The school of Fish.

IN AN OP-ED PIECE entitled "Why We Built the Ivory Tower," published in The New York Times, Stanley Fish, a literary archon of the theory of deconstruction that has ravaged the academy for years, conveys some departing thoughts, after his nearly half century in academia. (1) He packages these thoughts in the form of sage advice, though his basic thinking has changed little in either its nihilistic motives or its intellectual project. This is, after all, the very same Stanley Fish whom R. V. Young has warned us against in At War With the Word (1998) and, more recently, in a reconsideration published in these pages under the title "Stanley Fish: The Critic as Sophist." (2)

That Fish's thoughts again grace the pages of the Times comes as no surprise. It is by now all too evident that this national newspaper is not on the side of moral criticism or of the moral imagination. To study its daily book reviews or its weekly literary supplement is to see how the Times routinely weakens the discipline of humane studies and the standards of discrimination which Fish and his disciples are determined to abolish. Hence, to read "Why We Built the Ivory Tower" is to re-encounter Fish's zealous attempt to "make an absolute out of the relative." This attempt is characteristic of the Fishes, at home and abroad, who in theory and in practice are "enemies of the Permanent Things."

In spite of what Fish tells us here about the teacher's responsibility not to "cross the boundary between academic work and partisan advocacy," his words belie his unchanging objective. As such, he exemplifies the recalcitrant American academic who has no sympathy for the logos and who will sully it according to each new opportunity and tactic. He does not fool us, then, when he tells us that "our job is not to change the world, but to interpret it." In a sense, too, Fish still preaches to us a Kafkaesque gospel of meaninglessness: the belief that "character and culture" have no connection, that the health of the community does not depend on the health of the soul, that sacral values and virtues have no impact, that tradition is dead, that the "living principle" and "courage of judgment" have no lasting import or relevance. That, exactly, was and is Fish's message and mission, which are even more threatening in the twenty-first century. He is yet another representative of the spirit of the New Jacobinism, and where it is present, as Claes J. Ryn trenchantly shows, "it has its own discernible tenor and moral-intellectual momentum and direction." (3)

The fact is that what Fish is saying today, in specious language, is in keeping with a post-modern world in which the "disinherited mind" thrives and conquers. Fish also informs us that the job of "forming character"' and "'fashioning citizens"' is not the job of the teacher or implicit in the idea of a university. Clearly the Fish creed, educationally and intellectually, is rooted in the rejection of, or at least in the absence of, the moral imperative. Anything that deters humans from principles of behavior, Fish continues to insist, cannot and should not be seen as credible. We should, he is saying, remain in our "ivory towers" and do in them whatever we like and choose to do, with abandon. This is the Fish doctrine that has gradually throttled higher education and hands down to us the decadence we see in higher learning.

The drug of ideology is the Fish prescription, no matter how he describes it, no matter how he twists word meanings and degrades the sanctity of words like nobility, loyalty, honor, magnanimity. The devaluation of the idea of value is what Fish counsels us, and what the New York Times certifies in print. Fish's is the last word. And this is what is so distancing in a time of troubles, when the sapiential witness of an Irving Babbitt, of a Richard M. Weaver, or of a Russell Kirk is still available to us, but whose truths are ignored--or demeaned by the media czars who have "dreams of avarice." Needless to say, the virtues of "the conservative mind" remain anathema to the Fish doctrine and to his followers who persist in dismantling foundations of order, though that is something Fish would not venture to admit to openly in his Times communique. America's greatest liberal newspaper's own involvement in the Fish doctrine is, as always, marked by editorial subterfuge.

To be sure, were current conditions of criticism more favorable, Fish's position would be quickly and outrightly dismissed, but he and his cohorts have certainly caused the kind of damage that is almost irreparable. In departments of English, in particular, his theories have radically changed teaching and criticism, leaving in their wake cynicism and disorder. "[T]he search for truth," Fish declares, "is its own value...." He goes on to say: "One would like to think that even the exaggerated sense of virtue that is so much a part of the academic mentality has its limits." Actually the word virtue is for Fish a dirty word, to be scorned and removed. What Fish is thus doing in his Times column is what he has always done, that is, not to demonstrate the meaning of something, such as a text, but to persuade his readers and auditors to accept his concepts on his own reductive terms.

Manipulating language and corrupting, beyond good and evil, meaning is what he predictably reveals in "Why We Built the Ivory Tower." Here his interpretations, as elsewhere, are impervious to principle, and he employs them indiscriminately according to a given occasion and each new opportunity that arises. His agenda does not change, the words he uses are simply adapted to his gnostic purposes and relativistic proclivities. The teacher's responsibilities must require, he notes, "arguing (and voting on) things like curriculum, department leadership, the direction of research, the content and manners of teaching, establishing standards ... meeting classes, keeping up in the discipline, assigning and correcting papers, opening up new areas of scholarship." But "moral and civic education," he states, with almost a triumphant sneer, is outside the pale of the educator's purpose and belongs to other cultural agencies duly subordinate, no doubt, to the post-modern temper.

