Moral Relativity Is a Hot Topic?

[Dave Monroe]

>From Edward Rothstein, "Moral Relativity Is a Hot
Topic? True. Absolutely.," New York Times, Saturday,
July 13th, 2002 ...

Are you now or have you ever been a postmodernist?"

With that ominous echo of McCarthyism, Stanley Fish,
postmodern provocateur and dean of the College of
Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of
Illinois at Chicago, begins his defense of
postmodernism in a symposium in the summer issue of
The Responsive Community (www.gwu.edu/~ccps), a
quarterly political journal edited by Amitai Etzioni. 

Clearly, Mr. Fish continues, no one has yet threatened
to treat postmodernists like traitorous Communists,
but "it's only a matter of time," he says. A new
version of "America, love it or leave it!" is in the
making, he claims, "and the drumbeat is growing
louder." A "few professors of literature, history, and
sociology," he asserts, are now being told that they
are directly responsible for "the weakening of the
nation's moral fiber" and that they are indirectly
responsible for the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11.

This seems bizarre indeed. Postmodernism — familiarly
called pomo — has its roots in French and German
philosophy, but surely it has proven itself to be
loyally all-American. True, it has courted
controversy, and has been accused of failing to
recognize self-evident moral truths and even
scientific fact. Still, for decades the term has
thrived in university literature and history
departments and among communities of artists, and it
has been associated with pastiche, irony, relativism
and iconoclasm. 

But now Mr. Fish, fearing the growing drumbeat, has
mounted a campaign to defend pomo. His views are the
focus of the journal's symposium, "Can Postmodernists
Condemn Terrorism?," in which his often idiosyncratic
interpretations are challenged by academic luminaries
like Richard Rorty, Benjamin R. Barber and Cass
Sunstein. Mr. Fish also raises the pomo flag in
"Postmodern Warfare: The Ignorance of Our Warrior
Intellectuals," a cover article in the July issue of
Harper's magazine 

[...]

... I am among the pioneers in Mr. Fish's imagined
witch hunt. 

That is because on Sept. 22, my Connections column
suggested that the destruction of the World Trade
Center and the attack on the Pentagon could upset the
presuppositions of two major academic movements:
postmodernism and postcolonialism. Postmodernism, I
argued, challenges the notion of objective truth and
rejects the possibility of a transcendent ethical
perspective. Surely, I asked, what just happened cries
out for some different understanding?

As for postcolonialism, which treats Western
imperialism as the Original Sin of modern history, it
is prepared to view any act against the West as a
reaction to an injustice perpetrated by the West.
Surely, that, too, would require some revision, given
the totalitarian and fundamentalist goals of this
opponent? Such doctrines, I suggested, will have a
hard time condemning acts of terror in the ways they
deserve. 

[...]

But what is the nature of Mr. Fish's defense? And is
there any connection between pomo ideas about truth
and current battles against Islamic terrorism? 

First of all, Mr. Fish argues that my assertion that
postmodernists challenge the existence of objective
truth is all wrong, and so is my assertion that pomo
has anything to do with relativism. Postmodernists do
not deny the existence of truth, Mr. Fish declares, in
fact he believes in it. What postmodernists do claim,
he says, is that there is no "independent standard of
objectivity." This means that there is no way a truth
can be definitively proved to others. 

This argument would not be universally accepted among
postmodernists, and it still doesn't rescue
postmodernism from relativism. For in the end, whether
Mr. Fish or anybody else believes in the existence of
truth is irrelevant. The crucial point is that he
believes that there is no reliable standard for
proving it to an opponent.

But doesn't that lead to a form of relativism? An
observer might note that each party to a quarrel
asserts a different truth, yet conclude that both are
equally valid because neither can be objectively
proved false. In Fishean pomo, all we have are
competing claims, whether the issue is the numerical
value of pi or the assertion that the Mossad destroyed
the World Trade Center. 

But why should there be no way to definitively judge
such matters? Mr. Fish argues that if such standards
existed, we would have universal agreement. But why
does the existence of disagreement, obstinacy, error,
blindness or stupidity undermine the possibility of
objectively judging truth? In the mess of life,
whether in the courtroom or the classroom, efforts are
made all the time to establish truth objectively;
sometimes they fail, sometimes they succeed. Some
standards are discovered; others may never be found. 

But even if we accept Mr. Fish's arguments, other
problems arise.... 

[...]

The establishment of truth, for Mr. Fish, is a
sociological matter. "Truth" is acknowledged by others
not as a result of indubitable proof but as a result
of power or reward or rhetoric. Can't this change
expectations and behavior and even alter attitudes
toward war? If truth cannot be established on its
merits, then guilt and doubt may come into play when
using force in the name of that truth, particularly
when the arbitrary exercise of power is one of the
opponent's charges.

In the symposium, Mr. Fish seems to backpedal a bit,
arguing that pomo might actually have an effect. It
might, he suggests, teach us to understand the
opponent not as an evil abstraction but as a fellow
human being with his own motivations....

[...]

But this explanation is disingenuous. Mr. Fish is
really saying that he prefers one set of distinctions
over another — distinctions that, in this case,
emphasize resemblance, or perhaps even symmetry,
between the terrorist and his opponent, while ignoring
the central differences, including the fact that this
is a war against Islamic terrorism and its
totalitarian ideologies. 

Finally, pomo is bound to affect interpretations of
the war because postmodernism bears a peculiar
relationship to the West itself.[...] Postmodernism
evolved from those Enlightenment ideas. But then, in
the name of those same principles, pomo challenged the
West's claims for priority over competing
perspectives, criticizing its philosophical idealism
and its notions of objectivity. 

[...]

Of course, pomo isn't directly or indirectly
responsible for 9/11. But cannot pomo be taken to task
for its views and effects without Mr. Fish and others
retreating into McCarthy-era rhetoric, posing as
victims of Western absolutism? They are acting as if
they are not quite secure in their possession of the
truth.

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/13/arts/13CONN.html

And see as well ...

Fish, Stanley.  "Don't Blame Relativism."
   The Responsive Community, Vol. 12, No. 3
   (Summer, 2002): 27-31.

http://www.gwu.edu/~ccps/rcq/Fish.pdf

http://www.gwu.edu/~ccps/rcq/rcq123.html

http://www.gwu.edu/~ccps/



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