There are people like that
Russell encounters an Eaglefish and has one of those epiphanic moments when a few things suddenly “click”.
[A]mong our friends on the political Left – which is where I have my roots – there are people, not just a few but many, who despise everything I hold dear. These are supposed to be my allies, but they despise liberalism, reason, science, progress, and the Enlightenment. They hate the so-called “New Atheism”…because they see people like Richard Dawkins as providing a rallying point for … yes, liberalism, reason, science, progress, and the Enlightenment…It’s not some sort of accident or coincidence that their commitments so often have them opposing liberalism and all the values associated with it. They know that that’s what they’re doing; they actually see those values as disvalues.
Yeah. And that’s why I would so love to see them magically turned into women and transported to Swat so that they could ponder the absence of liberalism, reason, science, progress, and the Enlightenment up close and personal.
I despise and detest their frivolity. Their stupid, shallow, giggling lack of responsibility; their treating subjects that are very literally life and death to billions of people as mere toys for them to play with. They don’t even offer any serious reasons for their hatred of liberalism, reason, science, progress, and the Enlightenment – that’s what’s so frivolous about it. They just take it for granted, and offer at most silly lightweight pseudo-reasons, like the fact that their grandparents had religious beliefs. These guys aren’t children – they should know they need better reasons than that. They should pay better attention to the world, they should look around them, they should yank their heads out of their own stifling little egos.
Stanley Fish and Terry Eagleton, for example, are not just isolated, idiosyncratic sentimentalists who believe in belief. They really do hate the things that I value, and they see themselves as in a struggle to resist the very things that I am fighting for in all my work. When Eagleton says that Richard Dawkins is standing in his way, he actually means it. What’s more, such Eaglefish don’t see themselves as expressing a view that their colleagues and acquaintances will find alien and bizarre. They expect their views to seem familiar and attractive to many readers; they expect to find an audience for which such views will have the ring of truth.
Quite. This is why Butterflies and Wheels was created and why it still exists – because Eaglefish don’t see themselves as expressing a view that their colleagues and acquaintances will find alien and bizarre. B&W has been working hard (that is, I’ve been working hard, but it sounds grander to call myself B&W, as if I were a committee) for nigh on seven years now to make the Eaglefish view seem alien and bizarre to as many people as possible.
(OB) “B&W has been working hard […] to make the Eaglefish view seem alien and bizarre to as many people as possible.”
It’s working on me. Please do continue.
Look, you can go with Russell’s Eaglefish if you want to. But my two and a half-year-old thinks Feagletosh is too funny to just drop like that. So at least one household on the planet is sticking with Feagletosh.
Oh I think Feagletosh is brilliant! I said so on Russell’s blog. But Russell said Eaglefish so I stayed with that here so as not to sow confusion.
I studied literature many many years ago, and there was an emphasis on style over substance that I recognize in Eagleton, who is a literature professor. There was also a contempt for science as being prosaic, not poetic, which I’ve had to unlearn.
Eagleton is not concerned with the truth of his affirmations (he never says whether he believes in God or not or whether he is an agnostic), still less with the consequences of his statements in the real world: instead, he finds the new atheism to be aesthetically in bad taste, as if whether God exists and whether religion does good or evil is a question of taste.
I think their distaste for liberalism is born out of snobbery.
Eaglefish can’t stand the fact that commoners with their equally common tastes are allowed to consume vulgar things like hamburgers and salad that comes in a plastic bag.
It’s not “my” Eaglefish – it looks like Ophelia actually coined it. I do prefer it to “Feagletosh” because it conjures up a blurry image of some kind of scaly, feathery animal, and it enables us to talk in the plural about this species. But it’s a matter of taste. “Feagletosh” also has some good connotations.
Jakob: Correct, it’s snobbery. Snobbery is an integral part of higher education in literature and in the arts in general. At least it was back when Eagleton and I (we are roughly the same age) were in the university.
Quiet cheers. GO OB.
And Feagletosh is GREAT – do you know the Feagles? Really, really thick pixies totally in thrall to the Queen, in Terry Pratchett’s Wee Free Men and A Hatful of Sky.
Feagletosh and Eaglefish were funny, once. And if we had to have one, I’d pick Feagletosh. It’s funnier. But let’s not actually use it, huh?
When Eagleton coined “Ditchkins”, and actually proceeded to use it over and over, it looked incredibly childish. As well as puce-faced-furious-while-pretending-to-be-amused, which is not a good look.
