And in conclusion
A little more on Monsieur Poisson. I know – it’s silly – it’s a waste of time – it’s just ol’ Stash – who cares. But it’s also the New York Times, albeit only its blog, and ol’ Stash is a Name, and it’s interesting to notice how pervasive his tricksiness is. There is tricksiness in every paragraph, and often in every sentence. It’s interesting that a reputable academic allows himself to be so…disingenuous. He sets up a strawman version of ‘secular reasons’ in the first sentence and then gives variations on it throughout the rest of the article – thus vitiating the whole piece.
A somewhat less stringent version of the argument permits religious reasons to be voiced in contexts of public decision-making so long as they have a secular counterpart: thus, citing the prohibition against stealing in the Ten Commandments is all right because there is a secular version of the prohibition rooted in the law of property rights rather than in a biblical command.
It’s interesting that he chooses stealing – when the more obvious choice would of course be murder. But with stealing he gets to frame it as a matter of property rights, whereas if he chose murder he would be forced to admit that there are secular reasons that do not boil down to economics. He doesn’t want to admit that, and by god he never does admit it.
Whether the argument appears in its softer or harder versions, behind it is a form of intellectual/political apartheid known as the private/public distinction: matters that pertain to the spirit and to salvation are the province of religion and are to be settled by religious reasons; matters that pertain to the good order and prosperity of civil society are the province of democratically elected representatives and are to be settled by secular reasons.
‘Secular reasons’ pertain just to ‘good order and prosperity’ – nothing more ambitious than that. No equality, no freedom, no rights, just useful but minimalist order and prosperity.
And that is how he gets himself to the all-important claim:
This picture is routinely challenged by those who contend that secular reasons and secular discourse in general don’t tell the whole story; they leave out too much of what we know to be important to human life.
Well naturally – if secular reasons and secular discourse were as Fish described them, I too would contend that they leave out too much of what we know to be important to human life. But secular reasons and secular discourse are not as Fish describes them! His description is grotesque – he seems to have secular reasons and secular discourse confused with the most autistic kind of economics. Or rather, he seems to be pretending he does – I doubt that he is really as confused as he pretends to be.
He goes on doing the same thing until the end, naturally, but I won’t bother quoting every place he does it; it’s obvious enough.
That is the most felicitous turn of phrase I can remember reading in years.
Economics is a ridiculous faith that relies on unprovable (and deeply suspect) assertions and a massive case of confirmation bias. I’d hardly call it secular.
Religion poissons everything.
Oh, I dunno. Take the following: “So it’s O.K. to argue that a proposed piece of legislation will benefit the economy, or improve the nation’s health, or strengthen national security; but it’s not O.K. to argue that a proposed piece of legislation should be passed because it comports with a verse from the book of Genesis or corresponds to the will of God.”
Come to think of it, if I was an aspiring politician I could base a campaign on promises to do God’s will on everything: health, education, transport… It would be an open cheque. No matter what I did, I would always be able to find a verse in the good old book to back me up.
The wonder is that no politician has thought of it before. Fish is a genius.
;-)
:- ) Russell.
Fish is one of the biggest intellectual poseurs in the country. He’s America’s Mary Midgley, babbling on and on about topics he couldn’t be bothered to understand, because it’s all beneath a lofty intellect like his, but on which he still wants people to see him as an authority.
A lit crit degree makes you an authority on precisely one thing: Literature. Fish needs to go back to writing endless analyses John Milton and leave the religious discussion to people who actually know what they’re talking about.
I think all grad students and professors in English departments should have to sign a disclaimer that states, “I, ___________, hereby recognize that reading Derrida does not make me an authority on all intellectual topics. It’s questionable whether it makes me an authority on any intellectual topics. I promise not to be a pretentious, arrogant douche who devotes my career to finding the smartest-sounding ways to say the dumbest things imaginable.”
Prof. Fish doesn’t just have a background in literary criticism or literature. He’s a law professor. And some of the stuff he writes makes me (a lawyer who may someday have a part-time teaching gig at a law school) cringe.
Is he a law professor who actually went to law school, or is he like an honorary law professor who doesn’t know a damn thing about law?
OB,
According to Wiki, he doesn’t have any qualifications in law:
What the hell was the Duke law school thinking?
Yes that’s what I thought. Thanks for looking it up for me, Wes! (I’m terribly busy reading 87 pages of feverish drama about deleted posts at the Dawkins site. It’s hilarious…)
What indeed was the Duke law school thinking? Maybe something to do with rhetoric and tricksiness…Fish can teach evasive techniques to the eager law students.
That’s an unfair and inaccurate summation of Midgley, Wes. She has many insightful things to say about animals and ethics. And while she’s gone overboard in some of her criticisms of Dawkins, her books have several well-taken points about the danger of misapplying metaphors about “selfishness.”
As for Fish and law school, there are plenty of “law and literature” classes in all kinds of schools. And Fish is something of a celebrity, so it’s really not surprising, even if it is disheartening.
‘A lit crit degree makes you an authority on precisely one thing: Literature’
No even that: there’s never been a good work of literature based on literary ‘theory’. If you want to understand literature you don’t do it through the prism of a theory which distorts the object of study to fit it into preconceived ideas based on outdated economic theories, steam-aged psychology and a radical reinterpretation of Saussurean linguistics Saussure wouldn’t recognise.
