Shaking the Anti-Foundation

Mark Goldblatt from the July 2000 issue

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None of which inhibits Fish himself from privileging his own perspective. He argues in favor of affirmative action by citing "the undoubted facts" of systematic discrimination. And he thereafter rejects the notoriousargument made in Richard Hernnstein's and Charles Murray's 1994 book The Bell Curve that (in Fish's summary) "blacks occupy inferior social and economic positions because they are naturally inferior" on the grounds that there exists "an overwhelming scientific consensus that the concept of race has no biological foundation." By invoking a scientific perspective to reject a conclusion he does not want to entertain, Fish privileges reason over faith. But isn't this hypocritical?

Exactly! Fish would respond.

Despite his own practice, therefore--and hence invincibly--he is still willing to insist that there is no epistemological distinction to be drawn between a system rooted in principles of reason or revealed faith. "Rational deliberation," he declares, is itself an orthodoxy, "and the faith...is that through rational deliberation we shall arrive at the truth."

What Fish has failed to notice (and this is the perpetual relativist blindspot) is that the exercise of reason, at least on the level of first principles, is common to every society that has ever existed. Among ancient societies, for example, the eruption of a volcano might be ascribed to the anger of a god; among contemporary societies, it would more likely be ascribed to geothermal forces. Regardless of who is right, the process of rational deliberation is constant. The volcano erupted for a reason; something caused it to happen. That is the law of causality--which is not one way people have of looking at the world but the way they have of looking at the world.

From a recognition of the universality of rational deliberation follows a critical distinction between, on the one hand, societies that permit the exercise of reason to run its course relatively unfettered and, on the other hand, societies that willfully subordinate the exercise of reason to non-rational concerns. Naturally, the division is never cut and dried; Fish is quite right in his contention that a society's dominant world view always, to some extent, hems in its pursuit of truth. But the fetters are tighter in some societies than in others. There is a clear difference between a university whose motto is "Truth through investigation and experiment" and one whose motto is "Glory unto God in all things."

Likewise, there is a clear difference between a society that values individual freedom over collective stability versus one that values that latter over the former, or between a society sustained through republican democracy and one sustained through totalitarian force. Fish would argue that such a difference is, at bottom, merely a difference in perspectives--in other words, a political difference, not an ethical one. That is his perspective, and, despite its horrific implications, he will not be shaken from it.

Of this last point, I am certain. For in the interest of full disclosure (another principle) I must note that Fish and I engaged in a lengthy e-mail exchange last year after he took exception to a newspaper column I wrote. Though I cannot claim him as a friend, during the course of our correspondence, I found him to be a person of conscience, manners, and not-inconsiderable charm. As an intellectual, he probes effectively but prescribes badly. Despite his prominence, therefore, he'll never be more than a gadfly. But his buzzing is almost always provocative.