Associated Press A billboard along I-35 in Minnesota.

I know you’re not supposed to, but I just love to say I told you so.

What I told you back on Sept. 28, 2008, was that within a year of the day he left office George W. Bush would come to be regarded with affection and a little nostalgia. The responses (over 300 before the comments were closed) to that prediction were overwhelmingly negative; even the very few who agreed with me attributed what they took to be a sad fact to the stupidity of the American people. The other 290 or so said things like “No way”; “Are you kidding?”; ”Are you mad?”;“What a ridiculous and insulting premise!”; “I’ll miss him like a rash”; “This must be a satire”; “Bush is a sociopath”; “George Bush has destroyed this country”; “History won’t forgive him”; and (a popular favorite) “I hate the man.”
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Not long ago at some ungodly hour of the morning I saw an early Charles Bronson movie (“Showdown at Boot Hill”) in which the tough-guy actor played a bounty hunter driven by the fact that he was very short. Bronson (Luke Welch) spends some time explaining to his love interest that his entire life, including his decision to strap on a gun, has been a response to the humiliations visited on him because of his diminutive stature. Synopses of the movie on the Internet either do not mention this prominent aspect of the plot or touch on it only in passing, perhaps because it seems so much at odds with the figure Bronson cut (often semi-naked) in a series of famous movies — “The Magnificent Seven,” “The Great Escape,” “Hard Times,” “Chato’s Land,” “Mr. Majestyk” and, of course, in what sometimes seemed to be a series of innumerable and increasingly violent “Death Wish” movies.
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In the always-ongoing debate about the role of religion in public life, the argument most often made on the liberal side (by which I mean the side of Classical Liberalism, not the side of left politics) is that policy decisions should be made on the basis of secular reasons, reasons that, because they do not reflect the commitments or agendas of any religion, morality or ideology, can be accepted as reasons by all citizens no matter what their individual beliefs and affiliations. So it’s O.K. to argue that a proposed piece of legislation will benefit the economy, or improve the nation’s health, or strengthen national security; but it’s not O.K. to argue that a proposed piece of legislation should be passed because it comports with a verse from the book of Genesis or corresponds to the will of God.

A somewhat less stringent version of the argument permits religious reasons to be voiced in contexts of public decision-making so long as they have a secular counterpart: thus, citing the prohibition against stealing in the Ten Commandments is all right because there is a secular version of the prohibition rooted in the law of property rights rather than in a biblical command. In a more severe version of the argument, on the other hand, you are not supposed even to have religious thoughts when reflecting on the wisdom or folly of a piece of policy. Not only should you act secularly when you enter the public sphere; you should also think secularly.
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One of the respondents to my column on United Citizens, the corporate campaign funding case, declares, “Professor Fish is obviously an apologist for this bad decision” (Mark), while others are just as confident that I tip my hand in the other direction when I refer to the majority as “the usual suspects.”

The truth is that, as usual, I was not (until the last sentence) coming down on one side or the other, but attempting to lay out the assumptions that inform the majority and dissenting opinions, assumptions of which the justices may not be aware even as they are operating within them. I may have confused things a bit by saying at the end that I love the decision. What I meant is that I love the decision as a teacher because the number of issues it raises will keep a classroom discussion going for weeks, and that judgment is more than borne out by the wonderfully learned and spirited comments the column provoked.
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Citizens United v. Federal Election commission — the recent case in which the Supreme Court invalidated a statute prohibiting corporations and unions from using general treasury funds either to support or defeat a candidate in the 30 days before an election, and overruled an earlier decision relied on by the minority — has now been commented on by almost everyone, including the president of the United States in his state of the union address.

I would like to step back from the debate about whether the decision enhances our First Amendment freedoms or hands the country over to big-money interests, and read it instead as the latest installment in an ongoing conflict between two ways of thinking about the First Amendment and its purposes.
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He had us before he said hello. It was, in part, the look. Blue suit, but not the usual blue — subtler; red rep tie, white shirt, a skin color cosmetics and sun could never deliver, and, for much of the time, a big smile. It was the rock-star look in full Technicolor. Everyone else seemed to be in black and white. He dominated the screen and he did it with an ease that stopped just short of entitlement, an ease that said, in Chevy Chase fashion, “I’m the president and you’re not.”

Then there was the speech, soaring at the beginning and at the end, but in the middle a litany of specifics of the kind he did not offer in the long campaign of 2007-2008.
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My account of Barbara Herrnstein Smith’s new book, “Natural Reflections: Human Cognition at the Nexus of Science and Religion,” provoked many lengthy and serious comments in which a number of important issues were raised. The editors and I have invited Professor Smith to respond:

In his column here last week, Stanley Fish highlighted and discussed a particular line of argument in my book “Natural Reflections: Human Cognition at the Nexus of Science and Religion.” In a passage that especially interested him, I remark that even though scientific and religious teachings may be contradictory on some counts, a conflict between science and religion need not exist in the ongoing lives and experiences of individuals. For neither logic nor rationality requires that all our ideas, impulses, affections, and acts be mutually aligned all the time.
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Tomorrow, Jan. 19, marks the official publication of Barbara Herrnstein Smith’s “Natural Reflections: Human Cognition at the Nexus of Science and Religion.” The title would seem to identify the book as an addition to the ever-growing body of studies that explore the relationships and tensions between religion and science, usually with the intent either of declaring one epistemologically or morally superior to the other, or of insisting (somewhat piously) that the two are compatible if we avoid extreme claims and counterclaims, or of triumphantly announcing that science is a form of faith, or of purporting to demonstrate that religion can be explained in naturalist terms as an expression of the instinct to survive and propagate.

While Smith rehearses these theses and shows limited sympathy for some of them (and disdain for some others), her object in the book is to interrogate and critique the assumption informing the conversation in which these are the standard contentions. The assumption she challenges — or, rather, says we can do without — is that underlying it all is some foundation or nodal point or central truth or master procedure that, if identified, allows us to distinguish among ways of knowing and anoint one as the lodestar of inquiry. Read more…

At the beginning of the new year I resolved to leave off writing “old grouch” columns, columns that chronicle my inability to negotiate modern life. But resolutions rarely stand in the face of provocation, and so here I go again.

My bank has been bought for the third time and once again I wasn’t consulted, which was all right the first two times, but this time everything went wrong in what was euphemistically called “the transition.”

First, all the numbers on my accounts were changed and in the new order the people at my bank (the same people who were there before) have no means of retrieving the old numbers, which have been erased from their institutional memory banks.

Second, the old credit cards were canceled, which meant that some automatic payments weren’t made on time and I received a notice of cancellation from my insurance company. The worst of it was that while the new credit cards were sent, they were returned by the postal authorities to the bank for reasons that remain a mystery. Read more…