Both Fish and Leo share the requisite sense of urgency about what needs to be done in response to the exigence. For Leo, the lesson of 9/11 is that time has come to begin pushing the “multicultural-therapeutic left” away from its sloppy relativism and to offer a united, presumably “monocultural,” front in opposition to the terrorist threat. It is a line of thinking that appears to anticipate some lines of thought pursued subsequently by our political leadership: the world changed on 9/11 calling for an overhaul of our political priorities and our value system (or a return to our core values), including the sacrifice of some liberties in exchange for better security; our enemy is “terrorism” or some variation thereof (“Islamic fascism,” “international terrorist movement” “Muslim extremists”) that is monolithic, shadowy, and nihilistic in nature; in opposing this enemy we must be uncompromising and go it alone if other members of the international community do not share our vision. By the same token, Fish’s essay appears to anticipate many of the arguments put forth by eventual critics of the Iraq war, after Iraq became in effect a testing ground for ideas very much like those supported by Leo. What resulted is a textbook example of what has happened throughout history when absolutist ideas are tested on reality. The monolithic model of evil ran afoul of the heterogeneous nature of a deeply divided society. While terrorist groups did enter the fray after the American occupation, most of the violence after 2003 was sectarian violence, inflicted by specific groups, each “with a full roster of grievances, goals and strategies” seeking advantage for their interests.
One of the interesting questions raised by the notion of exigence is the degree to which the “defect” or “obstacle” it names is in the world versus in the eye of the beholder. Our own “realist” reading of the two essays would place exigence in both places. That is, Fish and Leo’s essays are at once responses to an event in the world independent of the power of language to change or reverse it, and continuations of the two writers’ lifelong working out of their belief systems. While Leo may imply that 9/11 changed the world, the world he describes in the wake of 9/11 is a world that has much in common with the dystopia he has been decrying for many years, and his prescription for dealing with the post-9/11 world is consistent with proposals for reform he has been making since the 1960s.
Likewise Fish’s liberal response (though Fish typically eludes labels like liberal/conservative, his position on this particular issue lines up with the position that many liberals ultimately took on the issue) to the exigence of 9/11 echoes ideas that he has been articulating for over thirty years in the realms of literary and legal theory. His insistence that we attend to the particulars of our enemies’ complaints in order to understand their motivations and what we are up against is of a piece with his insistence that we attend to the details of texts and work out their meaning in the context of their authors’ intentions. His contention that in justifying our responses to 9/11 we can only appeal to those contingent truths that we hold to in common with other members of a community who shares our beliefs—“the record of aspiration and accomplishment that makes up our collective understanding of what we live for”—is of a piece with his belief in communities of readers who work out standards for meaning and interpretation among themselves.
Our interest in connecting Leo and Fish’s arguments about 9/11 to their larger world view goes beyond any interest we might have in correctly labeling their political positions. Understanding the source of their claims is, we would argue, key to understanding the tone the two writers take in expressing those claims. Establishing a reasonably clear way of talking about matters of tone early on in an argument course is critical. It is critical because of the difficulties so many students face in finding an appropriate voice in their arguments. Part of this difficulty can be traced back to the different stages of development students occupy when they arrive in our classes. Students leaning toward dualism, for example, may adopt an overly aggressive tone in their arguments. (While few full-fledged dualists show up on day one in our classes, it is a position to which some, particularly first year college students, retreat when they feel threatened intellectually.) Remember, much is at stake for a dualist placed in the position of justifying ideas that they assume should require no justification. One symptom of this anxiety will be a tone of aggressive, if unearned, certitude. Claims, no matter how shaky, will be delivered with little support, no qualification and absolute conviction. Controversial categorical judgments, particularly moral judgments, will be handed down as if by fiat. Opposing arguments will be dismissed out of hand no matter how strong they may appear to a third party. Any reader not in complete agreement with the author of such an argument may well feel more bullied than persuaded.
Their counterparts in multiplicity, meanwhile, tend also to see their claims and judgments as self-evident, not because they are the One True Thing but because, hey, everyone gets to believe whatever they want. The tone favored by those in multiplicity will be considerably less belligerent than the tone adopted by their peers in dualism. They are not threatened by disagreement—after all, people inevitably see things differently; an argument for them is just a way to let people know “where they are coming from.” In truth, their claims are often difficult to disagree with. The more abstract the position they take, after all, the more difficult it is to dispute their basic premise that there is no real need to discriminate among positions. If the dualist tends toward an excessively belligerent tone, the multiplist tends toward an excessively bland one.
By way of helping students recognize the intellectual origins of tone and the limitations they face if they are unable to moderate their tone, it is helpful to analyze matters of tone in essays like those of Fish and Leo. Because these writers are considerably more sophisticated than most student writers, their tonal differences, though significant, are less stark than those we see in our classes. Underlying differences in tone between Fish and Leo’s essays are differences in outlook that we’ve already touched on. In particular, Fish’s tone can be traced back to his belief that truth must be rediscovered and renegotiated as contexts change, and that truth consists not of a correspondence between one’s vocabulary and a state of affairs in the world, but of the most persuasive justification among competing versions of the truth. Leo’s tone, meanwhile derives from his belief that there is one universal truth that is not altered by circumstances. Those who think straight, like Leo, possess absolute truth and good. Those, like the bishops, who think sloppily obscure our vision of truth and good and allow error and evil into the world. At the risk of overstating those differences, we would describe Fish’s tone as being closer to that of a mentor or guide, someone concerned simultaneously to clear up confusions and to complicate his readers’ understanding of things. It is an asymmetrical relationship to be sure, Fish is the teacher and we are his pupils, but insofar as he seems to believe we are capable of following a complex line of reasoning, it is not condescending. Leo’s tone, meanwhile seems closer to that of a gadfly or scold, brisk and judgmental. His concern is to clarify matters by simplifying them in order to facilitate sound moral judgment.
Leo’s tone is established in early his first sentence when, before telling us what the bishops’ statement actually says, he pronounces it “disgraceful;” and then, after offering two snippets from the statement, he proceeds to tell his readers what the bishops really mean, “[i]n plain English,” before concluding that it is “a moral mess.” Moral and linguistic clarity are of a piece for Leo. He gives short shrift, thus, to those who natter on about “root causes” and understanding acts “in context.” To set the record straight, he offers a “plain English” translation of this morally and linguistically sloppy talk, avowing that what the bishops really mean to say is that “reckless and imperial America brought the attacks on itself.” Throughout his critique, Leo offers scant evidence in support of his generalizations and few details that might help his audience identify the multiculturalists, moral relativists, and denizens of therapeutic culture in their midst. A single quote from “one upstate New York student” supports a broad generalization about lamentable educational practices common throughout American higher education, while the bishops’ statement is presented as “a minor example of what could be a major problem”—the inability of moral leaders “to say plainly that evil exists.”
If Leo’s characterization of the bishops’ statement is in fact accurate and fair-minded, the tonal aspects of his essay might be attributed more to legitimate moral outrage than to habits of mind congruent with his belief system. But even one sympathetic