***** _New York Times_ 6 February 2000
Ad Hoc Ethics
Stanley Fish suggests principles are shaky things to stand on.
By KATHA POLLITT
Stanley Fish -- Milton scholar, famous and powerful English professor (now dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois, Chicago), model for Morris Zapp, the amusing scoundrel of David Lodge's wonderful academic novels -- incites strong opinions. ''He's the devil,'' a historian friend of mine fumed when I told him I was reviewing this book. Whether or not devotion to poststructuralism and reader-response theory qualify as diabolical, ''The Trouble With Principle'' is indeed the sort of book one would expect of Milton's Satan: it's witty, erudite and brimming with self-delight. It's also intermittently frivolous, blinkered and unfair.
As in his previous venture into political philosophy, ''There's No Such Thing as Free Speech: And It's a Good Thing Too,'' Fish argues that there are no neutral principles that stand above and regulate political debate. What Fish calls ''capital-L liberal values'' like freedom of speech, religious tolerance, racial nondiscrimination and academic freedom are either self-contradictory (because they can lead to their own negation, as when free speech empowers Nazis who would destroy it) or fraudulent -- a move in the game the principle supposedly umpires. For Fish, there are only political positions themselves, whose proponents jockey for supremacy using whatever advantage they can muster -- including strategic appeals to neutral principle. Fish finds genuine free-speech devotees a bit bizarre (he calls the American Civil Liberties Union ''that curious organization whose mission it is to find things it hates and then to grow them''). His real target, though, is academic procedural liberals -- Jrgen Habermas is his bete noire -- who, he charges, claim to favor neutral principles but have actually stacked the deck by excluding their enemies -- religious fanatics, for example -- from the discussion on the ground that they are too intolerant and irrational to participate. It's not that Fish necessarily disagrees with the consensus he mocks -- he's strongly for affirmative action and objects to campus speech codes only when they're more trouble than they're worth. He just thinks liberals should stop kidding themselves about their motives. He objects to principle, as it were, on principle.
One can't help noticing, though, that Fish does quite a bit of deck-stacking himself, persistently characterizing his examples in a way that favors the anti-civil-libertarian point of view. Did Salman Rushdie ''denigrate a religion'' by putting a mildly salacious remark about Muhammad in the mouth of a character in ''The Satanic Verses,'' or is that just what his would-be murderers say? Are antipornography ordinances attempts to ensure the portrayal of women as ''human beings and not sex objects'' -- or is that just how antiporn activists see it? After all, it's not so obvious that human beings and sex objects are mutually exclusive. Similarly, it's hard to take seriously objections to school prayer when Fish characterizes it as ''offering a nondenominational prayer to a middle-school audience free to disregard it.'' For all that Fish insists on the importance of history, he seems uninterested in the disastrous history of limiting speech -- whether the banning of birth-control information and deporting immigrants for their left-wing views before World War II or police harassment of gay and lesbian bookstores in the name of fighting pornography in Toronto today.
Fish presents himself as a pragmatist and makes many telling points against the more abstract defenses of neutral principles; his literary critical prowess stands him in particularly good stead when he analyzes the opinions of judges who feel they must permit activities they abhor, like the notorious Nazi march in Skokie, Ill. But what about the pragmatism of the other side? The First Amendment is not primarily about the impossibility of judging ideas. It is about restraining government from using its immense powers to censor and coerce expression.
Similarly, academic freedom is not really about professors having to act as if a Holocaust-denying colleague may be on to something: it's about limiting the power of politicians, trustees and administrators to get rid of people and ideas they don't like. (Fish himself defends academic freedom on these practical grounds, but seems to think others are more starry-eyed. Maybe he's talking to the wrong professors.) That a general rule sometimes protects one's enemies isn't necessarily a reason to throw it out in favor of what Fish, borrowing a phrase from the philosopher Charles Taylor, calls ''inspired adhoccery.'' Fish says: ''Liberal platitudes become usable when all you want from them is a way of marking time between the battles you think you can win. Switching back and forth between talking like a liberal and engaging in distinctly illiberal attitudes is something we all do anyway.'' This sounds shrewd and hard-nosed, but is in fact amazingly nave: you can't call on the courts to ban a Nazi march in Skokie and expect much sympathy when your demonstration is banned. People remember these things -- and they don't like hypocrites, however clever.
Fish's skewed reading of civil-libertarian arguments made reading this book a stimulating but maddening experience. For a man who presents himself as having a Machiavellian appreciation of power, he seems curiously unworldly -- much like the academic capital-L Liberals he despises. Thus he relies on us to make the right case-by-case distinctions after neutral principles have been discarded -- between explicit pornography and great poetry, anti-Semitic propaganda and ''The Merchant of Venice,'' speech codes that work and those that don't, professors with virtuous unpopular ideas and those with evil unpopular ideas. But who is this ''us''? It may be that Stanley Fish could decide all these matters with ease, but no one's going to ask him to, any more than Jrgen Habermas will be invited to redesign the Bundestag as an ideal speech community. In the actual world we live in, these decisions will be made by judges, administrators, policemen, district attorneys, politicians, civic big shots, all with their own agendas. Their interest in the finer points of literary criticism -- or liberalism -- can be judged by phenomena like the recent confiscation in Oklahoma City of the film ''The Tin Drum'' as child pornography and the use of Internet filters that block New York City public school students from connecting to sites about breast cancer and contraception.
At the moment, insisting on the neutral principles Fish dismisses seems a truly inspired bit of adhoccery.
Katha Pollitt, a poet and a columnist for The Nation, is the author, most recently, of ''Reasonable Creatures.''
Copyright 2000 The New York Times Company *****