Barbelith Underground > Switchboard > Freedom of the Press versus Islamic Blasphemy

Stanley Fish's op-ed in the New York Times today is worth reading, "Our Faith in Letting it All Hang Out," which I think I actually somewhat agree with, although I'm not convinced his use of 'liberalism' is as careful as it should be, and I'm sure I'm convinced by his taking this stance, as I'll explain below. However, Since NYT has that annoying registration policy and rapid conversion to pay-per-view archive, I'll excerpt the entire conclusion to the piece:

... the editors who have run the cartoons do not believe that Muslims are evil infidels who must either be converted or vanquished. They do not publish the offending cartoons in an effort to further some religious or political vision; they do it gratuitously, almost accidentally. Concerned only to stand up for an abstract principle — free speech — they seize on whatever content happens to come their way and use it as an example of what the principle should be protecting. The fact that for others the content may be life itself is beside their point.

This is itself a morality — the morality of a withdrawal from morality in any strong, insistent form. It is certainly different from the morality of those for whom the Danish cartoons are blasphemy and monstrously evil. And the difference, I think, is to the credit of the Muslim protesters and to the discredit of the liberal editors.

The argument from reciprocity — you do it to us, so how can you complain if we do it to you? — will have force only if the moral equivalence of "us" and "you" is presupposed. But the relativizing of ideologies and religions belongs to the liberal theology, and would hardly be persuasive to a Muslim.

This is why calls for "dialogue," issued so frequently of late by the pundits with an unbearable smugness — you can just see them thinking, "What's wrong with these people?" — are unlikely to fall on receptive ears. The belief in the therapeutic and redemptive force of dialogue depends on the assumption (central to liberalism's theology) that, after all, no idea is worth fighting over to the death and that we can always reach a position of accommodation if only we will sit down and talk it out.

But a firm adherent of a comprehensive religion doesn't want dialogue about his beliefs; he wants those beliefs to prevail. Dialogue is not a tenet in his creed, and invoking it is unlikely to do anything but further persuade him that you have missed the point — as, indeed, you are pledged to do, so long as liberalism is the name of your faith.

(Stanley Fish is a former lit. professor at Duke in its heydey, now a law prof at Florida International Univ., who has recently taken to deep criticism of "liberalism"--which he uses, I think, pretty loosely. I've seen him speak and read his op-ed pieces whenever I come across them, and I can't quite pin him down: he so delights in creating an image of himself as a kind of curmudgeonly contrarian--an older Chris Hitchens in some ways--that I can't quite tell how much he actually believes his own arguments. Which, for me, makes me somewhat skeptical of this claim for grounded morality. The Wikipedia entry on Fish also finds a kind of slipperiness in Mr. Fish... ).

If anyone wants to read the whole thing, PM me.