STANLEY FISH
Stanley Fish is a professor of humanities and law at Florida International University, in Miami. In the Fall of 2012, he will be Floersheimer Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law. He has also taught at the University of California at Berkeley, Johns Hopkins, Duke University and the University of Illinois, Chicago. He is the author of 13 books, most recently “How to Write a Sentence,” a celebration of sentence craft and sentence pleasure; “Save the World On Your Own Time"; and “The Fugitive in Flight,” a study of the 1960s TV drama.
On Sunday in these pages, Molly Worthen reported on the decline of “the Protestant civil religion that has undergirded our common life for so long “(One Nation Under God?).” That might come as a surprise to the millions of TV viewers who watched the memorial service held in Newtown, Conn., a little more than a week ago. Despite a few gestures in the direction of Catholics and religious minorities (and no gestures at all in the direction of non-believing atheists and agnostics), the tenor of the service was deeply Protestant, as were the remarks of President Obama (that famous Muslim!) who seemed more preacher than chief executive as he repeatedly struck biblical cords and ended by recalling Jesus’s call to send the little children to him.
The memorial service was not the only occasion marked by the unapologetic invocation of religious sayings and symbols. For a few days at least, God and Christ were major media personalities, and the outpouring of ritual piety seemed to confirm Brian Leiter’s identification of “existential consolation” as one of the chief characteristics of religion. For believers, writes Leiter in his new book, “Why Tolerate Religion?” religions “render intelligible and tolerable the basic existential facts about human life, such as suffering and death.” Rendering the suffering and death experienced in Newton intelligible is surely what Obama and others were trying to do, and it is easy to understand, as Leiter observes, why religious belief is of “central importance in so many lives.”
But Leiter has another question: Does the undoubted centrality of religion in the lives of its adherents suffice to justify exempting it from generally applicable laws? Should religion enjoy a special status that merits a degree of solicitude and protection not granted to other worldviews or systems of belief?
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I saw the poster in the window of one of the New School buildings. “The Future of Higher Education: A Panel Discussion, Monday, December 3, 6:30 – 8.” To say that I have heard the topic discussed before would be an understatement (maybe 50 times), but I can’t resist the (unlikely) possibility that someone will say the magic word. At the very least I went in with a certain anthropological curiosity. What are they going to say this time?
“They” on this occasion were four college presidents, Stephen J. Friedman of Pace University, Robert A. Scott of Adelphi University, Debora L. Spar of Barnard College and David E. Van Zandt of The New School. The format was good. No prepared statements, just questions posed by Van Zandt acting as moderator and a freewheeling yet structured discussion.
The presidents took turns mapping out the new landscape of higher education — runaway costs, skyrocketing tuition, low graduation rates, the promise and burden of technology, crushing student debt, the effects of globalization — while at the same time expressing intermittent nostalgia for an older one. “Whatever happened to the idyllic liberal arts model?” asked Scott. The answer was, first, that no one could afford it (no more specialized courses with two or three students, said Spar) and, second, that many students don’t seem to want it in an age when the value of courses and degrees is measured by the likelihood of future career earnings.
The tension between a market model and a Socratic model was nicely captured by two statements Spar made in succession. The first warmed my heart: “We want to teach students things they don’t want to know.” That is, rather than regarding students as consumers (all the rage these days in places like England and Texas), we should regard them as yet-to-be-formed intellects who are often best served by saying no to their desires — as we have traditionally. But then Spar immediately added, “Yet, we can’t be too removed from the marketplace.”
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Democrats and the liberal media have been beating up on John McCain and other Republicans for waging a vigorous campaign against the entirely hypothetical possibility — it is the political equivalent of a derivative — that President Obama will nominate Susan Rice to be secretary of state. The president has responded by defending Rice and, in schoolyard fashion, daring her detractors to come after him, the real target.
J. Scott Applewhite/Associated Press Sen. John McCain, joined by Sen. Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire, said he would do all he could to block the nomination of Susan Rice as Secretary of State.They already have done that, and quite successfully; for by mounting what some say is an egregious attack on Rice, McCain and company have outflanked Obama and put him in a box even before there is a real issue on the table. It’s downright diabolical and it is brilliant. They have manufactured a conflict and then positioned themselves so that they can’t lose it.