If any of this drivel shed some genuine light on Shakespeare at least we might sympathise with attempts to extend the theory’s reach beyond literature into science or philosophy – but it doesn’t.
‘A lit crit degree makes you an authority on precisely one thing: Literature’
No even that: there’s never been a good work of literature based on literary ‘theory’. If you want to understand literature you don’t do it through the prism of a theory which distorts the object of study to fit it into preconceived ideas based on outdated economic theories, steam-aged psychology and a radical reinterpretation of Saussurean linguistics Saussure wouldn’t recognise.
If any of this drivel shed some genuine light on Shakespeare at least we might sympathise with attempts to extend the theory’s reach beyond literature into science or philosophy – but it doesn’t.
Jenavir,
That doesn’t refute what I said. Fish has also written some very influential work on the poetry of John Milton.
I’m not claiming that he and Midgley have never accomplished anything at all. I’m saying that they arrogantly pontificate on topics they haven’t even attempted to understand. Midgley wants to pontificate on biology, even though she doesn’t understand it. And Fish wants to pontificate on legal issues, even though he is pretty much ignorant in that field..
Midgley’s blather about “selfishness” just proves my point. She completely and utterly misunderstood the argument Dawkins made in The Selfish Gene, and refused to back down even after it was pointed out to her that that’s not at all what he meant.
Not to mention her recent endorsement of Fodor and Piatelli-Palmarini’s misguieded attacks on natural selection. You know the only other endorsement that I’m aware of for that book? The Discovery Institute. Fine company she’s keeping.
I realize that she made some good points in her early works, such as Beast and Man. But whenever she steps outsider her area of expertise, she just babbles nonsense.
To be fair, Fish does actually know a lot about legal theory and something about substantive law.
He could claim, with some plausibility, that his expertise is in interpretation and the philosophy of interpretation (which intersects in a big way with legal philosophy, since a lot of the law involves interpreting precedents and statutes, which are often ambiguous and/or mutually contradictory). He’s had some good debates about this with Ronald Dworkin and sometimes, at least arguably, got the better of the argument. It’s fair enough to include some of his work on a bona fide course in jurisprudence.
I don’t much like his approach to, well, anything much … especially of late when he’s been obsessed with defending religion. But he’s not totally ignorant about the law or about philosophy/theory of law. It’s just that he’s, um, like, wrong.
But, Wes, she does understand a great deal about biology, including (some of) Dawkins’s arguments. I’d recommend The Ethical Primate as an example, but Beast and Man itself also concerns biology. Yes, she misunderstood Dawkins’s Selfish Gene metaphor and refused to back down, and she sometimes defends silly concepts (like the book attacking natural selection). But she can be wrong about something without being ignorant of the whole subject–as Russell notes about Fish. That was the extent of my point.
Thanks, Russell, that makes sense.
Jenavir, I know of zero biologists who think Midgley ‘does understand a great deal about biology’ and I know of a few who are pretty sure she doesn’t. Unless you’re a biologist? If you are then I stand corrected on the first claim!
I’ve been meaning to read Surprised by Sin for years…It does at least sound interesting.
But Shatterface, lit crit is one thing and literary ‘theory’ is quite another. There really is such a thing as good lit crit – quite a lot of it in fact. (And Fish may even have written some, when he was young and…less omniscient.)
Eagleton, who is exasperating when he writes about politics or religion, has written some good lit crit – and some bad as well.
Come to think of it, lit crit should teach you not to stray out of your area of expertise. You’re meant to know the texts you write about thoroughly, and take to task those who haven’t read the texts as thoroughly. One of the results of education should be knowing how great your ignorance is on almost all subjects. Do these guys tell mechanics how to fix their car?
Lit crits used to stick to their own subject – really they did. It was the ‘theory turn’ that changed all that. Bleah. They’re the only brand of academics with that kind of grandiosity, and they’re the ones with the least claim to it.
Ophelia, I’m surprised that you would want to read Surprised by Sin. It has never appealed to me. The idea that the whole thing was preplanned by Milton, that Milton wasn’t, after all, of the devil’s party without knowing it, but designedly wrote Paradise Lost in such a way as to show that we are truly fallen creatures, and therefore are attracted to the expansive, difiant, undefeated figure of Satan, is about the least helpful analysis that I have ever heard of Milton’s epic.
Milton was very much like his own Satan. He himself was irrepressible, defiant, sure of himself, and would not bow down to authority. That his figure of Satan should have expressed the Renaissance conviction of the nobility of the creative human mind is not surprising in the least. That it could be read in the rather paltry way suggested by Fish, though he seems to have impressed a lot of Milton scholars, could not stand up to an unbiased first reading of the poem. Milton was not only of the devil’s party without, perhaps, knowing it; he was also on the side of the renewed excitement of human creativity that had transformed the mind of Europe. It is surely significant that of all the contemporary Renaissance figures, only Galileo is mentioned in the poem, and Milton had met Galileo in Italy, and was totally enthralled, not only by his scientific work, but by the way this confronted the power and privilege of clerical authority.
Of course, having written about Milton in this way, it is not at all surprising to see the adaptable Fish, poissoning the waters again (to use Russell’s rather nice play on words) by putting religion where Milton would have put human beings. The result smells repugnantly fishy.
Ah well you see Eric not having read it I didn’t know all that!
I forget why I thought it sounded interesting…But don’t worry, if it’s like that then if I do get around to it, I will scowl on page 1 and snarl on page 2 and close the book forever on page 3.