July 13, 2002
Moral Relativity Is a Hot Topic? True. Absolutely.
By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN


"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
And who, Mr. Fish asks, has made such defense necessary by trafficking in
a new "brand of scapegoating"? He mentions Pat Robertson and Jerry
Falwell but also "our most distinguished newspapers." This is one of
those papers, and 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.
This argument apparently touched a nerve, for criticism of postmodernism
increased until Mr. Fish felt called upon to defend it on Oct. 15 on the
Op-Ed page of The New York Times. Since then, the controversies, if
anything, have become more heated. The "flap" about pomo, he proclaims in
Harper's, signifies very little "apart from the ignorance of those who
produced it."
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. He
wants to proclaim pomo's innocence of any charges against it, because, he
says, its arguments don't really affect behavior. Postmodernism, he
writes in Harper's, "is a series of arguments, not a way of life or a
recipe for action." Yet Mr. Fish treats truth not as an objectively
verifiable ahistorical object but as something that is wrestled over in
the midst of daily life. Convictions, he argues, are supported by
invoking "received authorities, sacred texts, exemplary achievements and
generally accepted benchmarks." Mr. Fish has even compared the
establishment of scientific truth to a game of baseball; it is judged
according to the rules of the game.
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. Mr. Fish, for example, says that when
Reuters stopped using the word terrorism because "one man's terrorist is
another man's freedom fighter," this policy was mistakenly attacked as
pomo-style cultural relativism. Actually, he argues, Reuters saw that the
word was "unhelpful" because, in Mr. Fish's words, it "prevents us from
making distinctions" that might allow us to get a better picture of whom
we are fighting.
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. As I
argued in September, the insistence that differing perspectives be
accounted for and that the "other" be comprehended is an outgrowth of
Western science and Western liberalism. 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.
The war now taking shape may even be related to the principles that gave
birth to postmodernism. Avatars of absolutism ? terrorist Islamic
fundamentalists ? are challenging the liberal democratic societies of the
West, objecting to their power, their values, their differing creeds,
their modern (and postmodern) perspectives. This is something Mr. Fish
recognizes. But postmodernism tends to retain its old critical habits. So
when postmodernist arguments are applied to the war, they often seem
directed at the West, relativizing its claims and qualifying
condemnations of the opposition.
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.


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