Fish's "sophistical equivocation," Young reminds us, cannot be allowed to cover up his basic instincts as a sophist, as a nominalist whose influence on educational thought and policy is ultimately fatal. At the center of Fish's orientation, Young iterates, "is the steadfast denial of the principles of practical reason; that is, he rejects the notion that there are permanent, self-evident premises upon which human beings ought to base their judgments about morality and other important matters of worth." Only when this rejection is seen for what it is worth, will the consequences of Fish's ideas be fully understood for what they are: attacks on life, literature, and thought and on the values and the principles that underly them--that, cumulatively, shape humane civilization.

That Fish has no concern with civilization, with its Judeo-Christian foundations, with our classical and covenantal patrimony, and with the litterae humaniores, is what drives his doctrine. He has no real feeling for or comprehension of what Babbitt writes in the first paragraph of Democracy and Leadership (1924) in this memorable passage: "When studied with any degree of thoroughness, the economic problem will be found to run into the political problem, the political problem in turn into the philosophical problem, and the philosophical problem itself to be almost indissolubly bound up at last with the religious problem." Fish is incapable of composing such a critical statement, and is equally incapable of conveying Babbitt's integrity of thought, with such clearcut authority, direct and honest expression, and uncompromised meaning--and moral seriousness.

What Fish has to say, in his first paragraph in the Times, discloses precisely what his thinking seeks to proffer: the strictures and commands of a strategist to his troops, in which cliche and deception accentuate the attitudinizing and the assumed self-importance of the criticadministrator who alone "interprets" the world and defines the work of the teaching brotherhood: "After nearly five decades in academia, and five and a half years as a dean at a public university, Iexit with a three-part piece of wisdom for those who work in higher education: do your job; don't try to do someone else's job, as you are unlikely to be qualified; and don't let anyone else do your job." Insight and wisdom are hardly qualities one can expect to meet in Fish; his personality keeps promoting itself, if not his arrogance, however much he may try to mask his goals.

At the heart of Fish's advice to educators is his denigration and leveling of moral principles and the moral constant as major factors in the educational and cultural realm. For him the moral idea, in any form, must be silenced by whatever means, especially as seen in his contempt for language and for the meaning of language. Cleverness and pretension are Fish's twin weapons in his campaign to annul the moral sense, if not the historical sense, which he views as lacking any absolute standing or pertinence. Hence he ventures to inform us that the special morality he espouses is the "morality that penalizes cheating, plagiarizing and shoddy teaching." In other words, Fish and his crew will act as moral arbiters who will designate and if necessary deregulate the areas of moral action; and who, entrusted with the "authority of interpretive communities," will provide us with the grammar of theory and obeisance.

He goes on to observe with a kind of haughty attitude, proper to the mandarins found in positions of power and influence in American society and culture, that if any moral and civic instruction is to be legitimate in the academy, it should be something decided in advance by teaching authorities (indoctrinated by Fish) from among the sundry "competing views of morality and citizenship," with the intention of finding "the right one." If this is what Fish means by the "piece of wisdom" he seeks to convey in his twilight years of imperial service as a teacher and an administrator, then what he says is purely and simply highfalutin bunk. The word according to Fish needs to be seen for what it is: a total replacement for the paradigms of wisdom and insight that endures in the foundational writings of a John Henry Newman or a T. S. Eliot. Neither Fish nor, for that matter, The New York Times, is inclined to acknowledge these exemplars, except in derogatory ways.

Nor, too, will Fish and his followers make any reference to the condition of the human soul, to its moral measure, and to its place in the human equation and in the human community. Rather, Fish chooses to stipulate other categories and entities that he deems worthy of our moral concern. His concerns, in short, are meretricious, no matter how he expresses them in his sophistical terminology. Where in the Fish doctrine, one must ask, is there any appreciation of what Babbitt writes with the implicit sincerity that one will not find in the Fishes of the postmodern world. Intellectual and spiritual ascent is for him a needless and even empty effort, unteachable and untenable. His final sentence of advice, in the Times, summarizes for us the whole truth about Fish and his school: "If we aim low and stick to the tasks we are paid to perform, we might actually get something done."

