Culture of Death Watch
How To Catch Fish
by Thaddeus J.
Kozinski
Stanley
Fish is infamous for his subversive talents, especially his ability to
deconstruct what seem to be impregnable arguments with a mixture of penetrating
intuition, rigorous analysis, and ironical wit. Catholic scholars skeptical to
the coherence of liberal political thought owe Fish a great debt for his
uncanny ability to expose the rotting skeleton of liberal orthodoxy, revealing
the irrational and intolerant dogmas hiding underneath its shiny skin. Although
normally the enemy of secular liberalism is the friend of Catholicism, this is
not quite the case with Stanley Fish; for, Fish's postmodern anti-liberalism is
really a more advanced metastasization of modernism, and is therefore as much
an enemy to traditional Catholicism as enlightenment Liberalism. Nevertheless,
Fish has done some great work, and it is worthwhile for Catholics to study him.
We should appreciate and utilize the good wherever it can be found. Fish affords
Catholics effective arguments against the regnant, ubiquitous, and deceptive
liberalism, and we can profit from them.
Liberalism is a Liar
"All of liberalism's
efforts to accommodate or tame illiberal forces fail, either by underestimating
and trivializing what they oppose or by mirroring it." (
The only reason people are
unaware of this is that it is a deftly hidden lie that all but the most
anti-liberal simply can not—or will not—see. Fish sees it, and he wants to show
us what he sees. The question though is whether Fish is able to see it because
he is anti-liberal or because he is the consummate liberal. To prove his thesis
(though I am not sure what "prove" can mean to an antifoundationalist
like Fish who accepts no independently accessible locus of truth) Fish
discusses three types of liberal theorists that constitute the ultimate liberal
antipodes outside of which a theory may not be properly identified as
"liberal." These three types of liberals are:
(1) Those who urge fairness and deliberative rationality as ways of
securing political order against disruptive energies, especially the energy of
fundamentalist religions,
(2) those who believe that fairness and deliberative rationality are
stalking horses for a political agenda that will not announce itself, and
(3) those (actually one) who offer as an antidote to disorder more of
the same.
Fish calls their work
"empty" and explains the content of that null set in the rest of his
essay. The question is whether Fish himself unlocks Locke's "lock,"
so to speak, or does he rather give us an even more impregnable one than the
one he purports to break.
What Fish means by
"theory" is fundamentally important for understanding his argument.
For Fish, "theory" is opposed to "belief" in that
"theories are something you can have . . . beliefs have you, in the sense
that there can be no distance between them and the acts they enable." Now,
theories are always bound up with some "principles" that are akin to
theories in the "distance" one can have from them. That is, when one
claims to know a theory based upon principles, he is claiming to proceed
"from no angle or from an angle so wide that it takes in everyone, no
matter what his religion, political affiliation, ethnic identification, and so
on." But for Fish the principles that constitute a theory are always (by
the very nature of things) "tied to some moral or political agenda."
Therefore, "liberal theory," which is inevitably made up of
"principles," is a contradiction in terms. There is no such thing as
liberal theory, or any theory for that matter, because there is no such thing
as a belief-neutral theory, no such thing as a human perspective with "an
angle so wide that it takes in everyone." Insofar as liberalism purports
to have achieved this angle, it is a liar.
What Fish wants is to make
us aware of the lie by convincing us that "conflict is the name of our condition."
Liberalism does everything in its power to destroy this awareness by convincing
us that "we can all get along" as long as we accept one of its
"judgments of all mankind," to use words of Locke, that is proffered
to us obsessively by liberal theorists and the religious, cultural and
political "authorities" that pay obeisance to them. But since the
content of this so-called "universal judgment" is, in truth, just the
personal, subjective, moral agenda-promoting belief of the particular theorist
or authority in question, a belief that by very definition possesses no
objectively-evaluative feature that can be recognized and accepted by others
("others" inevitably see a theory "from the outside"),
every appeal to principle, even if it is worded as an appeal to
"procedure" or "fairness" or "equality" or, dare
I say it, "freedom," and characterized as a self-evident reality,
whether it be Locke's negative standard of "madness," Rawls' positive
standard of "reasonableness," or the modern liberal's criteria of
"hate and prejudice," is just a big, fat lie. It is the very
tyrannical imposition of a particular view of the good the eradication of which
liberalism pretends to base its entire project upon! In fact, it is a more
tyrannical imposition than any dark-aged autocrat could have envisioned; for,
whatever tyrannies existed under the rule of Throne and Altar, they were, at
least, honest tyrannies; the modern brand of tyrant rules, as E. Michael Jones
has demonstrated, by convincing his willing victims that he brings
"liberation" in the form of access to pornography, contraception,
abortion, McDonalds, and MTV.
Once we see we have been
lied to, we can escape from the immorality of living out this lie by rejecting
liberalism absolutely and seeking to overthrow it, "The religious person
should not seek an accommodation with liberalism; he should seek to rout it
from the field, to extirpate it, root and branch." For Fish, true morality
can come about only if we have purged the liberal lie from our souls, for then we
can be truly free to "figure out what you think is right and then look
around for ways to be true to it." This is the content of morality for
Fish, and he finishes his essay with an exhortation to be moral. In short:
Liberalism is immorality; reject liberalism and become moral! There seems to be
no more radical rejection of the liberal order possible, since liberalism
identifies itself as morality itself, and exhorts us to reject anti-liberalism
to become moral. If I were Fish, I would hire a bodyguard. Liberals cannot be
trusted to be tolerant.
