Bigger Fish
“Maureen Dowd is on vacation” says the notice at the bottom of the op-ed page of today’s New York Times. (Lent discourages any unseemly display of joy!).
In Maureen’s little pond Stanley Fish swims this month. Professor Fish has an engaging column today entitled, “Religion without Truth.” No poaching on this pond, however: it is available only to subscribers to Times Select.
Fish comments on Time Magazine’s cover story about teaching the Bible in the schools. To appease the multi-culturalists assurances are given, in the story, that the Bible will be taught simply as a secular text, with truth claims securely bracketed.
The cantankerous Fish will have none of that. He comments: “The truth claims of a religion — at least of religions like Christianity, Judaism, and Islam — are not incidental to its identity; they are its identity.”
And he concludes with a splash: “Teaching the Bible in that spirit may succeed in avoiding the dangers of proselytizing and indoctrination. But if you’re going to cut the heart out of something, why teach it at all?”
If that last bears some slight resemblance to the thought of the current occupant of the Chair of Peter, perhaps Ms Dowd could be persuaded to prolong her vacation, and the editors of the newspaper of record might try to land an even bigger Fish.
Bob, I’m puzzled.
1. It seems to me that one can teach THAT religions, various religions MAKE truth claims without teaching the studnets that the truth claims are either justified or correct. You could teach the bible the same way you teach Greek mythology and history–hey kids, the they believed this to be true.
2. If I may be so bold to ask you a direct question: what do you want? To have someone treat the bible as making truth claims does not mean that they will treat those truth claims as true. They may just as easily treat them as completely, utterly, false and dangerous.
And so we’re back to square one.
Dear CK,
I would have thought that your LONG apprenticeship to Colbert would have equipped you to recognize (even a considerably less gifted effort at) tongue-in-cheekiness.
Time for that second cup of coffee!
RI
Well, since I’m borrowing your themes in a post below, there’s no reason you can’t borrow mine!
I find that nearly everything Stanley Fish writes has a veneer of logic that falls away upon any slightly deeper examination. What is the reason for teaching anything besides math, science and language? Well, for instance, we try to learn history to understand “where we’ve been” and perhaps in the hope of understanding “where we’re going.” We learn, for instance, about slavery and Nazism with no intent whatsoever in elevating the value of these things as societal norms. If you live in a society in which many people are or even were adherents of a specific religion, that’s reason enough to understand it. For pete’s sake, we still study the mythology of ancient Rome, Greece and Egypt, and yet, for some reason, the ONLY reason Fish can think that we’d want to learn about Hinduism, Christianity, etc., is to foment actual belief in their tenets. I’m sorry, that’s just too disingenuous. The danger of studying religion is that it won’t really be “studying” but “proselytizing.” I studied religious literature in high school and the teacher had to constantly move the class away from the pleas of students who wanted to use the class as a chance to preach their own beliefs. That’s why it should be limited to experienced teachers and 11th/12th graders.
How can anyone not love Maureen Dowd?
But I have given away too much here. Let me proceed to another topic.
If you teach the Bible without investigating its truth claims, what are you teaching? I would say literature rather than religion. Now the Bible is a collection of literary pieces, some very good and some a little tiresome qua literature. But there is also the question of what Bible you would teach. The Bible as Jews understand it is not the same as the Bible as Christians understand it, and Christians themselves are not in agreement about the canon. So in view even of canonical issues how can teaching the Bible as literature be free from religious controversy
The comparison with teaching classical mythology is rather loose. Classical mythology is not like a Greco-Roman Bible. Almost no one today–there may be some neo-pagans around–believes in the religious element in classical mythology. Hence not much room for sectarian disputes among the students, although some Christians might, I suppose, claim the ancient gods were demons and others might think that was silly. But I think the religous import can be largely bracketed and one can say that these stories are worth reading in the way that many other fictions are worth reading.
But the same is not the case with the Bible, in my opinion. I don’t say this is exactly Fish’s point, but I think it belong to the same family.
Stanley Fish writes elegantly and engagingly, and more often than not is on target. As with his fellow pragmatist Richard Rorty, I am happy to stay on board for most of the ride. But here, as if often the case with both of them, Fish drives off a precipice.
