Stanley Fish's 1996 article in First Things, "Why Can't We All Just Get Along?", is a must-read. Despite continued leaps and bounds in the realms of science -- from plate tectonics and the moon landing to the human genome and a bonafide "wrinkle in time" -- it's amazing to see just how little progress has been made in the human art of philosophizing.
In humankind's great experiment to ensure a permanent intellectual peacetime, the enlightenment effectively swallowed up the entire playing field. Liberalism depicts the mind as "not yet settled" on a particular set of dogmas (foundational beliefs from which thought proceeds). Fish offers the tenets of liberalism as follows:
1. Even if you do not embrace a point of view you can still understand it
2. Beliefs are analyzed by rational criteria which themselves are bound to no particular beliefs; they are objective
3. A fixed commitment to an idea or value is a sign of cognitive and moral infirmity
4. A reasonable mind is an open mind, ready to jettison its most cherished convictions
In my recent experience in the worlds of education and institutional religion in the Midwest -- in sync with my time spent in Scotland and Canada in years gone by -- Fish is right to say that liberals, generally speaking, hold to these very tenets as dogmas. And I've been one of them. I've acted as an authority figure in matters religious, moral, ethical and philosophical, and I've promulgated the view that our society is meant to be one characterized by skepticism, tolerance and infidelity.
Fish further argues that to suggest to the liberal that this message is self-contradictory, since it marginalizes and excludes (among others) the religious voice, might get you a conciliatory seat at the table of discussion, only to be patronized by ears which do not hear and eyes that politely stare before looking elsewhere for more "reasonable" contributors.
I find this positively devastating. This means that there's an unresolvable intellectual and moral war in our society, and we've been doing a good job at fooling ourselves that if we could only universalize the principles of skepticism, tolerance and infidelity, it would yield that world which John Lennon imagined ten years after the publication of this article.
Fish has been criticized as an extreme relativist and an anti-foundationalist. He got his start in medieval literature (especially Milton, quoted extensively in the article linked above) and then developed a literary theory that made central the interpretative communities of a given text -- akin to reader-response theory. For Fish, truth is always contingent (dependent) on the culture from whence it rises. Appropriately, perhaps, Terry Eagleton accuses Fish of being a liberal among liberals, having abandoned all hope of an objective plane from which to launch a properly robust and legitimate critique. (I'm truly sorry that I wasn't still in Edinburgh when Eagleton delivered his The God Debate Gifford lectures two years ago.)
Two questions must be answered. First, is it possible to be committed and tolerant at the same time? What does that look like? Second, has liberalism as a movement graduated to that lofty, laurel-laden vantage point?
I remember an article by Fish that I read in college, "Going Down the Anti-Formalist Road," published in 1989. Near the end of the article (p.29) he tries to clear up how anti-foundationalism (the denial in the existence of any truth, known or unknown, that operates as the basis for all real knowledge) does not contradict itself by offering itself as yet another foundation. This is basically the same issue the relativist faces when saying "There is no absolute truth" -- is that statement absolutely true?
Fish comments, "Philosophers of a certain kind love this kind of argument, and one can almost hear them chortle as they make it." He observes that his thesis merely asserts the local, in-culture quality of all foundations, his own included, and the way in which they are established "by persuasion," that is, by argument and counter-argument, all limited by context, none of them "just there." And, as long as anti-foundationalism "holds the field" against all critics, it can be considered "absolutely true (at least for the time being)".
Well, if you're like me, your brain is swimming right now. Nevertheless, it seems to me that Fish is right about modern-day liberalism. Whether or not it's possible to be at once tolerant and committed, we can say for certain that it's not happening often enough.
And for myself, I've noticed a blatant undercurrent of tension and muddled thinking whenever I pronounce the rightness in accepting the (in my view ridiculous) literal beliefs of conservative Christians, whether about the rapture, the devil, the resurrection or the divine nature of Jesus. Even though I don't subscribe to those beliefs, I accept that others believe them.
Unfortunately, the language of acceptance and tolerance is very ambiguous. As Fish states, do I treat the ramifications of those beliefs as credible and fully equal to my own? For example, if I married a woman of non-materialistic persuasions, and we raised a child, and that child became sick with leukemia, would I allow her to skip a visit to a medical clinic and simply trust to the priest? Hardly.
Can tolerance, then, really be called tolerance if it excludes personal risk? I have a hard time seeing how.
Real intellectual conflicts do exist in our world. It's difficult to identify universal principles that all people to agree on, and can be used as the basis of fruitful dialogue. The problem is only exacerbated if we consider societies on the other side of the globe, or those from centuries past. And throwing the blanket of tolerance over them does mitigate conflict, but to what extent does it do so falsely? Is it worth it?
Maybe in some cases, it is. Right now we have a locked Congress with an approval rating lower than polygamy, made of two sides who refuse to compromise, much less tolerate each other. We have a country to run, an economy to bolster, and a debt to repay. Let's quit bickering and meet half-way, right?
On the other hand, maybe the Conservative's open love for dogma has been mocked by the Liberal's equal but far more secret love for the same for too long. Could a deep-seated hypocrisy in the values I've embraced for years, the Enlightenment doctrine, produced the bitter and backwards politics we now see emanating from the GOP?
