Over in the December issue of Harper’s, there’s an essay by Stanley Fish on the push, by proponents of Intelligent Design, to “teach the controversy” as a way of inserting their beliefs into the biology curriculum.
I’m having some trouble with the essay on at least a couple of counts.
One of Fish’s arguments is that by employing this “teach the controversy” tactic, IDers actually are taking a cue from the multiculturalist left. While that appears to be so (based upon Fish’s quoting of a pusher of ID), what rankles me is Fish’s revisionist history about what it was for which the original multiculturalist left was pushing.
What he seems to claim, in essence, is this: That the multiculturalist left, in an orgy of postmodernism, struck out to do away with any notions that there was any discernable truth to be had.
My own recollections of the multiculturalism fights during the 1980s, however, suggests that the original pitch of the multiculturalists was to legitimately broaden the discussion. But then multiculturalism was hijacked by two forces.
On the one hand, you had what we could call radical multiculturalists with an agenda — for example, outright overturning any sway of “white male” culture, even if it happened to be legitimate culture. On the other hand, you had the radical right which worked to cast all multiculturalists as being of the radical type, out to undo Western Civilization.
Unfortunately, Fish seems to swallow wholesale both mischaracterizations of the original multiculturalism.
My other issue with Fish’s essay is this: While the controversy over ID may be a manufactured one when it comes to biology curriculcum, and as such ID has no place in the biology classroom, like it or not it is an actual social controversy and therefore arguably has a place in the social studies classroom.
Not once does Fish address that question, instead preferring to use his essay to trash not just ID proponents (justly so), but also to trash original multiculturalism by buying into the perversions foisted upon it by both the radical left and the radical right.
Convenient for Fish as this might be, in that it allows him to paint and position himself as somehow being outside the fray, inventing a multiculturalist boogeyman to go along with the monster from the ID seems more than a little irrelevant to the matter at hand.
If his underlying argument is that there are, in fact, some truths to be had, don’t we have to start with a full, rather than a selective, deployment of the facts?