I felt immensely relieved not to be on the same side of an argument as him. Anyone with a maturity level somewhere over seven would find Eagleton’s effort cringe-makingly embarrassing. That sort of thing’s a huge own goal. It makes him look stupid, angry, and a bit wierd. So I’m glad it was him, and not “us”.
Responding in kind elevates both of them to prominence they’d find gratifying. But let’s face it, when your life’s intellectual journey is from Catholicism to Marxism to pomo lit-crit bullshit to (apparently) “sophisticated theism”, with ever once having been attracted to a system of thought that’s actually a useful tool for engaging with the real world, then you’re not exactly the sharpest butterknife in the drawer.
Not so much Feagletosh as “who?” and “who cares?”
It really shouldn’t be necessary to look at Swat to get some idea of what the absence of liberalism, reason, science, progress, and the Enlightenment is like. The absence of most of these things (science being the exception) was pretty widespread in Europe in the last century, especially in the first half. (Names like Hitler, Stalin, Franco and Mussolini come to mind.) So some knowledge of European history ought to do it.
I appreciate Laon’s sentiments, but I don’t personally feel we’re descending to Feagletosh’s level by coining and using Feagletosh. We saw the dirty trick he was pulling by creating a strawman with a nastily evocative name that he can accuse of putting forth ideas that have been expressed by neither of the inspirations for the name. To respond with “Feagletosh” actually seems to me to be a relatively witty touche. To put it another way, Ditchkins represents an untrue slur on the nature of current mainstream atheist thought, while Feagletosh is actually an accurate representation of the fancifully reckless way in which at least two individuals perpetrate and extol this slur.
A few small points:
I agree with some of the posters above – name-calling is fun but we shouldn’t do it. Terry Eagleton is something we should rise above.
I’m not sure that idiocy has any particular political cast – surely views have to make sense before they can be labelled one way or the other (assuming there are only two ways).
Treating large numbers of people as numerical fodder for point-scoring rather than as real is a failing many of us have fallen into in the past and will again. I can recall one blogger arguing that there was no moral case against the Iraq war for example, the probable violent death of large numbers of actual real people not figuring in his moral calculus at all. Academics may be more prone to it, but we all run this risk whenever we generalise while making an argument.
Remember also that respectable people are never anti-science, they are anti-scientism, and that is a completely different thing *cough*.
Wellll…granted, I don’t recommend going on using Eaglefish/Feagletosh forever. But for purposes of making fun of this particular effusion by Fish? Where one problem with the piece is precisely that one can’t tell where Eagle leaves off and Fish begins? Where one can’t tell whether Fish is endorsing or merely reporting, or worse, whether he is doing one under cover of doing the other? I don’t think that’s so bad.
May I suggest “Eaglefishy” when you’re feeling irrationally affectionate? That’s Eagleton, Fish, and Gray.
Heh. I’ve been meaning to point out the affinities between Gray and Figgleash. Johnny Eaglefish has a nice raffish note. He could do an apache dance for us.
I suffered through a Gray podcast a couple of days ago, and found myself wondering what his shrink would say. It’s odd for him to have such antipathy for Dawkins & co., considering his own status as a non-believer. And he really does have an intense antipathy…he twists and turns to find something to pin on Dawkins. He talks about his similarity to Nazis and communists, says he has nothing new to say, calls him evangelical and fundamentalist. You keep wondering–why so angry?
I have a little hypothesis, which is that straightforward people like Dawkins threaten to put convoluted cultural critics out of business. Dawkins is like the boy in “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” Eaglefishy all want these things to be painfully, painfully complex, because contortionism is what they’re all about. Honestly, when you read/listen to these guys, you have to think they “have issues” (and I don’t mean bonafide philosophical issues).
“because contortionism is what they’re all about.”
I re-read Martha Nussbaum’s reply to Fish at a conference in 1985 (it’s in Love’s Knowledge) yesterday. She nails him on that, though in a polite sort of way.
I hate this about ‘cultural critics’ – the contortionism is all they have, yet they think it provides them with a platform to pronounce on everything.
I secretly think literature professors should go back to writing about literature. By the way, one of my great accomplishments in life was getting a letter to the editor published in the NYT about the idiocy of something Fish said in one of his columns. He had said professors shouldn’t encourage students to think about reality, but just about texts. Rant, rave, sigh.
