Some choice outtakes from Jonah Goldberg's current rant against postmodernism, Stanley Fish, and English departments:

In the sciences, when we translate an idea to physical reality we take into account the fact that there might be tangible repercussions in the real world.

In the world of art and humanities, however, no such principle exists. Indeed, the total lack of a principle of restraint is more often mistaken for some kind of principle. In the humanities, all ideas--except conservative ones--spurt out as if from an unmanned fire hose, spraying in every direction without a care about who gets soaked. Indeed, the only notion actively censored is the suggestion that things might be better if someone grabbed hold of the hose.

The occasion for these comments is Fish's article on postmodernism in the current Harper's. "What's set me off," Goldberg confesses, "is Fish's claim that postmodernism is simply 'a rarefied form of academic talk.' Fish would have people believe that postmodernism is simply what postmodernists do in their hidden English-department laboratories." As Goldberg notes, Peter Berkowitz has already handily shredded the article, along with Fish himself. What concerns Goldberg here is the more general problem of the English department, whose total philosophical irresponsibility he equates with a familiar strain of terrorism:

Well, not only did the virus of postmodernism escape Fish's lab, but he and his henchmen ground it up into fine particles and sent aerosolized packets of it to every magazine, newspaper, publishing house, and movie studio in America. Fish's hypocrisy is stunning. The PoMo virus has infected millions, destabilizing traditional institutions across the social landscape. And yet when confronted, he says "I'm not responsible for what happens in the real world, I'm just a lab technician." Well, this high priest of the cult of the twelve monkeys is responsible.

Call it feminism, critical race theory, critical legal studies, queer theory, whatever: It's all shrapnel from the same postmodern bomb, broadly speaking. These doctrines haven't all been terrible for America, but their misapplication and over-application have. Scientists take responsibility for the damage they do. English professors take speaking fees. Conservatism, which does not fetishize the masses, understands that even an intelligent idea can have horrific consequences if let loose upon a society. The uninformed, the lazy, the affected, the ambitious, and the dumb can adopt sharp-edged ideas and use them as blunt cudgels if we are not careful. The authors of postmodernism have not been careful.

This is strong stuff, and that's why I quoted it at length. Goldberg's anger is worth a long, hard look. Fish may be the catalyst for the column, but the culprit is not the oh-so-trendy, always-ahead-of-the-game, I-know-better-than-you, let-me-tell-you-what-to-think-and how-to-think-it Fish, so much as it is what Fish stands for: the English department. English, to Goldberg's mind, is an ideological anthrax laboratory (or, as his metaphor mixes, an unauthorized munitions factory). What gets made in English is, as far as Goldberg is concerned, every bit as lethal, and every bit as evil, as the poisonous spores and deadly explosives wrought by terrorists. Maybe even more so, if you consider how many millions of people have swallowed the radically egalitarian swill proferred by the politicized postmodernists who run the show in English and its adjunct departments--Women's Studies, Afro-American Studies, Ethnic Studies, and so on. Shakespeare wrote about pouring poison into unsuspecting ears; Goldberg is suggesting that this is just what English departments do.

One of the major topical gripes Goldberg and others have with politicized postmodernism is that it diminishes terrorism by simultaneously defining it away (suicide bombers are not terrorists; they are noble emblems of resistance) and by confounding it with legitimate exercises of power (Sharon is the real terrorist in the Arab-Israeli conflict; the U.S. war on terrorism is itself an act of terrorism; and so on). It's a damn good criticism of an academy that has shown itself to be shamelessly, even proudly amoral in the wake of 9/11. That so many academics saw that day principally as an opportunity to theorize, that the events of 9/11 were, for the radically hip, not a political and moral wake-up call, but instead a gloriously self-confirming proof of their pet postcolonial theories, was, and remains, repellent in the extreme. Hence Goldberg's extraordinarily virulent language.

Nonetheless, one has to ask what it means that Goldberg uses such provocative language in the context of a complaint about the postmodern abuse of language. After all, in comparing literature professors to terrorists, isn't Goldberg engaging in just the sort of radically equivocal thinking that he is reviling? And as such, isn't he discrediting his argument about the violence English does by doing the same kind of violence unto English? I don't have the answer, but I have some thoughts about what it is that Goldberg is getting at when he fingers English as the scene of America's moral malaise. I'll elaborate soon in another blog.