Stanley Fish is a lion of the literary critical establishment, which means that most people know to ignore him. Except for the New York Times, which has a nasty habit of keeping people around who sound reasonable but are generally full of shit in a variety of ways--David Brooks, Ross Douthat, William "Never right about anything" Kristol.
Case in point: Here's Stanley Fish arguing that we should recognize that Santorum comes from a long tradition of American godbotherers. Which means that we're wrong when we say that Santorum doesn't understand the Establishment clause separating Church and State because other people--intelligent people like Supreme Court justices--make the same claims.
(If you have a little voice on your shoulder who says, "well, couldn't they all be wrong together?," congratulations: you're smarter than a New York Times columnist.)
Now, Fish is not alone in taking to task people with whom he nominally agrees with. (I'd bet a fair bit that Fish votes for Obama over any GOP candidate.) Walter Benn Michaels, another lion of the lit crit world--hear him roar!--makes some similar arguments. (See Our America, where he reveals that multi-culturalist liberals are the real racists.)
What particularly bothers me about this Fish article is that Fish seems to concede some legitimacy to Santorum's ideas on the procedural grounds of tradition--precedent. "Other people have said X, therefore we have to take X seriously." I grant this: there's a tradition, so we can't say that X is totally new--but X can still be radical and out of touch with the mainstream--or simply wrong.
Maybe it's my atheist Jewishness, but I take seriously Washington's 1790 letter to the Touro Synagogue in Newport, drawing a picture of a tolerant utopia where "every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree, and there shall be none to make him afraid" about his religious differences. This is an equally valid American tradition--and it's one that Santorum is totally out of touch with.
It seems to me that mentioning the founding fathers have become a lot like quoting biblical passages. People pick and choose what they interpret as best backing up their views and ignore the rest of it. "Oh of course if the founding fathers said that 'all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights' they meant Christianjesusgod as their creator. What other creator could they mean? So therefore we must all follow Christianjesusgod as the founding fathers would have wanted!"
ReplyDeleteI like the portmanteau "Christianjesusgod." I do wish these people would always be more explicit about which God they want us all to follow instead of saying "God" and thinking that we're all on the same page.
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