Capitalism and its failure of values. The solution for Eagleton lies in abandoning the simple economic calculus of Capitalism and embracing Marxism. It is Marxism that offers the necessary grounding in values to stand against economic inequality and imperialism.

Despite my opposition to Communism, I actually enjoyed this part of the book as well. I see no problem in reconciling religion in general and Christianity in particular with Marxism. Any person of faith who can reconcile his faith with evolution should have little difficulty making his peace with Marxism. I can even admire Eagleton for his subversiveness in wrapping a Marxist polemic between the cover of a theist book. Ordinary passive believers looking for confirmation in their faith are going to be in for a rude surprise. I find his case for Marxism remarkably eloquent and persuasive after a fashion. One of the beauties of being a free-marketer is that I am able absorb the strong points of every other economic ideology. For example, yes I have a problem with CEOs making millions while ordinary workers struggle to get by. I think companies would, in general, be far better off being run by their workers and for their workers. The free-market offers the opportunity for such a proletarian takeover without a drop of blood being shed. (The fact that our government has stepped in to bail out corporate America from a financial mess of their own creation offends me as much as the most ardent Marxist.)

My problem with Eagleton is that his hostility toward Capitalism leads him into an anti-West rant where he blames the United States in particular for pretty much all of the problems in the Third World. Eagleton dances around the issue but in the end, for all intents and purposes, he blames September 11 on the United States since, from his perspective, the United States created the problem of Islamic terrorism. Eagleton may be a bit more subtle than Ward Churchill but that just makes him all the more dangerous. Eagleton is smart enough to know that his case cannot stand critical scrutiny yet continues to try implying it on the sly.

As with many on the radical left, Eagleton’s anti-West sentiments quickly lead him to attacking Israel as the fist of the West’s oppression. Eagleton waxes nostalgically about President Nasser of Egypt. According to Eagleton:

Nasserism, once the dominant secular-nationalist, authoritarian-socialist current in the Arab world, was effectively destroyed by the Western-backed 1967 Israeli victory over Egypt. The Islamism that arouse in the wake of that defeat arraigned Nasser for his failure to lead the Arab forces to victory over Israel. The political balance within the Arab would shifted accordingly, away from a discredited Nasserism to the monarchical, pro-Western Wahhabi fundamentalists of Saudi Arabia. What a secular politics could apparently not accomplish, a fanatically religious one could achieve instead (pg. 106).

So great tragic turning point in history was when the Mein Kampf loving dictator of Egypt failed to destroy its democratic neighbor and massacre its Jewish population.

Considering that Eagleton has no problem with apologizing for Nasser’s atrocities, one might hope he would show Israel the same courtesy. Israel is blamed for perpetuating a massacre on the Jordanians in 1971. Eagleton point blank argues that “without the vast concentration camp known as the Gaza Strip, it is not at all out of the question that the Twin Towers would still be standing" (pg. 107). While the first concentration camps were created by the British during the Boar War, in modern parlance a concentration camp means something very specific. So by using this word, Eagleton can mean only one of three things. He could be a Holocaust denier, who believes that the camps were about as bad as the Palestinian situation. He could be an anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist, who believes, without evidence, that Israel has murdered millions of Palestinians. Or he could just be a plain liar, seeking to malign Israel and Jews for his own ideological gain.

Eagleton is a textbook example of Dennis Prager’s observation that hatred of the United States and anti-Semitism seem to follow similar lines of reasoning and have common origins. In the end one must view Faith, Reason and Revolution as an attempt to pass off anti-Israel propaganda and plain anti-Semitism under the guise of a bestselling book on religion. The fact that this is only a passing issue in the book makes it all the more dangerous. If Eagleton had been forthright about his agenda this book would never have sold. He is not really interesting in defending Christianity or any form of theism. His real interest is to push for Marxism, an ideology grounded in hatred of the West and of Israel.

Stanley Fish and the Wine Hoax

I consider Stanley Fish to be one of the great public intellectuals of our day. I may not always agree with him, but I have great respect for him. He is one of the world’s foremost scholars on John Milton and he also manages to be a highly coherent and readable political thinker. He might be one of the leading advocates of post modernism, but he is the sort of post modernist that I can accept. He is someone who uses post modernism as an analytical tool and not something to be worshipped for its own sake.

