A moral imbecile
Stanley Fish is a smug bastard. This is not news, but he’s smugger than usual in his New York Times blog post on Rushdie and Spellberg and Jones. The first sentence is a staggerer.
Salman Rushdie, self-appointed poster boy for the First Amendment, is at it again.
That just irritates the bejesus out of me. Self-appointed? Poster boy? At it again? Excuse me? He could hardly have been less self-appointed – it was the Ayatollah and his murderous illegal bloodthirsty ‘fatwa’ that appointed Rushdie a supporter of free speech, not Rushdie. And Rushdie defends free speech in general, not the First Amendment in particular; how parochial of smug sneery Fish to conflate the two. And ‘poster boy’; that’s just stupid as well as insultingly patronizing: Rushdie doesn’t swan around with a crutch, he makes arguments in support of free speech. And ‘at’ what again? ‘At’ saying that publishers shouldn’t give in to threats either from Islamists or from academics speaking for notional Islamists or ‘offended’ Muslims who in some distant subjunctive world might be ‘offended’ by a novel about Mohammed’s child ‘bride’? Now that’s ‘self-appointed’ – Denise Spellberg did a lot more self-appointing than Rushdie did.
Random House is free to publish or decline to publish whatever it likes, and its decision to do either has nothing whatsoever to do with the Western tradition of free speech or any other high-sounding abstraction.
Of course Random House is free to publish or not publish, but what happened is not quite that simple; Random House decided to publish and then at almost the last minute decided not to, for a very stupid and craven reason that then became public. That’s not illegal – Random House is ‘free’ to do that (depending on what it says in the contract, that is), but that doesn’t mean the rest of us can’t point out how stupid and craven Random House is.
Rushdie and the pious pundits think otherwise because they don’t quite understand what censorship is. Or, rather, they conflate the colloquial sense of the word with the sense it has in philosophical and legal contexts. In the colloquial sense, censorship occurs whenever we don’t say or write something because we fear adverse consequences, or because we feel that what we would like to say is inappropriate in the circumstances, or because we don’t want to hurt someone’s feelings. (This is often called self-censorship. I call it civilized behavior.)
Oh do you; do you really. Someone decides not to write something because (for instance) she fears being killed by enraged Islamists – and you call that ‘civilized behavior’?
I don’t believe a word of it; I don’t believe that even of Stanley Fish; I think he must have lost track of what he’d just said by the time he wrote the bit about civilized behavior. But that was stupid of him, and smug, and sloppy. If he does believe that, then he’s a moral imbecile.
But censorship is not the proper name; a better one would be judgment. We go through life adjusting our behavior to the protocols and imperatives of different situations, and often the adjustments involve deciding to refrain from saying something. It’s a calculation, a judgment call. It might be wise or unwise, prudent or overly cautious, but it has nothing to with freedom of expression.
Oh yes it does. When the ‘imperative’ of a particular ‘situation’ is that our judgment tells us not to write a novel or play or cartoon because of threats of violence then that has a great deal to do with freedom of expression. If we can’t safely write X Y or Z because furious religious zealots might kill us if we do, then we don’t have freedom of expression. It’s been taken away from us by criminal extortionists. Stanley Fish ought not to be so complacent about this.
What a louse Fish is! Rushdie is very measured in his writings about Islamism and its threats to free speech – far more measured than in his high pitch prose novels. “Self-appointed poster boy” is cheap and wrong. He’s not a “poster boy” for those fearing the new censorship i.e. from powers outside of your own government, but an example of its existence. It’s like calling Solzhenitsyn the “poster boy” of those opposed to the repressive powers of the old Soviet Union, and has a strong sense of denigration.
If someone in Belfast pre Good Friday agreement had been writing unflattering stuff about the IRA and they threatened to kneecap her if she carried on, that wouldn’t “censorship” either, I suppose.
Depends, Professor Fish. “We don’t like the book” is judgment, as is “We don’t think we can make money on it” and “We don’t print books of that sort; try a publisher who does.”
But yes, there are freedom of speech and expression concerns when the publisher says, “We liked the book, we were going to publish it, we thought we could make money on it, but then we were told that we might get killed if we did it.”
…and Fish thinks that not saying something for fear of hurting someone’s feelings and incurring social disapproval is the same as not saying something for fear of GETTING KILLED?
Uh, okay.
Well, that was why I said (being ultra-charitable) that perhaps he’d forgotten what he’d said at the beginning of the sentence by the time he got to the end. But in fact I don’t really believe in being that charitable. Whether he thinks that or not, that certainly is what he said, which makes him (at least) an irresponsible git.
I liked him better when he stayed in David Lodge novels…
I think Fish has spent at least the last few years taking the gig that pays the most – did he not make a surprise move to some place in Florida no-one had ever heard of?
Literary critics are an odd bunch. John Sutherland, who writes for the Guardian, penned a piece a few years ago of ‘advice’ on entering the profession. It boiled down to ‘publish anything, anywhere, that they’ll pay you for.’ And yet he still poses as a defender of an older and a nobler age when the fancy takes him…
I know, I know, I was thinking yesterday that Morris Zapp was so much more amusing and less repellent.
Literary critics have this delusion of omniscience that no other field seems to have, at least not in the same way or with the same disproportion between self-image and reality.
To get an appreciation of the real Fish, it is de rigeur to have read Sokal and Bricmont’s Fashionable Nonsense, about the Social Text hoax and the surrounding miasma of nonsense that is modern pomo ‘Critical Theory’ (a useful companion is Gross and Levitt’s Higher Superstition).
It surprises me not at all that Fish should conflate good manners with fear of death as a reason not to publish something. To be anyone in his milieu is by definition to be a woolly thinker. The high-falutin’ gibberish that Fish and his ilk churn out is couched in obscurity not because of the depth of its intellectual content but to conceal its essential vapidity. To the extent that there is an underlying idea, it is that all modes of discourse are contingent. When one eschews objectivity to this extent, I suppose one can fail to see the distinction between not behaving like a boor and cringing in terror. Yes, ‘moral imbecile’ seems about right (or perhaps ‘moral autist’ is nearer the mark.)