Fish is a poseur who can present himself when he chooses as even mildly conservative in his counsel, and this is exactly a ploy that makes him dangerously engaging to innocents and discontents alike in the intellectual community. In his Times piece his pseudo-sentiments are subtly included and cleverly presented so as to give his concepts the appeal and the respectability they simply do not warrant. If Fish strives, then, to establish acceptable and reasonable credentials, their falsity is also evident, betrayed as he is by his own ingenuous thought and opinion, by his calculating efforts to deconstruct the moral problem in any way he possibly can, and must, even if on the surface he seems sometimes to invoke its validity. In him sophistry and opportunism fuse instinctively, as his own record corroborates, regardless of his semantic skills. In his Times column, he is again to be caught in his own word-games, as he plays them to the hilt. His strategies in this connection are astonishing as one discerns their indwelling presence not only in his nominalist text, but also in his masquerade. First principles and first things are utterly alien to him and his supporters, who would expunge them from human memory.

Obviously, the tendentiousness of Fish's op-ed commentary is something the Times understands--and promotes. In an earlier period, Fish would have been seen as a consummate casuist who in the end detests the idea of transcendence in any form at the very point that it goes beyond socio- and empirico-critical contexts. His allegiance to these contexts is deep and irrevocable: his words, to be sure, may have at times a convincing ring to them, but they are categorically opposed to the value of things sacred. His is a profane creed, a profane spirit, a profane standard--to be resisted and exposed at every step and in every form. His objectives, hence, are ultimately transparent insofar as they would nullify universal truths and laws; Fish rejects "visions of order," except those he creates and moulds in his own image. He holds to no canons, no traditions, no verity. (A Joseph Conrad, in fact, would see in Fish an archetypal knack for betrayal.)

A post-modern discourse, and faith, is what Fish seeks finally to enthrone; on this score there can be no question whatsoever of where his greatest loyalty lies. If he appears to tell us otherwise, he is first among equals among the people of the lie. His doctrine ultimately enlarges the vacuum of disinheritance in which his authority and his personality reign supreme and in which change and impiety are the sole criteria. For him and his ilk, overstuffed as they are with self-conceit and self-interest, the roots of order and the needs of the soul are inhibitors--myths to be dissipated, as strange gods are incessantly introduced and crowned and dismissed. Clearly, Fish and his theory thrive in an unsettled social and cultural climate where traditions are summarily abrogated. In his work and role, he embodies the "unregenerate personality" T.S. Eliot once pointed out as being "partly self-deceived and partly irresponsible"--and, above all, capable of "great mischief." In short, Fish's educational thought ultimately has the consequence of depriving moral character and critical intelligence of any intrinsic value and is entirely confluent with extreme animus against the "ancient and permanent sense of mankind."

Though Fish also presents himself as a Milton scholar and interpreter, he would have been far better a Joyce authority--the James Joyce of Ulysses whom the novelist E. M. Forster accused of trying "to spatter the universe with dirt, and to make all our habits and ideals (art, religion, and society in particular) seem ludicrous and repulsive." For what Forster has to say about Joyce is equally applicable to what Fish and his post-modernist allies are preaching and teaching in the classroom in the name of decadence. These are ostensibly harsh words to write and to print, but they cannot be watered down at a time of a widening and deepening moral crisis when higher learning, in especial, is being assailed by those who have been conditioned by nihilistic pronouncements. (Young is not far off the mark when he writes that "The collected works of Stanley Fish could very aptly be entitled ... Ideas Have No Consequences.")

Standards of discrimination, for Fish, are the target of his "antifoundationalism"; "meaning" and "interpretation," in effect, must be liberated from any discipline, or value, even as the "text" is shorn of any primacy of meaning. Fish, literary theorist, invites his colleagues to return to their ivory towers not out of some sense of responsibility to moral principle but out of loyalty to "the ideological imperative" and all the heresies and the deceits that issue from it. The ivory tower which he wants us to revere is that which unleashes antinomian precepts and behavior, subject to no civilizing restraint or reticence and impervious to the eternal questions. In Fish's ivory tower a teacher finds the final freedom to do his own thing, within the mantra of Fish's "professional" enunciations. The ivory tower becomes is effect still another abominable laboratory in which to anatomize the canon and the logos, as well as the values and the character of liberal education. Perhaps in this ivory tower the aspiring teacher, created in the image of Stanley Fish, will discover the formula for transforming moral discourse, the imaginative vision, and the critical pursuit into a satanic entropy. Sadly, this transformation signals the end of humane civilization and the crumbling of the ancient edifices, as ordained in The School of Fish.

1. May 21, 2004, A27. 2. Modern Age: A Quarterly Review, Summer 2003, 243-253. 3. The New Jacobinism: Can Democracy Survive? (Washington, D.C., 1991), 14.