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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
All I can say is if that's the enemy, he's pretty damned pathetic. And yet Bennett keeps stamping down these tiny embers of paleoliberalism as if there were a whole forest at stake. Yes, yes, the head of Reuters was stupid to propose expunging the word "terrorist" from press coverage. But how many news organizations followed suit? Yes, yes, literary theorist Stanley Fish propagates nonsense, but why bother correcting him? Who, outside an exceedingly narrow band of academe, even cares what Stanley Fish thinks?
We must remember, though, that the fight for academia's soul has uniquely personal resonance for Bennett: It is ground zero in his private war against the liberal establishment. Still, I can't help thinking that if he'd gone to college within the last 20 years, he'd be holding his fire a little more often than he does -- only because he'd know how ineffectual the leftist movement really is. I speak as a good Mondale liberal who, in four years of undergraduate study, attended precisely one anti-government rally: something about El Salvador. It attracted perhaps 30 students -- most of them, like me, drawn by curiosity -- and it was closer in feel to a Civil War reenactment than a genuine protest. It ended; we returned to our dorms; the beating of our butterfly wings caused scarcely a sniffle on the other side of the world. We never expected it to.
As for the liberal professors who were supposedly controlling our minds, how many of us brought enough of our minds to the classroom to be controlled? How many of us even came to class? (And while we're on the subject, did Bennett skip a class or two of his own? Is that why he renders Lincoln's "mystic chords of memory" as "mystic cords"?) The point is that education is just one of many crucibles in which people's characters are forged. Students today, much like the students of Bennett's generation, arrive at their political and moral calculi in a variety of not-always-inspiring ways -- with a lot of help from parents and friends and a little help from, yes, teachers, and, OK, left-wing movie stars and right-wing columnists and taxi drivers and that guy around the corner who sells cheese dogs.
Unfortunately, that multiplicity of perspective is the very thing that keeps Bill Bennett up at nights: "What I fear is the erosion of moral clarity, and the spread of indifference and confusion, as a thousand voices discourse with energy and zeal on the questionable nature, if not the outright illegitimacy, of our methods or our cause." This is John Stuart Mill's marketplace of ideas turned on its head: a Babel of mutually canceling opinion. But in fact, those thousand dissenting voices stem from the very feature that Bennett identifies as the defining glory of Western civilization -- "the open, curious, free spirit of sic et non," "the habit of self-criticism" which is "the one irreplaceable engine of human progress."
Look how quickly, though, that "habit of self-criticism" metamorphoses -- in the same sentence, actually -- into a "self-destructive fetish." Bennett has a knack for trivializing even the most legitimate exercises in national self-criticism. Let's pause to observe the way he dispenses with one shameful episode of American history: "In an action that has been a source of controversy to this day, and for which our government has apologized, substantial numbers [of Japanese-Americans] were placed in internment camps for the duration of the war." See, class? Begin with disclaimers ("source of controversy"), qualify in advance ("our government has apologized") and then lay out the troubling fact in the most denatured and passive voice you can manage ("substantial numbers were placed"). That wasn't so bad, was it?
Evasions aside, it takes courage to be Bill Bennett. To castigate Americans for questioning and Muslims for not questioning. To classify Islam as a warrior religion and then speak wistfully of "the martial spirit that was once routinely associated with American Christianity." To denounce the "triumphalist habits of thought" that abound in Islamic schools and then laud the United States as "the marvel and envy of the ages." To lionize the heterosexual heroes of Flight 93 and leave out the gay one. To call for moral clarity when all he really wants is moral unanimity.
What are we to do with such a man? By ending where we began. By recasting all his contradictions, his hypocrisies, his aversion to nuance as the nuance and complexity and contradiction of a "character" (fictional, nonfictional, it makes no difference). This character, this William Bennett, is a sad man: He was born 200 years too late to write the Federalist Papers, and he can't find a cause equal in stature. He is a worried man: scared of modernity, scared of a world that has been unshaped by Jesuits. He needs reassurance. And so we un-Jesuits, we bastard children of modernity, address him:
"We know why America is fighting, Mr. Bennett. Many of us, indeed, support that fight. But why, apart from theological directive, is the other side fighting? That is the question that some of the liberals and academics you deride have been trying, however awkwardly, to answer. They recognize that answering it has not just intellectual but strategic value, and so they call on the very disciplines you despise -- value-neutral analysis, relativist casts of mind. Isn't America strong enough to handle that? Isn't the questioning of received wisdom -- even your wisdom -- as much a part of the war effort as waving a flag or blowing a horn? Or writing a book? Or calling for moral clarity?"
