11.24.05
Fish on ID’s Postmodern Tactics
Stanley Fish takes ID to task in the current Harper’s (12/05) for its appropriation of postmodern strategies. But here we have a problem. The ‘postmodern’ strategy is endemic throughout a host of New Age movements, and in fact the term shows one of its first appearances in Toynbee. It is not a left invention. In any case, the strategy is a false one, to be sure, although one has to wonder that the postmodern left should now complain.
The postmodern critics of science missed the boat here. The reign of Darwinism really does serve the interests of those in power and is quite hegemonic.
At the end of the article Fish makes a dubious comparison with Holocaust deniers, not quoted.
Academic Cross-Dressing
When George W. Bush said knowledge is neither inertly given nor recently that evolution and merely a matter of personal opinion but Intelligent Design should. be taught side by side, so that students “can understand what the debate is about,” he probably didn’t know that he was subscribing to the wisdom of Gerald Graff, a professor of English at the University of Illinois, Chicago, and a founder of Teachers for a Democratic Culture, an organization dedicated to “combating conservative misrepresentations” of what goes on in college classrooms. Graff and Intelligent Design are now a couple on the Internet; a Google search for both together will turn up more than 100,000 pages, even though Graff had never written a word on the subject until he wrote in protest against his having been “hijacked by the Christian Right.” What the Christian Right took from him (without acknowledgment) was the idea that college instructors should “teach the conflicts” around academic issues so that students will learn that knowledge is neither inertly given nor merely a matter of personal opinion but is established in the crucible of controversy. What is ironic is that although Graff made his case for teaching the controversies in a book entitled Beyond the Culture Wars, the culture wars have now appropriated his thesis and made it into a weapon. In the Intelligent Design army, from Bush on down to every foot soldier, “teach the controversy” is the battle cry. It is an effective one, for it takes the focus away from the scientific credibility of Intelligent Design away from the question, “Why should it be taught in a biology class?” and puts it instead on the more abstract issues of freedom and open inquiry. Rather than saying we’re right, the other guys are wrong, and here are the scientific reasons why, Intelligent Design polemicists say that every idea should at least get a hearing; that unpopular or minority views should always be represented; that questions of right and wrong should be left open; that what currently counts as knowledge should” always be suspect, because it will typically reflect the interests and preferences of those in power. These ideas have been appropriated wholesale from the rhetoric of multiculturalism-a school of thought, emerging from the 1960s left, that proceeds from the unimpeachable observation that there are many different standards of judgment in the world to the unwarranted conclusion that judgment should therefore be dethroned entirely. Multiculturalism’s goal was to gain acceptance for practices ruled out of bounds by established authority; its strategy was not to put new forms of authority in
place of the old ones (which would have required the constructing of arguments) but instead to render all authority illegitimate, by explaining it away as the accidental ascendancy of
one tradition over its equally worthy rivals. Why should we accept a canon of literature put in place by dead white males? Why should we stigmatize homosexual behavior just because it is condemned by a few church fathers? Once questions like these are posed and the expected answer-there is no reason, just prejudice and custom- has been given, the way is open for any constituency to play the same
game. If multiculturalists can defend gay marriage by challenging the right of a church or a state to define what marriage is, why can’t Intelligent Design proponents demand equal time in the classroom by challenging the right of Ivy League professors to say what science is?
One needn’t believe in this line of argument in order to employ it; it is purely a matter of tactics. Phillip E. Johnson, a leading Intelligent Design advocate, is quite forthright about this. “I’m no postmodernist,” he declares in a 1996 interview with the sociologist Amy Binder, but “I’ve learned a lot” from reading them. What he’s learned, he reports, is how to talk about “hidden assumptions” and “power relationships,” and how to use those concepts to cast doubt on the authority of “science educators” and other purveyors of the reigning orthodoxy. His views, he says, “are considered outlandish in the academic world,” but the strategy he borrows from the postmodernists-the strategy of claiming to have been marginalized by the powers that be-is, he boasts, “dead-bang mainstream academia these days.”