Thank you, Jean. That’s the kind of thing I meant when I talked about redundancy a few threads ago. And in cases like that before us, it’s more extreme than redundancy. Dawkins et al are letting in the light (by being as straightforward as you say) and our opponents here can only really accomplish their work in conditions lacking clear visibility. When the light does stream in, they are exposed as not merely useless, but as active impediments to anything that can be helpful to the living.
I think not at all secretly that lit crits should go back to writing about literature.
Wo, cool about getting a letter to the Times published! Especially one retorting to Fish! [offers laurel wreath]
These musings put me in mind of a story I may have told here before; my apologies if that’s the case.
Either late 2006 or early 2007 I was walking along Unter den Linden with a small group that included family and friends. There was another group there, too, and it was suckering passers-by into playing the old shell game. One was running the show and three or four others were pretending to be onlookers and lucky winners. To cut a not very long story shorter, we ended up standing not far from them and I was describing to my group what was really going on. I wasn’t loud, but audible to the swindlers and their next prospective suckers. Suddenly the main man made a very aggressive move in my direction and screamed at me to piss off (“Verpiss Dich!” – it’s a stronger expression in German).
You’d have to be pretty gullible not to understand what was going on if you saw that scene. It’s what I’m frequently reminded of when I see religious leaders, certain political figures and a particular breed of academic getting angry at those telling things like they really are. After all, it’s their racket that’s being ruined if their chicanery is made obvious and the truth believed. The biggest difference between them and the con-men of Unter den Linden, as far as I can see, is that the Popes, politicos and profs don’t vanish at warp speed every time a policeman comes too close.
Maybe I’m too old-fashioned, but it has always seemed to me that academics ought to be in the business of rendering whatever it is that they know intelligible to others (if memory serves, it’s called teaching). Perhaps the job description was changed while I wasn’t looking, but whenever I see someone with an academic title making something harder rather than easier to understand (or losing their temper at someone doing the opposite), that person gets filed in my mind along with her/his shell game brethren.
“Maybe I’m too old-fashioned, but it has always seemed to me that academics ought to be in the business of rendering whatever it is that they know intelligible to others (if memory serves, it’s called teaching).”
This is one of the worst aspects of the pomo movement. They seem to think that the purpose of giving lectures is to impress their students rather than teach them anything.
It’s almost like the role a cult-leader plays. They aim to have impressionable students looking up at the lectern in awed-wonder at their intellectual mastery.
When I was at university, I quit in frustration at the complete lack of genuine intellectual inquiry or educational intent. Even the non-pomos subscribed to a watered down version of this attitude.
I take your point about other intellectual fashions like Hegelianism and psychoanalysis. As I see it these are basically the same people, but the trends in bullshit change over time.
I certainly think the type of people who go in for this kind of stuff are much more irresponsible in discharging their teaching duties than others. It’s not that they are out of touch, or that they don’t put the effort into teaching. They try very hard to make sure their students are awe-struck. It’s like the students are there only to gratify the egotism of the great guru.
Pomos (and their like) give bad grades for dissent. Especially if it involves independent thinking and rational argument – you can just about get away with quoting the objections of another pomo. The result is that students end up paying large amounts of money to completely waste their time learning how to flatter to the person marking their essays.
It’s basically secular theology. You read a load of nonsense then engage in tortuous intellectual gymnastics in an attempt show how it’s profound.
I’m not sure if the obsession with publication is really responsible for this. Philosophy is probably the archetypal example of that kind of subject, but it is the area of the humanities least contaminated by such nonsense.
The reason these trends are allowed to emerge is because of low intellectual standards. Foucault would never get printed in the American Philosophical Quarterly because his work just isn’t up to it. However, he managed to become practically worshipped in disciplines that never embraced intellectual rigour to begin with – including continental philosophy.
Here is an interesting discussion of why it is important to be obscure in some circles:
http://www.dan.sperber.com/guru.htm
The Fish part of Feagletosh mentions the meeting of po-mo and religion, though of course not in a straightforward, honest way.
I never put myself through what Jakob quit in disgust; I had a gut feeling, which I still think was right, that I would only have been inviting conflict with authority had I done so (I had never been – internally – anything but an atheist). My suspicions remained suspicions for a long time after that, because nothing forced me to confront what was going on in that field. Two things eventually forced me to investigate it to the depth I felt necessary. One was a case where I had to force myself to understand how bullshit pomo language was being used to cover up and/or justify a case of historical forgery (I’m proud to say that it’s still the first thing that comes up if you google my surname together with “bullshit” on German Google). The other was getting into a situation where I had to translate a few pages of such stuff. When you’re just reading, it’s easy to skim and not worry if you didn’t understand what was meant by every comma. But if you’re translating, you really have to come to grips as precisely as possible with the meaning of what is being said. At that point, it was brought home to me with full force that it didn’t really mean anything. It was on the level of “lots of fancy names say such and such, therefore I am suggesting that it is possible that maybe…” Tons of verbiage and nothing nailed down anywhere, except the implicit authority of the names being quoted. There are worse cases and better cases, but the range seems to be from long-windedly saying something simple and obvious, through saying bugger-all, all the way to disguising something quite diabolically objectionable.