Bad Fish
“The genius of the liberal
state,” Kenneth Craycraft tells us, “is precisely its ability to afford a
rather wide range of individual religious liberty, while denying the most
fundamental and authentic freedom— that of a church which would presume to
judge and, when necessary, condemn the regime as immoral.” (Kenneth R.
Craycraft, Jr. The American Myth of Religious Freedom. [
Now, Fish's solution would
be to have a state in which everyone has the right to judge and condemn the
regime at every moment, since, for Fish, "conflict is the name of our
condition." I agree that conflict is intrinsic to a fallen world and hence
a fallen politics, and anyone who disagrees with this is just plain stupid.
Chesterton said that the dogma of original sin is irrefutable—just read the
newspapers. But the only logical conclusion is outright war, if we digest Fish
properly. And no one wants that, at least not as the only indicator that we are
being moral! Fish thinks that politics is war because he is an
anti-foundationalist when it comes to morality. He is like Hume in this
respect, except Hume was happy enough with his tea-time at 3:00 PM, even if
violent anarchy could never be perpetually avoided according to Hume's own
principles; at least it wouldn't happen in his lifetime, he might have gambled.
Fish would rather skip the tea and urge us all to join the moral army of
fighting for our beliefs right now, even if we can't know for sure that they
are true beliefs! A nihilistic army of moral warriors, all against all, is the
truth of things, so let's, at least, live honestly.
But of course, Fish can't
know for sure, according to his self-sabotaging epistemology, that this state
of moral war is the truth of things! Thus, his writing is no different in its
deceptiveness than Locke's Letter Concerning Toleration or Rawls's Theory
of Justice. Fish, like Locke and his modern disciples, can give us nothing
other than yet another iteration of "the universal judgment of
mankind" or "reasonableness" or "democracy" or
"the war on terror" or what have you, that is, some "from the
inside" platitudinous truth claim that masks itself as "the way
things are" and is ostensibly accessible from the outside. (Why else would
Fish publish his writings if they weren't publicly accessible?)
In spite of Fish's
deceptiveness, I admire him—in the same way I admire Nietzsche. They both have
the courage to display openly the intellectual, moral, and political
consequences that ensue when one denies the existence of objective truth with
respect to God's will and the ability to know such objective truth. This is
what liberalism denies, hiding its denial. Insofar as Fish exposes this
subterfuge, he is an effective enemy of liberalism and a friend of Catholicism.
However, insofar as he engages in this denial himself, even though he is open
about it, he must still be considered an enemy to the cause of Christ.
The Protestant
Revolutionaries denied the certain truths declared by the infallible teaching
authority of the Magisterium of the Catholic Church, as well as the capacity of
Her custodians and all faithful Christians to be certain of Her possession of
the truth. They supplanted this authority and certainty with Sola Scriptura,
an inexorably subjective and "from the inside" conduit to definitive
and saving knowledge about Christ. The Enlightenment liberals then built on
this subjectivist sand and supplanted the Bible with "reason." The
post-modernists then supplanted reason with "irony," and the
"truth" that there is no access to universal truth about the will of
God, or at least no way to know that one has access to it. And at the end of
this line, we find Fish.
The Fisherman's Line
Ultimately, only Jesus
Christ has the authority to settle the just bounds between Church and state
because He is the author of both. By the fact of His Incarnation, he brought
together Church and state, Heaven and earth, divinity and humanity for the
first time, and after bringing them together, He commanded their proper separation:
"Render to Caesar what is Caesar's, and to God what is God's."
Therefore, in order to know we owe Caesar and God today, we must listen to His
authentic and infallible mouthpiece. Unless we have access to the voice of
Christ, Fish is right—there is no way of solving the problem; it is mission
impossible.
Yet, there must be a
solution because Christ commanded us to solve the problem. In short, Christ
must have given us a sure and "from the outside" way of determining
His will regarding the proper ordering of Church and state. Anything but a
living, visible, unified, universal, hierarchical, concrete, corporal
institution whose unity, holiness, universality, and apostolicity can be
recognized by all "from the outside" could not afford us the clear
determination of Christ's will. Anything less inevitably perpetuates both the
denial of access, and the subjective uncertainty of that access, to the
definitive truth regarding Christ's will, a denial and uncertainty that makes
the just separation of the prerogatives of Church and state impossible. What we
would have without it is either outright war or the Procrustean attempt to make
the message of the Gospel fit into the arbitrary will of whoever happens to be
ruling the state - in short, chaos or a hopelessly compromised Christianity.
Is our only alternative a
perpetual chorus of liberals like Locke and Fish telling us what reality is and
what the "true" Church is and what God wants, people who claim to
know something they don't know and to do something they can't do? Is there no
end to the Lockes, Rousseaus, and Rawlses; the Jeffersons, Madisons, and
Wilsons; the Weigels, Novaks, and Neuhauses, that is, deluded, prideful men
daring to instruct the Catholic Church on what is Caesar’s and what is God’s,
whether in the name of “nature,” “freedom,” and “democracy” – or even in the
name of the Church Herself?
No one but God can define
His Church and Her relationship with the state; no man is God but Christ; and
no one can authoritatively speak for Christ other than His Holy Roman Catholic
Church. Only She has absolute freedom of conscience; only She has been
authorized to speak for God on what belongs to Him! To hook Fish and unlock
Locke, we repair to that line of expert fishermen that traces its ancestry back
to that first fisherman, a fisherman who was also a locksmith; for he was told
by Christ to be "a fisher of men," and was given the keys of the
Kingdom.
This article was
published in the April, 2005 issue of Culture
Wars.
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