Postmodern Warfare

[Dave Monroe]

>From Stanley Fish, "Postmodern Warfare: The Ignorance
of Our Warrior Intellectuals," Harper's, Vol. 305, No.
1826 (July 2002), pp. 33-40 ...

   "Who would have thought, in those first few
minutes, hours, days, that what we now call 9/11 was
to become an event in the Culture Wars? ... it was
only on September 22 that the first sign appeared, in
a New York Times opinion piece written by Edward
rothstein and entitled 'Attacks on U.S. Challenge the
Perspectives of Postmodern True Believers.'  A few
days later ... Julia Keller wrote a smaller piece in
the Chicago Tribune; her title ... 'After the attack,
postmodernism loses its glib grip.'  In the September
24 issue of Time, Roger Rosenblatt announced 'the end
of teh age of irony' ...  And on October 1, John Leo,
in a piece entitled 'Campus hand-wringing is not a
pretty sight,' blamed just about everything on 'the
very dangerous ideas' that have captured our 'campus
culture'; to wit, 'radical cultural relativism,
nonjudgmentalism, and a postmodern conviction that
there are nor moral norms or truths worth defending.'
   "Well, that certianly sounds bad--no truths, no
knowledge, no reality, no morality, no judgments, no
objectivity--and if postmodernists are saying that,
they are not so much dangerous as silly.  Luckily,
however, postmodernists say no such thing, and what
they do say, if it is understood at all, is unlikely
to provoke with the anger or the alarm of our modern
Paul Reveres.... it depends on what you mean by
'objective.'  If you mean a standard of validity and
value that is independent of any historically emergent
and therefore revisable system of thought and
practice, then it is true that many postmodernists
would deny that any such standard is or could ever be
available.  But if by 'objective' one means a standard
of validity an value that is backed up by the
tried-and-true procedures and protocols of a
well-developed practice or discipline--history,
physics, economics, psychology, etc.--then such
standards are all around us, and we make use of them
all the time without an metaphysical anxiety." (p. 33)

   "In the end, the post-9/11 flap about postmodernism
is the blowing of so much smoke, sound and fury
signifying very little apart from the ignorance of
thsoe who produced it.  There's no there there.  This
is not true, however, of what succeeded that flap in
the popular and semi-popular media, the question of
whether or not this is a religious war.  That question
was asked against the backdrop of the Bush
Administration's desire that the war not be
characterized as a religious one...." (p. 34)

"... in matters of religion--and I would say in any
matter--there is no public space, complete with
definitions, standards, norms, criteria, etc., to
which one can have recourse in order to separate out
the true from the false, the revolutionary from the
criminal.  And what that means is that there is no
common ground, at least no common ground on which a
partisan flag has not already been planted, that would
allow someone or some body to render an independent
judgment on the legitimacy of the declarations taht
issue from Bin Laden and his followers about the
religious bases of their actions.
   "Indeed, only if there were such a public space or
common ground could the question 'Is this a religious
war?' be a real question, as oppposed to a tendentious
thesis pretending to be a question, which it is.  That
is to say, the question 'Is this a religious war?' is
not a question about teh war; it is the question that
is the war.  For the question makes assumptions Al
Qaeda members are bound to reject and indeed are
warring against: that it is possible to distinguish
between religious and nonreligious acts from a
perspective uniflected by any religion or ideology
.... these assumptions make sense only in the context
of another: that religion is essentially a private
transaction between you and your God and therefore is,
at least in principle, independent of your actions in
the public sphere, where the imperatives you follow
might be political, economic, philanthropic,
environmental--imperatives that could be affirmed or
rejected by persons independently of their religious
convictions or of their lack of religious convictions.
   "What I have rehearsed for you, in a nutshell, is
the core of what has been called America's 'Civic
Religion' .....  If you leave me free to believe
whatever I like, I'll leave you free to believe
whatever you like, even though in our respective
hearts we reagrd each other's beliefes as false an
ungodly.... Let's live and let live.  Let's obey the
civil, nonsectarian laws and leave the sorting out of
big theological questions to God and eternity.
   "All of that is precisely what adherants of the Al
Qaeda version of Islam hate and categorically deny,
which is why the question 'Is this a religious war?'
will make no sense to them, or, rather, will make only
the sense of a question issuing from an infidel who is
by definition wrong and an enemy...." (pp. 35-6)

   "This refusal of Al Qaeda-style Islam to honor the
public/private distinction is the essence of that
faith ..." (p. 36)

   "Although it may not at first be obvious, the
subsititution for real religions of a religion drained
of particulars is of a piece with the desire to
exorcise postmodernism.  In both instances, waht is
feared is teh absence of a public space or common
ground in relation to which judgmnts and
determinations of value can be made with no reference
to the religious, ethnic, racial, or national
identities of the persons to whom they apply....  This
can't be a religious war.  It must be a war of common
sense or common ground against the fanatical and
irrational.
   "What must be protected, then, is the general, the
possibility of making pronouncements from a
perspective at once detached from and superior to the
sectarian perpectives of particular national
interests, ethnic concerns, and religious obligations;
and the threat to the general is posed by
postmodernism and strong religiosity alike,
postmodernism because its critique of master
narratives deprives us of a mechanism for determining
which of two or more fiercely held beliefs is true
(which is not to deny the category of true belief,
jsut the possibility of identifying it
uncontroversially), strong religiosity because it
insists on its own norms and refuses correction from
the outside.  The antidote to both is the separation
of the private from the public ....  The point of the
public sphere is obvious: it is supposed to be the
locationof those standards and measures that belong to
no one but apply to everyone.  It is the location of
the universal.  The problem is not that there is no
universal--the universal, the absolutely true, exists,
and I know what it is.  The problem is that you know,
too, and that we know different things ...." (p. 37)

   "What to do?  Well, you do the only thing you can
do, the only honest thing: you assert that your
universal is the true one, even though your
adversaries do not accept it, and you do not attribute
their recalcitrance to insanity or mere
criminality--the desired public actegories of
condmenation--but to the fact, regreattable as it may
be, taht they are in the grip of a set of beliefs that
is false.  And there you have to leave it ....  We
have to live with the knowledge of two things: thatw e
are absolutely right and that there is no generally
accepted measure by which our rightness can be
independently validated.  That's just the way it is,
and we should just get on with it, acting in
accordance with our true beliefs ... without exepcting
that some God will descend, like the duck in the old
Groucho Marx TV show, and tell us that we have uttered
the true and secret word." (pp. 37-8)

   "The distinction I am trying to make here is not
between affirming universals and denying them but
between affirming univertsals because you strongly
believe them to be such and affirming universals
because you believe them to have been certified by an
independent authority acknowledged by everyone." (p.
38)

[...]

   "A summary, then, and a scorecard: Is postmodernism
either dead or one of the causes of our present
distress?  No.  Is this a religious war?  You bet. 
Are professors as a class unpatriotic and thus
deserving of the condemnation William Bennett and so
many others rain down on them for the crime of saying
things these pundits don't like?  No again.  Can the
complex realoty of particular situations be captured
in the abstract vocabulary of so-called universals? 
No, in thunder." (p. 40)

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Yahoo! - Official partner of 2002 FIFA World Cup
http://fifaworldcup.yahoo.com