It's a theory, and it's one I wish I could investigate further. But I can't think how. So I'll instead let mastication and rumination take over, keep my eyes and ears open, and see if these ideas ring true over the course of the next couple years.
In humankind's great experiment to ensure a permanent intellectual peacetime, the enlightenment effectively swallowed up the entire playing field. Liberalism depicts the mind as "not yet settled" on a particular set of dogmas (foundational beliefs from which thought proceeds). Fish offers the tenets of liberalism as follows:
1. Even if you do not embrace a point of view you can still understand it
2. Beliefs are analyzed by rational criteria which themselves are bound to no particular beliefs; they are objective
3. A fixed commitment to an idea or value is a sign of cognitive and moral infirmity
4. A reasonable mind is an open mind, ready to jettison its most cherished convictions
In my recent experience in the worlds of education and institutional religion in the Midwest -- in sync with my time spent in Scotland and Canada in years gone by -- Fish is right to say that liberals, generally speaking, hold to these very tenets as dogmas. And I've been one of them. I've acted as an authority figure in matters religious, moral, ethical and philosophical, and I've promulgated the view that our society is meant to be one characterized by skepticism, tolerance and infidelity.
Fish further argues that to suggest to the liberal that this message is self-contradictory, since it marginalizes and excludes (among others) the religious voice, might get you a conciliatory seat at the table of discussion, only to be patronized by ears which do not hear and eyes that politely stare before looking elsewhere for more "reasonable" contributors.
I find this positively devastating. This means that there's an unresolvable intellectual and moral war in our society, and we've been doing a good job at fooling ourselves that if we could only universalize the principles of skepticism, tolerance and infidelity, it would yield that world which John Lennon imagined ten years after the publication of this article.
Fish has been criticized as an extreme relativist and an anti-foundationalist. He got his start in medieval literature (especially Milton, quoted extensively in the article linked above) and then developed a literary theory that made central the interpretative communities of a given text -- akin to reader-response theory. For Fish, truth is always contingent (dependent) on the culture from whence it rises. Appropriately, perhaps, Terry Eagleton accuses Fish of being a liberal among liberals, having abandoned all hope of an objective plane from which to launch a properly robust and legitimate critique. (I'm truly sorry that I wasn't still in Edinburgh when Eagleton delivered his The God Debate Gifford lectures two years ago.)
Two questions must be answered. First, is it possible to be committed and tolerant at the same time? What does that look like? Second, has liberalism as a movement graduated to that lofty, laurel-laden vantage point?
I remember an article by Fish that I read in college, "Going Down the Anti-Formalist Road," published in 1989. Near the end of the article (p.29) he tries to clear up how anti-foundationalism (the denial in the existence of any truth, known or unknown, that operates as the basis for all real knowledge) does not contradict itself by offering itself as yet another foundation. This is basically the same issue the relativist faces when saying "There is no absolute truth" -- is that statement absolutely true?
Fish comments, "Philosophers of a certain kind love this kind of argument, and one can almost hear them chortle as they make it." He observes that his thesis merely asserts the local, in-culture quality of all foundations, his own included, and the way in which they are established "by persuasion," that is, by argument and counter-argument, all limited by context, none of them "just there." And, as long as anti-foundationalism "holds the field" against all critics, it can be considered "absolutely true (at least for the time being)".
Well, if you're like me, your brain is swimming right now. Nevertheless, it seems to me that Fish is right about modern-day liberalism. Whether or not it's possible to be at once tolerant and committed, we can say for certain that it's not happening often enough.
And for myself, I've noticed a blatant undercurrent of tension and muddled thinking whenever I pronounce the rightness in accepting the (in my view ridiculous) literal beliefs of conservative Christians, whether about the rapture, the devil, the resurrection or the divine nature of Jesus. Even though I don't subscribe to those beliefs, I accept that others believe them.
Unfortunately, the language of acceptance and tolerance is very ambiguous. As Fish states, do I treat the ramifications of those beliefs as credible and fully equal to my own? For example, if I married a woman of non-materialistic persuasions, and we raised a child, and that child became sick with leukemia, would I allow her to skip a visit to a medical clinic and simply trust to the priest? Hardly.
Can tolerance, then, really be called tolerance if it excludes personal risk? I have a hard time seeing how.
Real intellectual conflicts do exist in our world. It's difficult to identify universal principles that all people to agree on, and can be used as the basis of fruitful dialogue. The problem is only exacerbated if we consider societies on the other side of the globe, or those from centuries past. And throwing the blanket of tolerance over them does mitigate conflict, but to what extent does it do so falsely? Is it worth it?
Maybe in some cases, it is. Right now we have a locked Congress with an approval rating lower than polygamy, made of two sides who refuse to compromise, much less tolerate each other. We have a country to run, an economy to bolster, and a debt to repay. Let's quit bickering and meet half-way, right?
On the other hand, maybe the Conservative's open love for dogma has been mocked by the Liberal's equal but far more secret love for the same for too long. Could a deep-seated hypocrisy in the values I've embraced for years, the Enlightenment doctrine, produced the bitter and backwards politics we now see emanating from the GOP?
It's a theory, and it's one I wish I could investigate further. But I can't think how. So I'll instead let mastication and rumination take over, keep my eyes and ears open, and see if these ideas ring true over the course of the next couple years.
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