This is nothing if not clever. In an academy where talk of “marginalization” and “hegemonic exclusion” ~
is routine, Johnson and his friends can use that talk-in which they have no real stake-to gain a hearing for ideas that have failed to make their way in the usual give- and-take of the academic debates Graff celebrates. In Graff’s book, “teach the controversy” is a serious answer to a serious question: namely, how can we make students aware of the underlying issues that structure academic discourse? In the work of Johnson and other Intelligent Design proponents, “teach the controversy” is the answer to no question. Instead it is a wedge for prying open the doors of a world to which they have been denied access by gatekeepers-individual scientists, departments of biology, professional associations, editors of learned journals-who have found -: what they say unpersuasive. In their hands, the idea of teaching the controversies ceases to be an academic proposal directed at teachers and students and becomes a political proposal directed at legislators, school boards, and the general public. They say “teach the controversy,” but what they mean is that biology, having rejected Intelligent Design on scientific grounds, should nevertheless be forced to include it on the larger grounds of fairness.
The sleight of hand here is to deflect attention from the specific merits of one’s claims
by attaching them to some general truth or value that can then be piously affirmed. This is why Intelligent Design advocates so often urge a long view of history. Isn’t it the case, they ask, that it was once evolutionary theory that was kept out of some classrooms in this country? That proved to be an error; isn’t it possible that, someday, refusing to teach Intelligent Design in science classes will be thought to have been an error, too? After all, haven’t many once-discredited theories been accepted by a later generation of scholars? And doesn’t history show us that apparently settled wisdom is often kept in place by those whose careers are invested in it? Although the answer to all these questions is undeniably yes, the mistake-and it is one made by some postmodern thinkers and seized upon by conservative polemicists-is to turn the fact of past error into a reason for distrusting any and all conclusions reached in the present. The judgment of experts is not discredited generally because it has occasionally turned out to be wrong; one has to go with the evidence one has, even if that evidence may be overtaken in the long run. It is no method at all to say that given our uncertainty as to what might turn up in the distant future, we therefore should systematically distrust what now appears to us to be sound and true.
Unfortunately (or fortunately for the Intelligent Design agenda), this is precisely what is said by multiculturalists and some postmodernists; and in saying it they have merely drawn out the implications of one strain of liberalism, the strain that finds its source in John Stuart Mill. In On Liberty, Mill insists that knowledge not meeting the test of repeated challenge is not really knowledge; indeed, he goes so far as to recommend that when a settled conclusion seems to have no challengers, some must be invented, for in his view the process of debate and controversy is more important than any conclusions it might de- liver. This is also the prevailing view of First Amendment doctrine, as articulated by New York Times v. Sullivan (1964), a case in which the values of truth and accuracy are subordinated to the supposedly greater value of “uninhibited, robust, and wide-open” discussion. In its opinion the Court blurs the distinction between true and false statements by recharacterizing the latter (in a footnote that cites Mill) as a “valuable contribution to the public debate,” thus paving the way for those who, like the advocates of Intelligent Design, assen that their views deserve to he com~d (and: taught), even when—especially
when-the vast majority of authorities in the field have declared them to b~ without scientific merit. It is an assertion that liberals by and large resist when the message is racist or sexist, but it is a logical consequence of liberalism’s privileging of tolerance over judgment.
Liberalism privileges tolerance because it is committed to fallibilism, the idea that our opinions about the world, derived as they are from the local, limited perspectives in which we necessarily live, are likely to be in error even when- again, especially when-we are wholly committed to them. If God,
or God’s representative is removed as the guarantor of right judgment, all that remains is the judgment of fallible men and women who will be pretending to divinity whenever they confuse what seems to them to be true for what is really true. Be- cause this mistake is natural to us, because the beliefs we acquire always seem to us to be perspicuous and indubitable, it is necessary, liberalism tells us, to put obstacles in the way of our assenting too easily to what are finally only our opinions. One way to do this is to institutionalize Mill’s advice and to re- quire, as a matter of principle, a diversity of views with respect to any question. The New York Times v. Sullivan decision quotes with approval Judge Learned Hand’s declaration that in essence the First Amendment “presupposes that right conclusions are more likely to be gathered out of a multitude of tongues, than through any kind of authoritative selection.” Typically, those who make pronouncements like this assume (without saying so) that the tongues making up the multitude will belong to persons who are committed to the protocols of rational inquiry; frivolous persons, persons who exploit those protocols qr play with them to gain political ends, are not imagined. (When Graff counsels “teach the controversy,” he means teach the real controversies, not the manufactured ones.) But nothing in a statement like Hand’s rules them out, and once “authoritative selection” has been discounted and even rendered suspect because of its necessarily fallible origins, there is no reason at all for excluding any voice no matter how outlandish its assertions. After all, who’s to say?