One knows what Fish has in the back of his mind: the “religious studies” mindset that leaches out all theology from the treatment of religious texts and re-interprets them in terms of Durkheimian functionalism, Freudian psychoanalysis, Eliade’s phenomenology of a generic “sacred” order, etc. These efforts do seriously miss the point. Moreover they are, I think, mindless of important developments in philosophy: Donald Davidson and Robert Brandom have, in different ways, emphasized that to understand anything or anyone is to understand how those who hold certain beliefs draw inferences to and from them, and this in turn requires that they hold them as true. What this means for Fish’s argument is that if “the bible as literature” abstracts from the convcictions of those who take it to be scripture, it turns it into a different text altogether.
Unfortunately, this does nothing to support Fish’s main point, which is that if you’re not going to read the bible (the Koran? The Bhagavad Gita?) as a believer, you might as well not read it at all. As Cathleen Kaveny pointed out, while I may not be able to understand someone without understanding that she holds her sets of beliefs to be true, that doesn’t mean I myself must hold all those beliefs to be true. (To employ the stock ethnological example: I share many beliefs with the Azande, and I understand what they believe and that they take their beliefs as truths, but that doesn’t mean I buy the bits about witchcraft and the chicken oracle.)
Fish himself, in another Times Select article (03/24/2007) put it well when he complained that a recent lawsuit, filed when a student was required to write a letter to a state legislature supporting gay adoption, missed the point: the problem was not that the assignment discriminated against her as a Christian, but that advocacy has no place in the classroom. Fish goes on to say that
A student assigned to study an issue must be equipped with the appropriate analytical skills. Acquiring and applying those skills in no way depend on political or ideological affiliations. If the assignment is to give an account of the dispute about gay adoption rather than to come down on one side or the other, two students with opposing views of the matter might very well produce the very same account. Academic performance and individual beliefs are independent variables.
So teach religious traditions as systems of beliefs taken to be true. Just don’t proselytize. That seems easy enough.
Regarding Joseph Gannon’s point: you can’t avoid the “religious controversy” in the Bible, as you can with Greco-Roman mythology. Judaism and Christianity are Jamesian “live options”, after all. But those controversies will look very different to a Buddhist or an atheist than a Christian or a Jew. But what’s the problem here? It isn’t one of understanding, as long as the atheist or Buddhist know the controverted truth-claims are truth claims and not something else.
One final point: Fish’s illustration of governor Fordice complaining about the phrase “Judeo Christian nation” (as opposed to a “Christian nation”, period) perhaps makes his point but obscures another. Jews, Christians, and Muslims share much in common¸ theologically, but the easy “Judeo-Christian” hyphenated abstraction glosses over even more significant differences. On that score, Fordice was right. But the United States is not, in fact and intention, either a “Christian nation” or a “Judeo-Christian”one. Its conception of legitimate governance is entirely secular, designed to include Jews, Christians, Muslims, atheists and agnostics, etc. equally as citizens. Relgious beliefs may be relevant to the political positions one takes, but one should not think of any system of belief as the basis for “the nation.” To think otherwise is just not to have even given a cursory glance to the constitution. The Radical Orthodoxy crowd is right about at least this: “Christian America” misses both the political secularity of “America” – which I, at least, think on balance is a good thing – and the fact that a nationalized Christianity (or any other religion) is actually idolatry in disguise. (The nation as Baal.)
You can teach the “Great Philosophers” and try to explicate what they thought. But it is not enough to consider what they thought, or even how the thought of one philosopher has influence that of another or even has had broad cultural influence. It is also important to ask whether or to what extent a philosopher got it right. It is not enough to understand what, say, Rene Descartes thought or how he came to his views. One also wants to know whether his particular form of mind-body dualism is tenable.
How is it different with the great religious thinkers and the scribes that have recorded their teachings? Yes, it is possible to teach religous thought as a species of the history of ideas. And it is possible to study religions as social phenomena. Or even as psychological phenomena. I have no complaint about anyone’s doing any of these things. But finally, it seems to me, one wants ask what truth there is in any or all religions. A course that suppresses this issue of truth is a course in the history of religions or the sociology of religions or the psychology of religions but not in religions on their own terms.