Let us count the ways in which Obama’s room for maneuvering has been reduced to almost nothing.
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No topic is more frequently debated with less resolution than hate speech. This is made abundantly clear in a new collection of essays written by some of the leading contributors to the debate. The volume is called “The Content and Context of Hate Speech: Rethinking Regulation and Responses,” and it is edited by Michael Herz and Peter Molnar.
What you learn in the course of reading this book is that there is no generally accepted account of (1) what hate speech is, (2) what it does (what its effects are) and (3) what, if anything, should be done about it. To be sure, everyone agrees that it is hate speech when words are used to directly incite violence against a specific person or group of persons. But as Arthur Jacobson and Bernhard Schlink point out in their contribution to the volume, on such occasions the words are instrumental “to an incipient assault,” and it is the assault, not the words, that the state criminalizes. (It is, say the courts, “speech brigaded with action.”) There need be no debate about what to do in the face of that kind of speech because it is already being done by extant laws.
The rest are all hard cases. Is it hate speech when, in a paper with scholarly trappings, someone says that the Holocaust never happened and was invented by Jews in an effort to induce guilt and gain money? Is it hate speech when a pamphlet explains how Muslim Americans plan to impose Shariah law and subvert the traditions of this country? Some who consume such statements will certainly feel hatred for Jews and Muslims, and no doubt those who make such statements intended that result. But no call to violence is issued and one might say — in the United States it will always be said — that while it is hate speech disguised, the disguise is good enough to remove it as a candidate for regulation.
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I saw Ben Affleck’s movie “Argo” the other day, and ever since I’ve been wondering why it’s gotten such good reviews and has even, as some of the reviewers breathlessly say, “been generating Oscar buzz.” It’s not a bad movie; watching it is not a chore; it’s just that I’d seen it done before and done better.
Basically it’s a caper movie: some improbable task has to be pulled off by a combination of ingenuity, training, deception and luck. One of my favorites in the genre is “The Dirty Dozen” (1967). A dozen soldiers incarcerated for a variety of offenses, including murder, are recruited to drop down behind enemy lines and take out some German officers who have gathered for rest and recreation in a palace-like chateau. The movie divides into three pretty much standard parts: (1) the presentation of the scheme to reluctant and unimaginative superiors, (2) the transformation of a ragtag bunch of ne’er-do-wells and wackos into a coherent, coordinated unit and (3) the carrying out of the task. (“Tower Heist” is a recent comic version of the genre, as are the various “Ocean’s” movies and “Inglourious Basterds.”) Everything points forward to part 3, and a movie of this kind is successful if the audience is completely caught up in a succession of unanticipated difficulties, resourceful acts performed by unlikely persons and last-minute escapes from what appears to be certain disaster.
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Akhil Reed Amar, a professor of law at Yale, begins his new book, “America’s Unwritten Constitution,” by calling our attention to two places in Article 1, Section 3 of the Constitution. The first declares that the “Vice President of the United States shall be the President of the Senate.” The second reads, “When the President of the United States is tried, the Chief Justice will preside.”
It doesn’t say why. But the reason, says Amar, emerges “upon a moment’s reflection.” Even though “these words say nothing explicit about the vice president … it quickly dawns on us that the central purpose of the passage was to oust the vice president from the chair … in presidential impeachment trials”; for were he not so ousted, “the vice president would have an intolerable conflict of interest” given that in the event of a conviction, he would ascend to the presidency.
The example illustrates Amar’s main thesis: “The written Constitution cannot work as intended without something outside of it — America’s unwritten Constitution — to fill its gaps and stabilize its meaning.” The meaning of the “inside” — the text’s literal words—cannot be specified independently of the “outside” — the set of assumptions and values that hangs over the enterprise and gives the deeds and words that occur within it shape and point. The text may not enumerate those assumptions and values, but, explains Amar, they “go without saying,” and because they go without saying the words that are said receive their meaning from them. “The unwritten Constitution … helps make sense of the text,” a sense that would not be available if an interpreter were confined to a “clause-bound literalism.”
