If you descended from Mars and read Stanley Fish’s Feb. 12 NYT op-ed on the cartoon controversy, you would have no idea that editors, cartoonists and all “blasphemers” had been threatened with grisly death by extremist Muslims from London to Karachi. Or that so-called “moderate” forces had called for the prosecution and punishment of those who offend their religious views. Fish is aware of this but chooses not to acknowledge it. To do so would interfere with his conclusion: that the problem is not religious fanaticism — it’s liberalism.
Fish writes:
The first tenet of the liberal religion is that everything (at least in the realm of expression and ideas) is to be permitted, but nothing is to be taken seriously.
Is that so? I dare say I’m not the only liberal who takes expression and ideas quite seriously. One of those ideas is that xenophobia is wrong. But another of those ideas is that when a free media in a free country is vilified and threatened by religious fundamentalists, you stand by the media.
Fish feels differently:
This [i.e., the unshakable belief in free speech] is also a morality — the morality of a withdrawal from morality in any strong, insistent form.
On the contrary, liberals’ belief in free expression is quite strong and insistent, and hardly a “withdrawal from morality.” And what “morality,” pray tell, are the fundamentalists putting forward? Fish has nothing to say about this. Instead he praises the anti-cartoon protesters in the most apolitical terms:
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.
That’s clear enough. He goes on:
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.
In Fish’s world, then, there are “liberals” and there are “Muslims.” There are no liberal Muslims.
But here’s the strangest assertion of all:
[I]n the public sphere, the argument goes, one’s religious views must be put forward with diffidence and circumspection. You can still have them and express them — that’s what separates us from theocracies and tyrannies — but they should be worn lightly. Not only must there be no effort to make them into the laws of the land, but they should not be urged on others in ways that make them uncomfortable.
[…]
This is, increasingly, what happens to strongly held faiths in the liberal state. Such beliefs are equally and indifferently authorized as ideas people are perfectly free to believe, but they are equally and indifferently disallowed as ideas that might serve as a basis for action or public policy.
Fish seems to be lamenting this entirely salutary state of affairs. He says nothing about why fundamentalist Islam makes liberals, including liberal Muslims, “uncomfortable.” And he cannot possibly believe that the worldview on display here in the streets of London should “serve as a basis for action or public policy.” So what is Fish doing in this editorial, besides blowing hot air and obfuscating the real issue?
**Note: Andrew Sullivan weighs in here.
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