Intelligent Designers are not the first denizens of the right to borrow arguments and strategies from the liberal and postmodern left. In the early 1990s the Holocaust denier Bradley Smith was able to place an ad-actually an essay-in college student newspapers in part because he presented his ideas under w’ the heading “The Holocaust Controversy: The Case for Open Debate.” Not the case for why there was no campaign to exterminate the Jews, or for why the Nazis were innocent of genocidal thoughts, or for why Holocaust-promoting Jews are just al trying to drum up “financial support for Jewish causes”-though all these things were asserted in the body of a the ad-but the case for open debate, a and how could anyone, especially an ” academic, be against that? Ours is ~ not a “radical point of view,” Smith ~ asserts. We are just acting on premises that “were worked out some time ago during a little something called the Enlightenment.” In short, we are I the true liberals, and it is the scholars who have become “Thought Police” either by actively working to exclude us or by sitting “dumbly by, allowing campus totalitarians to determine what can be said and what can be read on their campus.”
Proponents of Intelligent Design are rightly outraged when their efforts are linked to the efforts of Holocaust deniers, for there is no moral equivalence between the two projects. One, after all, is in the business of whitewashing genocide, whereas the other wishes only to give God the credit for having created the wonders of the physical world.
(I know that Intelligent Design literature stays away from the word “God,” but no one, in or out of the movement, gives any other answer to the question, “Designed by whom?”) There is, however, an equivalence of strategy that makes linking the two inevitable: in both cases, issues that have been settled in the relevant academic departments–history and biology, respectively-are reopened by reframing them as abstract questions about the value of debate as a moral good. When John West of the Discovery Institute (the Intelligent Design think tank) declares that “All Americans who cherish free speech” should reject any effort to exclude Intelligent Design from the classroom and invokes “the free marketplace of ideas” to clinch his case, his words could be incorporated wholesale into Bradley Smith’s ad. Intelligent Designers and Holocaust deniers, despite the great differences’ between them, play the same shell game; they both say: Look here, in the highest reaches of speculation about inquiry in general, and not there, in the places where the particular, nitty-gritty work of inquiry is actually being done. They appeal to a higher value-the value of controversy as a good no matter what its content or who its participants-and thereby avoid questions about the qualifications necessary to be legitimate competitors in the competition. In the guise of upping the stakes, Intelligent Designers lower them, moving immediately to a perspective so broad and inclusive that all claims are valued not because they have proven out in t~ contest of ideas but simply because they are claims. When any claim has a right to be heard and taught just because it is one, judgment falls by the way- side and is replaced by the imperative to let a hundred (or a million) flowers bloom.
There’s a word for this, and it’s relativism. Polemicists on the right regularly lambaste intellectuals on the left for promoting relativism and its attendant practices-relaxing or abandoning standards, opening the curriculum to any idea with a constituency attached to it, dismissing received wisdom by impugning the motives of those who have established it; disregarding inconvenient evidence and replacing it with grand theories supported by nothing but the partisan beliefs and desires of the theorizers. Whether or not this has ever been true of the right’s targets, it is now demonstrably true of the right itself, whose member’s now recite the mantras of “teach the controversy” or “keep the debate open” whenever they find it convenient. They do so not out of a commitment to scrupulous scholarship (although that will be what is asserted) but in an effort to accomplish through misdirection and displacement what they cannot accomplish through evidence and argument.