The Trouble With Principle - Stanley Fish (review)

It must be hard to be liberal in a world full of extremists, hard-liners and fanatics. Liberalism – the ideological offspring of the eighteenth century Enlightenment – is the convictional pattern that today governs practically all public and intellectual discourse in the Western world. Liberals appeal to a set of principles that they hold to be incontrovertible, even “self-evident”: free speech, equality, tolerance, freedom of belief, democracy, the right of the individual to make independent and autonomous moral decisions. These are the dogmas of liberalism.

Yet every now and again the smugness and complacency of liberal thinking is exposed for the sham it is - usually when people whose rights liberals advocate won’t behave. For example, when indigenous or third world peoples speak against homosexuality, western liberals are quite plainly confused as to how to respond without appearing racist, as was the case with the Episcopalian bishops at the Anglican Lambeth conference in 1998. Likewise when David Irving, the historian who claims that the Holocaust was largely a hoax, sought permission into Australia, his right to freedom of speech was denied it because it was thought he might inflame racial hatred. Further, when novelist Salman Rushdie was condemned to death by the Ayotollah Khomeini, this was deemed by Western observers as taking free speech too far. The principles of free speech and the tolerance and protection of minorities are plainly at cross purposes.
The trouble is, liberals appear to advocate a comprehensive tolerance when in fact they do nothing of the kind. They would advocate freedom of religious belief – so long as that freedom does not transgress its carefully proscribed limits. Religious belief, for example, should not be a matter for parliaments or courts, nor should it have any influence there. And yet for any person holding such a religious belief, this caveat will seem hilarious. How can any truly and firmly held belief be discarded as if of no relevance in one sphere of life?

This, in Stanley Fish’s words, is “boutique multiculturalism”. A boutique multiculturalist will “always stop short of approving other cultures at a point where some value at their center generates an act that offends against the canons of civilised decency as they have either been declared or assumed.” (p.56) A boutique multiculturalist suffers from an inability to take seriously the core values of the cultures he or she tolerates. He or she apparently enjoys diversity, but only when divergent cultures and views are presented in sanitised or tame versions.

A “strong multiculturalist”, on the other hand, makes a genuine effort: tolerance is stipulated as the first principle, and tries to accord all cultures a deep respect at their core. However, as Fish points out, strong multiculturalism founders when it encounters the very intolerance it loathes at the centre of another belief system. How do you respond to Muslim intolerance of Rushdie? You might tolerate it, in which case tolerance is no longer your core principle; or you might condemn it, in which case you turn out to be another boutique multiculturalist after all.

Stanley Fish’s aim in his book The Trouble with Principle is to unpick the rhetoric of liberalism and expose it as dishonest at the core. As he explains it, the really dangerous thing about the liberal appeal to principles is that it uses the rhetoric of neutrality and distance while being nothing of the kind. It takes the moral high ground, aloof from irrational evils like “dogmatism” and “fanaticism”, all the while being just as dogmatic, fanatical and irrational. It is “a wolf in reason’s clothing”. (p.187)

The strategy of liberalism is to clear a public space, free (allegedly) from ideological (and especially religious) concerns, and in which only agreed truths, such as “two plus two equals four”, may prosper. Other beliefs may be held, but only in private. The curriculum for a secular education, for example, should be absolutely free from religious influence. However, Fish points out that what is and what is not ideological is itself a matter of dispute: “Christ is risen” may be such a truth for some and not for others. In addition, in late twentieth century Western democracies, the values and ideology of liberalism are held to “go without saying”. The values and ideology of Christianity may only be held in a private way. They must be set aside in the public sphere.

The double standard of this seems obvious to me now that Fish has pointed it out! Whenever Christians enter into the public sphere as Christians they are exposed to ridicule and held to have transgressed the sacred boundaries traced by liberalism. David Marr’s book The High Price of Heaven is an example of just such a sustained and bitter attack on Christian interference in public affairs from an openly liberal perspective. He wears his boutique multiculturalism on his sleeve: he is completely – unashamedly - intolerant of Christian social policy in all its forms.

Stanley Fish is a delightful scallywag; but he is far more than that. Over four decades he has established himself as a world-class Miltonist, a philosopher of law, and a literary theorist. His books are always provocative and argued with an intense and vigorous logic. His texts are full of closely worked examples and case studies, where the implications are meticulously teased out. He does not like a snow-job: and he is happiest untangling and exposing them. Perhaps liberalism is the biggest snow-job of all.

Fish’s extensive study of the Christian poet John Milton has given him an understanding of what it is to believe. Indeed, he rightly sees that none of us is without “beliefs” – shaped by history and context and other beliefs - that stand prior to rationality. In fact, our beliefs actually condition our use of reason, more than we are conscious of. There is something deeply internal to true beliefs. They claim our souls and change our lives. Liberals, despite their rhetoric, want to hold all other belief systems at arms length – to admire, but not to really understand from within. They draw a wedge between “belief” and “reason”, and with extreme prejudice. Of course, this is all done by appeal to apparently neutral “principles”. The sleight of hand is obvious in the slow motion replays Fish allows us with his careful analysis: these “principles” are not neutral at all, but suit the vested interests of those who hold them.

The lessons to learn from Stanley Fish are many. We Christians have perhaps grown ashamed of our commitments and beliefs in the public sphere. We have perhaps bought the liberal rhetoric of neutrality too readily. We have perhaps hoped that we could easily shed our most deeply held beliefs when we needed to speak in public. We have perhaps allowed ourselves to be marginalised as “fundamentalists” and “fanatics”. We are perhaps embarrassed to cause a fuss and call the bluff of the liberals who sanctimoniously call on people with beliefs other than their own to hide them in public. What the rigorous analysis of Fish reveals is that the impressive edifice of liberalism is in fact a mirage; and that we need pay it far less deference than we do.

Like the Wizard of Oz, the very real power of liberalism rests on the illusion of substance.