Twenty years ago, a New York Times editor phoned Stanley Fish and asked for a column. “About what?” he replied. “Anything you like,” she said. Fish came up with “How the Right Hijacked the Magic Words” (August 13, 1995), which argued that conservatives had seized the liberal lexicon of equal opportunity, color blindness, and individual rights and used it to assail liberal programs such as affirmative action. The Times liked it and asked for more.
Over the next 18 years, a remarkable corpus grew: 300 columns on the op-ed page, under the “Think Again” rubric, and on the Opinionator blog. Readers loved them and hated them in large numbers, just what the Times needed in an era of partisan niches and upheavals in print journalism. Comments on each one ran to the many hundreds, and academics across the country shared his links all the time. Fish had the right mix of academic acumen and street smarts, plus a talent for op-ed prose. He didn’t talk like a pretentious Ivy League leftist, and while he defended his colleagues against charges of political correctness during the Culture Wars, he seemed to relish the contest and enjoyed the company of Dinesh D’Souza and other conservatives. Who would have thought that an English professor skilled in High Theory and 17th-century poetry would gather a mass audience and stick to crisp 1,000-word sallies?
The topics varied widely. He covered academia, of course, but also jurisprudence and the Supreme Court (Fish has taught law at Florida International University and Yeshiva); religion and atheism; his father Max, the plumber and union leader; movies and actors (Charlton Heston, Kim Novak, Charles Bronson); fracking; and the spurious premises of liberalism (the liberalism that presumes that it’s only procedural, not political). The voice was always the same: precise about what it knows and honest about what it doesn’t; self-mocking and open to wordplay; out to clarify quarrels and explain sides, then judge who has the better argument.
Here is Fish on Flemming Rose, the Danish editor who ignited the Muhammad cartoon affair in 2005, saying that his call for cartoons was “not directed at Muslims” but only to address “the problem of self-censorship” (the words are Rose’s).
That’s the Fish style, compact and trenchant, irritating to some (here, liberals who claim neutrality) and satisfying to others (conservatives who are sick of liberals claiming neutrality).
Think Again collects almost 100 of those columns and arranges them by eight topics (“Personal Reflections,” “Reflections on the Law,” “Reflections on Academic Freedom”). They jump around as you might expect, given the genre—though some form a series such as the groupings on hate speech and on the humanities. Most take a prominent topic and analyze the leading contentions and evidence, as if Professor Fish were translating the discourse of the intellectual elite (Supreme Court justices, philosophy professors) for a lay audience, doing so without a whisper of condescension.
An example: The Supreme Court rules in Snyder v. Phelps (2011) that the father of a dead soldier may not prevent protesters from showing up at the funeral and holding abominable signs that say “Thank God for Dead Soldiers” and “You’re Going to Hell.” Free speech, you see. That Mr. Snyder was a captive audience and couldn’t escape the taunts makes no difference, the majority stated, nor does his anguish. As Fish puts the free speech position, it always comes down to the social costs of limits upon it:
Such logic you would hear in a law school seminar. Fish notes its weakness—that is, how easily “public concern” applies to anything and becomes an absolute justification—but goes further and gives the human side.
There are too many threads and subjects in the volume to cover in a review, and they all make stimulating reading, even in those columns that already sound dated. Fish’s pieces on affirmative action, for instance, are obsolete in light of recent research on the academic harm that recipients of affirmative action undergo once they begin their coursework. Occasionally, too, his provocations strike you as flat wrong, as when he denies the impact of abstract beliefs: “What exactly will have changed when one set of philosophical views has been swapped for another? Almost nothing.” Anyone who has undergone such a self-revision likely feels differently.
But right or wrong isn’t really the case, as Fish himself insists. These commentaries don’t press a point of view, or a politics, or a taste. They are, instead, a form of mental catechism. He talks about political and cultural affairs, but the way he does so matters more than the beliefs he espouses. Indeed, he confesses in 2009 that “I don’t stand anywhere,” not finally and fundamentally. Liberal, progressive, conservative, reactionary—it depends on the issue. He seems to favor gay rights, but on contemporary art he’s “hopelessly retro.” He vindicates a certain kind of identity politics—why not vote for the interests of your own group?—yet he deplores professors who turn college into social justice camp. He opposes fracking but agrees with Justice Samuel Alito on freedom of association for religious groups
on campus.
The center of Fish’s project lies elsewhere, not in politics but in competence. The value he upholds most is that of the job well done. Campus leftists who turn classrooms into indoctrination sessions aren’t culpable because of ideology; they have betrayed their Ivory Tower calling (Fish approves of the disengaged campus). The New Atheists aren’t guilty of a pernicious irreverence; they just don’t know anything about the religions they denounce. Do your homework. Polish your skills. Fix your premises. Get it right. Think again—and better. That’s the common instruction in his New York Times career.
Fish has two heroes, neither one an academic or intellectual, judge or politician: Frank Sinatra and Ted Williams. They could be callous and selfish, generous and racially progressive, too. But “neither their vices nor their virtues . . . appeal to me,” Fish says. “It is their single-minded dedication to craft.” Say the same for Fish.
Mark Bauerlein, professor of English at Emory, is the author, most recently, of The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future.