With all due respect to Fish, though, he suffers from an inability to get over the fact that he was connected, if only tangentially, to the Sokal Hoax. The Sokal Hoax has become a legend among critics of post modernism as the moment that post modernism was called out as an emperor with no cloths. Here is what happened. In 1996 Alan Sokal, a professor of physics at NYU, sent a paper titled “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity” to Social Text, a journal published by Duke University and considered to be one of the main organs of post modern thought in America. This paper was full of post modernist jargon and not something that could be easily understood by members of the lay public. Apparently the editors of Social Text could not understand Sokal either or were just too lazy to bother so they simply published the article, relying on the fact that Sokal had a PHD and his article sounded good. Once the article was published Sokal revealed to the public what his article was actually about; it argued that the laws of physics and mathematics were cultural constructs, with no inherent validity. While it would seem that Fish was not involved with the publishing of Sokal’s essay, he taught at Duke at the time. Fish has never gotten over this embarrassment and has repeatedly inveighed against Sokal for the “unfairness” of it all and declaring that it proves nothing.

Recently Fish returned, once again, to this issue, responding to a similar hoax played on the magazine Wine Spectator by critic Robin Goldstein. Goldstein created a wine list for a completely fictitious restaurant, Osteria L’Intrepido, and managed to get a rating from the magazine. Fish brings down Wine Spectator’s Executive Editor Thomas Matthews’ response that yes his magazine was taken in by a hoax, but that it was a very elaborate hoax. Goldstein went through the trouble of providing them with an address and phone number and even went so far as to create a website for his nonexistent restaurant. As far as Matthews is concerned it is unreasonable that the readers of his magazine should expect them to actually go to the restaurant and see if they actually have the wines they claim to have.

Fish sees a parallel between what happened to Wine Spectator and what happened to Social Text. They both accepted submissions on good faith, which turned out to be hoaxes. For Fish this says nothing about the intellectual legitimacy of either institution. They operate on the assumption that those who submit things to them are acting on good faith. For support Fish refers to Simon Blackburn, who, in response to Sokal, argued that, as someone whose expertise is in philosophy, he could not be expected to judge the historical validity of articles submitted to him. The example he gives is of someone sending him an article arguing that Thomas Hobbes’ political philosophy was influenced by his experience in Venice.

With all due respect for such eminent scholars as Fish and Blackburn, this is nothing less than an apology for intellectual laziness. Part of being an academic is that you are not inclined to take things on good faith. The whole point of academic publishing is that a book or article is to be peer reviewed and not simply one person’s opinion. When I, the reader, pick up a piece of published academic literature I am supposed to assume that not only is it the work of an accredited academic scholar but also that it was read by other accredited scholars, capable of judging the piece, and that these scholars, at the very least, found no reason to object to it. I, the reader, am the supposed to take what I am reading on good faith, but the only reason why I can do that is because I am taking it on good faith that those who screened what I am reading were not talking the author on good faith.

Off of the top of my head I would not be able to tell you if Hobbes was ever in Venice or not. I do know that he spent a significant amount of time on the continent after he fled England due to the English Civil War and the execution of Charles I. If a paper came across my desk, something maybe written by a student, with the thesis that Hobbes was influenced by his experience in Venice I would bother to actually check if Hobbes was ever actually there. If do not readily find such information and the student proves incapable of producing it then that student will fail.

I am about to take my general exams. The people on my committee will demand that I not only sound like I know what I am talking about but will also insist that I actually know what I am talking about and will call me on it if there is any hint that I am bluffing. When I write my dissertation I will have to defend what I write in the face of knowledgeable scholars, who will have no hesitation in taking what I have written, ripping it up in my face and telling me that my work is garbage. I do not claim to be perfect, but I do hold myself to a certain standards and there are people who will hold me to those standards.

This is what academic scholarship is about. We are supposed to demand a high standard of ourselves and if we are not qualified to comment on something we should excuse ourselves and remain silent. This is what separates us from the rest of society and this is what gives us our authority. While it may be perfectly acceptable for Rush Limbaugh or Matt Drudge to simply pass on any bit of information that supports their cause without careful investigation, academics, if they wish to claim greater legitimacy than Limbaugh and Drudge, must make it obvious to everyone that they operate on a higher standard. This is particularly true for those who are in the humanities. Since we do not deal in hard empirical facts our very legitimacy rests on the unchallengeable quality of our scholarship. People may disagree with our conclusions but they must never have the grounds to challenge the intellectual process that have gone into our conclusions. If we cannot live up to this goal than there is no point to our enterprise.

The people who read Sokal’s essay and agreed to publish it are a disgrace. They should have all been fired from their possessions and never allowed to work as academics again. Their incompetence endangers not only post modernism but all academic scholarship. Sending hoax articles to journals should be a common occurrence in order to keep people honest. Those in the lofty position of editing journals should have to be on their guard. Allow a hoax to be published on your watch and your reputation and your career will be at an end.