Back to the religion connection. I see a very close analogy between the bamboozling that pomo profs do with convoluted language and the religious objections to having sacred texts translated into a language the masses could understand. The important thing is to retain authority and that can only be done if the important message can only be even partially comprehended through the agency of a high priest or guru (my earlier redundancy point). If you don’t accept that, you’re not told your argument is poor, you’re told you’re a heretic, to pretty much the same extent in both religion and academia.
I seem to recall Frederick Crews had a nice example of Judith Butler trying to pull that on him in “Follies of the Wise.” Nuff said.
Well said, Stewart & Jakob. But however intellectually bankrupt and personally irritating I find the whole class of academics we’re talking about (Eagleton, Fish, Gray, Butler – oh dear FSM, leave us not forget Judith Butler!), my real concern is the institutional structures that foster their development and success. Not all academics are full-time intellectual masturbators/bullshit artists, but a great many are; and they are concentrated in some disciplines, but largely excluded from others. I want to know what institutional changes can be put in place to make the former disciplines more like the latter.
Although philosophy does have it’s fair share of bullshitters, I think you’re right, Jakob, that it’s less infected than many of the other humanities disciplines. But why? Is the tendency towards bullshit in some fields inherent in the subjects of study and research, or perhaps in the methods/approaches to research? If so, what can be done to discourage bullshit in those fields? Do the institutional incentives emphasizing specialization and publication encourage bullshit, as I suggested above? If so, those incentives seem to be widespread across many if not all disciplines – so what disincentives keep bullshit from taking over some of them, and how can we put those disincentives in place for the others?
It’s fun to trash the world’s Feagletoshes – to demonstrate that they are full of shit, and why. And when they spout their bullshit in the public sphere, it’s more than fun – it’s a necessary corrective. But I don’t think the question “Why does this wanker have a well-paid, highly respected academic position and get their utter twaddle published in major papers?” is an idle rhetorical question. It’s vital that we find substantial answers to those questions so we can make academia better. Moral condemnation of the intellectual and educational sins of Stanley Fish and Terry Eagleton and their ilk does not interest me very much: Changing higher education institutions so they don’t keep fostering the spread and success of that ilk matters much more to me.
Yes! At last!
I’ve been waiting for the subject of lit crit to come up so I’d have an excuse to link to this:
http://xkcd.com/451/
G, Mark Bauerlein argues that the tenure process has a lot to do with the ‘why Feagletoshism?’ question. He says that the process has been (in intention at least) easier on people who have to decide by setting a standard criterion: A Book. No nasty arguments about performance, just a yes or no; is there a book or not. This means that an aspiring academic has 3.5 years to write a book in time for the tenure decision. That’s not nearly enough time to do actual research – so it becomes very useful to be able to just write some warmed-over Butler-or-insert name here. A career trajectory like that of M H Abrams becomes impossible, while an endless stream of ephemeral and worthless bullshit becomes all too possible.
the process has been made easier, that is.
I think (at least in the UK) that English academics are far less obsessed with Theory than was the case a few years ago. I’m an English lecturer myself and self-identify as a literary critic – and that’s never been a problem.
@Jean K – quite agree with you – I’m interested in literature and that’s what I write about!
@OB – I sense the emphasis is shifting away slightly from a fetishisation of the monograph in favour of articles in refereed journals.
To be fair though, Stanley Fish *does* write about literature – and I thought Surprised By Sin, his study of Paradise Lost, was brilliant – though it’s a while since I read it.
But wouldn’t that be ‘used to’ write about literature, Sarah? I’ve long meant to read Surprised by Sin, because it does sound good – but it was published more than forty years ago. It doesn’t really show that Fish writes about literature now!
It was published in 1967 – when lit crits did still (just barely) write about literature. It was after that that they became omnicompetent Theorists. Our Stan didn’t exactly buck the trend.
Yes, ‘used to’ may well be more accurate! I had forgotten SBS was *quite* so old!