Stanley Fish recently wrote in the New York Times that a reporter called him after the September 11 attacks to ask if that event meant "an end of postmodernist relativism." Professor Fish thought it a bizarre question, he says, rightly characterizing "postmodernist relativism" as a "rarefied form of academic talk," but he felt nonetheless obliged to defend such talk against unjust charges.

It is certainly true that the reporter revealed himself as uninformed, or naïve, or wildly optimistic in his question. No one at all familiar with the species could imagine for a moment that the merely real would have any effect on the theoroisie. But it is also true that the "postmodernist relativism" that Fish proceeded to explain turns out to be such a vapid, vanilla sort of relativism that no one but the usual reflexive fundamentalists would object to it. It boils down, says he, to the discovery that we can formulate no absolute, universal statements about truth or justice that would compel assent by everyone, regardless of anyone's prior beliefs. In other words, even if we had had the opportunity, we could not have dissuaded the hijackers from doing what they did, because they thought they were doing the right thing just as firmly as we believe it was wrong, and there are no stone tablets to point to that would decide the issue.

Fish makes some sort of point about opposing, not terrorism, which is an abstraction and therefore an impediment to clear thinking, but terrorists, who are concrete things, even if obdurate ones. By the same method one might argue that it is not postmodernism that has come under suspicion and criticism but certain concrete persons, self-identified as exponents of one or another flavor of rarefied academic talk, who have made public pronouncements that reveal at best moral obtuseness and at worst cynical casuistry.

If "postmodernist relativism" as explained by Professor Fish seems somehow familiar, that may be because you took Philosophy 101 in college (remember, you signed up hurriedly after you found that Intro to Swedish Film was already full?). As I recall, the Sophists were involved, along with some other folks who lived 'way too early to qualify even as premodernists. And then there was Kant, whom you could set your watch by and who gets us at least to the 18th century, though he took the other side of the argument. All along the way, of course, there was religion, if that isn't beneath mention.

Even vanilla relativism has its problems. The most common one claims that relativism holds that nothing is absolute except the truth that nothing is absolute. The exception, goes the usually unexpressed argument, is so blatant that it must be either false or a case of special pleading; either way, it casts grave doubt on the foundation of relativism. Actually, the argument is not so much unexpressed as not expressed verbally. It is most often made by means of winks or smirks or knowing nods. In other words, it is made in much the same spirit as the original argument for relativism. Each says, in effect, "Ha ha, gotcha, and you can't prove otherwise," and dares all comers to try. Each is, that is to say, an instance of (rarefied) adolescent posturing.

Professor Fish's version of relativism forces him to say, in a great many more than just so many words, that we are entitled to oppose and even retaliate for the September attacks because we don't like them. One of the ways he says this is that we should understand the perpetrators as "bearers of a rationality we reject because its goal is our destruction." We should not seek, nor would we find if we did, any more general or fundamental justification. Shifting scale a bit, I suppose it follows that the only reason I shouldn't steal the professor's Jaguar is that he wouldn't like it if I did, and it's only his good luck that the laws are such that he could enlist the power of the state to recover it. Even here I sense a weakness in his argument, however, for while in the mirror-image case I also wouldn't want him to steal my Saturn, I suspect he would refrain not for that relativist reason but because he absolutely would not be caught dead driving such a car.

Why adolescent? Because it is so characteristic of the adolescent mind, unformed and for the most part at sea, to grab onto some seemingly anchored dogma or stance, one that stoutly resists refutation by peers. If it involves a dilemma or bit of verbal legerdemain, so much the better. Philosophy has many such buoys to offer. Solipsism is a popular one - logically consistent, utterly irrefutable - and, indeed, vast numbers of people have adopted it as their personal creed, if the traffic here in Phoenix is any indication. It is also adolescent in its trust that whatever happens among bunches of words either faithfully reflects or magically shapes the nature of reality. A reviewer of a recent book by Stephen Hawking took the physicist to task for seeming to believe that the universe actually is as it is described by science. The reviewer is a philosopher and could find (perhaps has found) precisely the same assumption in his own field: that human reason is an appropriate and sufficient tool for analyzing and describing reality. It may or it may not be; the case is open. Certainly it would be hard to argue on evolutionary grounds that it has any such capability, and, again religion aside, it is hard to see on what other grounds a case could be made.

It is our maturer uncertainty about the relationship between reason and reality that makes, for example, Anselm's ontological argument for the existence of God seem like a trick. Was anyone ever persuaded by it? Was anyone, comfortably beyond adolescence, ever convinced to become a solipsist? The words may seem to compel a certain conclusion, and "Socrates is mortal" has conditioned us to respect the force of verbal logic, but do we follow them obediently into whatever cul-de-sac they seem to imply? Descartes' "proof" that a world existed outside his thinking self is famously desperate, and no one seems to have improved on it. Do we then conclude that, and more importantly behave as though, there is no external reality? Not if we are of sound mind, and of age. We learn, perhaps after a bit of battering about, that it things go better if we assume the world. The clever argument is sufficiently at home on the page. So, too, with many other results of rarefied academic talk.