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Back when Salman Rushdie was made the object of a fatwa because his book “The Satanic Verses” was regarded by many Iranians as a blasphemy against the prophet, I went to a conference where a panel discussion was devoted to Rushdie’s situation. A member of the audience raised his hand and, without a trace of irony, asked, “What’s the matter with those Iranians? Haven’t they ever heard of the First Amendment?”
The implication was that if they had heard of it and read it and gotten its message, they would have understood that you don’t target or attack people because of what they have written; you don’t respond to words, however harsh and wounding you take them to be, as if they were physical blows. Now, in the wake of the events in Libya, the same kind of thing is being said by American politicians and commentators. If you’re listening to the radio and tuning in to the cable news shows, you’re hearing any number of people (including Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton) declare, first, that of course the video vilifying Islam is reprehensible and, second, that nevertheless nothing can justify the eruption of “senseless violence.”
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I’ve never before had the experience of seeing a movie based on the ideas of a friend who is also the film’s producer, writer, co-director and on-camera star. The friend is Dinesh D’Souza and the movie is “2016: Obama’s America.” It’s a bit less than 90 minutes long and for the most part it follows the path of D’Souza’s 2010 book “The Roots of Obama’s Rage.”
That path is at once psychological and historical. D’Souza tells us that he wants to understand Obama’s actions, which do not, he contends, follow either from the American dream of the founding fathers or from the civil rights story of Selma, Birmingham, Brown v. Board of Education and Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech. Instead, according to D’Souza, the dream Obama is intent on realizing is the dream of his anti-colonialist father, Barack Obama Sr., whose influence on his son’s life is, perhaps paradoxically, all the greater because he was absent; the two met only once, when the future president was 10 years old.
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It’s summer 2012. I’m sitting in a newly rehabbed building in Bloomville, N.Y., a town you’ve most likely never heard of. A beautiful young woman, Inez Valk-Kempthorne, is telling me how she began life in the Netherlands, made her way to New York, worked as a model, met and married Justus Kempthorne, a boy from Tennessee, visited friends in Bovina (a metropolis down the road), bought property, built a house of post-and-beam (Justus is a carpenter), fell in love with a building at a town crossroads, bought it, renovated it, and in early July opened Table On Ten (Route 10, that is).
Seventeen years ago, in 1995, I heard that there was a cafe about to open in Bovina. Let’s go see what it is, I said to my wife, and so we drove through a landscape of incredible beauty and arrived at a building that seemed to have been transported from another world. Inside were counters and shelves filled with delicacies one might find at Balducci’s. Polished wood floors, attractive hanging lights, a music system playing Chet Baker (a favorite of mine) and, in charge, a beautiful woman (there’s a pattern here) who welcomed us as if we had always been her best friends. That was Carol Spinelli, who along with her husband, Dave Jalkower, was a refugee from the fast-paced world of the New York garment industry. You can take the girl out of New York, but you can’t take the New York energy out of the girl, and that energy was poured by Carol and Dave into a magic place called Main Street Bovina. It changed everything.
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D’Souza Responds
By STANLEY FISHTags:
dinesh d’souza, film, president obama, Reader Comments
S.F.: How’s the movie doing?
D.D.: Today the film surpassed Michael Moore’s “Bowling for Columbine” and this week it will surpass both Moore’s “Sicko” and Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth.”
S.F.: Congratulations! Many readers asked, “Who funded the movie?” Behind the question is a suspicion that it was bankrolled by right-wing money men, and that therefore it was a bought-and-paid-for campaign ad from the very beginning.
D.D.: The movie was funded by 25 individuals. It is true that none of them, to my knowledge, is an Obama fan, but none of them, not a single one, tried to dictate to me what should be in the film or even reviewed the film before it was released. So the film is not a production of the Republican Party or of the Romney campaign or of the talismanic figures like Karl Rove who are involved in the PACs. I am pleased to say that I will be able to give the investors their money back.
S.F.: Some readers characterized the King’s College, of which you are the president, as “barely above correspondence level,” a place where little science except creationist science is taught, a venue for the promotion of Christian doctrine rather than a genuine liberal arts college devoted to open inquiry. How would you characterize the college? Are you a creationist and do you believe, as one reader assumed you do, that the earth is 6,000 years old?
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